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How irritating is it when someone does something douchey and they say, "Well, I'm sorry if you felt offended, I didn't mean to"? It is so irritating.
Just- no. No, a thousand times no. There is no "if" here. You did a thing. Because of this thing, a person or group of people was hurt and/or insulted. The correct way to apologize is to say, "I'm sorry for hurting/insulting you." Not "sorry-if" or "sorry-you-felt-whatever." No. None of that. You apologize for the hurt, and then you ask what you can do to make amends. If absolutely necessary, you can then qualify with an "It wasn't my intention/I didn't realize/I never meant to," but only if you honestly had no idea your actions would have the effects they did.
This goes for asshats conducting poorly worded surveys on the internet and people you deal with in every day life. *sigh*
Anyway. I managed to find out about Ogas' survey the day he put it up- it popped up on my bloglists and I read through all of the awesomely intelligent and scathing comments left by various fans. I spent an afternoon indulging myself in the wank and the intelligent discussion, and it was deeply inspiring to watch fandom unite against the asshaberdashery of outsiders. But then I got to the RPS commentfic on the original survey discussion post, and I hit the back button so hard it gave me whiplash. And I hadn't looked at any of the discussion stirred up by the survey since then until today. So, whatever I have to say about the RPF commentfic (which isn't even available anymore, since the survey journal has been deleted), has probably already been said.
I'll admit to having a bias against RPS to begin with- I could go into detail about why it doesn't hold my interest, but that's not really important. It's not my cup of tea, and I'm perfectly capable of skimming, scrolling, or backing away when I encounter it unexpectedly. It hits my "eh, not interested" buttons, generally, not my "oh jesus no no no badtouch." And the commentfic in the survey thread totally hit the latter button for me.
A member of my family used to make crude jokes about me and a close friend of mine being sexually involved; since I'm not out to my family, these jokes were a double-whammy of hurt- firstly because my sexuality was being questioned in a way meant to humiliate me for their entertainment, which is Not On in general. And secondly because not only was I being made the butt of a cruel joke, but so was my relationship with my friend.
Did my family member realize exactly how violated and hurt his jokes were going to make me feel? No. But that's no excuse for shitty behavior- even if he just intended the joke to amuse the people around him, it still required my humiliation for the punchline.
So that was where I went when I hit the RPS crackfic on Ogas' LJ- but even without that baggage, I'd still have found it upsetting. It's one thing to write fic about people who will never, barring a highly unlikely set of circumstances, see the products of your labor. It's another thing entirely to post pornfic about someone and their research partner in that person's LJ. (The fact that the LJ in question was created to deal with responses to the survey is irrelevant; it was directed at Ogas and meant for him to see.)
The survey was poorly constructed and offensive; the responses to legitimate concerns brought up by fans were condescending and insulting. But the guys who wrote it are still people who are deserving of some basic level of respect. It's a very low level of respect- call them bottom feeding, sludge-brained trolls, tell them you've seen more rigorous academic research on the back of a cereal box, whatever- but don't bring sex and personal relationships into it. Don't use as weapons the very things that outsiders so often try to turn on fandom.
And it does become a consent thing- don't force people to participate in your kink if they aren't willing. No one deserves that, not even condescending pseudo-academic jerks. It may have been crackfic, but it was still sexually explicit RPS, and it is phenomenally bad form to make the particpants of your RPS read what you've written about them.
The NSFW tentacle photo manip treads similarly sticky ground- although I honestly find it less offensive than the comment fic. I think it's distasteful, but I find explicit RPF photomanips distasteful in general. (Which is an issue that ties into how I feel about privacy and public figures, and it all gets kind of complicated and muddled.) Since it wasn't sent directly to Ogas- it was meant for fandom's eyes, not his- it isn't uspettingly triggery for me the way the comment fic was, and I can see how it serves as an act of protest in the context of Ogas' actions towards fandom.
On the other hand, it's very easy to take an image completely out of context- information can't be controlled on the internet, and what happens on someone's LJ rarely stays there. And when you take that image out of context, you have a picture of a person- a real person, not a character- being tentacle-raped. (The caption may indicate it is a rape fantasy, but that doesn't make the image any less rapetacular to someone familiar with the tropes of the tentacle-rape genre.) And that is deeply discomfitting.
Put it back in context, though, and I still find it distasteful, but not upsetting. I dunno. To what extent is an artist responsible for their art when it's taken out of context? I'd generally say the artist isn't responsible, but I do think people should be aware of the possibility for their art to cause harm. (Which isn't to say that the artist in this case wasn't! I'm just musing aloud at this point.)
Curiously enough, I think that if Sai had been photomanipped in as himself, instead of as a tentacle monster, I would have been even more offended and upset than I was by the comment fic. I'm not sure if that's just my own personal baggage making me feel that way, though.
Just- no. No, a thousand times no. There is no "if" here. You did a thing. Because of this thing, a person or group of people was hurt and/or insulted. The correct way to apologize is to say, "I'm sorry for hurting/insulting you." Not "sorry-if" or "sorry-you-felt-whatever." No. None of that. You apologize for the hurt, and then you ask what you can do to make amends. If absolutely necessary, you can then qualify with an "It wasn't my intention/I didn't realize/I never meant to," but only if you honestly had no idea your actions would have the effects they did.
This goes for asshats conducting poorly worded surveys on the internet and people you deal with in every day life. *sigh*
Anyway. I managed to find out about Ogas' survey the day he put it up- it popped up on my bloglists and I read through all of the awesomely intelligent and scathing comments left by various fans. I spent an afternoon indulging myself in the wank and the intelligent discussion, and it was deeply inspiring to watch fandom unite against the asshaberdashery of outsiders. But then I got to the RPS commentfic on the original survey discussion post, and I hit the back button so hard it gave me whiplash. And I hadn't looked at any of the discussion stirred up by the survey since then until today. So, whatever I have to say about the RPF commentfic (which isn't even available anymore, since the survey journal has been deleted), has probably already been said.
I'll admit to having a bias against RPS to begin with- I could go into detail about why it doesn't hold my interest, but that's not really important. It's not my cup of tea, and I'm perfectly capable of skimming, scrolling, or backing away when I encounter it unexpectedly. It hits my "eh, not interested" buttons, generally, not my "oh jesus no no no badtouch." And the commentfic in the survey thread totally hit the latter button for me.
A member of my family used to make crude jokes about me and a close friend of mine being sexually involved; since I'm not out to my family, these jokes were a double-whammy of hurt- firstly because my sexuality was being questioned in a way meant to humiliate me for their entertainment, which is Not On in general. And secondly because not only was I being made the butt of a cruel joke, but so was my relationship with my friend.
Did my family member realize exactly how violated and hurt his jokes were going to make me feel? No. But that's no excuse for shitty behavior- even if he just intended the joke to amuse the people around him, it still required my humiliation for the punchline.
So that was where I went when I hit the RPS crackfic on Ogas' LJ- but even without that baggage, I'd still have found it upsetting. It's one thing to write fic about people who will never, barring a highly unlikely set of circumstances, see the products of your labor. It's another thing entirely to post pornfic about someone and their research partner in that person's LJ. (The fact that the LJ in question was created to deal with responses to the survey is irrelevant; it was directed at Ogas and meant for him to see.)
The survey was poorly constructed and offensive; the responses to legitimate concerns brought up by fans were condescending and insulting. But the guys who wrote it are still people who are deserving of some basic level of respect. It's a very low level of respect- call them bottom feeding, sludge-brained trolls, tell them you've seen more rigorous academic research on the back of a cereal box, whatever- but don't bring sex and personal relationships into it. Don't use as weapons the very things that outsiders so often try to turn on fandom.
And it does become a consent thing- don't force people to participate in your kink if they aren't willing. No one deserves that, not even condescending pseudo-academic jerks. It may have been crackfic, but it was still sexually explicit RPS, and it is phenomenally bad form to make the particpants of your RPS read what you've written about them.
The NSFW tentacle photo manip treads similarly sticky ground- although I honestly find it less offensive than the comment fic. I think it's distasteful, but I find explicit RPF photomanips distasteful in general. (Which is an issue that ties into how I feel about privacy and public figures, and it all gets kind of complicated and muddled.) Since it wasn't sent directly to Ogas- it was meant for fandom's eyes, not his- it isn't uspettingly triggery for me the way the comment fic was, and I can see how it serves as an act of protest in the context of Ogas' actions towards fandom.
On the other hand, it's very easy to take an image completely out of context- information can't be controlled on the internet, and what happens on someone's LJ rarely stays there. And when you take that image out of context, you have a picture of a person- a real person, not a character- being tentacle-raped. (The caption may indicate it is a rape fantasy, but that doesn't make the image any less rapetacular to someone familiar with the tropes of the tentacle-rape genre.) And that is deeply discomfitting.
Put it back in context, though, and I still find it distasteful, but not upsetting. I dunno. To what extent is an artist responsible for their art when it's taken out of context? I'd generally say the artist isn't responsible, but I do think people should be aware of the possibility for their art to cause harm. (Which isn't to say that the artist in this case wasn't! I'm just musing aloud at this point.)
Curiously enough, I think that if Sai had been photomanipped in as himself, instead of as a tentacle monster, I would have been even more offended and upset than I was by the comment fic. I'm not sure if that's just my own personal baggage making me feel that way, though.
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