Inspired by Stanku: Cruelty in Fiction and why it upsets Readers so much · 2:36pm Oct 19th, 2018
This is a response to Stanku's blog post in which he comments on his experiences after posting fiction which included sexual violence with pornographic intent. Stanku argued that talking of such a thing as cruelty in fiction does not make sense, since the entity subjected to these cruel acts is not a real one. The response got a bit long, and i felt that other people might be interested in my contemplations on the matter, so i decided to post it as a separate blog post instead. The first paragraph only has a relation to the topic if you have read Stanku's original post.
(In response to your example of a doll that mimics human emotions but has none:)
Let me first point you to Alan Turing's work. Turing chose to rephrase the question regarding machine intelligence thusly: "If we can find no objective criteria by which we can differentiate between a human and a machine, then we have no reason to claim that the machine is not a thinking entity if we maintain that the human is." A most brilliant use of double negation, for Turing never states that this indicates that the machine was a thinking entity. The same line of argumentation would follow for a doll, or a robot, or a simulated human mind. I have repeatedly heard that: "Machines cannot feel pain." Well, if a machine, as makes sense from an engineering point of view, is equipped with sensors that detect physical damage and is programmed to avoid it, how exactly is that to be differentiated from pain? If you go back in history you will find a number of statements the likes of "Negroes/Indians/Asians/Jews/Cathars don't really feel pain, not the way we do." And today, you have a number of people who claim that animals do not really feel pain and have no concept of death, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
But I think the issue you are running into is an entirely different one. As author, one has presumed full control over the characters in the story (I personally feel differently: in a good story, the characters start doing whatever they want guided by my subconscious, and I may at times end up being seriously upset about what is happening in my story), and there are no physical parts that we could measure for pain the same way we could measure the signals of damage be transmitted in a machine. Yet the problem does not lie in the object that is treated cruelly, it lies in the subject that is delivering the cruel treatment. Any action taken has not only an effect on the target, but also on every entity utilized in the process. Punch in a nail and you will have strain on the handle of the hammer and molecular rearrangement on its head. The vast majority of people reflect very little at all, and even less once their emotions get involved, but I would maintain that subconsciously what worries these people is less the cruel treatment of a fictional character but the existence of a person who would be capable and willing of delivering such treatment at all.
If you want to make a practical experiment to see if that is true, do the following. Do not actually write a horrendous sexual torture fic, just mention the possibility of writing one and see what reactions you get. They will be pretty identical to if you had actually written it, even though the cruel treatment that would only have been fictional and only been delivered upon a figment of imagination is merely a possibility, not a reality.
And that is where we come full circle to what you wrote at the end of your original post: good stories make us feel. They have a profound effect on our psyche and our subconscious, and as demonstrated by Goethe's Werther, can in fact strongly influence the behaviour of a large group of people. Most do not have the rational knowlegde and do not reflect enough to be able to analyze this in detail, but on an instinctual level they very much understand and fear the power that a good story can have.
One step further: every human can only ever experience the inside of their own minds. As the only possible option of creating a working mental model of the universe, we function on the basic assumption that other humans more or less think, feel and see the same way as we do. We assume that "red" means the same for both of us, that a cry of anguish is caused be an emotional experience familiar to us, that both of us have a concept of "me" that is similar enough that we can have a conversation about it. We can never know for certain, but we need this assumption to be able to have discussions and stay functional in the real world. Thus, the reader makes the assumption that the author is fundamentally a being similar to him. That they share the same feelings, that joy, angst or disgust is the same for them. So when they encounter a situation in a text that elicits a strong emotional response from them, they automatically assume that the author experienced the same reaction. And that is where things get scary. If there is a being so fundamentally different that it responds with joy and elation to a situation that causes horror and disgust in a person, then that appears as a very dangerous and threatening entity.
I'd say that the problem lies in part in our perception of reality. To you, the 'Twilight' in your fic is barely more than a name, as you said, a doll adorned merely with the superficial clothes of the 'actual' Twilight in the show (wait, but that is a fictional character again!). Still, since you experience them in your mind as fundamentally different entities, one of which is capable of experiencing pain and emotional suffering and the other is not, you have little qualms of putting the 'not real' Twilight through the most horrendous of experiences for your pleasure, for you do not feel that any harm is being done, and as such - as mentioned above - describing these actions does not have the effect of for instance dulling you to the suffering of real human beings. For other readers there is no differentiation between your 'not real' Twilight and the character they have strong sympathy for, and based on their assumption that they and you are fundamentally similar beings they are appalled that someone could take such action, not so much because they think that there somewhere exists a real, Platonian Twilight who is rather upset with what you wrote, but because of what writing such fiction says about you as the author if you are capable and willing to describe such acts. They are afraid of what will become of you if you get more and more used to abusing or torturing others for your pleasure - as for them the distinction between your 'fake' Twilight and a 'real' Twilight does not exist - and they will react with defensive anger based on their fear.
I hope this was reasonably succinctly and clearly phrased, that this is helpful to anyone and am happy if it inspires independent thought and reflection.
I broadly agree with your overall point, which I understand as follows: what upsets people about reading "cruel" stories about their favourite character is not so much concern over the said character as the author behind the prose. It's a natural answer that I didn't properly see at the time. After all, differences in sexual preferences attract moral judgement like nothing else.
Now obviously there are cases of sexual preferences the practice of which should be rightly deemed as wrong in some relevant moral sense, and cases where such judgement itself would be wrong. The first category is mostly made of acts that bring concrete harm to other people (with or without their consent makes a difference is debatable).
The key question here is whether writing "cruel" porn belongs to the first category of illicit sexual acts. Is it the kind of practice that brings concrete harm to other people? A lot hinges on how we understand "concrete harm". If someone gets really upset after reading such a story, perhaps that counts, supposing sufficient warnings were not in place to signal of the harmful content. If they were, then the responsibility for knowingly reading harmful material returns to the reader and becomes analogous to, say, smoking. The case of minors being exposed is what I see as one important subtopic, but that ties to so many other issues it's hard to say anything too specific about it here. Minors in general should be protected from all kinds of exposure harmful to them, but clearly that does not imply the source of exposure is as such morally condemnable.
I focus on "concrete harm" as the keyword here because I don't think simple disgust (or anger, fear, confusion etc.) entails a right for moral judgement. Depending on the person, many things can be found disgusting/frightful/angering without any moral issues being concerned. An obvious example is homosexuality, which historically has incited all of the aforementioned emotions. Who could argue such reactions were, or are, a sufficient reason for moral condemnation of homosexuality? And who could argue the case of "cruel" (literal, fictive) porn is essentially different, supposing no concrete harm to others is involved?
I think something you should consider is striking the "other" part. I would maintain that even bringing harm to oneself is in most beliefs morally and in most systems ethically condemnable - in fact, most law systems consider intentionally harming oneself a punishable crime, which is rational given that harming oneself implicitely harms the collective (of course we are only talking about relevant levels of 'harm' here, whatever those might constitute).
Often, the fear is voiced that by indulging in the creation or enjoyment of such fiction the author changes themselves, becomes more and more compelled to seek out ever more extreme experiences until those thoughts that scare others deeply spill over to actions in the real world.
I'd say proper scientific research in that subject would be interesting. I would expect that no causal relation can be found, but cannot say for certain without additional data.
One of the areas that i have a bit of experience in that can probably be considered somewhat similar is that of so called "ego-shooters". Every now and again there is an outcry that these computer games cause violence after there has been another mass shooting and one game or another is found amongst the possessions of the perpetrator(s). If that were true, if but 0.1 percent of people playing these video games were ultimately driven to commit violent acts, you would expect every Counterstrike tournament to end in a massacre (not the digital kind). Yet there has not been a single one in dozens of tournaments, in fact, those renting out mess halls stated that the only group that left the place cleaner behind them were Jehova's Wittnesses.
It's a typical case of getting the causality wrong. I would expect that chances of finding that someone who gets convicted of committing a series of crimes of sexual nature had either created or appraised "works of art" - be they stories, paintings or fictional films - depicting such acts are about 100%. If they commit them, of course they are interested in them and want to obtain additional information. To conclude from there that the appraisal of these things caused the crimes just means not understanding the difference between correlation and causality. It would be the same as thinking that everyone who loves reading thrillers will either commit a murder or end up as a detective. From wanting to obtain information it does not necessarily follow that the individual has any intent to act.
As far as protecting minors from topics, i tend to think that this is often done either excessively or wrong. In his excellent book "Ok Killing" Lt. Col. Dave Grossman laments that our society has become so estranged from death that we are having trouble dealing with it. That sex is something that must not be talked about or showed any more has led to an assortment of the most peculiar and weird sexual myths. I personally blame to a large degree that young women are strongly discouraged from thinking, enjoying or talking about violent acts for the cases where rape victims just don't fight back at all, but freeze up incapable of action.
If there are no stories, no talking about a topic, how is a child to learn how to deal with them? And while of course we want children to be protected, it is usually not our own decision when tragedy strikes. Death or predators won't wait, or stick to what we want to think of as socially acceptable. Assuming the average life expectancy to be around 80 years, just blatantly refusing access to stories dealing with the subject matter where children or "young adults" can learn how to handle them - regardless of personal development - for one fourth of their life is a very strange decision indeed.