In order of your points: although not all people who write violent fantasies act them out, almost 100% of the people who do end up acting out violent fantasies first read and wrote about them
However, you're ignoring the demographics of audience, just a bit. Women (and it is women who primarily write and read RPS) often have fantasies in which they are raped, yet those fantasies are not an indication that women desire to be raped in real life. Rape fantasies are a rather interesting aspect of human behaviour that point to the ways in which the relationship between fantasy and desire and reality is far more complicated than you're allowing for in your simple, causal equation. How much more complicated, then, is that relationship when the writer imagines, not meeting an actor, or raping him, but that the actor is in a sexual/romantic relationship with another actor?
You're now on the verge of advocating that RPS is unethical because a small subset of RPS readers/writers confuses fact and fiction and and so the presence of "bad readers" necessitates we ban the books (books which are already labeled "fiction").
by writing RPS, we are denying another person's liberty for our own pleasures..."Power over"? Why do you need, why do you even want "power over" another human being? What ethical reason can whitewash the removal of another person's autonomy?
You're misunderstanding me, I think. We may desire power over our own desires, which often seem to sweep us away, and writing a fantasy and sharing it give us some power back over those desires, so that we no longer feel quite so subject to their whims (and to the sexual attractiveness of actors).
Actors work the tease--the promise of "look at me" while they're always out of reach. Acting is an illusion of intimacy with the audience, and most of us (the sane actors and the sane audience members) recognize this, even during those moments outside the performance itself (such as when an actor gives autographs and shakes our hand, thus prolonging the tease by offering more of themselves but withholding any real intimacy). They further tease us--to maintain our interest in them--when they do interviews. Is that tease unethical, because it's a lie? Perhaps. But I'd argue it isn't, because actors do so assuming that the audience is saavy to the lie--that we know a fiction when we see it (and yes, a few psychos out there don't know it, but that hasn't shut down the workings of the celebrity industry, which has been teasing us, with our consent, since the first actor stepped onto a stage and spoke to us.)
So the tease isn't fulfilled, and we seek some release, and most of us, sane as we are, don't expect the actor to fulfill the promise of the tease.
But, although the story gives us some way of controlling our desire, it only gives us an illusion of controlling the actors themselves. We have that same illusion when Entertainment Tonight offers us a tour of an actor's home, or an interview that promises to give us an inside view into the actor's thoughts. Celebrity is something an actor cultivates, through a publicist and an industry dedicated to making the actors seem huge and important, and letting us feel important by letting us share in their lives, if only through the illusion that we "know" them.
Perhaps RPS does infringe, not on an actor's autonomy, but because it threatens to equalize some of the power of the tease, by giving the audience the ability to do the work of celebrity-worship at a not-for-profit level--one the actor and industry doesn't control or make any money off of.
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Re: Look at my mini, imagine me in it, but don't touch unless I ask you to.
Date: 2005-03-18 04:12 am (UTC)although not all people who write violent fantasies act them out, almost 100% of the people who do end up acting out violent fantasies first read and wrote about them
However, you're ignoring the demographics of audience, just a bit. Women (and it is women who primarily write and read RPS) often have fantasies in which they are raped, yet those fantasies are not an indication that women desire to be raped in real life. Rape fantasies are a rather interesting aspect of human behaviour that point to the ways in which the relationship between fantasy and desire and reality is far more complicated than you're allowing for in your simple, causal equation. How much more complicated, then, is that relationship when the writer imagines, not meeting an actor, or raping him, but that the actor is in a sexual/romantic relationship with another actor?
You're now on the verge of advocating that RPS is unethical because a small subset of RPS readers/writers confuses fact and fiction and and so the presence of "bad readers" necessitates we ban the books (books which are already labeled "fiction").
by writing RPS, we are denying another person's liberty for our own pleasures..."Power over"? Why do you need, why do you even want "power over" another human being? What ethical reason can whitewash the removal of another person's autonomy?
You're misunderstanding me, I think. We may desire power over our own desires, which often seem to sweep us away, and writing a fantasy and sharing it give us some power back over those desires, so that we no longer feel quite so subject to their whims (and to the sexual attractiveness of actors).
Actors work the tease--the promise of "look at me" while they're always out of reach. Acting is an illusion of intimacy with the audience, and most of us (the sane actors and the sane audience members) recognize this, even during those moments outside the performance itself (such as when an actor gives autographs and shakes our hand, thus prolonging the tease by offering more of themselves but withholding any real intimacy). They further tease us--to maintain our interest in them--when they do interviews. Is that tease unethical, because it's a lie? Perhaps. But I'd argue it isn't, because actors do so assuming that the audience is saavy to the lie--that we know a fiction when we see it (and yes, a few psychos out there don't know it, but that hasn't shut down the workings of the celebrity industry, which has been teasing us, with our consent, since the first actor stepped onto a stage and spoke to us.)
So the tease isn't fulfilled, and we seek some release, and most of us, sane as we are, don't expect the actor to fulfill the promise of the tease.
But, although the story gives us some way of controlling our desire, it only gives us an illusion of controlling the actors themselves. We have that same illusion when Entertainment Tonight offers us a tour of an actor's home, or an interview that promises to give us an inside view into the actor's thoughts. Celebrity is something an actor cultivates, through a publicist and an industry dedicated to making the actors seem huge and important, and letting us feel important by letting us share in their lives, if only through the illusion that we "know" them.
Perhaps RPS does infringe, not on an actor's autonomy, but because it threatens to equalize some of the power of the tease, by giving the audience the ability to do the work of celebrity-worship at a not-for-profit level--one the actor and industry doesn't control or make any money off of.