Where Is The Line With Erotica?

I have a very dramatic friend who likes to invoke the stories of Sadat Manto and then loudly proclaim that discourse is dead. Actually, I have sixteen of that friend but they're all journalists so, forgive me, my sample is skewed (since we're pretty dramatic people who always write #nodrama on our Bumble bios), but they have a valid point. We cannot talk anymore. We live in a time when our politics are so partisan (and often for good reason) that we cannot listen at all, but that's not the worst of it, the worst of it is that we live in a time when everyone has a position on everything. We all already know our opinions about everything, we've done the googling and nailed the coffins shut, our minds are made up about *everything*. No one is still "figuring it out" or wondering about things, all the decisions have been made, and that is the real bullet to the head of discourse. Every discussion is about the bottom line: you don't want vedic math taught in schools, you must want to vote Gandhi then, you want to give poor sick people medical coverage, you must want to take away our liberty (or guns) and become Venezuela then. There is no discussion, only conclusions. Disagreement still warrants words, but when you have already decided there is nothing but silence. 

Personally, I am terrible at having stable opinions, and often opinions at all, I am much better at considering information and weighing the nuance to come to various conclusions, so this era is difficult for me. I don't take positions, I have ongoing thoughts that change in real-time based on the information going in me, and it's hard to do that when everyone around you seems so touchy about everything. Over the past few years, I have started to censor myself in some little ways, and it's mostly because I just don't want the hassle, or the condemnation. 

Let me give you an example, a few months ago I wrote something about my life which included an anecdote (of a sexual nature) from when I was a young girl. This anecdote included my exact age when that had happened and later I tied the incident to my adult sexual proclivities and the overall tone of the piece was erotic and extremely dirty. My writing was removed and before it was removed several people condemned it for being problematic. The next day I wrote another, similar thing, and this time I didn't include my exact age when certain things, let's call them sexual-awakenings, had taken place, the writing was not removed and it still stands today. The act of removing my age from my story was an act of self-censorship that I committed so that my writing was acceptable but there's a lot to unpack here. Let me just start by saying that I do get it. I get why a broad mandate is better than one that allows for loopholes because we don't want to encourage the pedophiles. I don't want to encourage the pedophiles, I don't want to give them fap-fodder any more than I want to give it to abusers, predators or consent violators. That is never my goal when I write. 

However, I feel there is a lot of denial when it comes to the kink-community, there is something that none of us want to say out loud: A lot of what we do can be encouraging to the wrong people. See, we think from our perspective, we think from the perspective of people who practise pain, control, violence from a standpoint that is well-considered, negotiated and consensual, and that's wonderful, but that may not matter as much from the perspective of a pedophile or an abuser. To them, reading and looking at pictures of people in situations of distress, women dressed like little girls who call themselves that and the manifestation of consensual non-consent dynamics may still seem encouraging. It's not okay for me to say how old I was when something happened, but it is still okay for me to describe my appearance, my clothing and my lifestyle, and a lot of indications about age can be made that way. I may not even be underage, but by description alone, I can make myself seem that way. When you talk about colouring books, unicorns, daddies and lollipops, you may do so as an adult, but to the willing, the adulthood can be ignored there. When I talk about violation, pain and destruction, I may do so as someone who is consenting to that, but to the willing, the consent can be ignored there. It still looks and sounds an awful lot like the real thing. That's because there are people with bad intentions, they exist, and no one wrote something so problematic that they created them. They exist.

So, if they do exist, and I do know this, what is my responsibility as a writer? What is okay to write and what isn't? 

I admit, I do not have an answer to this that is satisfying or complete, but I have a lot of questions.  For me, the way I circumvent this is that I write in first-person and that way I can display the mind of my protagonist as much as their circumstances. It may not always make things comfortable, but it makes things clear. Additionally, I write about things I have personally experienced and that way no matter how distasteful my subject, I know, at least, that I am speaking the truth. However my technique is not perfect, and it can be proven ineffective with ease. After all just because I know that life is messy and contains nuance that doesn't mean the pedophile reading my stuff really cares, and this is where the questions begin for me. 

We live in a world where sexualizing youth and young women is completely normalised. We worship youth and a lot of pop-culture is devoted to that. All the people who climb on me every time I so much as suggest I may have indulged in dirty sex and violence before it was legal for me to do so will also watch Game of Thrones with bated breath even though the young women on that show are definitely not legal. They will read Lolita and canonize it as a foundational text of being "little". They will glorify Anais Nin and quote her every chance they get but if they ever read her erotica (or any other work), there is a lot of "problematic" stuff there. She once wrote a story about a duke or something who was staying next door to a set of young twins who would get in bed with him in the morning and he would manipulate them into jerking him off by pretending it was a game. The canon of our literature is littered with the sexualisation and exploitation of young women. Every writer you fucking love forced some 14-year old girl to marry him and wrote ballads about stalking them. Which, of course, doesn't mean that because problematic literature existed once, it must continue. It does not. It just means we are hypocritical in our approach. Problematic fiction from dead people is more acceptable than gut-wrenching reality from the alive. Besides, when we write these things, a lot of them are based in reality. If stuff really happens, and we change what we write to represent an ideal state, is that even still literature? 

But that's not it, it's the eroticism that we write into these things that needs to be questioned, yes? 

If I eroticise rape, will that make people rape? If I eroticise colouring books, will that make pedophiles happy? If I eroticise violence, will that make abusers flourish? If I continue to write like this, am I doing a disservice to women? The reason I am convinced this is not true is that when men wrote and still write like this, no one had/has a fucking problem with it. The moment a woman takes charge of the disturbing circumstances in which she finds pleasure, that's when everyone suddenly needs us to be censored. Well, this culture in which things like rape, abuse and sexualisation of youth is taboo yet alarmingly prevalent, I did not create it! And blaming writers for it is like turning on your air-conditioning and thinking it helps fight global warming. This exists, and to a certain extend the fetishes surrounding it exist because of the state of society right now. We've been fed these things for years and years in ways that are a lot more sinister than a writer delineating their sexual journey. Removing the content won't make anything better, understanding it might. 

We cannot have both. We cannot say kink is totally normal but anything that is a little to the left or a little to the right is the most heinous crime imaginable. Sorry. Kink can be practiced safely. It can exist in circumstances where it has no negative impact on you, your community or anyone's mental health. It can be a perfectly healthy thing, but it doesn't have to be and the fact that people are often turned on by elements of it that are wrong means that we might all have a little "less-than-moral" side to us when it comes to what we like. I know I do, but no writing in the world can convince me to act on that, only I can do that. If you ever find yourself reading something that makes you think: This is hot but this seems wrong. That's a good thing. It means you know what works for you, but also that it isn't perfectly okay to treat the people in those circumstances in that way. The alternative, not having that writing there at all, is just a denial of reality. We can cancel many things, we cannot cancel reality though. 

That doesn't mean there is no line whatsoever, it means that the reason for our objections to things must be clear to ourselves. It means that when we read things, and we should be able to extricate fantasy from reality. It means that when we see real people being harmed we are responsible for raising our voices but we cannot pretend that getting angry at erotica is changing the world, not when you will act like a rape-apologist and watch softcore pornographic television that features real young women. It means that we should be able to approach things with more than one thought, and take from content the things we like and learn from it the things that we find wrong. That's also a part of art. It shows you what is wrong with you. It's on you to be responsible for it. That doesn't mean I am not responsible for what I write. I am. But I am not responsible for rape because I write rape. That's the rapist. I'd stop writing the psychosexual impact of rape, if it didn't exist.