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I am happy to defend the idea that drawn erotica is inappropriate material for a public library to carry. Tom of Finland may have made many gays very happy, but if they want his material they are free to pay for it themselves.
I stand on the null hypothesis that public libraries, until very recently, also agreed with me.
Would you like to defend or justify some sort of reasoning for the change?
So I have actually looked at the images in Gender Queer. I would not call them "erotica." It's supposed to be a coming-of-age novel about a queer kid experimenting with sex acts that she ultimately finds unappealing.
Would I want my pre-teen kids to read it? No. It definitely should be age-restricted. But "This shouldn't even exist in a public library" seems a bit much.
Influencing my opinion is the fact that I distinctly remember books like Flowers in the Attic and the John Norman Gor series existing in my school library when I was a kid. Now maybe you can make a case that text is less harmful/dangerous than images, but I would contest that. Those books had some fucked up themes and scenes, and the sex scenes weren't even explicit.
I extend to people the presumption that if they are engaging in the discussion, they have at least looked at the most salient examples of the topic, and so stating that I have “actually looked” at the examples could only be read as a veiled accusation that the other person hasn’t.
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It’s a blowjob, dude. It’s erotica by its very nature. It shouldn’t be in the public library. Again I stand on the null hypothesis that until very recently, essentially every library in America agreed with me, and it is the change that has to be justified.
That being said, you bring up a good point. Flowers in the Attic and Gor shouldn’t have been in your school library. It shouldn’t have been in mine.
The sewage was already lapping around our ankles when we were kids, but that’s no excuse for letting things get worse. And yes, on the way back to having no metaphorical sewage flowing through our intellectual and spiritual lives, we have to pump the sewer back down to just around our waists, and then our knees, and our ankles, and so forth.
There are things that can be sexual but not pornographic, but those things are, culturally, well prior to Playboy.
Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica." The idea that no library books ever depicted sex acts (visually or textually) before Gender Queer is false.
TIL that should I ever venture onto Pornhub, all the videos will be about cleaning the grout in your bathroom, weeding the garden, the precise temperature at which your roast is perfectly cooked, and giving that mucky wall a good scrub.
Good to know!
I am a tiny bit confuzzled about "it's only a drawing of a blowjob so it's not, you know, erotic" but then that's because I am not ten years old today, and can't parse out "this is someone trying to have sex in line with a particular sexual fantasy but please read it like it's a medical description in a textbook and not about sexy times" from "this is a depiction of sexy times".
Or, to quote Field & Stream,
Rather like Branch Cabell's Jurgen - why no, prurient minded reviewer, all the passages about Jurgen labouring mightily in the night time with a lady friend on mysterious symbolic tasks are not about sex, how could you think that? (Reader, it was about sex). Suffers from being too clever-clever - if you're going to write fantasy, even satiric fantasy, it has to be less heavy-handed. Reading it today, it's hard slogging because the author cannot help but nudge you in the ribs every so often about "do you get it? do you? huh?"
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Erotica is meant to arouse. It's meant to be erotic. Obviously porn is erotica. But not all naked pictures are porn, IMO.
With the caveat that literally everything is "erotica" to someone, I have a hard time imagining anyone finding the specific scene we're talking about in Gender Queer arousing or stimulating, and it seems pretty obvious to me that that was not its intent. You can take issue with all kinds of things (like its suitability for children), but I think a lot of people are performatively clutching pearls about kids reading about sex.
Well, if depictions of a sexual fantasy are not meant to be arousing (and the author is trying to show that for her it was arousing as a fantasy, whatever it was like in reality) then to quote Gilbert and Sullivan "Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!”
Have you read the page in question? Did it strike you as erotic? Did it strike you as something meant to be arousing? Did you look at that panel and think it's something a teen is likely to jerk off to, or that the author thought of it as something to jerk off to? Because to me, it looked more like teens trying out a "sex fantasy" that turns out to be weird and ridiculous and completely unarousing, which was the point of that sequence. But maybe it did something different for you. I'll take your word for it.
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Sure they are. We can do this all day.
Not once have I argued this. You brought in the question of text. I’m not sure who you’re arguing with right now.
What I have argued and will continue to argue is that there is a constant churn of Cthulhu swimming left, towards greater and greater degradation of the commons. Today it’s someone defending cutesy drawings of blowjobs in library books that librarians push or market towards young teens or tweens, 10 or 20 years from now it’ll be someone defending librarians pushing kids towards cutesy drawings of some author’s autobiographical exploration of the first time they let their dog fuck them. Maybe sooner! Things are moving fast.
Maybe that will be too much for you, or maybe it won’t, maybe you’ll continue to say, “Well, I read Gor in the school library when I was a kid, and I remember the Gender Queer arguments on the Motte (PBUI) and the kinds of assholes who took the counter-argument to me, so this is fine also.”
Or maybe you’ll find your grandkid reading it in the library’s booknook and you’ll be appalled. I don’t know. But your current arguments are toothless to me because my stance is that Gor in the school library was already too much.
We are merely having the discussion about Gender Queer because that is where the current battlefield starts. Unfortunately, from my point of view.
I agree with the pattern you observe (but I have mixed feelings over whether it is a bad thing), and I also find it very annoying that normie progressives simultaeneously show radical acceptance towards the thing of [current year] and hostile disgust towards the stuff that hasn't yet been normalised.
But I believe that: a) In the specific case of gender queer, it is not happening b) When it does happen (now or in the future), it's not that bad.
And if that does happen in the future, that would also not necessarily be erotica. It's not about whether you, personally, find the lifestyle choices being proselytised gross or icky - the question is "does this work attempt to convey complex ideas and emotions that provoke the reader to think?" (or in the other direction - "would anyone want to read this work with both hands outside of their pants?")
I can easily imagine a serious piece of literature being written on this topic, in the style of "Gender Queer":
And yes, we can play this game again for any other "degenerate" aspect of human sexuality that also currently lies to the left of the Overton window (pedophillia, necrophillia, vore, etc)
Why is it so terribly awful for children to be exposed to actual erotica? (I am now moving onto point b - I maintain that Gender Queer is not erotica) My school library did not stock "Gor", but it did stock an adult fantasy novel, whose last half was a thinly-veiled femdom porn fantasy:
The actual book is even more sexualised than even this account would suggest (his "training" spans many pages) - I recall the "Mord-Sith" telling the protagonist to focus on her latex-clad breasts to avoid the pain of the Agiel (it can read the
submissive'svictim's thoughts, and hurts them when they think bad things about thedommeMord-Sith), another Mord-Sith who is implied to castrate her "pets", and another still who actually makes them communicate in barks and go on "walks" with her through the town naked, collared and on all-fours.As a pre-teen, I did indeed find this "confusing" (I was not aware that it was supposed to be erotic, so I wondered if there was something seriously wrong with me for finding graphic descriptions of "torture" arousing), and I remember feeling deeply ashamed about my enjoyment of the book and all the fantasies I had that were inspired by the book. And now... I'm an adult - and nothing bad happened. I don't have some kind of PTSD, I understand that was just a fantasy written by a horny guy (and Denna is not an accurate representation of female sexuality), I didn't develop an irrational fear/hatred towards women because I associate them with Denna, etc. Reading this synopsis of the book now, I can only laugh at how silly and over-the-top the whole thing was in retrospect.
This was not a good thing (as in, I'm not going to encourage any future children I have to read TWFR so they can experience what I experienced) - but in retrospect, this seems to be on a similar level of badness to the long list of other minor things that made my teenage years less than storybook.
But going back to point (a) - I think it's borderline even whether something like TWFR counts as "erotica" (the first half was just a normal fantasy novel, with mature themes, and the book did seriously explore the idea of being tortured - the Mord-Siths were not dominatrices, the torture depicted was very real and non-consensual, with blood and genuine agony)
Gender Queer is nowhere close to this border. Having skimmed the book, it totals 240 pages, of which there are exactly 2 short scenes that are of a sexual nature (the strap-on blowjob mentioned by the media, and also a medical exam showing the author naked without any scenery censor) - all of the remaining pages are just ordinary comic book drawings with pro-LGBT storylines and perspectives.
It is a reasonable position to be against titles like Gender Queer on the basis that you are against their underlying message, and do not want to normalise pursuing sexually deviant lifestyles (especially not to impressionable young children) - as I said at the start of the comment, I also have mixed feelings over the LGBTQ+ movement. But I think it is completely unreasonable to object on the grounds that works like these are pornographic (because they aren't)
CREW: A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries
Bolded for the part that gets as explicit as possible, but of course most of the other criteria are easy to apply as well. I'm familiar with the general argument you're making, but I'm also aware that this is not how libraries actually work, and I decline to be a rube.
I am not claiming that this is the criteria libraries use in real life to decide what is allowed on their shelves (I will join you in not being a rube here), or even that it should be the criteria they use.
I'm arguing that this is the criteria for whether something is erotica or not, and that it's disingenuous to call Gender Queer "erotica" and deny the fact that it does indeed attempt to convey complex ideas and emotions (albeit ideas that offend some people's sensibilities, and whose spread may well be damaging to society)
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Okay, but using your own personal definitions and saying "Nuh uh" isn't much of an argument.
Maybe so, though I am unconvinced by arguments that have been made basically since Roman times about the degradation of morals and the corruption of the youth.
I wouldn't have any heartburn about prohibiting Gender Queer from school libraries, but public libraries (which are meant to serve adults as well as children, and which can impose age restrictions on certain books) do not need to cater to your personal preferred level of acceptability.
Likewise, your arguments are toothless to me, because I don't know anyone who turned into a degenerate because they read spicy genre fiction as a kid. I am not saying there is no line, but the line is always going to be fuzzy and negotiable and subjective. You are afraid I'd be okay with exposing children to bestiality; I am afraid you'd like to censor anything that would raise a maiden aunt's eyebrows in 1890. You're right that this is where the battlefield is, however much I personally find Gender Queer offputting (and inappropriate for pre-teens).
I actually agree with you on this. It seems that, if I'm interpreting @BreakerofHorsesandMen correctly, anything outside of the most saccharine, banal works would be banned. Does description of child abuse warrant censure? How about descriptions of warfare or violence? Where does the line stop exactly? It seems that trying to ban things based off on their "appropriateness" to different age ranges is an inherently moral/political question.
However, I have to disagree with you here. It's well documented that watching too much porn can induce transsexuality or autogynephilia at least. I'd also argue that in terms of how well slippery-scope applies, sexuality is one context in which it best applies. Reading spicy genre fiction can easily lead to reading more hardcore fiction, which can in turn lead to joining adjacent online circles/forums/tumblrs that if not encourage, at least implicitly validate non-standard sexual behaviors and identities. Just see cracking-the-egg in trans spaces, or the public and shameless speculation on and encouragement for identifying as gay for anyone who even seems to be gay; see the anger when it comes to "queer-baiting".
Really, I believe the above is the crux of the argument. On one side, you have people who rightly believe that these works of art encourage or at least lower the activation energy of acceptance, so to speak, for sexual identities and behaviors that they perceive to be disordered or morally incorrect. On the other side, you have people who believe that not only are those sexual identifies and behaviors not disordered or morally incorrect, but should actively be accepted and encouraged in society; so, those works of art that can help to either cause people to tolerate those sexual identities or incorporate them into their person should be, in their view, not only permitted, but disseminated.
In Thomas Sowell terms, it's a conflict of visions.
I'd argue that you could actually make an empirical decision on which specific sexual identities are disordered or not based on empirical material outcomes, but that's beyond the scope of this comment.
Accepting that this is possible (I suspect there's more to it than someone coming across the wrong kind of porn at an impressionable age), obviously media affects people, especially children. This should be pretty obvious, but we fight about it because this can be interpreted as "watching too much porn can induce transsexuality or autogynephilia," "Reading spicy genre fiction is a slippery slope to degeneracy," "violent video games turns kids into mass shooters," etc. There are things I think kids should not watch or read and those things might not necessarily be just graphic sex or violence.
So I don't really disagree with your thesis, but I will repeat mine that this is a sliding and negotiable scale. Of course we should control/monitor what media children consume (and parents should be able to make individual decisions for their children). But inevitably parents who want more censorship are going to come into conflict with parents who want less, especially in common spaces. You should be able to prohibit your kid from reading Gender Queer - should you be able to prohibit mine? Libraries are one of those places where we're going to come into conflict, because it's a commons.
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It's actually a strap-on. And neither of the characters finds it sexy. The scene is meant to be awkward.
Confused teens not even knowing how to fuck might be gross but it doesn't strike me as erotica.
I am well aware it’s a strap-on. The facing page in the book in question specifically refers to the act as a blowjob.
I quote:
This writing is erotica.
IMO that's still missing the point. They were excited about it and tried to do it and found out it was awkward and disturbing rather than exciting. Like the same panel and the next several:
"I can't feel anything"
"This was much hotter when it was only in my imagination"
"Hey Z... let's try something else"
In thought balloons: "But now that I've had sex a few times I'm not sure I really need any more. Trying to get off in front of someone is kind of weird."
"I think when I do orgasm, it's not because of my body but in spite of it"
They were clearly acting out roles assigned to them by others and by media. If anything it was saying "putting on a strap-on and sucking it isn't what being queer is about"
To me this is practically anti-erotica. It's like reading about asexual people describing PIV sex as rubbing their elbows together.
It’s about a kid growing up not feeling feminine, struggling to fit into pre-built sexual and gender roles, experimenting, and ultimately realizing she's asexual and nonbinary.
It's definitionally unsexy as a whole.
Sure, but do we really need drawings of it, and not the character as she (or he, if we're being correct in our terminology) thinking about the experience, what he expected, and how that was different from reality?
This is the fundamental division here between the two sides: one set thinks "no, a depiction of a sexual act in a book for teenagers that will be in a school library is not appropriate" and the other set thinks "this isn't sexy like porn, it's fine".
The recommended reading age, looking it up, is for 14-15/15 and up. But will younger kids be able to access it? What's fine for a 15 year old may not be appropriate for a 12 year old, and that's part of the whole fight. Unless the librarians are ensuring younger kids can't get the book, and it doesn't seem like this particular group feels they should be engaging in what they perceive as censorship, then parents can't be sure their kids aren't accessing inappropriate material.
And that's the other part of the fight: what parents think they should be able to decide is appropriate for their kids, versus what the school or school board thinks is okay. Just saying that hey, kids have always sneaked around and gotten into stuff they shouldn't have at that age isn't good enough. Kids might be sneaking drinks at home out of the parents' liquor cabinet, but do we want schools handing out shots of whiskey to 12 (or 15) year olds on the grounds that "they're gonna do it anyway, might as well do it in a safe environment"?
"Oh hey, it wasn't whiskey, it was wine or an alcopop" isn't that much better as justification.
I think so. It's a graphic memoir.
Let me just dump some assorted background opinions that will probably offend approximately everyone, unintentionally.
So, yeah, I don't consider the awkward sex acts in Gender Queer pornographic or erotic. But I also am not that concerned about the risk even if some kids just flip through it to look for the dick scene and don't ever read a single word.
I'm fine with a school library stocking it for teenagers, but I'd be shocked if they were happily letting 8 or 9 year olds take it out and read it.
Yeah, I think it's the age-appropriate as well as every thing else. There's not going to be much middle ground between parents who don't want their kids exposed to this kind of material in school, without their parental consent, and without them introducing (or not) such topics on their own schedule, and school teachers/staff/administration who want to show off how liberal and open-minded and "We don't censor books here" they are.
I think it would be a safe bet that such "we don't censor books here" types, who like to participate in Banned Books
Daysorry, it's now an entire Week, wouldn't stock a copy of, say, The Secret of the Rosary because separation of church and state! non-establishment of religion! no preferring one faith over another! and so forth. Nobody would bravely stand up for "if kids want to know about such prayers, we can't stop them exploring their spirituality and we shouldn't try".More options
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Or in other words, it’s oppression pornography (or reverse pornography in the "reverse racism" sense).
It's still devoid of any other literary value and is just a masturbatory aid for progressive women, but the difference is important (and the first step to figuring out that in an environment of equality, unusual in a state of nature, their sexual misbehavior is just as much a problem as it is when men do it).
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By this media! There is no reason for young children to know about strapons or blowjobs. This is a self-licking ice cream cone - teaching children about explicit sex acts and then saying ‘well, children these days encounter sex early, they need to be taught about this stuff’.
When my grandfather was sixteen going on a picnic with a girl and her chaperone was considered risqué. Now they’re teaching pre-pubescents about blowjobs.
Well, as the sign at the "Drag the Kids to Pride" show told us, it's not gonna lick itself
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I find this... unlikely, unless your grandfather was Amish.
Assuming you are no older than me (and probably younger), your grandfather was dating in 1930s at the earliest. Picnics with a chaperone were considered old-fashioned in most of the US even then, and certainly not "risque."
It’s possible that mores were different for a young Brit of my grandfather’s (old-fashioned) class. He was later nearly disowned for marrying a girl at university (rare but they did exist) who didn’t have what was considered an appropriate background.
It’s also possible I made up the chaperone. I’m afraid it’s been a long time since I heard the story.
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He may not be American.
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Are all uncensored drawn images of sexual acts erotica or are you drawing some distinction between the two?
"Tom of Finland may have made many gays very happy, but if they want his material they are free to pay for it themselves." I don't know what this is supposed to be telling me; this is a fully generalizable argument against having libraries at all. If you want a math textbook, you're also free to pay for it yourself if you like math? Would you like to argue that erotic images are a special category that should be treated differently? If so, make the case.
Absent some evidence I am loath to accept your null hypothesis, just as you are clearly loath to accept mine. I will also note that you have chosen a specific slice of the argument I was making to defend by focusing solely on what you call drawn erotica and not, say, graphic images of war in history books. Do you support the latter being available in public libraries? If so, again, why the distinction?
Assuming that you were correct for the sake of argument, I think a pretty good justification for the change would be the Internet. Everyone already has unlimited free access to whatever type of content they want online, so it seems strange to put some special restrictions on an alternative service that is also available to serve the public at large (making it even less competitive than it already is with the Internet). Why would it be incumbent on the librarians to restrict their hub-of-information service when this onus is not placed on the Internet at large to do the same?
I fundamentally don't buy the arguments that children are being nefariously exposed to dangerous erotic content in some unique way through their public (not school) libraries. If their parents are so lax as to allow them to view dangerously inappropriate material in a public physical facility which has demarcated children's sections, when the system requires you to check out books for a defined length of time under a particular name, then those parents are lax enough that restricting the public libraries will have no effect anyway.
And everyone is always free to, you know, not take their kids to the public library if they don't want to. The fact that there is little necessity to do so is a load-bearing part of why the libraries should not necessarily feel obligated to cater their entire catalogue to the lowest age denominator.
And of course, there is room for nuance in all of these points. There is a great difference between erotic books being available in some clearly marked corner of the library vs. being advertised up front and loudly to all who enter.
I make the case that erotic images have always been a special category that was treated differently, from the beginning of public libraries. Public libraries were designed and intended to educate, uplift, and edify their users. You have to make the case for why we should change.
My hypothesis is the null hypothesis because prior to May 28, 2019, the question “Should we have comic books depicting blowjobs both in the public library and marketed to under-18s” would have probably caught the questioner a pedophilia accusation. It would have been so uncontroversially a negative that even to ask the question would be suspicious, and yet it only took the release of Gender Queer for a vocal minority to argue that I’m the one who has to explain why it shouldn’t be in the public library.
At some point in the living past, the question “Should we have, in the public library, comic books depicting graphic rape” would have been uncontroversially answered with a negative, and at some point in the living past, “Should we sell photos of naked women at gas stations” would have been uncontroversially answered in the negative, and so on and so forth.
The Internet is mostly a sewage pipe with a small bubble of moderately fresh air trapped up against the pipe, and I don’t find your argument that therefore libraries should also become sewage pipes to be at all convincing. “The Internet is for Porn”, after all, so libraries can and should be for something else.
This reasoning always shows up eventually. Of course I’m free to not take my kids to the public library. But I also used to be free to take them there and be fairly confident the worst thing they could stumble across was some text erotica. My parents could be reasonably certain the worst thing I would stumble across was a kiss and a fade to black in a fantasy novel. Their parents could pretty much trust the worst thing they were going to come across was a “Damn!”
The point is that my freedom to trust that the public library is in accord with what I and people like me view as the public interest has been slowly degrading for 40 years or more. This limits our access to and trust in the library and when we complain about it or express our grievances, we are met with your reasoning.
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This is obviously a generational battle and will continue to be so. I don’t fault my predecessors for not understanding what was going on, because it probably felt like having to explain to someone that the sky is blue and the grass is green, and that while sometimes the sky is orange and the grass is yellow, they still aren’t the same thing, only to be met with adamant accusations that the sky and the grass are the same thing until their will to resist was exhausted.
Now we are living in the world where everyone is expected to act like the sky and the grass are the same thing, and unsurprisingly it is starting to crack up under its contradictions.
The weirdest thing about gas stations stocking porn magazines was the 711 policy of stripping the cover off the damaged magazines and giving them away to customers. It was such a weird blend of considerate and inappropriate.
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