Big Ed's PlaceThe taboo erotica discussion
So I got sucked into a twitter discussion on taboo erotica. The discussion started on The Good Parts, which focused largely on the issue of why publishers won’t touch taboo topics in erotica. Remittance Girl recorded a rebuttal. Then a twitter discussion erupted (hashtag #taboorotica) and Monocle weighed in on erotica vs. violence here. A list of the on-going discussions are here.
Now I’ve already written posts about the internet increasing taboo porn, the attraction of the taboo and speedballs (recommended reading), and incest taboo attraction. So what am I adding this time?
Simply the argument that publishers are not being stupid or cowards. There be dragons in tabooland, however much we might not like it. The full argument behind the cut.
The obvious dragon for publishers is harassment by the legal establishment and/or self-appointed morality police. It doesn’t matter if you’re legally in the right if you can’t afford to continually pay for the lawyers, for example. Harassment can also fall into social, economic, and other methods as well. Furthermore, publishers are more vulnerable than authors. A publisher needs their customers to be able to locate them, which means that they need an address. An author might be able to remain shielded behind a pseudonym, but it’s harder for a publisher, particularly if they want to have more than a very small, select audience.*
*Aside: this is particularly a problem for folks in the legal sphere. For illegal products (drugs, high end prostitution, etc.), the risks drive the price up high enough that providers can make a decent profit with fewer customers than legal products can. If you need fewer customers, you can be more selective and take the time to check them out and get to know them first. But if you need to sell to a lot of customers, that will include strangers, which means making yourself available to folks who might wish you ill.
Now it would be easy if we could dismiss the harassers as ‘wrong’ or ‘stupid.’ But are they? Setting aside any religious-based arguments, what’s driving them?
For there’s a problem with playing at the edges. As Anais Nin said, “Extraordinary pleasures dull the appetite for ordinary pleasures.” We, as humans, all to easily reset the ‘norm.’
Just look at sex. A century ago, a prostitute could charge extra for oral sex–it cost more than intercourse. Now it’s much much less and much more common (see Superfreakanomics for the stats. I’ll review that book sometime soon). When the taboo becomes common, it loses it’s edge.
Furthermore, I don’t think this is just for the crazies or mentally disturbed. Yes, several author friends of mine have stories about fans who email them mistaking the fiction for something that actually happened (and finding encouragement therein). But I’ve also seen and known ‘normal’ people who find their definition of normal to be changed quite a bit as they’ve entered into the grey areas of sexuality. Heck, it’s happened to me (see my conservatism post here).
I’ve even found that to be true with the taboos themselves. In my late twenties, I got to know a man who’d done jail time for sexually molesting his kids. We talked and he told me how he constantly rationalized and persuaded himself that what he was doing was ‘normal’ and therefore ‘okay.’
Does that shift responsibility from him, or other perpetrators, to the authors and publishers? Hell, no. Adults need to be responsible for their actions and pawning it off on others is unacceptable to me. “I was drunk” isn’t an excuse, and neither is, “well, I read a lot of stuff that led me to think it was okay…”
But it does point to the dragon of desensitization. We’ve already done a damn good job of desensitizing ourselves to violence in the West. Do we wish the same in areas of non-consensual sex? For I see the taboos of age and bestiality as just variants of this taboo (see my politics post for more).
That said, I’ll grant that the desensitization dragon is a gross generalization. Adults are (generally) capable of separating fantasy from reality and not stepping across reality boundaries. Additionally, a specific piece of Art may actually increase sensitization. But if I’m a publisher, do I want to take the chance?
Which relates to the third dragon–genre convention. Once we label a story as belonging to a certain genre, we implicitly assign the conventions and norms of that genre to it. “Literature” can sometimes get away with playing in a genre without adopting the conventions (like Atwood’s A Handmaiden’s Tale does), but something that is seated firmly within the genre will risk disappointing readers and therefore prospective buyers.
Detective novels require the detective to solve the crime. Romance novels require the couple to end up together. Erotica… erotica requires a serious attempt to arouse the reader, usually through explicit sex scenes. If you always ‘fade to black’ a la the old Hays movie code, you’re not writing erotica as would be sold in bookstores.
Which means that, if I’m publishing something that shows how hot sex can be (genre requirement), but the coupling is ‘taboo’, I’m basically saying “taboo sex is good sex.” So I’ve not only done some desensitization, but I’ve dangled an apple on the other side of the line, hinting how good it would be if the reader just took a bite.
Can an adult keep fiction and non-fiction straight? Yeah, most can. But again, as a publisher, do I want to take the chance?
Which is really the sum of my argument–because there really aren’t three dragons but a single hydra. The nature of taboo erotica gives harassers enough quasi-legitimate arguments to come after a publisher if they want, and a publisher is going to have a hard time hiding if they want to stay in business.
I don’t necessarily like it, but as I said, I don’t think the publishers are necessarily cowards. In the art vs. commerce dichotomy, they’re on the side that requires more caution, and I wish them the best as the navigate the waters that be.
I think it’s quite a bit more complex than “Extraordinary pleasures dull the appetite for ordinary pleasures.” I’m not convinced that there’s an Overton Window for kink, or that desensitization is a universal phenomenon, for two reasons:
First, that there are all those studies which show a correlation between increased access to pornography and decreased incidents of sexual violents.
Second, because it worked exactly opposite that way in me. When I first got on the net, alt.sex.stories was a wild and woolly place with some incredibly perverse stuff. At first the sheer variety was amazing, and I rubbed myself raw, but rather quickly I started empathizing at a deeper level with the participants in the story, and I found myself squicked (back when that word was being coined) by much of that stuff.
Similarly, my personal physical sex life has gone some of that same way, from being excited about groups and what-not to realizing that, at least for me, it’s much more about the connection I feel with those I’m with than it is about quantity or variety.
Neither of those things contradicts your conclusion, in that it’s the public’s perception that more explicit sexual content in our fantasy materials leads to a resetting of the norms, and in that way I can’t fault publishers who are already pushing edges for playing a little safer anyway, but I also want to celebrate Nin and de Sade and all those pushing the boundaries of “taste” today because without those explorers we’re not going to learn that fantasy doesn’t directly drive reality.
It’s just gonna be a horrendous slog to get there.
I’ve seen the studies about the anti-correlation of porn and sexual violence, but I’ve also seen evidence on violence desensitization (without the sexual aspect). As for the Nin quote, I think “connection” is just a different axis for extraordinary pleasure. Probably a good one to go down, though, particularly compared to some of the kink paths.
I agree it’s gonna be a horrendous slog to get to reality-based mature truths about sexuality. But that’s a different set of rants.