“When a type of person isn’t depicted in a society’s art, that art conveys a worldview in which that type of person is either notably rare, non-existent, or not worth depicting.”
My only experience of being attacked and insulted by an internet rando was over the statement that all fiction is political. His namecalling and hostility did not, oddly enough, convince me otherwise.
Originally shared by Standout Books
All art is political, but not all art is consciously political.
Despite my attempts to avoid both reinforcing toxic forms and becoming polemic, I got caught out by the inherent difference in perspectives between each “perciever” of the work recently.
I, because I believe women can be both fighters and imperfect, wrote a pulp crime story with a female protagonist. Because it was a homage to classic pulp, it was first person so the protagonist (because people don’t tend to) didn’t narrate their name or sex explicitly until it became relevant. Despite the story opening with the protagonist mentioning one of the male characters having been one of the several people who had a crush on her in the past, about half the feedback I had was that the protagonist putting on a dress on the second page just happened without warning, like I set out to cry “gotcha” to the readers.
So, in that case, my assumption that people would assume a character who’d been hit on by several men was female was overridden by a common reader assumption that pulp heroes were male that was strong enough that about half the readers came down on the side of male character who’d had lots of homosexual friends rather than female character.
Despite my attempts to avoid both reinforcing toxic forms and becoming polemic, I got caught out by the inherent difference in perspectives between each “perciever” of the work recently.
I, because I believe women can be both fighters and imperfect, wrote a pulp crime story with a female protagonist. Because it was a homage to classic pulp, it was first person so the protagonist (because people don’t tend to) didn’t narrate their name or sex explicitly until it became relevant. Despite the story opening with the protagonist mentioning one of the male characters having been one of the several people who had a crush on her in the past, about half the feedback I had was that the protagonist putting on a dress on the second page just happened without warning, like I set out to cry “gotcha” to the readers.
So, in that case, my assumption that people would assume a character who’d been hit on by several men was female was overridden by a common reader assumption that pulp heroes were male that was strong enough that about half the readers came down on the side of male character who’d had lots of homosexual friends rather than female character.