Beneath the Bondage, Harmful Effects (wbur.org)

With 50 Shades of Grey still selling big, I don’t think I’ll be at a loss for kink-related news articles to blog about any time soon. As it is, though, this article gets to an issue that goes beyond kink, something that I’ve had to deal with in other contexts, although primarily in my advocacy of kink and sexual freedom: The difficulties some people have in separating fantasy from reality and how to best cope with that as a society. This is a thorny issue to discuss simply because there is the dark cloud of people’s deaths hanging overhead, and as with other topics relating to sexuality I often find myself debating people I usually agree with on most other topics. For me, though, this is a matter of freedom and even free speech, issues very dear to my heart, and even if I didn’t identify as kinky I would probably still be very vocal about this topic.

Since I tended to have older friends in my early years, and my sister and her friends were gamers, I kind of grew out of my Dungeons and Dragons phase before most kids I knew even started theirs. (It also helped when games like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy came out, since I could play those all by myself anytime I wanted.) My best friend growing up had to hide his gaming from his parents, though, since his mother adamantly believed that Dungeons and Dragons led to devil worship and suicide. I don’t know if this was triggered by the Mazes and Monsters silliness, or Chick tracts, or whoever was in charge of the church her family went to, but it was a real hindrance to me being able to play D&D as much as I wanted.

At the time I didn’t understand why I was being told that by pretending I was someone else that I would somehow start doing really bad and harmful things. I didn’t see D&D as being fundamentally different than when we kids would pick up sticks and pretend they were swords and have swordfights, or when we played house, or anything like that. The only major difference I saw with D&D were all the rules and charts involved, the minutia of gaming technicalities that really appealed to me back then. Maybe I saw things this way because I grew up in a family of artists, because I can’t recall a time in my childhood when I wasn’t imagining things and being creative. Of course I had my episodes where I didn’t fully comprehend the line between fantasy and reality because I was too inexperienced to know better, but I never got more than a few bumps and bruises from that, and in my experience that’s the case for the vast majority of people.

Although there are many kinksters out there who do kinky stuff without any element of overt roleplaying involved, a lot of that kind of play still has unspoken roleplay going on in the participants’ minds. You may not tell the people you’re playing with that you like to pretend you’re a virtuous woman kidnapped by the evil ne’er-do-well when you’re struggling after you’ve been tied to a chair and gagged, but there is still roleplay going on in your mind, which is the principal domain of roleplay. There’s a reason why so many of the cliché “excuse for someone to get tied up and/or flogged and/or serve as a slave to someone else” stories are so prominent in kink and kink-themed erotica. As Joseph Campbell so frequently pointed out, when we engage in these rituals where we reenact the myths of our culture — and even if the roles get updated to modern times, the knight rescuing the captured princess still holds serious sway in our collective unconscious — we are becoming a part of that myth ourselves, absorbing the lessons and emotions and experiences of the myth in a way that you simply can’t do by just reading about it. We are creatures of the senses, and when we engage all our senses in a roleplay we are transcending our own existences and learning about ourselves, and our cultures, in a way that isn’t replicable by other methods.

If we set aside the people who don’t want others to play D&D or kinky games or anything else simply because they don’t like those activities, the heart of the issue seems to be the inability of some people to separate fantasy from reality, a serious problem to be sure. In my lifetime I can’t ever recall any major effort to draw attention to this problem and try to resolve it, though, except the people who just want to ban fantasy and roleplaying activities and censor things that might encourage them. It feels to me like we may see this problem of people who can’t differentiate between fantasy and reality actually get worse in upcoming generations, not just because of the blurring of the fantasy/reality line that’s come with the wave of “reality” television shows the past dozen years, but because creativity and imagination have been so stifled by the removal of arts programmes in schools, mostly perpetrated by those who don’t want younger people to have the  skills necessary to think up something that’s better than the way people in power want things to be, i.e. conservatives.

I see this a lot when I hear younger people discussing My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. One of the main ponies is a pink pony named Pinkie Pie, who has gained a reputation for the odd things she does, a reputation that is amplified by how recent generations talk about her. A handful of times during the two seasons of the show that have aired so far, Pinkie Pie has turned to the camera and spoken to the audience, and each time this happens there’s a huge reaction by younger people who say things to the effect of, “Oh wow, Pinkie Pie’s breaking the fourth wall!”

The thing is, Looney Tunes were still on Saturday mornings when I was a kid (and they’ve endured long past that), and I can’t begin to count the number of times one of the characters, usually Bugs Bunny, turned to the camera and addressed the viewers, usually for a funny aside to the main action of the story. Similarly, when Pinkie Pie appears upside-down in a scene (another semi-frequent occurrence in the show so far), there’s a huge reaction from the fans, but that kind of thing used to be in cartoons all the time; even in my teen years when Tiny Toon Adventures was first broadcast, that sort of thing was Gogo Dodo’s stock in trade, and I can’t remember anyone making that big of a deal about it back then. The fact that so many people were making a big deal about a cartoon character breaking the fourth wall seemed really absurd to me for a long time.

When I thought about this, I realized that on top of Looney Tunes and other older cartoons not being broadcast as often these days, for a while now we’ve had young adults come of age after Batman: The Animated Series came out. That series and its success resulted in a major shift in American animation, one that’s talked about often, and while most people talk about that shift in terms of the darker tone cartoons took, I think it also ushered in a new era of (relative) realism in cartoons, at least those aimed at pre-teens and older people. There were certainly elements of fantasy in Batman: The Animated Series and the similarly-styled shows that came in its wake, but it was fantasy grounded in a sense of reality, the kind of world dynamics that, even if they weren’t real now, you could see how they could conceivably become real. To young people who grew up with these kinds of shows, and no places to learn about and explore their own creativity, a pony who sometimes seems to defy the laws of physics  — even on a show with talking ponies with eyes nearly as big as their heads and all of that — is something they can’t wrap their minds around.

It’s bad enough that children aren’t exposed to the arts in schools like they once were, that this notion that schools are only places to train young people for future jobs continues to grow in our culture like a cancer, and parents and other adults actively dissuade children from pursuing the arts because “there’s no money in being an artist.” (Tell that to J.K. Rowling.) More than just stifling the creative and imaginative impulses of young people, though, and depriving the world of the wonderful works some of these young people would make if they had a more nurturing and supportive environment for their imaginations to run wild, I think it’s going to worsen the problems that some people have differentiating between fantasy and reality. If a young woman doesn’t know that she can roleplay with consenting adults she trusts, that she can find an outlet to explore her desires to be submissive and subservient but still be an empowered, equal person in her everyday life, it’s no wonder that some of these women may subjugate their own lives and identities in an attempt to scratch that itch and deal with wishes that they can’t even begin to name because they’ve never been taught a way of putting those wishes into words, let alone how to fulfill them in ways that aren’t destructive to them.

There will always be those people who can’t differentiate fantasy from reality — I’m interested in finding out if this is a neurological phenomenon or something that’s caused by one’s environment — and some of these people are going to be hurt and even killed due to this problem. I don’t mean to diminish the tragedies these difficulties have brought about, but even if it were possible to create a nation in which there were no formal channels where people could engage in fantasy roleplay, you can bet a whole lot of it would be going on “underground” because there would be far too many people who would refuse to suppress their creative impulses and imaginations. If we can’t create a world bereft of fantasy (and what kind of monster would want to do such a thing), then the best we can do is to help people learn about that line and how to operate effectively and happily in both worlds.

Doing so will mean working to counteract the negative stereotypes we artists so often get saddled with. It will also mean working harder to expose children to atmospheres where they can get in touch with, and develop, their creativity, and if we can’t get arts programmes back in the schools then we’ll have to work outside the schools and create our own programmes. More than that, it will mean setting examples for people of all ages, showing that those of us who engage in fantasy, whether we’re authors of different worlds or we just like to play bondage games in the bedroom, can be healthy and happy people. It’s no small task, but I don’t want to think about what will happen if future generations are even more out of touch with their creative and imaginative powers.