How is it that abuse is now king?

[gunhilltrain]

You are correct. However, the phrase also works in the context Achtung used, in the sense that it means not to indulge yourself and put something into the story just because it pleases you. It could quite literally mean killing off a character if that better serves the story.

It could, I guess, but it seems more likely to be writing them out of the story.

 

[Bramblethorn]

It's somewhat oversimplistic and dichromatic. Often, it's not individuals who are inherently toxic, but rather the relationships and family dynamics that become toxic.

Sure, that can happen too, but that's not the situation I was talking about.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Yes, that was meant to be humorous. The guy went through a really rough divorce, hence the large gap between books.

All joking aside, I don’t agree with your criticisms of Butcher. Murphy’s death hurt, so did Susan’s, but that is what gives the story a sense of real stakes. If the antagonists have no hope of winning, if plot armor cloaks not just the hero, but everyone he cares about, your audience will start to lose their investment in the story. “Killing your darlings” does not mean abusing the characters without cause. It means being true to the world you have created and the rules that govern it. It means being faithful to the building narrative, even if it takes you places you would rather not go.

Contrariwise, if readers get attached to a character only to have that character killed off in service of somebody else's character arc, that can kill their investment just as effectively. In particular, doing it to female characters in support of a male character's arc has so much inglorious history that it has not only its own TVTropes page, but its own verb.

 

[TadOverdon]

Seventy-some years ago, Marlon Brando became a sex symbol by playing a bully and rapist.

He played him really, really well. Still...

 

[AchtungNight]

Seventy-some years ago, Marlon Brando became a sex symbol by playing a bully and rapist.

He played him really, really well. Still...

If you’re referring to the Brando character I think you are, I’m grateful to him despite his flaws. And that bothers me in ways not easily described.

Was it Johnny from “The Wild One”? If not, I’m relieved. I am familiar with that film but have not seen it.

 

[AchtungNight]

Contrariwise, if readers get attached to a character only to have that character killed off in service of somebody else's character arc, that can kill their investment just as effectively. In particular, doing it to female characters in support of a male character's arc has so much inglorious history that it has not only its own TVTropes page, but its own verb.

Oh, I know all about this stuff. It’s what I consider the Murphy in Dresden issue earlier discussed in this thread. And I’ve done it myself with a certain male character on behalf of an FMC’s arc (see Passion 4). Only that was not out of bad intentions. If any reader ever thinks otherwise… it had to be done. I’ll leave it at that. If Butcher had similar goals in mind with Murphy that I can’t perceive… I hope he will make them clear in a future story. And despite my anger with him, I’m still willing to give that skilled writer a chance.

And for the record, I mourned Susan but I still loved the way Butcher used her death to end the Red Court.

 

[MrHereWriting]

Are you talking past each other, or you missed something? Maybe I missed something. It says, "You kill your darlings when you decide to get rid of an unnecessary storyline, character, or sentences in a piece of creative writing—elements you may have worked hard to create but that must be removed for the sake of your overall story." It doesn't say anything specifically about harming a character.

You're just not following.

 

[lovecraft68]

It should be noted-but won't be-that this thread is another in a series of quite a few going back over the last year or so. There have been many "WTF" is going on here threads. Some discussing specific stories, some the overall site itself and others the worst offender. LW and its authors and readers. And in all those threads the same people just keep denying anything is amiss, anything is wrong, and god fucking forbid they say anything about the fact that unless your a total suck up, its easy to see the site is going downhill in its readership and the authors who feed it.

In the sites defense this is because society itself is going downhill. We live in 2023 and its still difficult to be a woman...except now the mantra all across the country is somehow men are victims. I'll ask this simple question of every man here.

Have you ever been afraid to take a drink from someone at a party? Afraid to put your drink down? If you were ever physically beaten and knew the assailant would you fear going to the police because no one would believe you? The answer is no and until that answer is yes, you have no idea what its like. Women who are raped and abused are afraid to come forward because they're inevitably called liars, gold diggers and slut shamed.

But all men are now victims. Women have to keep their pain and victimhood secret, men come to the net to cry and cry and cry about the evils of women and poor them. Women are condition to accept abuse and deal with it, Men who don't know what abuse is cry like babies if a woman didn't need their disgusting expectations. They then they spew their hatred of women across the net and they come here and spew it in comments and the stories the woman hating 'authors' write to fuel the like minded animals that they think are the 'victims' in this world.

Its fiction here, but trends in fiction often reflect the society we live in so the rise of abuse in mainstream novels, movies, here etc...reflect a real problem and is reaching the point shrugging it off as "well, its just stories' is allowing the problem to grow. Real people write these stories, real people are making these comments. When lit never screened comments my feeling was well, they leave it up to people if they want to remove them or report them etc....now that lit screens comments and you see what they let fly through its apparent what side of the coin they're on here. Clicks are all they care about and as we see all day long on social media...hate drives the clicks and reason is buried.

More people should complain about this sites increased lack of caring about its rape and torture rules, more people who act like they're on their moral and political high horse here should practice their "If you don't say something, your complicit" bullshit mantra.

But, nah, let's not get real here. I mean, shit, what if you say something about the BTB stories and someone bombs your precious 4.55 story down to a 4.45. That is far more important than taking a stance against hate and abuse. Best example of this came a few months ago when one author here challenged the site on why a story where a woman was raped to death was allowed...seeing it was many people here were saying "well the site seems to be loosening the rules etc etc...and taking the side of the author.

Few weeks later someone comes here and complains their much tamer NC story was reported and booted. The SAME people who said Lit will allow that material then told that person-and in their self righteous preachy way-that you can't write rape stories here. In other words they have no conviction, no consistency and no opinion other than what the site allows.

If you do feel this is an issue, well take a look around the room to see why it will continue to be so. People who care more about their following on a free site than anything important are the problem.

I wonder if we get another dozen of these threads if anyone's minds will change or it will just continue to act like the OP and anyone agreeing with them is wrong.

Mansplain away enablers.

 

[AchtungNight]

I’m just going to say this. I’m a man, I’ve suffered from my share of abusive relationships, and I know what it is to be afraid, shamed, etc. I’m on your level. You ever want comfort instead of the opposite, I will give it to you as best I can. But please don’t act like the opposite should be the norm for whatever reason. That just keeps making things worse. Thank you.

 

[SimonDoom]

In the sites defense this is because society itself is going downhill.

Except . . . this isn't true. Society is not going downhill. In terms of violence against women, for example, the violent crime rate in the USA, including sex crimes against women, is far lower today than it was in 1993, which was the eve of the era of the Internet, and online pornography and erotica. There is no correlation between the explosion of the availability of online smut, in all its forms, and violence against women. Sorry, but it just doesn't exist. The reality is that in most ways in the USA (I'll stick to my country and let others speak for other countries), things are better than they were a generation ago. There's more prosperity, and more meaningful freedom for large groups of people: historically disadvantaged racial groups, gay people, transgender people, women. Violence and abuse remain problems, but they are not getting worse. If you disagree, prove it.

There are some people who are deeply invested in pessimism about the world, and they're offended every time you try to convince them that things aren't so bad, or at least that they are not quite as bad as they used to be. You cannot reason with such people.

But all men are now victims.

Nobody in this forum is actually saying this. I've always made a point of saying the opposite, because the evidence shows this isn't true. Yes, there are some LW-BTB story readers and perhaps authors who believe this falsehood, but I don't see them represented in this forum.

Its fiction here, but trends in fiction often reflect the society we live in so the rise of abuse in mainstream novels, movies, here etc...reflect a real problem and is reaching the point shrugging it off as "well, its just stories' is allowing the problem to grow.

There's no evidence for this view. The problem is not growing. Abuse and oppression of women have always existed. It's better, not worse than it used to be. There's no demonstrated connection between the rise in fantasy stories and an increase in abuse of women (which does not exist).

More people should complain about this sites increased lack of caring about its rape and torture rules,

Again, there's no evidence of an increased disregard for rape and torture rules. The rape and torture rules at this site are stricter than they used to be. Stories that made the cut years ago have been deleted from the site. What HAS increased at this site is the rise of illiberal attitudes toward speech, which mirrors a trend in society at large, and an increasing desire by some contributors in this forum to regulate or ban story content they don't like. I've been reading stories at this site for 20 years and participating in this forum for almost seven and I've seen this trend at work. As complaints about content have grown, the appearance has grown of the site owners being indifferent to the wishes of the story cops. They're not indifferent; they just disagree with you, and I'm with them, not you.

But, nah, let's not get real here. I mean, shit, what if you say something about the BTB stories and someone bombs your precious 4.55 story down to a 4.45. That is far more important than taking a stance against hate and abuse.

This is just another way of saying, "Everybody who disagrees with me is acting out of bad faith and for improper reasons." Again, there's no actual reason to believe this. It's something you're just making up.

I wonder if we get another dozen of these threads if anyone's minds will change or it will just continue to act like the OP and anyone agreeing with them is wrong.

I disagree with the OP because the OP is factually wrong. It's not true at this site that abuse is king. It's false. I also disagree that the way to deal with an imaginary problem is to restrict speech further.

Mansplain away enablers.

Any pretense of wanting to have a civil and intelligent conversation is exposed as illusory when one talks this way to those with whom one disagrees.

 

[SimonDoom]

From the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a chart showing the rape rate in the USA from 1973 to 2003:




Another BJS chart showing rates from 1998 to 2011:





Since 2013 there has been some uptick of crime in the USA, and domestic violence spiked during the COVID lockdowns. But the cause of that increase obviously has nothing to do with online erotica, and rates are still far lower than they were before 1993.

There is absolutely NOTHING to support the idea that online erotic fantasy stories are increasing the incidence of violence against women.

 

[lovecraft68]

A parting shot. Abuse has always been king, but in prior and much better generations the abusers laid low, but we now live in a day and age where not only is abuse glorified, but as some here prove is met with far more acceptance than condemnation.

All hail the era that calls itself "Progressive"

 

[AchtungNight]

I will say this also. I know a lot of women who have been victims of abuse. Celebrities of whom I’m a fan, friends, relatives… and some of these people are men as well as women. I don’t blame any class of people for abuse in general. Not any specific gender, religion, profession, race, etc. It happens across all relationships and in all countries around the world. I don’t have the time to procure evidence but believe me, it does. I call abusers bad names to call them out, that’s it. They are people who have made stupid decisions at their core, this I know because someone (I won’t say who) recently reminded me.

Abuse is a fact of life and not a new one. I know this because I have a degree in History. I also know that today it’s often easier to accuse people of abuse in some cases and press the issue. Media exposure, acting skills, gossip, and other circumstances in the right combination can easily be misinterpreted, misrepresented, given a bad PR spin, and even twenty of more years later be shown as abuse or otherwise by one or more parties when all the participants in the relationship swore it was the opposite at an earlier time. You don’t have to be a fanfic writer to know this is true or be adept at taking advantage of it. Go check the entertainment news. I think some guy who once played a character named Hyde was convicted on charges recently. I think another actor who played a US president was cleared of similar charges a few months back- in court at least. Danny Masterson and Kevin Spacey if you need specific names.

Abusers can hide themselves, sometimes the victims help for various reasons. I’m going to stop saying whether that is right or wrong. I hope the victims won’t hide, I hope the victims can be helped and the abusers exposed and punished as applicable. I have helped make such things happen before and I’d do it again. And yes, I’m aware of the irony of me saying that as a man whose hobby is writing adult fan fiction. You need not bother pointing it out. I already have embraced spiritual agnosticism over a specific religion, tell myself I’m happy being single till I meet someone with whom I have a real lasting connection people will accept, and I live on the fringe of society in many other ways I won’t specify. What more must I do? Go to jail? Be executed? I haven’t broken the law yet, nor do I plan on it due to personal ethics. I have these ethics because I have known enough abuse victims and been one. I’ve imagined and read about more. I don’t need to create more victims of abuse. The very idea disturbs me. Believe me. I once had a bully at a summer camp aggressively come on to me not caring that I had made clear I was heterosexual on multiple previous occasions or that I was skilled at martial arts (I had made that clear too), he grabbed me, I lost my temper, and one thing led to another. He was unconscious, later sent home. I was isolated from my peers and made a pariah for the rest of the term. There were witnesses who saw the whole thing to make clear who was the bully and who rightfully fought back. As victims of abuse go, I’m luckier than a lot of people. I also have relatives who have suffered from actual abuse and false allegations. I won’t provide more details.

People are right to say abuse is not a new story. The idea of an evil emperor, dragon, queen, wizard, or whatever kidnapping and imprisoning someone and then that person being rescued by a hero is a tale as old as time. Go watch a Disney movie. And it’s real easy to say the victim is Belle and the Beast is the abuser when Gaston is the real villain. Just to pull a random analogy out of my ass. Or maybe, to use another analogy, the Evil Queen was the abuser and the Prince teamed up with those nice dwarves to help her victim Snow White out. I think that film went a more traditional route. I could also mention Aladdin, Rapunzel, Brave, Enchanted, Sleeping Beauty… the list goes on.

My ex was a fan of Twilight and 50 Shades. I told her politely but firmly after flipping through the same books that I was not into them. She was ok with that. We broke up for other reasons. I still don’t like that she was a fan, but those books may or may not have been abuse from certain perspectives including hers. I’m going to leave it at that. She’s not on trial here. Nor are Christian and Anastasia specifically, or Bella and Edward. I’m going to step aside from this discussion now, before it gets worse. This isn’t exactly a comfortable sword I’ve tripped over.

At least no one is accusing anyone else here of being an abusive person… yet.

 

[SimonDoom]

I’m going to step aside from this discussion now, before it gets worse.

This is somewhat frustrating. There's nothing particularly "bad" about this discussion, except to the extent that some contributors make false accusations against other contributors and impugn their motives or allege bad faith. There's no excuse for that. But it's an important discussion, and it's curious to me that people seem so squeamish about it.

At least no one is accusing anyone else here of being an abusive person… yet.

This is true, and let's hope it stays that way.

I think it's also true that nobody in this thread is excusing or justifying abuse, and I would hope that everyone can see that, as well.

The issue is not whether abuse exists or whether abuse is bad. Everybody in the thread agrees with that, so we should be able to set that issue aside. The issue is whether by creating a forum for these stories we are contributing to the real-world problem. This is an assumption some people make, but almost without exception they offer nothing to support it, other than, "This is how I feel." "This is how I feel" is not a legitimate ground for regulating what others write.

The problem with threads like this--the only problem--is when people conflate real abuse and what happens in erotic fantasy stories, and their confusion, or deliberate conflation, causes them to kink-shame or make false accusations against those with different tastes. There's no excuse for that, and doing so is what causes the moderator to cut the threads off.

 

[Euphony]

The problem with threads like this--the only problem--is when people conflate real abuse and what happens in erotic fantasy stories, and their confusion, or deliberate conflation, causes them to kink-shame or make false accusations against those with different tastes. There's no excuse for that

I've little problem with most things here but this fundamental disconnect running rampant caves my skull in every time.

Even if you don't write to navigate this complex world/society (as I do) I find it near impossible to believe there aren't things these folks LIKE (as entertainment or fantasy) that they have ZERO interest in actually engaging in in RL.

Our cultural media consumption is literally skewed towards fantasy these days. How those aren't indoctrinating but fiction is and is so absolutely is a belief I will never ever understand.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Back in 1965, Sean Connery was interviewed by Playboy, and the discussion turned to Connery's views on James Bond. Full transcript here.

Playboy: How do you feel about roughing up a woman, as Bond sometimes has to do?

Connery: I don't think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman ... although I don't recommend doing it in the same way that you'd hit a man. An openhanded slap is justified ... if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I'd do it. I think a man has to be slightly advanced, ahead of the woman. I really do ... by virtue of the way a man is built, if nothing else.

In 1987, he was interviewed by Barbara Walters:

Walters: You think it's good to slap a woman?

Connery: No I don't think it's good —

Walters: You don't think it's bad though.

Connery: I don't think it's that bad. I think that it depends entirely on the circumstances and if it merits it, yeah.

Walters: And what would merit it?

Connery: Well, if you have tried everything else, and women are pretty good at this, that they can't leave it alone. They don't — they want to have the last word. And you give them the last word but they're not happy with the last word. They want to say it again and get into a really provocative situation. Then I think it's absolutely right.

Connery subsequently claimed (1988 Philadelphia Daily News) that the interview had been cut out of context, but that he wouldn't change anything he'd said.

Vanity Fair interviewed him in 1993:

They taped two hours of me and only showed 20 minutes. Barbara Walters was trying to get me to say it was O.K. to hit women. But I was really saying that to slap a woman was not the crudest thing you can do to her. I said that in my book—it's much more cruel to psychologically damage somebody... to put them in such distress that they really come to hate themselves.... Sometimes there are women who take it to the wire. That's what they're looking for, the ultimate confrontation—they want a smack."

In 2006, Connery (now Sir Sean Connery, having been knighted in 2000) was politically active, and those remarks came up again. His ex-wife Diane Cilento, who'd been married to him at the time of the 1965 interview, alleged that he had been physically violent to her during their marriage.

The Times reported him as having said to acquaintances: "I don’t believe that any level of abuse against women is ever justified under any circumstances. Full stop." This seems to be a second-hand report of private conversation; I don't know that he ever publicly said that.

The Times article also reported an anonymous friend of Connery's as saying "The original thing he was trying to say back in 1965 was that you can do a woman a lot more harm by moral torture than with a slap, but ever since then that’s been translated into a slap doesn’t do a woman any harm". It's hard to see how one reads that into what Connery actually said in 1965, though.

The point here isn't what one actor believed about hitting women, or whether his views might have changed between 1965 and 2006. It's that his endorsement of slapping women did no significant damage to his public standing or his career all through that period.

I'm not as positive about the present as Simon is, but in this area it feels at least slightly better than Connery's heyday. There are still plenty of guys who think and act the same way Connery did back in 1965 (you can see some of them in the YouTube comments on the Walters interview :-/ ) but they're not quite as bold about putting their own names and faces to those opinions.

 

[ElectricBlue]

There is absolutely NOTHING to support the idea that online erotic fantasy stories are increasing the incidence of violence against women.

Your best buddy will say the charts are printed upside down .

 

[CyranoJ]

I'm not as positive about the present as Simon is, but in this area it feels at least slightly better than Connery's heyday. There are still plenty of guys who think and act the same way Connery did back in 1965 (you can see some of them in the YouTube comments on the Walters interview :-/ ) but they're not quite as bold about putting their own names and faces to those opinions.

Indeed. Not to mention that for most of the history of Hollywood up until at least the Eighties, smacking women around as foreplay or to settle down their hysterical nerves was a standard trope of mainstream film. Advertising was bluntly misogynistic and often "playfully" included "comedic" tropes about violence against women or creepy pseudo-pedophilic tropes about daddies and daughters. Anyone who thinks of that as a more benign era than the present is simply too ignorant to be worth responding to.

Now obviously there is a subculture today that is aggressively and gleefully pro-abuser. It's called the far right (and has a minor annex on the "red-brown curious" "left") and it's brazenly creepy and criminal and evil and dangerous. It doesn't represent mainstream culture, which has evolved in different directions... but making that sort of distinction would, of course, get in the way of churning out the interchangeable madlibs of boilerplate invective that are basically the sum total of a certain poster's contributions to threads like this one.

 

[HordHolm]

I'm not as positive about the present as Simon is, but in this area it feels at least slightly better than Connery's heyday. There are still plenty of guys who think and act the same way Connery did back in 1965 (you can see some of them in the YouTube comments on the Walters interview :-/ ) but they're not quite as bold about putting their own names and faces to those opinions.

The way I look at it is this:

Back in the day people had no 'public' voice - until extremely recently (within a generation, really) the only way for the vast majority of people to make any public statement was on a wall. And then some clever folks invented a method by which absolutely everybody who is even partly literate can vomit forth their opinions an anything and everything under the sun, and they tied that to algorithms that reward controversy. The result of this has been to make radical ideas held by vanishingly small minorities appear mainstream and ubiquitous. But in the real world it seems more and more that people are live-and-let-live types. The downside of this real world tolerance is that the minority hate isn't challenged because, well, live-and-let-live. So... are more people abusers than before? Or fewer? Perhaps neither answer is correct, and the reality is that those who believe in that toxicity are similar in number as they always were, but are more visible now.

I'm reminded of a Home Office report published way back in the UK during the height of the pedo-fear in the late 90s/early noughties, which identified that the number of individuals arrested/charged/convicted of crimes against children were exactly the same in proportion to the population as they had been thirty years earlier. The difference was that those crimes were getting greater visibility through media reporting, and it was this that made people feel that it was a bigger problem than in the past.

A different way of looking at this concerns air crashes. Ask Mr Average Joe how many people survive air crashes and he'll tell you that very few do. But if you actually look at the numbers it is more like this: 90% of air accidents involve no injuries, of the other 10% only 10% of those involve a fatality, and of those, only 10% involve total hull loss with no or only one or two survivors. So, just 0.1% of air accidents are of the 'everyone snuffed it' variety. But those are the only ones that make the front page news, and thus get noticed, because the others are simply not 'newsworthy' - who will take the time to read a paragraph about a plane pancaking on a runway but nobody got hurt? Unless there's something particular about it - the Miracle on the Hudson for example - the vast majority go unreported and thus, in the hivemind, didn't happen.

So this is long, sorry, but it is to say that yes, maybe there is more abuse now. But I doubt it. My suspicion is that things are slowly getting better, but because of greater visibility it may actually appear to be getting worse.

 

[Bramblethorn]

The way I look at it is this:

Back in the day people had no 'public' voice - until extremely recently (within a generation, really) the only way for the vast majority of people to make any public statement was on a wall. And then some clever folks invented a method by which absolutely everybody who is even partly literate can vomit forth their opinions an anything and everything under the sun, and they tied that to algorithms that reward controversy. The result of this has been to make radical ideas held by vanishingly small minorities appear mainstream and ubiquitous. But in the real world it seems more and more that people are live-and-let-live types. The downside of this real world tolerance is that the minority hate isn't challenged because, well, live-and-let-live. So... are more people abusers than before? Or fewer? Perhaps neither answer is correct, and the reality is that those who believe in that toxicity are similar in number as they always were, but are more visible now.

I think there's a lot of truth in this, but I also think the actual abusers are only part of the picture. That small minority are often enabled by a much larger group who aren't for abuse, who might shake their heads at it and make very firm tut-tutting noises, but who are still willing to hold their nose and support it as part of a package deal when it's bundled with something they want. "Yes, we know he's a predator and that's bad, but there's a buck in it for me..."

 

[TadOverdon]

If you’re referring to the Brando character I think you are, I’m grateful to him despite his flaws. And that bothers me in ways not easily described.

Was it Johnny from “The Wild One”? If not, I’m relieved. I am familiar with that film but have not seen it.

Stanley Kowalski.

 

[madelinemasoch]

I'm curious: why is it worthwhile telling fellow authors this? The Site has its rules and allows certain types of content. It seems to me if one doesn't like that content then one's beef is with the Site rather than the authors who write content that fits within the Site rules or the authors who defend the right of other authors to write such content. Isn't a statement like this just pointless and antagonistic kink-shaming? If one doesn't like the content on the Site one has the option of leaving, which strikes me as a more principled option than telling other authors that the stuff they write that falls within the Site's rules is disturbing shit.

Let's face it, it IS beating a dead horse. The Site has made it very clear over a quarter century what it will and will not allow.

No, Simon, my beef is not with the website, nor with you all, but with the world at large. I hope you have a good day.

 

[SimonDoom]

No, Simon, my beef is not with the website, nor with you all, but with the world at large. I hope you have a good day.

You too.

 

[AchtungNight]

Not to beat a dead horse, but some of the shit you guys write on this website is incredibly disturbing...

If you don’t like it, don’t read it. But I hope you’re not talking about my work.

 

[madelinemasoch]

If you don’t like it, don’t read it. But I hope you’re not talking about my work.

Nope. If I'm being entirely honest, I've never read you yet.

I think I'll delete that offhand comment at the risk of being insulting and focus on making my thoughts on the matter more productive.