autismserenity:
triggersqueak:
fmab:
fuck-ler:
fuck-ler:
A lot of abuse survivors who are like “this obviously abusive content is fine it doesn’t hurt me” have probably seen abuse normalized in their lives. I know I have. It doesn’t mean the content isn’t harmful.
“It helps me cope” that’s not a GOOD thing. I hate this site for saying everything is valid and refusing to look beyond that
not only that but when abuse survivors continue to consume and try to rationalize abuse by saying its fine, it only retraumatizes them and sets recovery far back. “coping” with abusive ships & content isnt real!
Fucking… @autismserenity @fandom-is-for-pleasure, either of you wanna tackle this? I… just can’t. I’m stressed and broken and don’t know where to begin, but I also can’t just let this stand.
I’m gonna go with: when people say that a story about an abusive relationship helps them cope, they mean it’s helpful to:
* see that other people know what it’s like
* see that other people know they exist
* see their terrible experiences reflected in a universe that’s really important to them - because it lets them feel like they could belong in that universe too, it’s not just for those other, valued, un-abused people
* see how characters they admire deal with that abusive situation.
(This covers a lot of things, but off the top of my head: maybe seeing them get sucked into a shitty abusive situation, not even realizing that’s what it is at first, is helpful because if this amazing protagonist can fall into that trap, then the viewer doesn’t have to shame themself for falling into it anymore. Or maybe the character eventually gets out of it, and it’s helpful to see how they escape and start to heal.)
* work through some of the shit it brings up for them
(I feel like a lot of people respond to that last point, or to all of them, with a contemptuous “you should work through that in THERAPY, that’s what it’s FOR, not by fucking around at home with fanfic or anime or whatever!” and like… Yeah, that can be really helpful, if you have a good therapist you can afford, and… these people are probably already doing that?
You don’t get to just have things come up and work through them in therapy, this shit is constant. You go to therapy or counseling to get help processing all the stuff that’s coming up in your everyday life. And having one person, who you’re paying to be supportive, tell you you’re not alone and shouldn’t shame yourself, is not nearly enough.)
A non-sexual, theoretically non-abusive example:
It’s true that this stuff CAN be retraumatizing. It’s also true that that experience can be cathartic.
And that being retraumatized by watching, or reading, something that you know isn’t real, is VERY different from being retraumatized by experiencing more violations in your own life.
Using that term in a way that implies those are the same thing feels very disrespectful of my experiences with abuse. Because no matter how horrible something I read or watch is, it’s not the same experience as having a person in my life who is violating my boundaries. YMMV.
Anyway: I used to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, back when it aired.
It killed Tara off RIGHT after a partner of mine killed himself.
That was extraordinarily retraumatizing. Especially since Willow and Tara had been very rare representation. And I’d really idealized their relationship and wanted them to get back together and do well by each other. Much like I’d idealized my own relationship, and wanted it to live up to my image of it.
I was watching that whole plot arc play out, week after week, while grieving, and raging against my partner and the show, and wishing both situations would magically somehow get fixed. Frequently, I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to keep watching the show.
But despite how hard it was, it was also helping me a LOT. For complex reasons, I couldn’t, at that point, tell most of my friends he was dead. Only one other person in my life knew, and he didn’t know how to respond or show up around it.
Having a similar tragedy playing out in fiction meant that my feelings were validated, by the reactions of other characters. It meant that my experience was, to some extent, validated, acknowledged, by what I was seeing on TV.
When nobody else in my life could grieve or rage for, or with, me, these characters could grieve and rage in parallel to me. I could see what support looked like, even if I couldn’t have it. When I felt like I wasn’t handling it well, I could say to myself, “At least I haven’t suddenly become evil and turned anybody inside-out.”
You could argue that that’s not the kind of content you’re talking about. That that plotline… what? Doesn’t normalize violence against women? Violence against lesbians? Gun violence?
That it’s okay because the villain meets with a terrible end? Even though Tara’s murder is something that does happen in our world, and Warren’s death is totally unrealistic and literally impossible here?
That it’s not an abusive relationship, just a single act of abuse? That you only mean people who watch or read or talk about abusive romantic relationships?
It’s just. If the arguments above make sense, then Harry Potter should be getting it for depicting an incredibly abusive, neglectful relationship, year after year, with the adults in power refusing to even acknowledge it. With the author, IMHO, treating what she’s describing very lightly, as if it’s just sort of inconvenient and rude of the Dursleys to make him live in silence in a closet.
That does get criticized, rightly. But according to this thread, people shouldn’t write or read anything like that, full stop. They’re doing something bad if they read those books over and over because they relate to Harry’s experiences of abuse. Or write more stories about that relationship. Or draw his uncle screaming at him and locking him up.
Or: Nobody should create or watch the US version of Queer As Folk because it depicts an emotionally abusive man in his thirties dating someone who, initially, is 17… even though the 17-year-old realizes, as he learns and grows, that he’s in an abusive relationship. And tries to set boundaries, and eventually leaves, and numerous characters tell the older dude that he’s being incredibly terrible, and that he should end the relationship.
The US version sucks (I haven’t watched the UK original) and there are a million terrible things about it IMHO. I can’t recommend watching this shit, on multiple different levels.
But I also have to recognize that there are people out there who idealized THAT relationship, and stood by it, insisting that it was healthy and fine – and that a lot of them, young and old, eventually figured out, through it, that their own relationships were toxic and they needed help.
And there are people who never got into those relationships, because they saw what this one was like.
And there are people who had no interest in anything like that, who saw people idealizing it and making fanart that idealized it, who reached out to support them instead of screaming at them for being terrible and wrong. And some of those people idealizing it were able to get out of bad situations earlier because they had a supportive community around them.
Idk, I’m pretty sure that the knee-jerk reaction will be to skip reading any of this, imagine what you think I said, and then be a dick about it, but it was worth writing for me anyway at least.
(Note: I called the Buffy situation “theoretically non-abusive” because, of course, we would learn later that Joss Whedon apparently killed Tara off because Amber Benson pissed him off by, basically, setting boundaries.
And also, accidentally killing one person by trying to kill another is legitimately an abusive act, albeit one that misfires. Not all abuse is sexual.)
