Today in Things I'm Not Posting On Tumblr
Oct. 27th, 2020 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetStuck on the teeter-totter between the very valid positions of "Watching a horror movie won't make you go out and kill someone" and "Negative representation in fiction can have a huge effect on real world interactions with marginalized groups". (Using those links because they're currently the most handy; there's also lots of stuff about representation and race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, etc etc etc.) Because, very clearly, fiction can and does affect how people interact with the world in a very tangible way... but I'm still anti-censorship, pro-shipping, etc etc etc.
My big, and very personal example, especially since I'm watching the anime right now, is Cardcaptor Sakura.
I'm a lapsed Catholic. I was raised in the Church and was very faithful for a good portion of my life. I was also uncomfortable with men being attracted to other men. Catholicism definitely wasn't the only cultural influence that made me feel that way, not by a long shot, but the Cardcaptor Sakura manga is the influence that made me change my mind.
Syaoran's crush on Yukito showed up at the end of volume two of the manga. By that time I'd already gotten Tomoyo's crush on Sakura (a girl crushing on a girl), which didn't bother me for whatever reason, but somehow Syaoran liking Yukito did.
I thought about it very hard and realized, almost immediately, that if I wanted to keep liking Cardcaptor Sakura, I would have to be okay with Syaoran's crush on Yukito, and m/m love in general. I really, really liked Cardcaptor Sakura already, and didn't want to like it even one iota less, so I started making myself get okay with m/m stuff right then and there. Not even making an exception for "just" Cardcaptor Sakura, or "just" Syaoran's crush, or "just" manga in general; all m/m relationships.
Cardcaptor Sakura also has no fewer than three teacher/student relationships, all of them with some pretty illegal age gaps. I never felt the same need to be "okay" with teacher/student relationships, or with adult/minor relationships, the way I did with m/m relationships, and I don't know why. I'm fairly certain I recall being squicked out by them, especially the one with the most significant age gap, but while my overall squicked-ness has faded when it comes to encountering them in media, it hasn't for real life.
I'm a very small sample size to work with, but for me, at least, it seems like I had a good idea of inherent morality vs immorality of relationships in media and real life, even in the same title; I felt more compulsion to be okay with the idea of a relationship between men or boys, which could be consensual, than between a teacher and their student, which I have serious doubts could be. Even though the same title gave both sorts of relationships the same treatment, I still walked away with different feelings for them.
I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say anymore, except that maybe we can trust ourselves more than we think, but sometimes we also need a push in the right direction to make good decisions about how we interact with people and ideas in reality.
My big, and very personal example, especially since I'm watching the anime right now, is Cardcaptor Sakura.
I'm a lapsed Catholic. I was raised in the Church and was very faithful for a good portion of my life. I was also uncomfortable with men being attracted to other men. Catholicism definitely wasn't the only cultural influence that made me feel that way, not by a long shot, but the Cardcaptor Sakura manga is the influence that made me change my mind.
Syaoran's crush on Yukito showed up at the end of volume two of the manga. By that time I'd already gotten Tomoyo's crush on Sakura (a girl crushing on a girl), which didn't bother me for whatever reason, but somehow Syaoran liking Yukito did.
I thought about it very hard and realized, almost immediately, that if I wanted to keep liking Cardcaptor Sakura, I would have to be okay with Syaoran's crush on Yukito, and m/m love in general. I really, really liked Cardcaptor Sakura already, and didn't want to like it even one iota less, so I started making myself get okay with m/m stuff right then and there. Not even making an exception for "just" Cardcaptor Sakura, or "just" Syaoran's crush, or "just" manga in general; all m/m relationships.
Cardcaptor Sakura also has no fewer than three teacher/student relationships, all of them with some pretty illegal age gaps. I never felt the same need to be "okay" with teacher/student relationships, or with adult/minor relationships, the way I did with m/m relationships, and I don't know why. I'm fairly certain I recall being squicked out by them, especially the one with the most significant age gap, but while my overall squicked-ness has faded when it comes to encountering them in media, it hasn't for real life.
I'm a very small sample size to work with, but for me, at least, it seems like I had a good idea of inherent morality vs immorality of relationships in media and real life, even in the same title; I felt more compulsion to be okay with the idea of a relationship between men or boys, which could be consensual, than between a teacher and their student, which I have serious doubts could be. Even though the same title gave both sorts of relationships the same treatment, I still walked away with different feelings for them.
I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say anymore, except that maybe we can trust ourselves more than we think, but sometimes we also need a push in the right direction to make good decisions about how we interact with people and ideas in reality.
