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You can't censor my bondage slavery fic! Part One.
I haven't posted here in years. Well, until I finally found something definitely worth preserving over here. This wank is reported in two parts, primarily because the wank itself is spread over two sizeable threads on the same forum.

Today's new flavour of wank comes to us courtesy of the SpaceBattles forum. The site originated as hosting for several fanmade 3D movies. From there, the site added a forum, becoming a place for science fiction fans to come talk about their favorite shows. Today, the site enjoys a userbase of almost 75,000 members, with subforums dedicated to roleplaying, fanart, and arguing over whether Superman could beat Goku, or the Enterprise-D could fight a Star Destroyer.

None of those, however, are what concerns us, today.

Spacebattles also possesses a creative writing subforum. In practice, this is mostly filled with fanfiction of varying levels of quality, plus another subforum dedicated to recommendation and handing out plot bunnies. For the most part, the content there consists of various flavours of gun porn, power-gaming, and a phenomenon known as "Humanity Fuck Yeah", in which plucky humanity triumphs over a variety of alien invaders out to enslave/destroy us. (Popular candidates for this role include the Minbari of Babylon 5 and the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, after two very popular an influential fanfics first posted on that board.)

All this is background to the events recorded in this post.

Forums user Lord Charon makes a post in a plot bunny thread for Harry Potter fanfics describing an idea he just can't let go off:

When Hagrid goes to get Harry, he introduces him to a girl on a leash, whom Hagrid calls 'Ermione, and says is going to be Harry's guide and servant due to having been raised in the muggle world, but also having lived a few years in the wizarding world. When Harry sees (or perhaps touches) the crest on her collar, he gets a feeling similar to the one he gets when he first holds his wand, and when he asks about the collar and leash, Hagrid explains that the leash is just to show who's responsible for her, while the collar keeps her under control, and connects her to her Master (Harry). Hagrid looks on her fondly, like one of his 'interesting creatures' (well, she's probably less dangerous than a dragon, at least), but reluctantly admits that she killed three people, even if it wasn't her fault.

Responses range from stunned incomprehension to, "This is just wrong." Some time later, a mod arrives to berate Lord Charon and ban him for the contents of his post. Lord Charon's post, however, is left intact.

Shit immediately begins to fly:

"The ruling was shit. Sure it was dark. Very dark in fact. But not worthy of an insta ban. I could somewhat understand a temp band but this.... This is just a mod going on a power trip to lord his own values over others using the vague rules of the site."

"I'm not even sure it's worth a temp-ban. It could have gone very inappropriate places, but merely discussing potential 'slavery' in a setting that actually has it (House Elves) even if it is vaguely sanatized."

Among the voices loud in their disapproval of the mod action is arthurh3535, who is equally loud in denouncingt he perceived arbitrariness of the mod action:

So, basically, it maybe/sorta alludes to something so isn't worth deleting, but bring down the ban-hammer so that everyone know that you ban even thinking of writing something uncomfortable because 'girl slavery' automatically equates squicky sex-slavery.

There's at least two sets of double-standards in that...

Despite (or perhaps because of) a mod stepping in to clarify the administration's position, other posters continue to echo arthurh3535's paranoia of mod oppression:

"What I dislike about this recent slavery issue is that it de facto cuts off a huge avenue to establish why a person / race / polity / religion / custom / nation deserves to get it's shit stomped in unless I take an alrready well established example which exihibits the feature I need in my antagonist(...)Now let us take an reader who has never heard of Draka and is now wondering: "Who are these Draka guys and why is everyone else in thread cheering that they're about to be invaded by walking sharktopus ?". So when he asks the thread, what answer should he get, according to how I interpret this recent application of moderator interpretation of the relevant rules ?

I think it would run along the lines of "Oh we can't tell you, we would get banned for it". "

(Note: The Draka mentioned above are a villainous race of Mary Sues from a pulp book series by S.M. Stirling. The series describes the slow conquest and enslavement of humanity by this race of genetic supermen, with the exception of a small remnant that flees for outer space. Understandably, they make somewhat popular villains for crossover fanfiction on Spacebattles.)

Surprisingly, despite comments from various posters explaining exactly what the problem is, arthurh3535 recalcitrantly fails to understand the reasoning behind the original mod action. In desperation, forums user Harry Leferts posts snippets from a particularly dark fic he wrote, pointing out that he never sustained any mod action from these posts, only for arthrh3535 to sneer:

"If the Mod had decided that it was too much for that moment, you'd be banned because he felt it was 'too much' even if it was not a deep or disturbing imagery per se.(...)Tomorrow he might decide that your story is too far and ban you, because you should be an amazing mind reader with precognitive powers to know that he can just decide something like that so arbitrarily.

Finally, not one but two mods step in to declare an end to the discussion:

"...if you are writing up a story(or even a story idea) which has an underage child being a "slave", and you don't think to yourself "wow this could go horribly in the wrong direction, maybe I should make it absolutely clear of what this is, and more importantly, what this isn't", because finishing it off with "'Servant' might or might not mean 'slave', it's up to the writer." tells me the poster didn't care. And that is not going to fly.

Now seriously, drop this derailment. You now have a second mod confirming what the first did(which shouldn't even be needed in the first place!). This goes double for all the people needlessly bitching about Kensai; we have a Complaint Procedure, check the news forum and follow it, before I start handing out temp-bans.

"The key issue is that we have found we can't trust this sub forums judgement at all.

You want to complain about us cracking down on stuff, but we're trying to contain this thing by stopping people from driving the Creeper Monkey to the Little Girl International Airport. If you have a problem with that, blame the people who buddy fucked you, assuming you're not the person doing all the buddy fucking."

This effectively ends the argument in this thread. Discussion moves on to more pleasant topics. The wank however, has not died. Elsewhere in the forum, it is brewing. That discussion, the fallout from the whole affair, will be discussed in my next post.

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ekaterinv
2013-02-12 10:09 pm UTC (link)

Thomas Jefferson also had a longtime sexual relationship with a slave. This was, obviously, rape. And yet she returned to him, when she could have stayed away, and lived as a free woman -- so things can get really complicated. (Though she might have just returned to him because he still "owned" her children, which is not so complicated.) This was also before slavery in the antebellum South reached its worst pitch of abuse. Not that it wasn't already incredibly horrible and abusive before, of course, but in Jefferson's time it was more like slavery had been in the past, rather than the outlier that pre-Civil War racial slavery became.

I'm trying myself to write about rape within a culture with slavery, and related to slavery, in an okay way. Any rape scenes can be fetishized by some people; that can't be helped. But I think simply not addressing it at all would be worse. Thinking about times when I believe it's been done well, I think one thing that's important (besides calling it what it is), is to make it important to the work, but to also show that it does not entirely define the victim's life. Also to show it from the victim's perspective.

Can you say what was triggering about the scene? Was it that someone who was supposed to be the hero was doing something so terrible, and that the movie did not admit it was terrible, or was it that it was there at all?

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tw: detailed description of rape scene mentioned in prior comment & discussion of sexual abuse.

franzen
2013-02-12 11:55 pm UTC (link)

True, but I used Jefferson as my example because American history has a blind spot with regard to just how unwilling he was to let go of his slaves while decrying slavery. When a friend called his bluff by offering to pay -- "I can't free my slaves, it would be economic ruin" -- Jefferson still refused. As you said, he also had a sexual relationship with a slave, which actually doesn't tend to be sensationalized in media so much as underplayed, because it doesn't fit any trope. There was a recent non-fiction biography of Jefferson that goes into just how unwilling he was to free his slaves and to let go of slavery of an institution, despite all the pretty words he wrote. Which is what makes him so fucking horrifying, at least to me, and goes back to Eichmann in Jerusalem and the core of what any work dealing with slavery is going to have to address. I haven't seen Tarantino's film (you can tell because I can't even remember the name) with DiCaprio and Waltz, but I remember reading articles debunking the idea of slave owners forcing their slaves to fight, which was apparently what DiCaprio's character was doing. (Based on the trailers, the scenery was pretty delicious, as he was going to town.)

There's "slavery is evil, and to demonstrate, let me show you the rape," which ends up as fetish regardless of intent (this is the most generous I'm willing to be regarding George R.R. Martin). Then there's "non-sadistic slave owners, who are wrong, but you can feel okay for liking them because they know not what they do/it's excused by context and/or history," which also tends to fall into fetish territory. Sometimes creators don't even bother detailing why human trafficking and/or slavery are allowed; I was stuck on Italian national rail and wound up reading The Kite Runner in one go -- it's an awful book on so very many levels, but perhaps the "best" part is when a villain randomly becomes a pedophile to demonstrate his truly evil nature. It's not fetish, but it's one storyline/presentation of slavery that's incredibly common and a long way from reality.

As far as Skyfall is concerned, this is the problem: in Scene 1, Bond talks to a very attractive woman he's seen before, who is employed by the antagonist Bond is after. While seated at the bar, Bond remarks that it takes a certain kind of woman to wear a backless dress and a thigh holster (can't remember what kind of gun she had -- it doesn't matter), there's some banter, but the scene's relevance hits when Bond examines her wrist and notes that she has a tattoo denoting who "owns" her. He says he knows enough about women to know when a woman is terrified (as the woman in question is), tells her her life history (she was abducted or otherwise captured as a child and turned into a sex slave at a young age, so from childhood on, she's been in the employ of the antagonist's forces), and he offers to rescue her. She tells him that the two men who have been watching them are her guards and will attempt to kill him after she leaves, but, should he survive, she's set to leave the current location at midnight (or whatever) and then tells him where the boat is docked.

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Re: tw: detailed description of rape scene mentioned in prior comment & discussion of sexual abuse.

franzen
2013-02-12 11:56 pm UTC (link)

She exits, followed by an action sequence. When that's over, the next shot is of the woman in question in her room on the boat (still docked), wearing a nightgown and examining herself in front of a mirror. A random man opens the door, she startles, he announces departure and leaves, and the camera pans to the table, where the woman is looking forlornly at the two champagne glasses she had readied. She sips from her own and sighs, then starts a shower.

The camera is filming her from behind the (steamed-over) shower glass at first, and then -- okay, here we go: the camera moves to inside the shower, and I think she's humming to herself as she lathers either her hair or her shoulder, but a noise very obviously startles her. She stops moving. The camera shows that the noise is, yes, the shower door opening, and it focuses on Bond's face (and naked torso). Bond -- says nothing and does nothing for a very long moment, during which his face can be read any number of ways, but "anticipatory" is one inarguable element. So: he's watching her in the shower, she's been spooked (and has no reason to think it's him and not, say, another one of the men who are holding her captive, as we saw moments ago); there's a very long moment in which we have a woman who is clearly scared (not moving, refusing to look behind to see who's there) and a "hero" character who is obviously enjoying the sight before him but also the cause of her fear, and, in fact, prolonging it. After that pause, he steps behind her and says something about how she looks better without the gun, she murmurs about feeling naked without it, they start kissing, and the camera moves back behind the shower glass.

There are multiple problems here: (1) The woman he's sleeping with has confirmed that she has been a sex slave for the majority of her life. This couldn't possibly be unsexy or cause consent issues for a man. What could possibly be hotter than a hot chick? I mean, yeah, you know someone "owns" her and has since she was a kid, but it's not like you have to consider that. (2) It's repeatedly stated that she's terrified. The only people I've ever known who found terror sexy are rapists. The majority of rapists want to see their victims in fear, as that's what they find sexually exciting. (3) Let's bracket the "consent" and "past trauma" issues (even though the trauma isn't past, since the woman is still currently enslaved) for a moment and pretend that this is just meant to be a sex scene. Okay. So why the hell is Bond terrifying the person he's about to have sex with and all but licking his chops as he watches her terror? And why is this presented as sexy and an unquestioned good?

It's okay, though, because the next time we see her, she's had her faced punched up, and then she dies. No one cares. This is actually stated by Bond at the time of her death. The "damsel in distress" trope is pretty common to the Bond films, obviously, but 1995's GoldenEye and then the recent Craig films had subverted it up until this point -- Bond would claim not to care about the hostage but, in fact, did, or the supposedly distressed damsel would change her own fate. Even in more straight iterations of "Bond Girl" deaths, there was some level of concern/remorse on Bond's behalf when he found the body. In the Craig era, Bond was brutally deconstructed by M and Vesper for his indifference to women (fake or not); M actually shows up to tear Bond several new orifices over the fact that he'll sleep with women who have nothing to do with the mission, leaving them to become easy targets for anyone looking for Bond. So not only does the woman in Skyfall die during a sick game of William Tell, Bond explicitly states that he absolutely doesn't care. She's never mentioned again.

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Re: tw: detailed description of rape scene mentioned in prior comment & discussion of sexual abuse.

franzen
2013-02-12 11:57 pm UTC (link)

I wasn't triggered because something in the scene directly related to my real life (... does anything in a James Bond movie have anything to do with real life?) or past sexual abuse experiences. It was the more "atmospheric/situational/cultural" kind of trigger, where superficially I had no reason to be upset but, thanks to trauma, my brain began to check out and I just waited for the movie to please fucking end. It took me until the next day to realize that (1) I had been triggered; (2) that was the source of my current "something feels off" mood; and (3) what the mechanics of it were. For me, it was seeing "terror" presented as sexy, even a natural stop on the way to bed. The staging, the expressions of the two characters, and the way Bond had complete control over whether or not to announce himself (and free the woman from the worry that she was going to be raped by one of the ship's crew) -- not to mention the fact that no one invited him into the fucking shower anyway -- was what threw me for such a loop.

Having been on the receiving end of that tactic -- "I JUST TERRIFIED YOU, LET'S HAVE SEX" -- and having had to physically fight my way out of that dynamic, I can't see the sexy. I can't see it at all. My favorite allies in real life are my male ones, who were the first to understand my experiences as violent -- because if sex involves a woman who's motionless, scared, crying, "playing dead," and unable to look at you, that's the opposite of what "good sex" is (to non-rapists). In the Skyfall case, it's particularly bad, because you know (and so does Bond) that the woman is scared because this has undoubtedly happened to her on many prior occasions, as a child and as an adult, and always ended in rape. The sex scene between the two didn't have to be nearly that uncomfortable (it would have been problematic, to say the least) but, for whatever reason, someone decided to stage it using rape tropes. I suppose you're supposed to cheer when Bond reveals himself and the two of them begin kissing passionately. Anticipation! Buildup! Screenwriting 101!

Some survivors of childhood sexual abuse have discussed how showering and bathing is often when abuse occurs, as helping a young child in the bathtub is an easy excuse. Some become terrified of bathtubs, shower stalls; of not locking the door upon entry; some refuse to close their eyes while bathing. I doubt the people behind Skyfall have reason to know these things, but that's what makes the scene even more horrifying. It's not even a new use of rape tropes; it's something women face every fucking day -- but it's okay, because it's Bond, and he's the hero.

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Re: tw: detailed description of rape scene mentioned in prior comment & discussion of sexual abuse.

ekaterinv
2013-02-13 01:21 am UTC (link)

Wow, that sounds incredibly awful.

For me, terror presented as sexy within an explicitly fantasy kink setting is fine. But when it's supposed to be just the way the world works -- and no one cares about the victim -- and jeez. I just have no words. Except I am very, very glad I never saw that movie.

And yeah, George R. R. Martin can bathe in Legos daily as far as I'm concerned.

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	jetamors 2013-02-13 10:38 pm UTC (link)
	To be specific, Sally Hemmings stayed with Jefferson because he promised that he'd free her family if she did. The only slaves he ever freed (all 6 or 7 of them :/) were relatives of hers. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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