Xanphibian, thank you.

[icarus]

Thank you, xanphibian.

For the record, I too am an incest survivor and I write about incest. heatherly's post... I have no words. Fortunately, xanphibian does.

Xanphibian sums up a lot of what I feel.

Yes. heatherly misses the point entirely. Yes. Many incest and rape survivors aren't just "okay" with these stories -- they actively seek them out. But to understand that, I think you should read xanphibian's post.

For the record, I'm bothered by heatherly's opportunistic fear-mongering about "outsiders" on the heels of the latest scares. There's potential for a fandom backlash against writers of incest, non-con, and chan. If that happens, no one's going to care if it's a good story or a bad story, or if it's "realistic" or not. We'll just be targeted based on the warnings.

If that happens, I'd do the same thing we did in LJ. I'd take all the warnings off my stories.

Lastly... "writing responsibly"? What the heck is that even supposed to mean?

Comments

[chronolith.livejournal.com]

one had to be a survivor in order to wrwite about such things

oh hay thar something that had been bothering me that I couldn't put a finger on until now.

I think it's a type of elitism and a way of saying that she, because she deals with these issues in her offline life, can determine the right way of talking/thinking/writing about these issues but the rest of us lowly fen cannot. That implication rankles, honestly, because it reeks of patronizing bullshit.

I'm not an incest survivor, but I have survived a lot of shit that I'm willing to bet most of the Fen has not. I guess according to her I get to tell the rest of the Fen the 'right' way to write about gang violence, getting shot, and war because I've experienced it up close and personal. This idea, to me, is abhorent. Mostly because I have problems talking coherently about what's happened to and around me. I like warfic and violent fic because it puts into words things inside of my head that I have trouble articulating. And if I don't like it, okay well there's the back button.

But somehow she is more specially and fragile and the rest of us have to 1) take care of how we write so we don;t hurt her fragile feelings, and 2) listen to her tell us how we ought to write because she knows better. That's crap.

[aukestrel.livejournal.com]

Definitely there seemed to be a "right way" implication in her post; I believe someone else pointed out that she went to a lot of trouble to define terms but left "responsible" out there as a very, um, nebulous "write your own definition here" kind of term, and, indeed, that word "responsible" was one of the red flags for me. The other thing that rankled was, as you say, that only people who have some personal knowledge of a subject are somehow qualified to write about it. That might be true for designing rocket engines, but somehow I don't think it's exactly true for writing fanfic. Or, um, even professional fiction. *g*