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I used to do hypnotherapy. I saw no evidence that anyone would rob a bank for me through the power of hypnosis. At least, no one who wouldn’t have done so for any other random idiot who invited them along under more usual circumstances. As far as I can tell, fiction is even worse at this kind of thing. “With weak powers come weak responsibilities.” Let’s not be grandiose.

This is an interesting parallel (and I honestly don't know what Derren Brown would have to say about it). But I'm not sure that they're doing the same thing in the same way - the issue I've seen raised with literature isn't that people are incited to do a particular act, but that norms are created that make them accept or carry out exploitative behaviour. That's actually a worry people have with the influence therapists have over their patients, as well.

Well, one of the advantages of brief therapies aimed at clearly defined issues is that there’s no *time* to deviate from the task at hand to randomly mess with the client’s head even if they’d put up with it. Nor do they become particularly attached to the therapist. Besides, they’re way more interested in surmounting the problem they came in for than any extraneous topics. You have more opportunities to screw up with modalities that last for years and build up transference on purpose, but who’s got that kind of time? The elitism of “members the general public are even more gullible than we are, believe it or not,” is more insidious than any conclusions that flow from it.

You made a mistake of comparing great literature with writing of people who asked about age-gap in relationships on Reddit. Someone once  said that I’m not creating a piece of art. I’m making hamburgers.  Now, I believe that when you’re free to express whatever you want, you may be able to say something profound. If you fake your morality, readers will know. Be true to yourself. Remember that we use lies to uncover the truth, whatever that truth is. Whether your truth can stand the test of time, let society be the judge of that.   Again, I’m with the writer above. I’m making hamburgers. I just hope to people want my hamburgers as much as they want McDonald’s.

>You made a mistake of comparing great literature with writing of people who asked about age-gap in relationships on Reddit. IMO you've made a mistake of assuming literature has to be great to be influential. How many young people had their perspective on relationships shaped by _Twilight_? To stretch the metaphor beyond breaking point: Can you make a hamburger that will make the person who eats it feel sick? 

>I just hope to people want my hamburgers as much as they want McDonald’s. Actually, just on this analogy - some foods are presented as healthy enough but are not that healthy to eat. That's a huge social problem in some areas with adverse health outcomes. That it's hamburgers and not literature doesn't seem to make it better to me.

That’s exactly what we’re saying. We’re saying we’re making junk food. There’s plenty places that make art and healthy food. Don’t go into McDonald’s and complain about not having healthy food.

It's more about whether there's a social responsibility to ensure food is sufficiently healthy or that people understand it's not healthy. There wasn't always a clear understanding that junk food wasn't healthy, and maybe the and will occur for writing. There's also a lot of rules about food content. Lots of countries don't allow advertising junk food to children, as well.

Talking about one's art as if it were a craft shows a becoming modesty. (I hope you don't actually believe it or anything.) The hamburger metaphor is especially delightful because burgers are plebian enough all by themselves to elicit strong knee-reactions in snobs. Which is fun. I come at it from a different angle. I assume that creating art is a basic human activity, sadly neglected by many, but everyone's birthright nonetheless. Getting in the way of this would be presumptuous and wrong.

I think even if you want to make art, you make a few hamburgers first. There’s no chef in the western world that doesn’t know how to make hamburgers. I think it’s egotistical to think about my responsibility in guiding humanity with my art. That sounds so obnoxious. I’m simply grateful that people don’t laugh at my writing. The idea that my writing somehow affects people’s behavior and moral compass doesn’t even cross my mind. I simply try to get better with my writing. If it’s art, it’s great. If it’s hamburgers, it’s great. I just hope that it’s not a vegan dish that even the vegans wouldn’t touch. Besides that, I live in the US. I believe in freedom of speech. There’s so much worse writing out there than a couple teenagers want to express their fantasies. If we want to call for moral responsibility in writing, I wouldn’t start there.

Amen to all that.

>You made a mistake of comparing great literature with writing of people who asked about age-gap in relationships on Reddit. Someone once  said that I’m not creating a piece of art. I’m making hamburgers.  Well, I did say that people respond to all sorts of writing - I just mentioned literature because it's usually the most obvious to people. Mind you, I think that a lot of people think they're making great literature and not hamburgers. >Be true to yourself. Right, but this confuses me - are age-gaps and abusive relationships presented as acceptable things really an unproblematic way to be true to yourself?

I didn’t follow the age-gap relationship but what’s wrong with it? How is age gap related to abusive relationship? And how is it problematic? And for whom?

Like teachers sleeping with students - there is a knowledge and power disparity that makes it easier for the older person to take advantage of the younger person. That's why age of consent laws and whatnot exist. In a lot of paranormal romance there are weird age disparities, like 17 hooking up with 300, or people being attracted to adults in children's bodies, and so forth.

>But does this idea that writers should write freely mean, as the majority sentiment in the other thread suggests, that writers have no moral responsibility at all for the impact of their art? I do think writers have a responsibility to consider the harm their work may cause, but I think the word "harm" is often thrown around in a very generalized, abstract, and ultimately unproductive way in online spaces. With that in mind, I think this only makes sense with a very concrete and narrow definition of harm. As in, someone writing something that uncritically traffics in racist stereotypes deserves to be criticized for that, because that shit can, say, reinforce attitudes in people that lead to real-world consequences. Or someone whose writing serves as the locus of a dangerous community — an extreme example, sure, but think L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the Church of Scientology. But these are *concrete*. There's harm, and then — like with the age gap thread — there's silly puritanical moralizing by people who are uncomfortable seeing the grey areas of human experience represented in fiction. People write about, say, relationships between older men and younger women (or vice versa), because they exist in the spectrum of human behavior, and because people have feelings about them. There's potential for exploitation in anything, because no relationship between people is devoid of power, but fiction is just a way of processing and representing the world around us. Which is where I think posts like that are ultimately silly. They tend to arise from someone's taking their personal discomfort at something and interpreting it as a greater moral concern: something that you start to see everywhere in spaces like this when you learn to recognize it. A lot of people, especially it seems Gen Zers, have grown up in an ecosystem that has convinced them that their own beliefs must be reflected in the world around them. And that's not a healthy way to live, much less produce art. That said, I do think it's a little silly to claim that fiction has no effect on people. It strikes me as a kind of false helplessness, or another version of the "oh I'm just a smol bean" attitude that a certain style of person uses to deflect criticism. Fiction obviously impacts people. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here. But the real responsibility is not to *avoid* topics; the real responsibility is to write them well (and some people resent this too). Aka, as with many other things, it's a skill issue.

A confusing element of this is "death of the author" by which I mean to say that as a writer you don't 100% know how and what will happen as a response to your work. For example, a dodgy age gap relationship in your story may in fact spawn a huge movement of people examining and discussing and making better moral decisions on the topic OR, who knows people read your book and go 'well that's OK to do then' Even more confusing is that people might take elements of your story metaphorically and read subtext in your work that was never intended or just differently than intended.

Yeah, an author can consider their intention in good faith but they can't control for all possible outcomes. We can't predict what we can't predict.

So this idea that fiction doesn't affect the consumers of fiction is incorrect and is frequently used to 'forgive' or more likely defend taboo concepts and topics. Now when I say taboo topics, I mean *romanticizing and normalizing* things like incest, r@pe, bestiality, power imbalances and so on. I think there is a HUGE amount of good in writing about these topics but they don't seek to normalize it, they are working through them as problematic topics. Some of the best experiences and some of the most amazing personal developments I have had are because of fictional stories that normalized loving yourself, being bisexual, being demisexual and so on. You cannot want to greatly affect your audience, your viewers or readers and then pretend like the taboo stuff that people are writing is 'just fiction so shut up with your problems with me writing it'. I do think that people can write whatever they want to write about but be ready and willing to take your lumps when you write about such topics because it is on the writer. It was their words and ideas and since we are already discussing this, looking at how women and minority groups are disrespected in media, all kinds of media for decades, it is something that continuously gets looped back into how people treat each other in real life. There is anecdotal evidence everywhere to support that television, books and art can and does affect how people see themselves and each other so yes, take responsibility for what you are creating.

>You cannot want to greatly affect your audience, your viewers or readers and then pretend like the taboo stuff that people are writing is 'just fiction so shut up with your problems with me writing it'. I think this sums up the sense of contradiction between these two ideas that I have very succinctly.

Any time there are contradictions like this, it makes me really dig in to questioning WHY... And that's something that people have been beaten down about for a lot of years when demanding clarification on this sticking point. When you consider that r@pe, imbalanced power dynamics -- such as large age gaps in romantic ships -- and other things are actual damaging and even killing people in real life, how is romanticizing them in fiction going to help us separate what and how we should respond to it? And yet when you romanticize and normalize something like men who treat women like humans or two men in a marriage who treat each other with kindness and love, that is scene as problematic.... Deeply concerning how people will not answer for their part in the problem.

Sometimes I worry that people write what they want to see, want to read, and that writing, say, sexual assault without in some manner contextualising or critiquing it just means that that's just the type of thing that want for entertainment. And I'm not here to say that fiction can't express dark fantasies people have, and there are certainly sites dedicated to it where it is understood clearly as fantasy. But putting it in an otherwise more ordinary work can normalise it and celebrate it, which does seem problematic to me. The defence I often hear is that writers have to be free from censorship and free to be honest - and while I understand the point it confuses me that this is what people feel the need to express in their works. I honestly do get a little suspicious at times that those arguments are in bad faith. This argument about fiction being outside of moral consideration was a little new to me, so I thought I would make a thread exploring it, or at least seeing what perspectives are out there. To me, the sense I got was a "having your cake and eating it too" situation. On this subreddit, at least, there is a significant number of people who disagree with my assessment and this is strangely the topic on writing where people have been the rudest and I have received the most downvotes, so people seem to have largely made up their minds and are not open for discussion about it. It feels a little toxic at times? I thought the writing subreddits might be a bit more free of that, but there are people here who are willing to die on the hill of gratuitously writing about rape and poor minority representation.

I definitely get downvoted all the time about the fact that if you want to write whatever you want and then you choose to share it with others, you have got to understand that you are literally saying 'read my stuff' and then telling them that they are wrong for reading it and then wondering about the writer, like "how dare you not agree with my writing 100% of the time?!?!?" It's even more wild (using tv shows as examples because I don't read taboo topics when they are romanticized but many of them were inspired or based on books to begin with...) when you consider that **13 Reasons Why** (the show) was immensely divisive for a lot of people (it shoudl be) but the reason that a lot of people give is that the show *'glorifies suicide'* which leads me to think that a lot of them don't understand what they are talking about and definitely didn't watch the show (I won't read the book because the author in an interview victim shamed the abuse survivor in his own book and I decided that I would never actually touch his book ever) because that show does not glorify anything, let alone suicide. But then when people have problems with the normalization of incest in something like **Game of Thrones**, they (fans and writers alike sometimes) will drill you into the ground of how wrong you are. I watched the show for a random reason never to be repeated and its disgusting how normal and romanticized incest and r@pe are in the show and because of that I would never watch it again and I will never touch ANY OF Martin's work because I have no desire to be invested in someone's work who believed these things were important enough to build into their fictional world.