Equal treatment versus special treatment
Dec. 15th, 2008 06:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficI don't know if you've been following Metafandom, or as it's known in some circles, the Academic Journal of McShep Smut, but a pretty interesting sorta-debate has arisen between the faction that believes writers have a social obligation to be... well... politically correct (cue Oscar music) and those who believe that writers shouldn't try to crowbar "morals" into their writing. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wemyss, which I'm pretty sure is not an Old English synonym for wenis, defends the latter position here, while stellaluna_, who is shockingly not a Mary-Sue kid sister from A Streetcar Named Desire fandom (did that joke sound funnier in my head or am I just desperate? Your call!), has a post here!
It's something that, as a writer, I've been thinking about for a while. Now there are cases that we can all agree are fucked up, like when Grey's Anatomy kills off one half of a lesbian storyline because it's about lesbians. But beyond the grossly prejudiced, there's the sticky area of equal treatment and special treatment, and how you define both.
Now, at its worst, special treatment results in happy gay couples and minority characters who exist mainly to cover the writers' asses at dinner parties. Nothing interesting happens to them because the writers don't want people to get angry at them, so you what you end up with are token characters that are boring and flat compared to the whiter, straighter characters. Not good.
On the other hand, equal treatment opens you up to more insidious forms of bigotry. Not intentionally, obviously, just people think up stories and naturally their thoughts run along the lines of stories they've seen before (ala tropes) and before you know it, they've repeated a negative stereotype that was probably better left in the past and for no compelling narrative reason to boot!
Just as an example, let's say I write a zombie story, as is my wont. There are five couples in there, four straight, one gay. Zombies eat four of the couples, but one survives to fight another day. And the surviving couple is a boy and a girl. I might argue that the gay couple was treated exactly the same as the straight couples. Four out of five didn't make it out, so they were just in the unlucky 80%.
Whereupon someone might argue that 100% of the gay characters got eaten by zombies.
Who's right? Well, both and neither, that's what I personally think. And far from censoring ourselves or saying screw political correctness, I think what we have to do is question our assumptions first. How come only one couple has to survive? How come only one couple is gay?
Recently, I read a book series in which there was a lesbian, possibly bisexual character. She pined over a straight character (1). My admittedly juvenile fun at reading the series as a lesbian romance got a bit screwed when the lesbian character was raped (2) to accomplish a plot point that, at this point in the series, I think could've been accomplished much more... entertainingly? Because for me, rape is anti-entertainment. And now it looks like her desire to become 'special friends' with the straight character is going to be abruptly retconned into being special friends with the heroine.
Admittedly, this isn't the most earth-shattering notion in the world, but I just think the author should've stopped at some point and said "whoa, I just wrote the lesbian who was pining over a straight girl getting raped. Do I really want to go there?" Not saying she shouldn't, but that before going ahead with a potentially offensive trope, she should think it over.
Not to toot my own horn, but I'm writing my own story. There's two women who are friends in there, but seeing as how one of them will end up with a man and another comes to a rather messy end, I don't think it would be appropriate for either of them to be lesbians. Likewise, there's a gay couple whose relationship ends tragically, but I think it's a strength to the story as a whole, not a detriment. And in another story, there's a beta lesbian couple which was also going to end up tragic, but I started thinking about how the story would go if both of the women survived, and eventually found a pretty cool plot point where I can contrast the women's happy reunion with the hero and heroine's 'is this it?' reunion, which ties into the larger story in a way that the brief shock of a death scene really wouldn't.
And once you start thinking about tropes like this, new plot ideas start occurring to you. In a lot of fiction, female characters are raped whereas male characters are seduced because (the implication goes) they're too strong to be raped. What if there was a villain who tried to rape the hero, which would underscore the powerlessness of the hero's present circumstances, while trying to seduce the heroine, which offers its own storytelling possibilities.
I'm sure just from my own description you could poke holes in these examples, but I'd rather imperfectly try at fairness then just... give up and board the social conscience failboat.
wemyss, which I'm pretty sure is not an Old English synonym for wenis, defends the latter position here, while stellaluna_, who is shockingly not a Mary-Sue kid sister from A Streetcar Named Desire fandom (did that joke sound funnier in my head or am I just desperate? Your call!), has a post here!It's something that, as a writer, I've been thinking about for a while. Now there are cases that we can all agree are fucked up, like when Grey's Anatomy kills off one half of a lesbian storyline because it's about lesbians. But beyond the grossly prejudiced, there's the sticky area of equal treatment and special treatment, and how you define both.
Now, at its worst, special treatment results in happy gay couples and minority characters who exist mainly to cover the writers' asses at dinner parties. Nothing interesting happens to them because the writers don't want people to get angry at them, so you what you end up with are token characters that are boring and flat compared to the whiter, straighter characters. Not good.
On the other hand, equal treatment opens you up to more insidious forms of bigotry. Not intentionally, obviously, just people think up stories and naturally their thoughts run along the lines of stories they've seen before (ala tropes) and before you know it, they've repeated a negative stereotype that was probably better left in the past and for no compelling narrative reason to boot!
Just as an example, let's say I write a zombie story, as is my wont. There are five couples in there, four straight, one gay. Zombies eat four of the couples, but one survives to fight another day. And the surviving couple is a boy and a girl. I might argue that the gay couple was treated exactly the same as the straight couples. Four out of five didn't make it out, so they were just in the unlucky 80%.
Whereupon someone might argue that 100% of the gay characters got eaten by zombies.
Who's right? Well, both and neither, that's what I personally think. And far from censoring ourselves or saying screw political correctness, I think what we have to do is question our assumptions first. How come only one couple has to survive? How come only one couple is gay?
Recently, I read a book series in which there was a lesbian, possibly bisexual character. She pined over a straight character (1). My admittedly juvenile fun at reading the series as a lesbian romance got a bit screwed when the lesbian character was raped (2) to accomplish a plot point that, at this point in the series, I think could've been accomplished much more... entertainingly? Because for me, rape is anti-entertainment. And now it looks like her desire to become 'special friends' with the straight character is going to be abruptly retconned into being special friends with the heroine.
Admittedly, this isn't the most earth-shattering notion in the world, but I just think the author should've stopped at some point and said "whoa, I just wrote the lesbian who was pining over a straight girl getting raped. Do I really want to go there?" Not saying she shouldn't, but that before going ahead with a potentially offensive trope, she should think it over.
Not to toot my own horn, but I'm writing my own story. There's two women who are friends in there, but seeing as how one of them will end up with a man and another comes to a rather messy end, I don't think it would be appropriate for either of them to be lesbians. Likewise, there's a gay couple whose relationship ends tragically, but I think it's a strength to the story as a whole, not a detriment. And in another story, there's a beta lesbian couple which was also going to end up tragic, but I started thinking about how the story would go if both of the women survived, and eventually found a pretty cool plot point where I can contrast the women's happy reunion with the hero and heroine's 'is this it?' reunion, which ties into the larger story in a way that the brief shock of a death scene really wouldn't.
And once you start thinking about tropes like this, new plot ideas start occurring to you. In a lot of fiction, female characters are raped whereas male characters are seduced because (the implication goes) they're too strong to be raped. What if there was a villain who tried to rape the hero, which would underscore the powerlessness of the hero's present circumstances, while trying to seduce the heroine, which offers its own storytelling possibilities.
I'm sure just from my own description you could poke holes in these examples, but I'd rather imperfectly try at fairness then just... give up and board the social conscience failboat.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 04:39 am (UTC)I call it "The First Church of Fandom is Srs Bsns".
>What if there was a villain who tried to rape the hero, which would underscore the powerlessness of the hero's present circumstances, while trying to seduce the heroine, which offers its own storytelling possibilities.
When I crack the NYT best-seller list with that idea, I might consider sending you lunch money.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 09:00 am (UTC)Whereupon someone might argue that 100% of the gay characters got eaten by zombies.
Who's right? Well, both and neither, that's what I personally think. And far from censoring ourselves or saying screw political correctness, I think what we have to do is question our assumptions first. How come only one couple has to survive? How come only one couple is gay?"
Why would any couples have to survive?
As for me, I resolve this problem by not mentioning any sexual orientation unless it's essential to the story. Was there a reason for any of the couples to be gay, except to fill the PC quota? No? Then why bother? If I need couples, and I want to kill four out of five, I make them all straight. Why? Simply so nobody can claim that "Oh woez, he killed the gay couple! Bigot!"
Well, actually, yes. But I'm an equal opportunity bigot: I hate everyone. I avoid such things not because I'm a homophobe, but simply because I don't want to bother having to justify my creative decisions to anyone. If I don't have a gay couple that gets eaten by zombies, and anyone complains, I'll just tell them what I just wrote here, and as far as I'm concerned I'm done with the matter.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 09:20 am (UTC)Ah, but then people will just complain you don't have any gay people in your story.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 09:36 am (UTC)but we all know what women are good for...
Date: 2008-12-17 06:13 pm (UTC)Like so many comic book females, being raped is the only real motivation many of these women have to become heroes. Because, again, that's really all a woman is good for. Duh.
But all of that aside, it is a travesty. There's two examples that come to mind of healthy queer relationships in comics (my field of obsession), and both of those are sometimes neglected or ignored depending on who the writer is.
Re: but we all know what women are good for...
Date: 2008-12-17 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-18 04:45 am (UTC)