Art and Culture

This is from a different conversation, worth it on its own.

All art is produced in a cultural context. As a creative person, your ideas don’t come to you from space aliens, they come to you from your own mind, which exists in a cultural frame. A modern white American fantasy novelist talking about how his black-skinned evil dudes are awesome is fundamentally different than a 7th century Tang poet talking about how his black skinned evil dudes are awesome (although not that different: China of that period had colorism, although it was more of a class thing than a race thing.)

That said, there’s nothing inherently wrong about introducing problematic material into your fiction. But good fiction is critical of the self. (likewise, bad fiction is uncritical of the self). Writing (which I’m using here as a sub for all creative arts) is more than being a transcriptionist to some alien idea entity. It’s an exercise in self-examination or a lack thereof, and it provokes in the reader self-examination or a lack thereof. Since the author and the reader both exists in cultural contexts, this extends into an examination of culture as a whole, or a lack of examination (reification) of culture as a whole.

None of what I’m talking about is, like, forced in any way. This is just something that all media does. All media drags in tropes from the society around it, and either uses them critically or uncritically. All media, when read or watched or listened to, brings tropes from the audience’s society to mind, and is critical or uncritical of them.

This isn’t all cut and dried, either. Something can be critical in some respects, uncritical in others. In fact, most media are.

But here’s the other part: Good fiction is humane. It may be cruel to the reader, but it ultimately seeks to make the reader a better person (even if that is simply “a more entertained person”) and to improve their lives. Cultural tropes are often quite negative and harmful to members of a society, and their presence in fiction (particularly in “light entertainment fiction,” where they are less expected) can be quite directly and immediately harmful to people in the society*. This is not something which I speak about in the abstract: I’ve suffered real immediate personal harm, in terms of social and economic rejection and also in terms of days lost to depression, from uncritical trope parroting regarding rape survivors, or Jews.

So if an author who is concerned with work being humane, with it benefiting his audience (including himself), it is a best practice to not uncritically repeat harmful cultural tropes. This doesn’t mean “don’t engage harmful cultural tropes” because that’s clearly BS. It means “maybe you shouldn’t engage them uncritically.” Be aware that this is a sharp, dangerous thing that you’re playing with, and you might cut yourself or others.

Just as a knife can be used to harm or heal, so can fiction, because it is that powerful, culturally, psychologically, and spiritually. If you’re handling a dangerous trope, the only concern is to make sure that the fiction around it is particularly good, with the best interests of yourself and your audience at heart.

This is not to say that fiction which uncritical parrots harmful tropes is necessarily wrong or should necessarily be dismissed. Some great works of literature fall into that category. It would be a tragedy to lose The Tempest, or Huckleberry Finn, or Lord of the Rings. I’m not advocating that, and if you don’t understand why I’m not, please do ask.

*It can also be damaging to the society as a whole.

Three ways to talk about rape

I’ve run into some real stumbling blocks talking about rape, previously. To some degree this is simply unavoidable: for both personal and cultural reasons rape is an incredibly emotionally fraught topic, and naturally people’s dander gets up when you talk about it. The other is that rape functions at multiple levels in society, and people feel a strong sense of “ownership” over the issue depending on their relationship to it. So I’m going to lay these out early on to have a post to refer to later.

1) Rape as an individual crime, with a perpetrator and a victim, including causes and effects. This is the baseline of experience, and when we talk honestly about rape to some extent we need to talk about this. In particular, I think that we don’t often talk about the motivations of perpetrators in any coherent sense. This is because the dialogue around rape is so culturally fucked that we feel a need to dehumanize both perpetrators and survivors: thus, talking about motivations and effects as things which are done by humans to other humans becomes very difficult. I’d like to talk more about this, upcoming.

2) Rape as a social institution. Rape isn’t an aberration: it happens in every human society throughout all of human history. It is fundamentally built into our social structure, and it forms an important part in both generating and enforcing social norms. If we’re going to take serious action to confront and reduce rape in our society, we’re going to have to address the ways it is part of our social structure. In contrast to “rape culture” we might call this “rape society.” I don’t think a lot of people talk about this, at least not in the corners of culture I frequent, so if anyone has any reading links please toss them out. I would like to eventually get to a point where I can analyze and discuss this level, but I’m not there yet.

3) Rape as a cultural concept. This is separate from the above, because it’s not about the actual practice of rape, but the idea of it and the use of the threat of rape to enforce and perpetuate social norms. A lot of anti-rape activism exists at this level: this is where the gender differences are most pronounced for instance (as a guy, for example, I have never been told that I shouldn’t walk home alone at night because I might be raped, but I have been told that if I break the law I will be punitively raped in prison.) This is where “rape culture” lives.

Of course, these things are actually so interconnected that placing them in three bullet points is misleading. Individual acts exist in a social and cultural context, the cultural context is not separate from the social hierarchy, and so on. But I think that confusion about the differences here leads to a lot of mistakes and mis-steps. When a feminist activist who is not a rape survivor tells me, a male rape survivor, that “I can’t understand rape,” she’s talking about the cultural level, where rape is strongly gendered and I will never have the female experience of it. (This is a charitable reading: she also might be a male rape denier or just ignorant and bigoted.) If I hear her as talking about the other levels, where I clearly have experience and understanding, I’m not going to take it well. So having this laid out will hopefully avoid some of those problems.

Being a rape survivor

Hi everyone. I’m Ben Lehman. I’m a rape survivor. I was raped by my maternal grandparents and some of their accomplices multiple times between the ages of 4 and 10, in a systematic and calculated way. Resulting from this, I have PTSD and chronic mono-polar depression.

I want to talk about rape in this space, and the really fucked up way that our culture deals with it, so it behooves me to talk about my own experiences as a rape survivor. There are two reasons that it so behooves me: one good, and one bad.

The good one is that I want to talk about theories and structure of rape as a personal crime, a social institution, and a cultural concept, and thus in the interests of honesty I should be clear about my own experiences so that we can analyze and discuss how my own experiences have led to my ideas about rape, as well as biased my views about rape.

This is important, and I want to come back to this over the course this discussion, which I’m hoping will be ongoing. I’d really love to have an audience willing to go “ok, Ben, but you’re biased because of your experience in such-and-such a way” because, lord knows, I’m not going to see all my own bias.

The bad reason is that, because I am not the ideal rape survivor, I need to use my own experiences to justify my privilege to talk about rape at all. We have a cultural tendency to question, doubt, and undermine rape survivors who don’t fit our ideal (young but sexually mature, female, pretty, virginal, “broken” by the experience, depressed by not acting out violently, white, attacked with force by a stranger). I meet some of these, but not others, and thus I’m pretty consistently belittled and dismissed in discussions about rape. This has happened to me so consistently, and so many times, that I now feel like I have to prophylactically but my “talking about rape credentials” forward before I can even begin to discuss it.

To be clear, this is bullshit. Rape is a human problem, and a widespread one. Everyone, from every society and in every class of our society, has skin in the game about rape. Even if you are not a victim or a perpetrator, chances are very high that you know someone who is one or both. Even if, by some miracle of statistics, you don’t know anyone immediately affected by rape, you are no less deserving to talk about it, because you have likely been threatened with rape. The threat of rape is used widely throughout our society as a means of enforcing gender, racial, and social norms, and I find it hard to imagine someone living today who has not experienced threats of rape to “keep them in line” somehow.

I want to use this space, in the future, to talk about this. But first I want to make sure it’s okay to talk about. First let me show you my credentials, and yours. This is a place where everyone gets the right to talk about rape, the right to be right or wrong about it.