Denying reality, but demanding a false realism…
This last two months, I’ve been working a lot harder than I should, and the stress is starting to break me. I’ve not been able to go a day without fatigue attacks, whether I’ve worked or not, and now I’m suffering from a number of MS-related issues in addition to having bouts of insomnia.
The problem with the fatigue is that when I drop, I’m not getting restful sleep. I’m just shutting down and collapsing. Obviously, this makes me moody, and it’s been extremely hard to stay positive and focused on my current projects. When I do finally get to sleep, I have nightmares, and I wake from them feeling ill. So I sit up and try not to go back to sleep, lest I go right back into the same nightmare.
This week, I’ve got myself worked down to only one project to promote, and I’m hoping to put off the muse from any new writing projects so I can recover some energy. This project is my editor’s campaign for her work on Thicker Than Blood, and it’s been going fairly well so far, with contributions up to $350. All the contributors thus far have been regular readers of mine, and several are fans of the Peter the Wolf series. I’m still struggling to connect with any new readers though, and if we want to reach any stretch goals, I’m going to need to work on that. I suspect, however, that this post will not help matters much. Ah well, such is life.
During this last year, while I’ve made preparations closing out the series, a number of child abuse cases have come to light, and they all follow a familiar pattern. People in positions of power have abused children, and because of their authority, other adults didn’t just look the other way, but actively worked to silence the victims and cover up the crimes. The most recent allegations are about old abuses, with the victims now coming forward as adults. There’s the Elm House pedophile scandal, and an orphanage in Jersey where politicians went to molest and rape children who had no one to protect them. The whole system failed these kids. Cops did nothing. The government actively worked to close investigations, and even now, they are working to bury the stories.
Despite the loud outrage that comes out after these stories break, nothing really changes. People growl and snarl about what they’d like to do if they had five minutes alone with the abusers, but that’s about the extent of their concern, which never actually extends to the victims. It’s a bit of saber rattling to ease their guilty conscience for not giving a shit, and once they’ve vented, the abusers are pretty much free to move on to their next victims. This is how modern society treats all problems, actually. We yell “That’s not right!” and then we let the crime go on anyway. Sometimes, we even continue to support the people committing the crimes. “Name one example!” you shout. The Catholic church. You’ve seen how complicit they are in abuse cases, how far reaching the cover up goes. But at the end of the day, when the Pope goes on a world tour, people throng to see his parade. They support the abusers, and they ignore the victims.
What has any of this got to do with my stuff? Well here’s the thing. Peter Holmes, the victim of childhood sexual abuse, is a sexual predator as a result of what happened to him. His story is as much about the mistakes he makes as it is about his coming to terms with his addiction and doing something about it. In the course of his first book, he abuses a younger neighbor, and when the truth comes out, the adults involved try to separate him from his victim, Alice.
However, a numbers of reviews that came in from my so-called friends all asked the same thing: “Why didn’t anybody do anything to stop this?” It’s like they chose to make up their own version of the story, glossing over the fact that Peter was kept from Alice, and that she began sneaking over to see him. When they got caught again, Alice is also punished and told to stay away from Peter.
The negative reviews glossed over the fact that Peter’s foster parents sought therapy for him, that they grounded him and tried as hard as they could to steer him in the right direction. They dismiss Alice’s decisions entirely, and this is something that I see a lot in real world abuse cases too. To adults on the outside of an abusive relationship, children are just stupid cattle who have no thoughts or ideas about what is happening to them. The whole issue of abuse falls on the sick perverts grooming their victims, and how the victims interpret the abuse is irrelevant. Even after a victim is in therapy, the standard method of dealing with their concerns is to tell them “stop thinking about it and move on.” It’s cruel, and it rarely results in a positive outcome for the victims. Yet this has not changed the methods used by therapists. It’s a medical insanity, using the same methods over and over even if they keep getting consistently poor results.
People got mad at me for saying that Alice might voluntarily seek to keep the relationship going, even though this is realistic and is similar to how real abuse works. People got mad at me because I told the story from an abuser’s perspective, so to their minds, that means I’m glorifying the deed or encouraging others to do the same things. And finally, they got mad because I chose to talk about a topic that they don’t feel has any place in a fantasy setting. To them, apparently, fantasy should only project the same old black and white moral values it always has, even though this isn’t very realistic.
There’s this strange disconnect from readers who demand realism from their writing, but don’t like reality intruding in their fantasies. We should make up evil monsters so the white hero can slay something and save the day, and everyone can go home feeling good about themselves.
But that’s not how our world works. In the real world, the cops aren’t good guys, and good people are really assholes. When 14 men in Texas gang-raped a little girl, the townspeople didn’t get upset about the girl being raped. They talked about what a shame it was that the men’s reputations were ruined. When the Penn state abuses story came out, the victims were attacked by the students for tarnishing the reputation of a local hero. When a drunken teen was carried around to multiple parties to be gang-raped, other people at the party photographed it and posted it online because they thought it was funny. This is reality. This is how the victims of abuse get treated by “good people.”
The irony is, in my story, many of my fictional adults show more responsibility than real world people do. But while people in the real world make little to no effort to help victims of abuse, they also find the strangest things to get upset about. So my book is “evil” because I’m talking about a huge white elephant in the room that they don’t want to discuss. I get attacked as promoting a lifestyle, and people are more mad at me for what I did to a fictional little girl than they would be for a real world little girl who was gang-raped.
I don’t write stories about monster hunters who save the day, because I see this as just another form of othering. It’s okay to hate the monsters, because “they aren’t like us.” I don’t believe that. In fact, one of the reasons I write the way I do is to suggest that we have more in common with the monsters than we like to admit. Humans are monsters. We’re petty and cruel, and we use the simplest justifications to ostracize or shun others. Some men use sexism to justify hating women. Some people use racial stereotypes to justify their xenophobia. At no time do these real world monsters ever see themselves as bad. Indeed, they call themselves the moral majority, and they remain proud of their hate. People crow about how they fight Westboro Baptist from protesting at soldiers’ funerals, or at the funerals of Sandy Hook victims. But when Fred Phelps was bashing the parents of Gwen Araujo and Matthew Sheppard, that went unchallenged. When the GLBT begged for support against Westboro, it wasn’t a problem for “good people.” It only became a problem after Wesboro went after straight people. This is reality.
I grew up outside of this shared societal narrative about humanity’s inherent goodness. I saw organized religions treat me and people like me like shit. I dealt with bullies, and with teachers, whose jobs should have been to protect me, who said I had it coming for not conforming to the herd mentality. I’ve reported abuse to the police, only to have them turn me right back over to my abusive mother and walk away. And after bullying made me react more violently, I was deemed a threat to the kids who were torturing me and sent to a shrink to ask what was wrong with me. Not one of the people who assaulted me ever had to speak to a therapist about their violent tendencies. I, the victim, was questioned about why I couldn’t just lay down and take the abuse. This is reality.
So I don’t buy into the innocence of children myth. I don’t believe in the goodness of society, nor do I accept platitudes about life getting better. The reality is, most people suck. They are abusive and cruel, and they justify their views all the time by only consuming lies which suit them. This is escapism’s biggest flaw, in that it prevents people from acknowledging their darker side. Without self-examination, there can be no growth or development.
This may be the worst crime I committed in Peter the Wolf, throwing it in the readers’ faces that abuse happens because the average person simply doesn’t care enough to help others. It’s a smack in the face to be told you aren’t the good person you think you are. And because of the offense I cause, people will tend to look for reasons to hate my writing, even if their reasons have no relation to what I actually wrote.
These same people LOVE to read books with murder, rape, and mutilation, provided that at the end, there is some kind of false reassurance that the bad guys will be dealt with. But here in the real world, sometimes people get away with atrocities because all good people turn their heads to look at something less troubling.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I want to bring it up in this context. Women are advised not to scream “rape” when they’re looking to draw attention to themselves, but instead to scream “fire!” This is because when a women screams rape, the good people who hear her stop listening. They shut the victim out because it’s “none of their business.” But if she screams fire, that gets through to a person’s sense of self-preservation. Then there is a greater chance of the rapist running away because there are witnesses who make the crime more risky.
No one likes to admit this. No one wants to confront that they are a bad person. And really, I get that. I spent a good portion of my life justifying being cruel to others because of what had been done to me. I was just paying people back for their pettiness. But I grew a conscience, and over time, I had no choice but to look at myself and admit that I was a monster.
And I still am. My consistence keeps me in check, but should I ever lose that, I could very easily go back to running scams, or to looking for victims to abuse. A lot of people try to convince me that I’m not a monster, that I’m really a good person. This isn’t so much to affirm my goodness. It’s meant to downplay the things that keep me up at night. Because no one wants to talk about this stuff. It’s just too awkward, and it might lead to a painful self-assessment where others look at themselves in the mirror just like I did. No one wants to do that, to look and admit that they don’t like what they see. It’s easier to buy into the social narrative of our collective goodness.
But that narrative is a lie. The average good person is okay with child abuse, provided it doesn’t happen to their kid. The average person accepts slavery because it keeps the price of products cheap. They talk about how we conquered racism and sexism, despite the fact that both problems are worse now than they were twenty years ago. People like me who say this, who ask them to confront reality, are the bad guys. Not because we do anything at all to make the world worse. No, because we don’t shut up and stop reminding others that they bear some responsibility for the state of our world.
So when people push for realism in writing, what they really want is a logical lie that fits their preconceived notions of how the world works. They do not want to see anything that confronts or challenges their views, and they will become openly hostile to anyone who attempts to challenge their proclaimed goodness.
I am a monster, but I’m not the bad guy making the world the rotten place it is today. I’m just one artist trying to depict the world in my art in a manner that’s reflective of us, not projecting virtues that we don’t possess. This will cost me more friends over time, I know. This will make me many enemies who will all claim my motivations are really about encouraging abuse. Because it’s easier to project a lie onto me than it is to ask, “Am I really as good as I claim?”
Your perceived reality of humanity ignores prejudice. Your version of reality allows you to be proud of achievements you never completed, to ignore the harm you do to others in petty little ways. Your shared goodness makes it easier to justify every evil you commit or condone. And this is why you shy away from anything that might push you to look in a mirror and see the monster lurking inside you. You externalize your evil through vampires and werewolves, through serial killers and mad scientists. But the most awful monster on planet Earth is a good person who never questions themselves. The most awful monster in your neighborhood is you. And that’s a bitter pill to swallow, isn’t it?
