Mind control problems

[gryphonsegg]

As a result of several different discussions I've been reading, I'm thinking about how mind control/brainwashing/compulsion plot devices are used in fiction, whether there are gender differences in how writers use said plot devices, and how common (or not) it is for the text or the creator(s) of the text to acknowledge that characters who use these devices for sexual purposes are doing something seriously wrong. It seems to be a disturbingly common occurrence for people involved with genre media to have a character use phlebotinum as a date rape drug and then talk about it as if they have no clue that what they're depicting is rape. I can think of examples of the alternative phenomenon, where the wrongness is acknowledged, and so far it seems that women writers are somewhat more likely to acknowledge it than men are. On the other hand, the example texts that have large fandoms certainly have enough women fans who go right along with the "LOL, mind control sex isn't really rape-rape" mindset, so I might just be getting a skewed sample because so many of the example texts that don't acknowledge it are from Western television and comics, where women don't make up as large a proportion of the writers as they do in some of the other media, such as fantasy novels. So it might be more of a "TV vs. books" thing than a "men vs. women" thing.

Would anyone be interested in a discussion about these patterns over multiple sources? I'm not thinking of works that are explicitly kink fic, erotica, or otherwise clearly categorized as written chiefly for sexual thrills so much as I'm thinking of works that are mainly adventure or drama or idea-centered and somebody just decided that having brain wipes, mind control spells, love potions, neuro hacking, or something like that would make things more interesting. Who went there and treated it seriously? Who went there and didn't?

Comments

[holyschist]

It seems to be a disturbingly common occurrence for people involved with genre media to have a character use phlebotinum as a date rape drug and then talk about it as if they have no clue that what they're depicting is rape

My problems with Torchwood, let me show u them. It put me off the whole damn show.

I would definitely be interested in that discussion!

[gryphonsegg]

Let's see, there's Torchwood, plus another British show that's an X-Men ripoff with extra rape culture (not that the X-Men line itself is super-enlightened, but I don't think even the worst of its writers have been as bad about superpowered rape as this show whose name probably blocked out for good reason). There's Dollhouse, which had this concept as its whole reason for existence, and there's something like this going on in The Vampire Diaries this season (the TV show, not the books-- the book series came first, lots of changes were made, and the show apparently makes one of the male characters much more evil while also woobiefying him and pushing a much more sympathetic take on him).

I thought of the question of the writer's gender and the TV vs. books question because I started thinking about how vampiric mind control is used in the Vampire Diaries TV show in contrast to how JK Rowling handles the Imperius Curse and love potions in her books. The Imperius is portrayed as totally evil-- it's one of the three Unforgivable Curses and the only one Harry is never tempted to use even against his worst enemies; love potions are introduced in jokey, light-hearted way as something teenage girls use to make popular boys kiss them, but later it's revealed that Voldemort's mother kept his father doped up on love potion for years, and love potions in general are cast in a more disturbing light after that. There's another book I read, an adult fantasy novel by a writer named Jane Lindskold, who had a villain put another villain under a love spell. I had plenty of issues with the gender subtext in that book, but there was never any doubt that the love spell was supposed to come off as disturbing. And then I thought of those other three TV shows that use technobabble equivalents of mind control and/or lust spells, and the people who talk about them in interviews don't seem to even realize what they're doing.

[holyschist]

Oh god, Dollhouse. Although I think with that one that at least Joss was aware of the underpinnings of rape--it was hard to tell how much of what went wrong with that show was the network versus Joss versus the base concept (although I personally think the base concept was problematic for a TV show, although it might have worked as a movie).

Yeah, I don't know what it is with TV versus books--I guess there probably are books out there that handle mind control/alien roofies/magic roofies poorly, but it does seem to be a lot more likely in books, and often the writers just don't seem to realize that it's the fantasy equivalent of GHB.

[gryphonsegg]

Dollhouse is a weird case because Whedon seems to have been aware of some of the underpinnings but not all of them. He talked about the Dollhouse as a metaphor for (or maybe an exaggeration of) Hollywood exploitation, but he appears to have gotten very far into the project without noticing the premise's much greater similarity to human trafficking. There was this one interview where he complained that some of the people who were unhappy about the prostitution angle in Dollhouse would have been fine with the show if the "dolls" were mainly used as assassins, and he was completely oblivious to the fact that there exists IN THE REAL world an international industry based on forcing girls and women into prostitution but there is no comparable industry trafficking in female assassins. He assumed that complaints about the rape/prostitution in Dollhouse were manifestations of people's hang-ups about "sex" and said that using the dolls as assassins would be worse because there's a victim in that scenario but when the dolls are used for prostitution there is no victim-- completely missing the point that there IS in fact a victim in prostitution when the prostitute is a kidnapped, trafficked, and brainwashed person. So while some aspects of Dollhouse were intended to be disturbing, I'm not sure how many.

I just thought of a book series, written by a woman no less, in which magic roofies are presented as okay as long as they're used by the writer's pet characters-- the Anita Blake series. It's basically just kink fic at this point, but the writer insists that it should be taken seriously, and the whole thing went completely off the rails a long time ago, and I don't even know anymore.

[holyschist]

Yeah, I have...mixed feelings about Joss and his general awareness of anything.

but he appears to have gotten very far into the project without noticing the premise's much greater similarity to human trafficking.

This BAFFLES me.

And, uh, speaking personally--I think programming people to assassinate other people is just about as creepy and wrong as programming people to think they're in love with their johns. It's just that in the REAL world, as you say, the latter has a whole lot more connection with reality. The closest I can think of is forced militarization, child soldiers, that kind of thing--which are horrifying and wrong, but not as close to the Dollhouse setup as real sex trafficking is (and it's also often tied up with rape, so).

Honestly, if the technology existed to "program" people into different personalities and doing specific things--I'm not sure it ever could be ethical. If a person wanted a skill or knowledge set programmed in, okay--but beyond that, yikes. It's just that sex and violence strike as as more icky than programming someone to be an awesome child psychologist or hostage negotiator or whatever. But even that...yeah, I don't know.

OH ANITA BLAKE. Yeah, I gave up those somewhere around Narcissus in Chains, so I have no idea how much creepier they've gotten since. Although yeah, the ardeur is pretty much a magic roofie.

[gryphonsegg]

So creepy that Anita outright admitted that what she and Jean-Claude did to the rat king was rape but still insisted that it was an okay thing to do. They also used the ardeur powers on a recovering addict, knowing full well that it would throw him right back to square one with his addiction, and forced arduer "sex" with Anita on a character who was otherwise exclusively homosexual, cast a spell on some other poor bastard that literally removed his free will in all matters permanently. All of this was rationalized as necessary to keeping the Council out of St. Louis, maintaining the power base, saving Damian from random energy-loss death yet again, etc. Also, Jason's girlfriend was "killing his soul" by being too vanilla in bed. And it's not treated seriously when someone doing breath play and refuses to acknowledge of the safe signal of the woman he's choking. Oh, and Anita sent some of the wereanimal dudes off to assassinate another wereanimal dude because he refused to sleep with her because he wanted to remain faithful to his wife. And Ronnie's now evil and slutty because she's jealous of all Anita's boyfriends, and there's this really nonsensical thing going on where any woman Anita doesn't like is both slut-shamed and prude-shamed at the same time. I DON'T EVEN!

[holyschist]

I think I stopped reading before then (man, the rat king was one of the few characters I gave a shit about).

The AB books are an absolutely PILE of terrible, unsafe "BDSM" and consent issues in general. It's part of why I stopped reading them (I kind of desperately hope LKH herself is not into BDSM IRL, because I wouldn't wish her on any actual people who might get hurt). I mean, the books aren't even good as BDSM fantasy --they're way worse than the Kushiel books, and you know I have issues with those.

[gryphonsegg]

Right after I made that comment, I remembered the Kushiel books and our previous conversation about them, and I thought, "That's why the Kushiel books are so popular; if someone has an interest in BDSM fantasy but doesn't have access to more obscure books, the only alternative is Anita Blake!"

[holyschist]

Or Anne Rice, ahahaha snorf snorf. I read the Amazon previews of the Sleeping Beauty trilogy once, and they were so ridiculous and repetitive I didn't even think they were worth reading for the humor value.

No, I think the lush flowery prose and Thinly Veiled Exoticized Version of Earth is also part of why the Kushiel books are popular. But yeah, they are very mainstream BDSM fantasy, and a whole lot better written and less gory than AB.

[gryphonsegg]

It occurs to me that AB, as painfully written as it is, does have a rather unusual place in this meta thing because the main character is both a victim AND a perpetrator of magic GHB rape. I've read lots of discussions among people who were unhappy with the turn the series took, and one of the more popular opinions is that Anita's later behavior would make some kind of psychological sense if you assumed that she doesn't want to admit she was raped in Narcissus in Chains because that would be tantamount to admitting that she's weak and just like those awful girly-girls. So she becomes so determined to convince herself that she wanted it, she acquiesces to sex she doesn't want because she no longer feels safe admitting that there is such a thing. And she goes along with forcing other characters into sex they don't want because if she has to do it, so does everybody else. Anita now explicitly considers any vampires, werebeasts, or magic-users who abstain, try to be faithful, avoid a specific kind of sex because it's not part of their sexual orientation or their kink, or just prefer to sit out the BDSM-themed drama of supernatural politics to be getting away with something that members of "the supernatural community" have no business getting away with. And it makes her angry when one of them does try to get away with it. There is a trace of a certain twisted logic in there, but Hamilton has made it very clear outside the text that it's not intentional.

[holyschist]

Yeah, it would make a kind of twisted sense, but...well, Anita is not a character whose head I've wanted to be in since the early books, and I don't want to be in the head of a character like that, either. Early Anita was irritating in some ways, but she didn't disgust me. :-/

[gryphonsegg]

At least 80% of my problem with Dollhouse was what I perceived as the show's insistence that the organization, the characters who worked in it, and the character who started out opposing it but eventually sold out to it were morally ambiguous. It was all absolutely, utterly WRONG, and I didn't appreciate how viewers were supposed to be partially sympathetic to rapists and traffickers.

[holyschist]

The first season had some potential; the second season went way the hell off the rails. But I think it was a terrible premise for a TV show, anyway. I get that they really WANTED moral ambiguity--I don't think you can have that in a story with that premise. I get that they WANTED to show Dushku's "range" as an actor by essentially giving her multiple characters--unfortunately, she has very little range, and that also mean the audience couldn't identify with a consistent main character.

Had it been a movie with a finite arc, about Echo and Sierra and Victor breaking free of the mind control and taking down the organization, I think it could have been good. Had it been a movie set in a post-apocalyptic world (a la Epitaph Two or whatever it was called) dealing with the fallout from these terrible organizations, it could have been good. As a TV show--it might have worked if the whole thing had been post-apocalyptic, but I'm darn sure it didn't work as it was, with the main character who wasn't a character but a series of programmed stereotypes.

All the "moral ambiguity"--well, I think it made sense that the characters would justify it that way to themselves. Most people don't like to think of themselves as "evil". But the narrative should NOT have supported that.

[gryphonsegg]

All the "moral ambiguity"--well, I think it made sense that the characters would justify it that way to themselves. Most people don't like to think of themselves as "evil". But the narrative should NOT have supported that.

YESYESYES! And this loops back around to my more general concern, which is that it bothers me to when writers, showrunners, actors, and what have you give every indication of supporting the idea that the moral status of mind control rape should be up for debate and the idea that what's really important in this conversation is how the perpetrators feel.

[holyschist]

zodiacal_light and I have been dissecting the hell out of Tamora Pierce's books lately (with love and frustration both), and one of the things we keep running into is Things That Would Be Fine IF the Narrative Critiqued Them At All.

I...do want to know in a work of fiction what the villains are thinking, because I think motivation is important--without it, characters quickly become cardboard or cariacature. But I don't think it should generally be the primary focus, and I think the fact that their thinking is fucked up need to be apparent.

[gryphonsegg]

I really, really like a well-written villain. Hell, I was a teenage Magneto fangirl. I've been a Catwoman fangirl for as long as I can remember. But sexual abuse is a deal-breaker for me, in a way that it apparently is not for many people. I don't find that particular species of villainy interesting or sympathetic or morally ambiguous at all, and I think it says something nasty about our society that so many people are okay with making narratives about sexual violation center on the abuser's inner pain. (And I might have some lingering nerd bitterness due to perceived overlap among fandom factions that give passes to rapist characters and those that excessively demonize some of my favorite characters for committing non-sexual questionable-to-bad deeds. Use magic roofies? Poor woobie! It must be somebody else's fault! Scar someone for betraying you in a way that might have gotten you and all your friends killed? EVIL! NOTHING YOU MIGHT DO FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE CAN EVER MAKE UP FOR THAT!)

[holyschist]

I'm not at all interested in narratives about the inner pain of abusers--but I do think abusers often rationalize to themselves that what they're doing is not abuse. So if an abusive villain is all "Why yes, I AM an evil abuser!" that rings false to me. Still don't want to spend much time in their head.

I do find some sexually manipulative characters interesting, in a repellent kind of way.

[lady_ganesh]

This is why I bailed out on Fruits Basket. The story of an abuser learning to become non-abusive is interesting, sure, and might even be positive and redeeming for some people, but I don't want to read it.

[gryphonsegg]

*nods* I finished the series, but I too was dissatisfied with that aspect of it. Also, FB might be an interesting work to include in the discussion because the canon is ambiguous about how much of the head of the family's hold on the other family members was because of the curse and how much of it was due to non-supernatural abusive family dynamics.

[lady_ganesh]

I keep thinking "I should finish that one of these days" and then...just not.

And there's all the forced amnesia!

[gryphonsegg]

The ending is . . . not badly done, but a bit of a let-down in some ways.

Over on LJ, Kansan Entrails and I have been discussing how forced amnesia is similar to and different from mind control.

[lady_ganesh]

I got sick of those 'and then X married Y, and L married M' endings in...I think fifth grade.

I'll go look!

[lady_ganesh]

It's especially baffling when you realize there was a WHOLE EPISODE in Dollhouse devoted to Priya's backstory-- where we found out she was 'given' to the Dollhouse so one man in particular could rape her repeatedly.

[gryphonsegg]

And the audience is encouraged to sympathize with the "morally ambiguous" characters who believe that doing that to a woman with a mental disability would not have been wrong. I guess moral standards and human rights only apply to the normatively abled?

[lady_ganesh]

But he thought he was 'fixing' her so that makes it okay, right?

[gryphonsegg]

Poor little geeky white boy and his woobtastic manpain! I hope the world's smallest violin gives him splinters.

[lady_ganesh]

His 'redemption' arc's what finally sent me out of the show. Seriously, to hell with that.

[gryphonsegg]

I have Very Special Issues with his type of guy in both fiction and real life anyway, so I can't even deal with that.

[lady_ganesh]

A lot of my falling out of love with Joss Whedon can be traced to my realizing those characters were the ones meant to reflect his personality.

[holyschist]

I haaaaaaaated Topher so. damn. much. I think my favorite part of the show was how much Whiskey hated him, too (as well she should have!).

Hating Topher = not a problem. The part where the show tried to make us feel bad for him = big fucking problem.

[gryphonsegg]

Seconding this so hard!

[lady_ganesh]

EXACTLY

[holyschist]

Priya's backstory was...oh holy shit, I can't believe they thought anything about the Dollhouse could be morally ambiguous after that (or before, for that matter).

[lady_ganesh]

EXACTLY

(I have no idea why that comment posted in the wrong place.)

[gryphonsegg]

I've recently found something else that might be of interest: an Ursula LeGuin story called "Solitude," which is about a culture (on one of the many "lost colony" worlds in the Hainish universe) that considers social charisma and group identity and normal-everywhere-else levels of relational manipulation to be evil magic. Interpersonal affiliations are extremely loose, and all forms of power-over relationships among adults are rejected. It's basically the opposite everything we've been discussing so far.

[lady_ganesh]

I'd be interested!

[gryphonsegg]

Yay! Your brain is shiny and thoughtful.

[lady_ganesh]

Aw, thanks.