The Less Valid Victims?
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Less Valid Victims? |
| Creator: | Candy Apple |
| Date(s): | June 17, 1999 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | The Sentinel, other fandoms |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | The Less Valid Victims?/WebCite |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Less Valid Victims? is a 1999 meta essay by Candy Apple.
The topic: feedback, Domestic Discipline, and The Sentinel.
It as part of a series at Fanfic Symposium.
Excerpts
The recent flurry of controversy over "Domestic Discipline" stories raises, in my opinion, another very meaningful issue. Those who object to stories in this genre, as I do, have cited a variety of reasons, including the concern that the stories are condoning, promoting even, the mentality that has often kept women in abusive relationships for years. But what of men? Even in this environment of slash fans, where male-male relationships are certainly not the object of discrimination, the vision of an abuse victim is generally female. Our society reinforces the concept that men are not valid victims of crimes like rape or domestic violence. This attitude is reflected in the macho ideals to which our men are raised trying to measure up--a "real man" can take care of himself, a "real man" wouldn't be weak enough to be slapped around by a woman (despite the fact that another societal norm teaches men that it is wrong to hit a woman, which definitely stacks the deck against them in a relationship with a physically combative or abusive female)--and this isn't even touching on how a man in a relationship with another man would fare. In our homophobic times, his pain would, at worst, be dismissed as one more piece of evidence of the depravity of gays, or at best, essentially ignored due to a lack of available community resources.
So what does any of this have to do with fan fiction?Sadly, far too much. The "Domestic Discipline" theme (which to me is only a pretty euphemism for domestic abuse) portrays two men in a relationship where one dominates the other, imposes his will on the other, and on more than a few occasions, uses superior size and strength to inflict physical pain on his significant other as "punishment" for "misbehaving". I raise the question of whether or not it would be the same turn-on to read or write if it were a woman being beaten. Would the person inflicting the beating be excused as easily? Is it more acceptable for Jim to beat Blair for misbehaving because Blair is a man? The issues of humiliation, loss of self-esteem, and acceptance of physical violence due to a host of other emotional/psychological issues are somehow less valid because the victim is a man? Or, do we automatically assume that because he is a man, he is "strong enough" not to be an abuse victim? That he couldn't be emotionally manipulated into enduring the abuse out of love or fear or any number of other reasons we see as logical when a female abuse victim stays on and makes excuses for her abuser?
"It's just spanking." That's another response to objections to "DD" stories, as if the issue of where you hit someone truly makes a difference in the debate of whether or not you should hit him at all. Further, since when isn't it dangerous to have someone with muscles that could bench press more than your body weight, delivering repeated blows to some part of your body? The spanking in these stories is not sex play--it's punishment, and often delivered in a spirit of anger. An angry, large, very strong man beating a smaller one until he's worked through his anger through the act of beating his lover. The image is ugly, and it makes me shudder.