cardassiangoodreads:
penny-anna:
Whenever an artist who makes dark content gets outed as a sexual predator people will be like ‘aha it was obvious something was up because their work was so dark and nasty’ and whenever an artist who makes wholesome content gets outed as a sexual predator people will be like 'aha it was obvious something was up because their work was so aggressively wholesome’ and it’s like you know I think maybe you can’t tell whether or not someone is a predator based on their artistic output.
There are a few exceptions but they tend to be pretty glaring ones: e.g. Woody Allen made a whole movie justifying being into teenage girls over women his own age (is this an uncharitable reading of Manhattan? perhaps, it’s about other things too. is it a wrong one though? no and if you’ve seen it and are honest with yourself, you know I’m right) and his particular set of Issues With Women are all over a lot of his work. But he also has a self-insert character who is usually played by him in most of his movies, so it’s not a stretch to say he puts more of himself in his work than most directors do.
Artists usually put some of themselves in their work, not none but also not all. Which parts get in there, the artist doesn’t often even have as much control over as they think. Most people who’ve ever made art in any form have likely experienced this - well it’s just as true for people who do this professionally.
But it’s never as straightforward or as sweeping as “dark stuff” or “wholesome stuff.” It’s far more complicated than that. And idiosyncratic - it expresses itself a little differently with each person and each work of art they create.
Sometimes you can get a sense of someone’s unconscious biases in their work particularly if they revisit a theme in a shitty way multiple times or say weird/shitty things about it in interviews/etc. Like if you see something which is a very obvious rape metaphor and then the creator goes on about how ~it’s not rape, it’s eroticism, she really likes it~ about something depicted as terrifying and violent which literally could not be consensual given its circumstances, it changes your read on it, and sometimes makes said creator seem like kind of a sexist dick. But not a rapist, because most sexist dicks are not rapists. Often with poorly-written rape what gets me is less the writing itself than when an author turns up and goes “Hey that thing I wrote? Totally isn’t rape! It’s consensual, good and fine!” and then you’re like, “Oh, you actually don’t understand how rape works, do you. Yikes!”, because interviews with people who do understand what they’re writing about will usually elaborate on that understanding rather than make what was written look worse knowing the author viewed it as “positive” or whatever. Some people will assume writing about that topic = “I think it’s consensual, good and fine” and that’s silly, but if an author gets up and says that they think that… I’ll take their word for it!
But. The thing is, you really can’t get a sense of someone’s actions even from that—just their ideas about a given topic. Unfortunately, we live in rape culture and that means a lot of people who are not rapists have very, very wrong ideas about what rape is and does. That sucks, and it may well put me off an author/their work, but it is not the same thing as being a rapist.
My number one reaction to someone’s biases flagging up in their work—not the topic, but how it’s handled (eg is there racism, sexism etc in how it’s presented in some notable way) is, “Welp, that person seems out of touch/like they don’t know what they’re on about at best,” and most of the time, yeah, it’s not evidence of criminality, it’s ignorance.
Now, that doesn’t mean ignorance can’t turn into an agenda over time, but that still has basically nothing to do with specific personal actions. Works that have an agenda (positive or negative!) are usually about projecting values on purpose (like prev’s example, Woody Allen’s story is making an argument not on how he specifically did what he’s accused of, but why it should be OK to do things he thinks are OK but that others disagree with). But he is an exception in that I genuinely can’t think of any “dark fiction” which was making a brief for shit like murder being OK! I’ve seen it written by conservative or bigoted authors whose works they’ve inserted their politics into on purpose, but most often it’s actually about associating people they dislike with the bad thing, rather than endorsing doing it, because weaponizing social taboos against people you hate is way easier than making a brief against the social taboo’s existence.
99% of the time if an author is really showing their ass in their work for some reason, they’re already showing their ass outside of their work… further elaboration incoming, so readmore bc this is long already.
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