What’s the word for it, the Wokenment?  Consciousness-expanding?  Awareness-raising?  We’ve had a lot of it, from the atheist schism that ultimately created this blog network to Me Too to Black Lives Matter and so on.  Good stuff.  A recurring theme of that all: that in lacking awareness, the privileged can cause various harms to the oppressed or less privileged.  By knowing the issues, we can do better, and a more equitable world will be a better one.

A more interesting one at least.  The art of the less enlightened (if not woke, asleep?) is all about the same white people we’ve been seeing all our lives – particularly dudes.  How weird was that juncture in history where movies and TV had so many single fathers?  The wall of thumbnails in video game stores featuring stubbly white guys?  Time for other people to be seen, and I’m into it.  I genuinely want to see them.

Had a comment on a recent article expressing that said commenter did not want to revisit books they’d read in the pre-wokenment days (my phrasing, i’m writing on fumes dogg), because the racism and misogyny in them would be more apparent now.  This dovetailed in my head with a post I’d read on social media about works by problematic authors, works that felt important to somebody in their youth, becoming so distasteful as to become unapproachable now.  There are some differences between the situations described, and in this other post from social media, I feel the response lacked nuance.  My commentariat unintentionally reminded me I wanted to say something about that.

Even in a much better world than the one we’ve all been living through, in our better tomorrow, some art is going to have skeevy elements.  This is in part an artifact of our history – we have a lot of feelings to work out, regarding every creepy thing we’ve experienced in culture.  (in part it’s just because we ain’t burning books and still want to read classics.)

That processing isn’t always about getting through to the other side.  Sometimes that’s just how it is in our brains now.  Like, would forced-feminization crossdressing, humiliation fetish stuff work in a world where nobody was shamed for whatever gender expression they’re wearing at the moment?  Maybe not, but until nobody remembers the world as it is now, some people are going to have that as part of their sexuality.  (not me, i have different problems lol)

And some people are just going to find pleasure in art about things that are unhealthy, or even outlandishly evil.  There is, as we speak, a subset of romantasy fans that are into unreal erotic gore scenarios, serial killer fetish carried into the realm of impossible things – characters that can still bone down while folded spindled and mutilated.  Sexual fetishes aside, action adventure as a genre is all about the fantasy that there can be violence that is good, or at least cool.  Romance vaunts the chase over the catch, no room for the real love that is nurturing each other in less novel or thrilling circumstances.  Horror is a profoundly ableist genre and if you somehow stripped all of that out of it, what remains is still getting a thrill out of watching fictional guys get slaughtered in spooky ways.

Mark Twain said something like, “Censorship is telling a man he can’t eat steak because a baby can’t chew it.”  Grown-ups get to drink a scotch nightcap in their crushed velvet smoking jackets while they read books about promiscuous spies shooting filthy commies.  Just as long as those grown-ups know they might get the kinda cancer where their jaw gets removed, weigh the risks, it’s a freedom we should have, shouldn’t we?  Art is generally less harmful than boozohol but it can still put some ill grooves on an uninformed mind.  I say, know what’s messed up about your kicks, and get your kicks just the same.

On the separate but related issue, an author that you once liked turns out to be a scumbag.  Can you still read what they wrote?  Like my commenter, you may find it doesn’t hit the same as it did in your youth.  The queen terf’s baby books are kinda gross, when read through a lens of understanding what she’s like.  You might see things in them you didn’t see before, and things you don’t like.  But if you can power through that, and the things you enjoy about problem artist’s art reward you for that effort, go for it.  Just don’t give them any more money.

Sometimes that’s trickier than one would prefer.  Probably if I’m listening to Biggie Smalls on yewchoob, it’s giving some fractional pennies to Puff Daddy’s legal defense, and you might not be aware, that guy is a nigh-Epstein-level piece of shit.  Time to bootleg those tracks and get with mp3s like it’s 1999.

Nothing original in all this, but the issues I chose to highlight might be slightly different from what you’ve seen elsewhere, and different perspectives are always good to get, as I mentioned in the first paragraph.  Shit, was this a complete thesis?  Time to get back to shitposting…

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