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Okay I’m feeling kind of ranty about this still so I want to take this opportunity to talk about narrative therapy, kink, and fanfiction.
Narrative therapy is a form of therapy that allows people to process trauma through the slight removal and distance of story. Some griefs and pains are so huge that even trying to process them can be overwhelming. Using the slight distance created by talking about traumas instead through storytelling allows people the ability to process difficult emotions easier.
This is why tragedy as a genre exists! The point of tragedy is catharsis, feeling a powerful devastating emotion in its entirety letting it wash through you and then pass. Opening ourselves to our own griefs can be unbearable, so we as a species find it easier to process them through characters.
Narrative therapy allows people to write and rewrite their own life story. They can change events that happen, or they can just find some measure of closure in processing something through metaphor. It can restore a sense of control over a life event that ripped away someone’s sense of self.
It is fairly obvious that a lot if not most people, especially when first starting in the art form, write fanfiction as an intuitive form of self directed narrative therapy. People love to project their insecurities and fears and experiences and traumas onto their blorbos.
Bad things happen to people. No one gets out of life alive. Some people experience the worst things imaginable and live to tell the tale. And sometimes those people process their traumas through creating fanart and fanfiction.
If art that depicts terrible terrible things like sexual assaults isn’t allowed to exist, then the people who have lived through them are forbidden from talking about their lived experiences. Isolated. Their very existence a taboo subject. People Need to be able to talk about their experiences, and survivors deserve to be able to make or consume art that reflects their life without being told they’re no better than whoever harmed them.
Now! That is not to say that everyone who consumes or makes erotica about a taboo subject has to have experienced that thing. Sexual fantasy is complicated and human brains are weird. But having sexual fantasies about a taboo subject is NOT the same thing as doing those actions in real life and many people fantasize about stuff that they have Absolutely no interest in actually doing. But trying to police sexual fantasies just harms people’s experience of self!
Kink is not inherently evil! Kink is just roleplaying!!! Many common kinks are reflections of larger cultural anxieties. For example, people socialized as women are taught to always fear sexual assault. Is it any wonder that so many have a cnc kink? Kinkplay or cnc erotica allow people to experience the feeling of a complete loss of control and process that in a safe way that they actually have complete control over.
Societies dominated by repressive religious morals already tend to result in people having unhealthy relationships with their own sexuality. Cultural norms around sexual purity do a number on people. I think a fascinating example of this is the girl defined sister who has actually started talking openly about how religious indoctrination about sexual purity almost destroyed her marriage (while still maintaining that sexual purity is important. Of course. Because the cognitive dissonance is strong). The saddest example of this I have seen is teens on tiktok self policing their sexual expression to the point of feeling bad for having a crush on a character their own age.
The answer to systemic sexual violence is not banning people from ever talking about it or making art featuring it. The answer is better education and social norms about consent and bodily autonomy, and a normalization of discussing difficult and complex subjects, and addressing environmental pre conditions and abuses of institutional power. It is not policing all sexual expression to make sure it is morally pure.
Anyway all this to say I stand by my universal theory that:
fanfiction 🤝 kinkplay 🤝 RPGs 🤝 narrative therapy
And please stop regurgitating christofash rhetoric about sexual and moral purity while complaining about art you find gross and telling people to kill themselves for having a slightly edgy ship. You are not preventing harm, you are doing harm.
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