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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   31176 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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I am happy to defend the idea that drawn erotica is inappropriate material for a public library to carry. Tom of Finland may have made many gays very happy, but if they want his material they are free to pay for it themselves.

I stand on the null hypothesis that public libraries, until very recently, also agreed with me.

Would you like to defend or justify some sort of reasoning for the change?

I am happy to defend the idea that drawn erotica is inappropriate material for a public library to carry.

So I have actually looked at the images in Gender Queer. I would not call them "erotica." It's supposed to be a coming-of-age novel about a queer kid experimenting with sex acts that she ultimately finds unappealing.

Would I want my pre-teen kids to read it? No. It definitely should be age-restricted. But "This shouldn't even exist in a public library" seems a bit much.

Influencing my opinion is the fact that I distinctly remember books like Flowers in the Attic and the John Norman Gor series existing in my school library when I was a kid. Now maybe you can make a case that text is less harmful/dangerous than images, but I would contest that. Those books had some fucked up themes and scenes, and the sex scenes weren't even explicit.

So I have actually looked at the images in Gender Queer.

I extend to people the presumption that if they are engaging in the discussion, they have at least looked at the most salient examples of the topic, and so stating that I have “actually looked” at the examples could only be read as a veiled accusation that the other person hasn’t.

———

It’s a blowjob, dude. It’s erotica by its very nature. It shouldn’t be in the public library. Again I stand on the null hypothesis that until very recently, essentially every library in America agreed with me, and it is the change that has to be justified.

That being said, you bring up a good point. Flowers in the Attic and Gor shouldn’t have been in your school library. It shouldn’t have been in mine.

The sewage was already lapping around our ankles when we were kids, but that’s no excuse for letting things get worse. And yes, on the way back to having no metaphorical sewage flowing through our intellectual and spiritual lives, we have to pump the sewer back down to just around our waists, and then our knees, and our ankles, and so forth.

There are things that can be sexual but not pornographic, but those things are, culturally, well prior to Playboy.

Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica." The idea that no library books ever depicted sex acts (visually or textually) before Gender Queer is false.

Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica."

TIL that should I ever venture onto Pornhub, all the videos will be about cleaning the grout in your bathroom, weeding the garden, the precise temperature at which your roast is perfectly cooked, and giving that mucky wall a good scrub.

Good to know!

I am a tiny bit confuzzled about "it's only a drawing of a blowjob so it's not, you know, erotic" but then that's because I am not ten years old today, and can't parse out "this is someone trying to have sex in line with a particular sexual fantasy but please read it like it's a medical description in a textbook and not about sexy times" from "this is a depiction of sexy times".

TIL that should I ever venture onto Pornhub, all the videos will be about cleaning the grout in your bathroom, weeding the garden, the precise temperature at which your roast is perfectly cooked, and giving that mucky wall a good scrub.

Or, to quote Field & Stream,

"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper.

"Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping".

Rather like Branch Cabell's Jurgen - why no, prurient minded reviewer, all the passages about Jurgen labouring mightily in the night time with a lady friend on mysterious symbolic tasks are not about sex, how could you think that? (Reader, it was about sex). Suffers from being too clever-clever - if you're going to write fantasy, even satiric fantasy, it has to be less heavy-handed. Reading it today, it's hard slogging because the author cannot help but nudge you in the ribs every so often about "do you get it? do you? huh?"

I tried to read Jurgen once, because it was supposed to be this towering fantasy masterpiece, and the title of Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice was a reference to it.

I bounced off it. Didn't care for it, didn't see what was so great about it. And I recall the language being too affectedly old-fashioned for a twentieth-century work.

Same here. I think part of its reputation was the perception of "he's talking about sex and this is driving the prudes nuts, tee-hee!" and part of it was "well ackshully proper fantasy is not that stupid black-and-white morality Tolkien nonsense, it's high-brow literary fantasy (that talks about sex and drives the prudes nuts, tee-hee!)".

If you want high brow literary fantasy you go for E.R.R. Eddison (who is frustrating and amazing at once). I think Cabell just hit the particular period (the 20s) that had a craze for historical/mythological, wry, satirical fantasy writing that sort of smirked at the reader in complicity ('you and I are both so smart, we know what's really going on don't we?') For example the Kai Lung novels of Ernest Bramah which are unreadable so far as I'm concerned (and which today would be excoriated for racism, which is unfair; Bramah was not trying to write about real China or real Chinese people, but the willow-pattern plate China version). They were wildly popular and all sorts of people loved them, Dorothy Sayers in at least one of her novels has Lord Peter and Harriet swapping quotations.

(Bramah also wrote the Max Carrados stories which are much better as Edwardian detective stories and still have a niche to this day).

But those who really disliked Tolkien (as, famously, Edmund Wilson in his essay Oo Those Awful Orcs hated it) loved Cabell instead:

As for me, if we must read about imaginary kingdoms, give me James Branch Cabell’s Poictesme. He at least writes for grown-up people, and he does not present the drama of life as a showdown between Good People and Goblins. He can cover more ground in an episode that lasts only three pages than Tolkien is able to in one of this twenty-page chapters, and he can create a more disquieting impression by a reference to something that is never described than Tolkien through his whole demonology.

Yeah, no. There's a reason we have a trilogy of movies based on The Lord of the Rings and nobody, to my knowledge, has ever tried making a movie out of Jurgen ("men like sexy women in theory as an ideal but can't live with real women, so they spend their lives chasing after the unattainable Perfect Woman happy in the knowledge there is no danger of them ever catching her, when they would then have to live an ordinary life with her, but it's the perfect excuse for ditching their wives and having a string of casual sex affairs" doesn't really make for a box office success).

I disagree vehemently with the late Ursula Le Guin on her politics and pretty much everything else, but she was a fine writer and she wasn't ashamed of "fantasy is only for kids not Real Serious Adults":

“Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

Tell me what you think about Wilson, Ursula:

“The genres” were ignored altogether and realistic fiction alone was left as literature, in the minds of the men who controlled criticism and teaching. Realism is of course a tremendous and wonderfully capacious literary genre, and it has dominated fiction since 1800 or before. But dominance isn’t the same thing as superiority. Fantasy is at least as immense as realism and much older — essentially coeval with literature itself. Yet fantasy was relegated for fifty years or sixty years to the nursery.

These days, I love to remember Edmund Wilson, king of the realist bigots, squealing “Ooh those awful Orcs!” and believing he’d made a witty and cogent critical point.

As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit — subliterature.

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