• ennemi [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago
    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.

    • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago
      CW

      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.

      anyway, good convo.