Interethnic Sex

[MelissaBaby]

Maybe sometime we can have a discussion of racial issues in erotica without someone falsely claiming that disagreement is based on white male grievance. Wouldn't that be something. It would be nice to have a discussion that raises different points of view without one side accusing the other of having racially-based motives.

You aren't offering another point of view, you are discussing a completely different topic.

 

[SimonDoom]

You aren't offering another point of view, you are discussing a completely different topic.

Even if that's true, it has nothing to do with white male grievance. There's no good reason for you to play that card.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Even if that's true, it has nothing to do with white male grievance. There's no good reason for you to play that card.

The discussion has become about, as you termed it, the "disrespect" paid to Roald Dahl, and by extension, Ian Fleming and Theo Geisel. All, to my knowledge, white males.

 

[PastMaster]

The discussion has become about, as you termed it, the "disrespect" paid to Roald Dahl, and by extension, Ian Fleming and Theo Geisel. All, to my knowledge, white males.

Sorry but I think thats a little simplistic.

Corrollatioin doesnt necessarily denominate causation.

The fact that all the aforementioned authors were white males and there is resistance to them being 'edited' is not about white male grievence
Enid blyton was also edited - and that too was ridiculous, and as far as I know she wasnt a white male.

People are trying to re-write history to suit today's culture - i wont use the word 'woke' even though i really want to.

What was written in those books, not only tells a story - but informs us about the culture and the society at the time they were written. It wasnt perfect and there were attitudes then that may be offensive to todays sensibilities. but they are still a part of our culture and our heritage, and they should be left alone to represent that.

There is an ongoing attempt to change history - to erase certain figures for various reasons, because the way they lived their lives - which was at the time of their life, acceptable and legal, does not stand up to today's standards.
This, I feel, is dangerous. History should be left alone. It is there for us to learn from. As churchill said 'those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,' We need to remember what went on back then, so we can make sure that the mistakes they made, will not be repeated.

 

[ElectricBlue]

My take is that the whole thing was a publicity stunt pushed by the estate and/or the publisher to drive sales. If people responded well, they have new editions to sell, if not, they can mea culpa and have reprints of the previous version ready to sell to those outraged.

It should also be noted that Dahl edited Willy Wonka back in the 70s when then movie was coming out. He changed the Oompa Loompas from pygmies to orange dwarves.

Yes, there's now a Puffin politically correct version, and a Penguin Get the Original version. Cynical yet?

 

[MelissaBaby]

Sorry but I think thats a little simplistic.

Corrollatioin doesnt necessarily denominate causation.

The fact that all the aforementioned authors were white males and there is resistance to them being 'edited' is not about white male grievence
Enid blyton was also edited - and that too was ridiculous, and as far as I know she wasnt a white male.

People are trying to re-write history to suit today's culture - i wont use the word 'woke' even though i really want to.

What was written in those books, not only tells a story - but informs us about the culture and the society at the time they were written. It wasnt perfect and there were attitudes then that may be offensive to todays sensibilities. but they are still a part of our culture and our heritage, and they should be left alone to represent that.

There is an ongoing attempt to change history - to erase certain figures for various reasons, because the way they lived their lives - which was at the time of their life, acceptable and legal, does not stand up to today's standards.
This, I feel, is dangerous. History should be left alone. It is there for us to learn from. As churchill said 'those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,' We need to remember what went on back then, so we can make sure that the mistakes they made, will not be repeated.

I don't see people not wanting their kids to be entertained by drawings of Japanese people as monkeys, or read about African slaves working in Willy Wonka's candy factory as "erasing history." But that's a discussion for another place, in my opinion.

 

[ElectricBlue]

There is an ongoing attempt to change history - to erase certain figures for various reasons, because the way they lived their lives - which was at the time of their life, acceptable and legal, does not stand up to today's standards.

This isn't new.

It's a bit like Trotsky being air-brushed out of Soviet history. Far quicker to use an ice pick in Mexico.

Where's Biggles when we need him? Better pay attention to Rudyard Kipling too, while we're at it; where will it stop?

 

[PastMaster]

I don't see people not wanting their kids to be entertained by drawings of Japanese people as monkeys, or read about African slaves working in Willy Wonka's candy factory as "erasing history." But that's a discussion for another place, in my opinion.

My point is don't rewrite the stories - write new ones.

then at some point as part of the child's education - maybe look at some of the stories of bygone era's and discuss why they are no longer used and no longer appropriate, perhaps compare and contrast the social system at the time they were written and that of modern times. make it a learning experience for the children to show how and why society has changed.

 

[lovecraft68]

Good job 'progressive' society your kind was foretold decades ago. Better get this one banned or rewritten posthaste.

 

[SimonDoom]

The discussion has become about, as you termed it, the "disrespect" paid to Roald Dahl, and by extension, Ian Fleming and Theo Geisel. All, to my knowledge, white males.

Which is no proof whatsoever that the motivation behind the comments in this thread is "white male grievance." You have no basis for saying that. It's smug, facile, and false. It's an unjustified ad hominem attack. You can disagree with the point being made without ascribing it to racial motives.

 

[Alitaptap]

My point is don't rewrite the stories - write new ones.

then at some point as part of the child's education - maybe look at some of the stories of bygone era's and discuss why they are no longer used and no longer appropriate, perhaps compare and contrast the social system at the time they were written and that of modern times. make it a learning experience for the children to show how and why society has changed.

I agree that keeping things as they were written and making them discussion points to be debated about is what needs to be done at present. Changing a dead author’s words seems sacrilegious to me - almost like photoshopping history based on what we deem should and should not be said. These are mementos of the past, and erasing them shows how little regard we have of this generation. Are young people so dumb that they would just be influenced by these blindly? Haven’t they proven themselves to be sharp enough to change what was once believed to be true?

And going back to the original thread, aren’t we writing fantasy to shed propriety? I mean, don’t we have enough of that in real life?

I think the more important question to ask, rather than if something is offensive, is does this character feel real. And I think beta readers are great for that - asking them, hey, could this be someone you know, your brother, your neighbor, your coworker, your friend? I think a certain amount of offensiveness is quite attractive actually, the imperfection makes things unique, makes them real. It’s like acknowledging that we all have a monster inside, and authors that are able to reveal that get me hooked.

I am of mixed race and the last thing I want is for someone to pander to my ethnicity, to drop cultural references in order to make something inoffensive, relatable and woke. I prefer the no holds barred approach - Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth - as Camus says. I have a lot of people in my life who are of various ethnicities and are offensive as fuck, and some are even caricature-ish and almost stereotypical, but I love them.

So from my two depreciated centavos worth, I’d say write what you see and hear, don’t be afraid to offend anyone, and try your best to make the character and situationship, as they say now, as real and truthful as you can.

But then again, I write poetry, and am failing at finishing my first long story, so I know you guys have a hell of a lot more experience than me and are much better at this. It’s just my two centavos.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Which is no proof whatsoever that the motivation behind the comments in this thread is "white male grievance." You have no basis for saying that. It's smug, facile, and false. It's an unjustified ad hominem attack. You can disagree with the point being made without ascribing it to racial motives.

I ascribed no motive to any individual. I pointed out, correctly in my opinion, that the thread had devolved into being about the topic of male grievance. How is that not the case, when the discussion had become about perceived wrongs being done to Dahl, Fleming, etc.?

 

[SimonDoom]

I ascribed no motive to any individual. I pointed out, correctly in my opinion, that the thread had devolved into being about the topic of male grievance. How is that not the case, when the discussion had become about perceived wrongs being done to Dahl, Fleming, etc.?

Melissa you are being ridiculous. When you raise the specter of "white male grievance" you are making an accusation against the people raising the point in this thread. The fact that the individuals discussed are white males is neither here nor there. I am not making my point because of a sense of "white male grievance." I have no white male grievance I think the idea is ridiculous. There's no purpose served in your raising the concept. Just deal with the issue on its merits and don't imply that the contributors here have racial motives. It's obnoxious and false.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Melissa you are being ridiculous. When you raise the specter of "white male grievance" you are making an accusation against the people raising the point in this thread. The fact that the individuals discussed are white males is neither here nor there. I am not making my point because of a sense of "white male grievance." I have no white male grievance I think the idea is ridiculous. There's no purpose served in your raising the concept. Just deal with the issue on its merits and don't imply that the contributors here have racial motives. It's obnoxious and false.

If you thought I was accusing you of having a grievance, that is not the case. The grievance in question, one which has been discussed a fair amount in the media, is regarding Dahl. A discussion about ethnic minorities became one about a purported wrong being done to the legacy of a white man. I did not care for that topic superseding the original purpose of the thread. If you find that ridiculous and obnoxious, so be it.

 

[djrip]

Good job 'progressive' society your kind was foretold decades ago. Better get this one banned or rewritten posthaste.

View attachment 2217824

It's odd to take a very progressive book like this, and pretend progressives would want to ban it. The few wrongheaded progressives who do want to ban certain books, target books with bigotry of some kind, and they do it through social campaigns (there are no laws against Dahl). The wrongheaded conservatives who want to ban certain books, target books that show inclusion and equality, or books about the less rosy aspects of American history, and they do so by passing laws, usually in Florida. I'm glad we here are the good kinds of progressives and conservatives who don't go for that censorship crap.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I had it pointed out some years ago that in efforts to be more inclusive, majority people need to be willing to go ahead and try, and accept sometimes they'll make mistakes. If authors for example only write about their own characteristics, people in currently under-represented groups will be waiting a very long time for the few already-underrepresented authors to write about them.

I think this is where a lot of authors get unnecessarily timid. If one lives on a diet of "cancel culture" news it's easy to get the impression that writing non-white characters is some sort of minefield where putting a single foot wrong will result in being unpersoned by a horde of rabid grievance-seekers. So they default to writing an all-white cast, or they include non-white characters but write them all just like white people.

But in my experience, the bar is really low, for exactly the reasons you've mentioned. As long as one makes a bit of an effort to get it right, and treat those groups with at least as much respect as one would extend to one's favourite deceased author... well, I've had a bunch of "great to see somebody like me in a Literotica story for once" comments. I can't remember a single time that I was yelled at for it, and I tend to remember that kind of thing. IME, if I make the effort, readers from those groups will appreciate that and cut me slack.

I agree with @MelissaBaby that there's a middle ground in between stereotypes and erasure. Sometimes it gets tricky walking the line between acknowledging cultural features and perpetuating stereotypes.

I think one of the best pieces of advice I've seen about minority rep in fiction is that a lot of this stuff gets easier to navigate if a body of work has more than one character from a given background. If your cast has just one Black character, one Asian, one Deaf, ... then it's hard for readers to distinguish between a statement about a character, and a statement about that character's culture, and a generalisation about every single person from that culture. When there are multiple characters, it becomes a lot easier to show those distinctions and acknowledge that while a culture will have its own expectations, every person within that culture has their own relationship with those expectations.

This is something I tried to use in Red Scarf. Anjali's family are in some ways a stereotype: controlling, conservative Hindu parents who are determined that their kids will grow up to be doctors (the medical kind!) or engineers. That stereotype exists because it's not an uncommon tendency, but it's not every Indian family - and although Anjali ultimately rebels against her parents I didn't want that to come across as "smart girl realises Western culture is better than Indian culture".

I tried to address that a bit by having other Indian/Indian-Australian characters in the story to show a bit of range, and I referenced her having a group of Indian-Australian friends, but as I went on I found it hard to incorporate that side of her life into the story. The problem there was that her relationship with the narrator was a secret from her family, so she needed to keep those two sides of things largely separate. As her parents' behaviour got worse, I wasn't satisfied that I'd adequately made that distinction, so I ended up just having her articulate it:

"...sometimes when I was a kid I hated being Indian. I wanted to fit in with the other girls, you know how it is. Fat chance. And as I've grown up I've been trying to get past that and be comfortable in my skin. We go back every year but it still feels like I'm going there as a child. Some day I want to be able to go to India as an adult and understand more about where I'm from. I know I'll never really belong there but I'd like to be...less of a stranger to it? Do you know what I mean?" She was flapping her hands feverishly.

"I think so?"

"But whenever I think about India, my parents are in the way. I just end up angry and resentful. I keep bringing everything back to the way they treat me, and I hate that. I want to be able to have a relationship with it without it being through them, I know that doesn't make sense."

If I was writing that story over, I'd look for ways to show a bit more of the positive sides of the culture Anjali's parents come from and have the narrator experience that directly - maybe have her go along to a movie night with Anjali's friends and see how they interact. Hindsight is 20/20. But even if it's a little bit clumsy, I'm happier that I articulated that distinction, that those two antagonists aren't meant to stand for the whole of "India".

A little bit of background detail can really help, too. One of the comments I got on Red Scarf:

As an Indian myself, I found your portrayal of the Kapadia family very believable. Sure, Indian (or Asian in general) parents wanting to make doctors (or engineers) out of their children is a well-known fact, even a meme by now. But the subtler details, like them telling "practically the entire Indian diaspora in Sydney that Anjali Kapadia was going to be a doctor", the issue of Anjali switching from her medical studies being "exacerbated by some sort of rivalry with the Daswani family down the street", and many others, ring very true. And Anjali's father's password, "tendulkar34357", was just icing on the cake. I had a good laugh over that. (For those not in the know, Sachin Tendulkar is a retired Indian cricketer, one of the best batsmen of all time, and for us Indians, the "God of Cricket". The 34357 is a reference to the number of runs he scored throughout his career.)

Some of those details were suggested by an Indian author who helped me with those aspects of the story, but the password was inspired by a family member who had "bradman9994" as his; it's not hard to figure out what an Indian equivalent would be!

While my young childhood was very white, after that I've been surrounded by very diverse people. Often when needing a random character I might look across the street or office and use them, though for main characters I choose features I know a bit about at least. I had a generic character recently where I nicked speech patterns off a few friends, then realised after her story went live that she must be from Malaysia or Singapore. So I ran with that for her second story, giving her the background similar to some friends of mine, though what's in the resulting story is a few dialect phrases and her repeatedly grumbling that England isn't set up for people under 5'2"...

Ah! I wondered about that. I read the second of those stories first, which does explicitly mention her Malaysian background, and when I went back to the first I was a little surprised that it seemed to be soft-pedalled by comparison. Now I understand why that was.

 

[SimonDoom]

If you thought I was accusing you of having a grievance, that is not the case. The grievance in question, one which has been discussed a fair amount in the media, is regarding Dahl. A discussion about ethnic minorities became one about a purported wrong being done to the legacy of a white man. I did not care for that topic superseding the original purpose of the thread. If you find that ridiculous and obnoxious, so be it.

Thank you for the clarification. I still don't understand the invocation of "grievance." Dahl is dead, so he can't have any grievances. Same with Dr. Seuss. To raise the concept of "white male grievance" in a thread like this logically is going to be interpreted as applying to the people contributing to the thread, not the people being talked about. If that's not so, OK. We can move forward on the merits of the discussion without anybody getting prickly about accusations of bad motives.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Thank you for the clarification. I still don't understand the invocation of "grievance." Dahl is dead, so he can't have any grievances. Same with Dr. Seuss. To raise the concept of "white male grievance" in a thread like this logically is going to be interpreted as applying to the people contributing to the thread, not the people being talked about.

To be clear, the person who brought Dahl's hypothetical "grievances" into this discussion wasn't Melissa, it was the dude who was talking about how Dahl "would be outraged if he were alive". You should probably be talking to that guy instead of calling Melissa "ridiculous".

 

[SimonDoom]

To be clear, the person who brought Dahl's hypothetical "grievances" into this discussion wasn't Melissa, it was the dude who was talking about how Dahl "would be outraged if he were alive". You should probably be talking to that guy instead of calling Melissa "ridiculous".

I think I said something about Dahl being outraged. I think he would be. That doesn't mean it's fair to call it "white male grievance." He's dead. I think it's an unfair and phony cheap shot to raise the phrase in a discussion like this. It does not add to the discussion in a productive way and I believe people at Literotica should refrain from attributing positions taken in these threads to bad and racially-oriented motives unless there is a very strong reason to do so, which there was not in this case.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Thank you for the clarification. I still don't understand the invocation of "grievance." Dahl is dead, so he can't have any grievances. Same with Dr. Seuss. To raise the concept of "white male grievance" in a thread like this logically is going to be interpreted as applying to the people contributing to the thread, not the people being talked about. If that's not so, OK. We can move forward on the merits of the discussion without anybody getting prickly about accusations of bad motives.

Threads drift off topic all the time. Absent strict moderation, it's inherent to the format. But it doesn't happen in a random manner, there are often particular patterns. The interests of any dominant group of posters will tend to push other discussion aside. Not to be glib, but the every-thread-eventually-becomes-about-Star-Wars thing is an example of this.

I think it's a fair assumption that in most threads here, the majority of participants will be white men. So, there is often a drift in the direction of what they want to talk about, regardless of the original intent of the thread. That's not the fault of any individual. But it can stop discussion of interest to others dead in its tracks.

Posters on this thread clearly expressed their opinion that Dahl and other writers were being unfairly targeted for being offensive according to current standards. That is, by definition, a grievance, and in the particular, a grievance in defense of white men. I called it what it is. I regret that you took it personally, but that was your choice.

 

[K0fcali]

Thanks for your contribution.

Em

No problem thank you

 

[JaxRhapsody]

Hang on, let me check.

No sadly not .

Em

Damn shame. We coulda helped each other; you a futa, me black.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Damn shame. We coulda helped each other; you a futa, me black.

Together they fight crime!

 

[JaxRhapsody]

It's odd to take a very progressive book like this, and pretend progressives would want to ban it. The few wrongheaded progressives who do want to ban certain books, target books with bigotry of some kind, and they do it through social campaigns (there are no laws against Dahl). The wrongheaded conservatives who want to ban certain books, target books that show inclusion and equality, or books about the less rosy aspects of American history, and they do so by passing laws, usually in Florida. I'm glad we here are the good kinds of progressives and conservatives who don't go for that censorship crap.

I still have no clue why Bone was on the banned book list. I remember reading the comic in Disney Adventure mags, and maybe the sunday papers.

 

[JaxRhapsody]

Together they fight crime!

Heros in the streets.
Getting dirty in the sheets.