yeah i understand that. it would also be the wrong takeaway to look at it and say "hmm, wow, love the child sex scenes in this, wish there were more of that elsewhere." i'm not saying it can't be used effectively like Nabokov does, but if someone wants to see that in every book, they don't like it for the horror, they have a fixation on children having sex and that's an issue.
Taking this comment seriously would involve taking a two sentence throwaway comment on hexbear.net trying to make a point about the value of art at face value. Not everything you see on the internet is a serious decree about the state of modern art. In fact some of them are jokes.
I'm sorry, is it literal pedo shit? Or is it a novel? Because there are enough rich, powerful, actual pedos that you really dont need to tilt at a novelist who did too much coke 4 decades ago.
does cocaine make you think that writing pedophilia into your novel is a good idea, even if it's clearly not good? i mean i know it's a hell of a drug, but i'm pretty sure it doesn't start making you think creative thoughts about
Its not pedophilia though? Its like categorically not that. It's children fucking each other. That really happens IRL. Whether it was done well or "artistically" is another point of contention.
Also people are actually allowed to display pedophilia in art. Depictions aren't endorsements
at least in my opinion, middlebrow horror novels by a guy who was an insane cokehead at the time does not qualify as "art." i think it's incredibly difficult and delicate to attempt to depict either pedophilia, or children fucking, something that yes i think it's really goddamn weird to write, in good art, let alone, again, middlebrow horror, to the extent that i don't think it really ought to be attempted. depictions aren't necessarily endorsements, but if you're operating on the terms of the current global cultural movements inherited largely from the English imperium in the Victorian era, it's pretty fucking difficult to not accidentally tacitly endorse via the nature of the depiction.
Well I'm sure we can just make you the grand arbiter of what is and is not art and that will work out perfectly for the rest of us. Im glad you're here to shield us from amoral pieces of media that will turn us into pedophiles, or whatever.
Or maybe I just think theres a million more deserving and effective targets for your ire
well you could try actually presenting an argument about why the depiction of this in IT is so important that you want to argue it with me here, deep in the comments of a niche communist internet forum. regardless of whether you think that i should be spending my time doing something better (i agree, pretty surprising to me someone wants to defend this so readily on here), apparently i'm one of the more important things deserving of your ire. i mean what do you want me to work with here, i said that in my opinion (i.e. not universal, but if you'd like to make me the grand arbiter of what is art, i'd be happy to do it i guess) IT does not qualify as art and beyond that does not artistically benefit from a depiction of
CW: pedo shit
child group sex. in a book that is pretty clearly intended to be read by adults, written by an adult operating from the base of his most immediate random cokehead thoughts. which to me, again, makes the depiction of child group sex extremely suspect.
Because the American left has no business moralizing works of art because they're too weak and ineffectual to do anything of note. This is a tantrum that plays right into the sort of Moral Panic that the ruling order fucking loves.
Railing against works of art you find disagreeable is one of the most annoying thing leftists do that they've convinced themselves is "praxis." It comes from having no organization, no comrades, and no structure to implement change, so we all gather in these echo chambers and yell at Steven Fucking King, some dude whos gonna be dead and forgotten in 20 years, while the men who actually hold political and economic power, that they use to normalize pedophilia and 1,000,000 other things, will be chuckling about the fact that he had to publish to his death to maintain some standard of living.
Its not abt defending It or King, its about not becoming another chud ass culture warrior but for the liberal/left side.
Even this was too much effort for a fucking hexbear comment. That's all youre getting
Railing against works of art you find disagreeable is one of the most annoying thing leftists do that they’ve convinced themselves is “praxis.” It comes from having no organization, no comrades, and no structure to implement change, so we all gather in these echo chambers and yell at Steven Fucking King, some dude whos gonna be dead and forgotten in 20 years, while the men who actually hold political and economic power, that they use to normalize pedophilia and 1,000,000 other things, will be chuckling about the fact that he had to publish to his death to maintain some standard of living.
then why are you here? i'm only shitposting on here. i'm certainly well aware that posting isn't praxis. we are arguing in a niche communist internet forum, on a meme post about how a work of art is bad, because some of us think that the depiction in question is pretty fucked up, and some people really seem to want to defend it here (you apparently). if you wanna tell someone off, why not tell off RNAi for posting instead of...not posting and touching grass i guess. i for one am relaxing on a day off. in my opinion, i'm not doing praxis, i'm criticizing a novel that i do not consider to be a work of art because someone posted about it and i feel like posting. to me, this seems an awful like going through an argument because you didn't like my one comment about thinking that IT having this graphic depiction is fucked up. you could have left it and moved on, neither one of us would comment on it again, and i for one would continue to go one with my life, doing what i'm going to do, not posting about the left culture war on any site but this one.
I get what you're going for here but disqualifying it as "being art" kinda sucks to me because bad art is still art? Like just say its bad art. Like even the most vapid meaningless mass market shit that doesnt try to say anything is art. The word "art" isn't a superlative to award to things you respect.
i think your bad art stops being art the moment your mind in any state decides to put that scene into the story. you wanna pick your favorite flavor of non-artistic depiction to put on it, fine by me. i don't really care to debate the semantics of what is and isn't art in general, but i think depicting children in such a way just shouldn't exist. we've already decided as a society that children in general can't consent, and even when two children do consent to sex with each other, that's an extremely different social situation than an adult depicting it in his horror novel.
is it not as likely or more likely that the author was trying to be edgy and writing marquis de sade wannabe shit? is it absolutely necessary to diagnose them with a paraphilia and guess at their intent?
mind you I haven't read the book and I don't really know exactly what it is that I'm defending. if it's graphic to the point of being pornographic then I am not at all interested in defending that. you keep stressing that it's "pedo shit" like that's self explanatory but it really does not get any sort of point across
whoa, i've never claimed that king is a pedo guy himself, and i wouldn't. i'm saying his depiction of it is an edgy depiction of something that is associated solely with pedophilia. i'm saying that regardless of his intent its indefensible and fucked up. i'm saying that it is immaterial to the plot, and therefore a very strange thing to defend.
i'm also saying that because of the nature of the cultural basis that king was writing from, regardless of his pathologies, it was there in his subconscious for his coke addled brain to grab onto and write into his horror novel. i imagine he probably thought it was unsettling and horrifying. that doesn't mean it was a good idea, and i think it wasn't, i think it's the kind of thing you put in your novel if you're doing an insane amount of cocaine.
i just started labeling my cw's pedo shit before that's what rna put on the post, but i guess i was wrong for assuming that people took that as "anything involving the topic at all" as i did.
CW: more of this stuff that's really cool to argue about
well if if it's reasonable to assume that stephen king isn't a pedo, and that the intended audience of "IT" isn't pedophiles, then what makes it pedo shit? I hate getting into semantics, especially on this fucking subject, but I think we can be forgiven for the way we interpreted your comments
from what I gather, the scene is not exactly immaterial to the plot. people here have argued that there would have been better and far less problematic ways to advance the story in the same manner and I can sort of agree there, but that amounts to saying "here's how I would do it better" and not "here's why this shit is inadmissible", or anything about the general sentiment that any story going that far is automatically bad
I mean yeah sure it's strange, weird, fucked up, transgressive and from an authorial perspective probably better avoided altogether if only to spare one's self from grief, but is it actually harmful
CW: just my favorite thing in the world to argue about apparently
i tagged anything involving the idea of kids as sexual subjects in anyway as pedo shit because i don't think it's something that merits depiction in pretty much any way, except for perhaps something like Lolita, and even then it's clearly touchy. the point with the plot isn't that king contrived a narrative that could only be resolved by a child orgy, it's that he reached a narrative point where he had a group of very upset and scared children in a sewer with a cosmic horror, and he decided that they should calm down by fucking each other. i'm not going to debate in general about "well i would have done it better," just that holy fucking shit is that not an acceptable plot device, unless perhaps you're writing a serious literary novel that is explicitly exploring the fucked up nature of the dynamics. i think it's harmful to display this in any way, and just super weird for the kids to be doing in a sewer in response to cosmic horror.
if others have summarized it properly, they're doing it to coax themselves into adulthood under the assumption that the clown will leave them alone afterwards. it's not exactly pulitzer shit, but it's not completely out of left field for that story either. in other words it's pertinent enough to the story that it can't really be hand waved away as a cheap pretext to shove a child orgy into the novel.
I guess it just doesn't really get any reaction out of me. mind, I'm not particularly attached to the idea of having children as sexual subjects in my stories either. only I'm having trouble seeing how it's inherently worse than any other commonly accepted excess of imagination like SV, or torture porn, or make-believe genocide, what have you. it's all beyond my capacity to reminisce either way.
I’m not particularly attached to the idea of having children as sexual subjects in my stories either. only I’m having trouble seeing how it’s inherently worse than any other commonly accepted excess of imagination like SV, or torture porn, or make-believe genocide, what have you.
I don't think those things should really be in "art" either. but this is at least very clear cut to me. i don't think it matters how or why they got to that point. did anyone else point out to you that king, a cis white male, decided to depict inherently non-consensual sex between minors wherein all the child protagonists but one are males? did anyone decide to also explore the importance to the plot of what that would do medically to the girl in the situation, a minor as equally unprepared for it as every other minor involved. i'm not asking to reminisce on any of these awful things, i'm just baffled that people would go to bat in the comments that it's important to be able to depict this.
you make a good case for this stuff being peak /r/menwritingwomen material. I guess that on its own makes either the book or the passage in question problematic and/or worthy of derision. this is tangential though. if the author hadn't been a cis white male, and if their depiction of the situation had been medically accurate, wouldn't you still object to the scene on the grounds that it contains a child orgy?
as far as the importance of being able to depict this goes, I can think of a better way to phrase it. if you want to take the option away from other people, you need to have a good reason. more than that, it needs to be pretty unambiguous, because even before bringing ethics into consideration we all have subjective notions of what doing it "correctly" entails, pertaining to our abilities as storywriters and/or critics of storywriting. if anything, we've proven this.
in any case, I don't want this discussion to grow contentious, so I'll bow out here. I appreciate the time you've spent discussing this with us and I can't say I completely disagree with you either.
wouldn’t you still object to the scene on the grounds that it contains a child orgy?
absolutely, but i'd be less interested in debating it because the focus could be on the general trauma of the depiction, and it would be more likely to meet the extremely narrow artistic range in which i could find such a depiction in some way acceptable.
more than that, it needs to be pretty unambiguous, because even before bringing ethics into consideration we all have subjective notions of what doing it “correctly” entails, pertaining to our abilities as storywriters and/or critics of storywriting.
i don't disagree here, i'm not really in the habit of saying that something should be banned outright. but i also don't see the idea of no one reading IT ever again to be in any meaningful way a loss to the world.
![[CW: Pedo shit] Pillar of american culture](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/w7IraBiZuk.png){kind=link}
CW: the heavy shit the thread is about
spoiler
yeah i understand that. it would also be the wrong takeaway to look at it and say "hmm, wow, love the child sex scenes in this, wish there were more of that elsewhere." i'm not saying it can't be used effectively like Nabokov does, but if someone wants to see that in every book, they don't like it for the horror, they have a fixation on children having sex and that's an issue.
Taking this comment seriously would involve taking a two sentence throwaway comment on hexbear.net trying to make a point about the value of art at face value. Not everything you see on the internet is a serious decree about the state of modern art. In fact some of them are jokes.
sorry, if you made a joke about
spoiler
literal pedo shit in art
then i missed it over having a problem with
spoiler
literal pedo shit
I'm sorry, is it literal pedo shit? Or is it a novel? Because there are enough rich, powerful, actual pedos that you really dont need to tilt at a novelist who did too much coke 4 decades ago.
does cocaine make you think that writing pedophilia into your novel is a good idea, even if it's clearly not good? i mean i know it's a hell of a drug, but i'm pretty sure it doesn't start making you think creative thoughts about
CW: pedo shit
kids fucking.
Its not pedophilia though? Its like categorically not that. It's children fucking each other. That really happens IRL. Whether it was done well or "artistically" is another point of contention.
Also people are actually allowed to display pedophilia in art. Depictions aren't endorsements
CW: pedo shit
at least in my opinion, middlebrow horror novels by a guy who was an insane cokehead at the time does not qualify as "art." i think it's incredibly difficult and delicate to attempt to depict either pedophilia, or children fucking, something that yes i think it's really goddamn weird to write, in good art, let alone, again, middlebrow horror, to the extent that i don't think it really ought to be attempted. depictions aren't necessarily endorsements, but if you're operating on the terms of the current global cultural movements inherited largely from the English imperium in the Victorian era, it's pretty fucking difficult to not accidentally tacitly endorse via the nature of the depiction.
Well I'm sure we can just make you the grand arbiter of what is and is not art and that will work out perfectly for the rest of us. Im glad you're here to shield us from amoral pieces of media that will turn us into pedophiles, or whatever.
Or maybe I just think theres a million more deserving and effective targets for your ire
well you could try actually presenting an argument about why the depiction of this in IT is so important that you want to argue it with me here, deep in the comments of a niche communist internet forum. regardless of whether you think that i should be spending my time doing something better (i agree, pretty surprising to me someone wants to defend this so readily on here), apparently i'm one of the more important things deserving of your ire. i mean what do you want me to work with here, i said that in my opinion (i.e. not universal, but if you'd like to make me the grand arbiter of what is art, i'd be happy to do it i guess) IT does not qualify as art and beyond that does not artistically benefit from a depiction of
CW: pedo shit
child group sex. in a book that is pretty clearly intended to be read by adults, written by an adult operating from the base of his most immediate random cokehead thoughts. which to me, again, makes the depiction of child group sex extremely suspect.
Because the American left has no business moralizing works of art because they're too weak and ineffectual to do anything of note. This is a tantrum that plays right into the sort of Moral Panic that the ruling order fucking loves.
Railing against works of art you find disagreeable is one of the most annoying thing leftists do that they've convinced themselves is "praxis." It comes from having no organization, no comrades, and no structure to implement change, so we all gather in these echo chambers and yell at Steven Fucking King, some dude whos gonna be dead and forgotten in 20 years, while the men who actually hold political and economic power, that they use to normalize pedophilia and 1,000,000 other things, will be chuckling about the fact that he had to publish to his death to maintain some standard of living.
Its not abt defending It or King, its about not becoming another chud ass culture warrior but for the liberal/left side.
Even this was too much effort for a fucking hexbear comment. That's all youre getting
then why are you here? i'm only shitposting on here. i'm certainly well aware that posting isn't praxis. we are arguing in a niche communist internet forum, on a meme post about how a work of art is bad, because some of us think that the depiction in question is pretty fucked up, and some people really seem to want to defend it here (you apparently). if you wanna tell someone off, why not tell off RNAi for posting instead of...not posting and touching grass i guess. i for one am relaxing on a day off. in my opinion, i'm not doing praxis, i'm criticizing a novel that i do not consider to be a work of art because someone posted about it and i feel like posting. to me, this seems an awful like going through an argument because you didn't like my one comment about thinking that IT having this graphic depiction is fucked up. you could have left it and moved on, neither one of us would comment on it again, and i for one would continue to go one with my life, doing what i'm going to do, not posting about the left culture war on any site but this one.
I get what you're going for here but disqualifying it as "being art" kinda sucks to me because bad art is still art? Like just say its bad art. Like even the most vapid meaningless mass market shit that doesnt try to say anything is art. The word "art" isn't a superlative to award to things you respect.
CW: the worst stuff still
i think your bad art stops being art the moment your mind in any state decides to put that scene into the story. you wanna pick your favorite flavor of non-artistic depiction to put on it, fine by me. i don't really care to debate the semantics of what is and isn't art in general, but i think depicting children in such a way just shouldn't exist. we've already decided as a society that children in general can't consent, and even when two children do consent to sex with each other, that's an extremely different social situation than an adult depicting it in his horror novel.
CW: edgelord shit
is it not as likely or more likely that the author was trying to be edgy and writing marquis de sade wannabe shit? is it absolutely necessary to diagnose them with a paraphilia and guess at their intent?
mind you I haven't read the book and I don't really know exactly what it is that I'm defending. if it's graphic to the point of being pornographic then I am not at all interested in defending that. you keep stressing that it's "pedo shit" like that's self explanatory but it really does not get any sort of point across
whoa, i've never claimed that king is a pedo guy himself, and i wouldn't. i'm saying his depiction of it is an edgy depiction of something that is associated solely with pedophilia. i'm saying that regardless of his intent its indefensible and fucked up. i'm saying that it is immaterial to the plot, and therefore a very strange thing to defend.
i'm also saying that because of the nature of the cultural basis that king was writing from, regardless of his pathologies, it was there in his subconscious for his coke addled brain to grab onto and write into his horror novel. i imagine he probably thought it was unsettling and horrifying. that doesn't mean it was a good idea, and i think it wasn't, i think it's the kind of thing you put in your novel if you're doing an insane amount of cocaine.
From the way the CW was worded my assumption was you were calling Stephen King a pedo.
i just started labeling my cw's pedo shit before that's what rna put on the post, but i guess i was wrong for assuming that people took that as "anything involving the topic at all" as i did.
CW: more of this stuff that's really cool to argue about
well if if it's reasonable to assume that stephen king isn't a pedo, and that the intended audience of "IT" isn't pedophiles, then what makes it pedo shit? I hate getting into semantics, especially on this fucking subject, but I think we can be forgiven for the way we interpreted your comments
from what I gather, the scene is not exactly immaterial to the plot. people here have argued that there would have been better and far less problematic ways to advance the story in the same manner and I can sort of agree there, but that amounts to saying "here's how I would do it better" and not "here's why this shit is inadmissible", or anything about the general sentiment that any story going that far is automatically bad
I mean yeah sure it's strange, weird, fucked up, transgressive and from an authorial perspective probably better avoided altogether if only to spare one's self from grief, but is it actually harmful
CW: just my favorite thing in the world to argue about apparently
i tagged anything involving the idea of kids as sexual subjects in anyway as pedo shit because i don't think it's something that merits depiction in pretty much any way, except for perhaps something like Lolita, and even then it's clearly touchy. the point with the plot isn't that king contrived a narrative that could only be resolved by a child orgy, it's that he reached a narrative point where he had a group of very upset and scared children in a sewer with a cosmic horror, and he decided that they should calm down by fucking each other. i'm not going to debate in general about "well i would have done it better," just that holy fucking shit is that not an acceptable plot device, unless perhaps you're writing a serious literary novel that is explicitly exploring the fucked up nature of the dynamics. i think it's harmful to display this in any way, and just super weird for the kids to be doing in a sewer in response to cosmic horror.
CW: advanced desensitization
if others have summarized it properly, they're doing it to coax themselves into adulthood under the assumption that the clown will leave them alone afterwards. it's not exactly pulitzer shit, but it's not completely out of left field for that story either. in other words it's pertinent enough to the story that it can't really be hand waved away as a cheap pretext to shove a child orgy into the novel.
I guess it just doesn't really get any reaction out of me. mind, I'm not particularly attached to the idea of having children as sexual subjects in my stories either. only I'm having trouble seeing how it's inherently worse than any other commonly accepted excess of imagination like SV, or torture porn, or make-believe genocide, what have you. it's all beyond my capacity to reminisce either way.
CW: advanced desensitization
I don't think those things should really be in "art" either. but this is at least very clear cut to me. i don't think it matters how or why they got to that point. did anyone else point out to you that king, a cis white male, decided to depict inherently non-consensual sex between minors wherein all the child protagonists but one are males? did anyone decide to also explore the importance to the plot of what that would do medically to the girl in the situation, a minor as equally unprepared for it as every other minor involved. i'm not asking to reminisce on any of these awful things, i'm just baffled that people would go to bat in the comments that it's important to be able to depict this.
CW: can probably tell by now
you make a good case for this stuff being peak /r/menwritingwomen material. I guess that on its own makes either the book or the passage in question problematic and/or worthy of derision. this is tangential though. if the author hadn't been a cis white male, and if their depiction of the situation had been medically accurate, wouldn't you still object to the scene on the grounds that it contains a child orgy?
as far as the importance of being able to depict this goes, I can think of a better way to phrase it. if you want to take the option away from other people, you need to have a good reason. more than that, it needs to be pretty unambiguous, because even before bringing ethics into consideration we all have subjective notions of what doing it "correctly" entails, pertaining to our abilities as storywriters and/or critics of storywriting. if anything, we've proven this.
in any case, I don't want this discussion to grow contentious, so I'll bow out here. I appreciate the time you've spent discussing this with us and I can't say I completely disagree with you either.
CW
absolutely, but i'd be less interested in debating it because the focus could be on the general trauma of the depiction, and it would be more likely to meet the extremely narrow artistic range in which i could find such a depiction in some way acceptable.
i don't disagree here, i'm not really in the habit of saying that something should be banned outright. but i also don't see the idea of no one reading IT ever again to be in any meaningful way a loss to the world.
anyway, good convo.