A plea for tolerance?

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Not sure quite what to call this - it's a comment I made on an earlier thread, where it was pretty deeply buried. I'm posting it as a separate comment because it's something I feel pretty strongly about.

Yes, I know - this is a sporking community. We are making fun of the Harry Potter books, and, at times, some of us can get quite irate in our discussions. But - please, please, can we refrain from getting irate towards J.K. Rowling?

Here's what I mean: I'm really not comfortable discussing the character of an actual human being just because I find her books frustrating. I'm a bit of a structuralist. The author is dead once a book has been published, and that cuts two ways. The author is no more privileged in his/her interpretation than any other reader, because the work belongs to the readers now. And there are limits to what we can extrapolate about an author's belief, personality, etc, based on the work s/he has written.

As angry as I get at the awful, mixed messages in these books, I think we must never forget that a real, vulnerable human being wrote them. It isn't right or fair to trash her while trashing the books. (Though I like to think we're not trashing them, but subjecting them to rigorous criticism!) And I'm really not comfortable with speculating about her family life and personality based on the words she's written. Though I do believe all real art is "true" in a deep sense, and reveals the heart of its creator, I still think the art has, and must have, its own validity. You see what I mean?

I hope to be a published author one day. Though I neither want nor expect Rowling's level of fame, I wouldn't like it if anyone psycho-analyzed me on the basis of my stories. I don't think any of us would - and many of us do some type of creative work. Would we like to be called "stupid cows" because a reader found our work stupid? The person is not the work.

So I think it's fine to discuss the image of God in Rowling's stories. I think it's fine to question the heavy use of Christian symbolism given the non-Christian content of the stories. Heck, I've done this myself, repeatedly! It's fine to discuss the mixed messages about race, bullying, authority figures, and so much more. But I'd rather not discuss the psychology and personal life of the woman who wrote the stories. J.K. Rowling is a woman trying to write, and raise a family, and live, in this real world. We shouldn't forget that, no matter how angry her books make us.

Comments

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

Ultimately your comment here, your forbidding me from calling Ginny the Girl Who Dates, is based on fear. You're afraid that making my 'technically factual' assessment of Ginny "feeds into the cultural belief that woman can't legitimately have such desires of their own".

It's not fear, it's facts. We live in a world where an 11-year-old girl being in the company of teenage boys is used to excuse/justify her gang-rape by nearly 30 men some of whom were nearly three times her age. It is a world where a woman dancing in public is considered permission to strip her bare for the entire world to gawk at and masturbate to in perpetuity.

By holding up female sexuality in any form as something to be mocked, shamed, and criticized, you legitimize the philosophy that those more extreme perspectives rely on to exist and perpetuate themselves. What's more, you increase the pain of the victims by affirming to them that their tormentors are correct: that they have somehow debased themselves in trying to connect with others, that they deserve to be punished and looked at with scorn despite their actions harming no one. That you think maybe their punishment shouldn't be as severe isn't a comfort at all, only the difference between adding a piece of straw to the back of a straining camel vs. adding a twig or a log. When that camel's back breaks, do you truly believe you'll have no culpability at all?

(And please don't try to argue that words such as slurs and aspersions aren't harmful: the brain processes emotional pain in exactly the same area it processes physical pain. Unless you want to argue that, for example, the pain of a broken leg is equally inconsequential, just don't go there.

http: (slash) (slash) www (dot) sciencemag (dot) org (slash) content/302/5643/290)


Instead I personally would prefer to tackle that concern from the other end - by seeing Ginny for what she is, but striving to eliminate any bias or discrimination that makes such an observation of a girl any more damning than that of a boy.

Unfortunately, in the real world such observations are not neutral. We see this time and time again whenever a woman is accused of impropriety, regardless of whether the “offense” is actual or imagined or even whether people agree it should be an offense in the first place.

As I explained at the beginning of this series of posts, public shaming is at it's core a form of mob justice. And as we have seen over and over and over again, when the person held up for shame is a sexualized female, the response generated by that mob is beyond vile.

We see this every time a woman is found guilty in the public court of having her sexuality exposed while existing as female. A virtual lynch mob forms, bombarding her with messages calling her a slut and a whore, blaming her for her own violation, telling her she deserved her pain, that she should kill herself, that they'll kill her or rape her or both. Some will even follow up on those threats. It doesn't matter if she technically had sex or not. It doesn't matter if she was a child who could not, under any interpretation of the law, give consent even if she was willing. There is a deep seated strain of misogyny in our culture that bubbles up to the surface whenever such a case makes its way into the public eye.

The only way to circumvent such mob justice is to codify the acceptable consequences into law and enforce that law; to define clearly what the offense is and what penalty society deems adequate to atone for it, following the payment of which the offender has erased their debt and can move on without further retribution.