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Originally Posted by Sirtel
So? It's fiction. Many fictional books, for example, idolize war; by your logic, they all should be banned. Many romance novels idolize relationships that in real life would be called abusive; should they be banned also?
I don't think banning everything is the solution. Grown and reasonably sane people are (for the most part) perfectly able to tell the difference between reality and fiction.
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I want to agree.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan
I think that my problem with this argument over not publishing a book because can influence to people come from my own story. A lot of time people have told me (even recently) that I shouldn't read romance because real life is not the same. Then I feel they are calling me stupid, a person not able to recognize fantasy from reality. And I've got the same feeling when I read some arguments here, sorry.
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I especially want to agree with this. And it's really annoying that it's mostly girls who get targeted with this: Girls are told they will learn that obsessive stalking is romantic from Twilight, but boys don't hear that they will learn to be criminals from Artemis Fowl.
I loved "Gone with the wind" as a teenager, and didn't notice until much later how racist it is. My favourite romance novel was "The flame and the flower" -- I reread it recently (carefully, it's worn to pieces from all my rereading more than thirty years ago), and for the first time
really noticed that it starts with the hero raping the heroine. When one of my favourite science fiction authors died a few years ago, I reread an anthology he made which introduced me to science fiction and fantasy -- and I wanted to go back in time and give 12-year-old hildea a hug and a pile of SFF books which acknowledge the existence of women.
The punch line to stories like that is: "...and still, I turned out OK". That's what I want to say. I'm a good person, so of course I can't be racist. I'm a strong, modern woman, so of course I can't have internalised any sexism.
But of course that's not true. I'm a human being, a social animal, living in a society. Of course I'm affected by the attitudes of people around me, and the stories I've read and seen and heard. Occasionally, I stumble hard against my own prejudice, when it becomes so blatant that I can't ignore it. And those times I wonder about all the times I don't notice my own bias.
I recently read a fairly new bestseller, translated to oodles of languages. It's well written, with a thrilling plot, and appalingly racist. It's racist against a group which suffers discrimination and hate crimes today, in both US and Europe. Now, I don't think people read this book and mistake it for fact. And I don't think they read it and get all their existing opinions about that group replaced with the ones in the book. But I do think it nudges people a little bit in a more racist direction, and makes any existing prejudices a bit more entrenched, and contributes, in a small way, to continued racism and hate crimes against this specific group.
I don't think that book should be banned, but I do wish that the editor had mentioned this problem to the author. Maybe something like "Cut 100 pages, that murder subplot is too much of a coincidence, and you need to explain why the villain doesn't synthetisize the vaccine. Also, the book is really racist, fix that."
Prejudice and discrimination is probably as old as humanity, and is reinforced by all aspects of society, not just books. We're never going to get rid of it, but the least we can do is being willing to recognize it when we see it, and saying "Hey, that's not OK. Cut it out, please."