(for peachespig)

Two and a half years ago, I posted a short essay called A Stubborn Romanticizing and Eroticizing Impulse, which I still think more worth reading than pretty much anything I've ever posted. From the introduction:

What does all this have in common? Sexualizing, that's what. Taking something that was intended (or possibly intended) as non-sexual, and layering sexual feelings, expectations, and interpretations over it. In my opinion, this procedure, and the results of this procedure, is a mainspring of the whole "fandom" phenomenom. We take the energy of literary appreciation and creative endeavor and combine it with the immense energy of our sexual drives, fueling a very strong motivation to spend time and effort on Harry Potter. Certainly there are exceptions, but for a large portion of the fandom, their participation is continuously fueled by "warm" feelings for a certain pairing, a certain character, or even a certain actor or actress. I, it must be said, am NOT an exception.

Today I want to write about a different impulse, one I see as similarly strong and widespread, but one for which I feel a good deal less sympathy and complicity than I do for the impulse to romanticize and eroticize. I'm talking about the impulse to transform the subtle and complex into the simple and moralistic, to take creations drawn in continuous shades of gray and view them in black and white, to flatten the three-dimensional and polarize your response (to a character, a subplot, a theme, a pairing) into either unconditional love or unrelenting condemnation. ( Read more...Collapse )