I'm posting this here because it's too long to fit as a comment in the thread it is a response to.



You know, I know I'm wading into the fray a bit late. Apologies, as work has been hectic. But the fact that you used the model of a continuum of sexual violence piqued my interest so avidly that I couldn't resist.

I've read the feminist work on sexual violence as a continuum to which I suspect you refer, or at least, I've read at least one of them. Heard about it first in an undergrad course on sociology that I took, geez, that's scary, something like over ten years ago. Very useful concept, that. Found it very helpful in terms of understanding some of the big misunderstandings around gender and violence. Namely, the famous feminist war cry that all men are rapists, which tends to put the hackles up on defensive men, which isn't really the best summary of what those particular feminists really mean--which is that the trouble is that women cannot tell by simply looking at a man (or woman) which ones are likely to be rapists, and therefore, we sadly often have to assume that anyone could be a potential assailant, and get wiggy about little things like obscene phone calls, when there is no immediate physical threat, and our poor but sometimes clueless SOs and friends are left baffling over why we get upset all out of proportion with the actual physical action.

So, yes, continua. Very important way of explaining quite a bit.

However, here's my problem. It just so happens I've been nursing this pet theory about RPS for a while now. Namely, that RPS isn't nearly as distinct from FPS (or RPF from FPF) as people might like to believe.

That is to say, no matter how much many fan fic writers might like to think that character fic, and character slash in particular, does not raise any of the points about the questionable ethics of privacy invasion, image tarnishing, and intellectual property that you rightly raise as potential problems with RPS, I'm afraid to say that I cannot help but think that they do.

On one end of the continuum, you have fan fic written about texts that have never been visually rendered ever. For example, Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake vampire series. The covers on her books do not depict any graphic (and by graphic I mean picture, not level of gore or violence) of the characters. So those who are writing LKH fan fic, slash or gen, are pretty clearly in the realm of as absolutely not based on real people fic as you can get.

On the other end of the continuum, you have fans who regularly seek out the object of their fiction. People who've met, or perhaps even shagged, the objects of their fic. People who closely watch every second of video footage and who also seek out the stars in their regular haunts in order to see what the celebs are like even when the cameras are turned off and the celebs believe that they are no longer performing for a crowd (although, I suspect that even then, as they are likely out in public, said fans are still getting a somewhat mediated performance.)

Everything else, including most of the character based fan fic out there, is somewhere between those two extremes. Whether those who think that RPF/RPS is inherently unethical want to admit it or not, and whether the RPF tinfoil hat brigade that is convinced that they really have the true and authentic understanding of fill-in-the-celebrity-name here want to admit it or not, nothing between those two extremes is not really, at heart, on a continuum between the two.

Take, for example, my first fandom: Star Wars Ep 1. Obi-Wan Kenobi, as written about in fan fic, is informed by the performance of him by Ewan MacGregor. Whether fans want to or not, the body, the personality, and the artistic interpretation of the character about whom fans write has been shaped by Ewan's performance.

What about AU stories that feature characters from one text who are set into the AU of a character played by the same actor? Doesn't that begin to blur the lines?

In wrestling fic, the lines get even blurrier. Wrestling fic has the dubious distinction of managing to possibly run afoul of both copyright and libel law. The character names and images are legally owned by the WWE, but if a person is writing about the wrestler behind the character, then there's a chance that he or she could be sued under libel law.

I have heard all the arguments against RPF/RPS before, and I've never quite bought them, in part because I firmly believe that celebs, esp. those who trade on their own sexuality and sex appeal, have given up some (though not all) of their privacy rights by going into that profession. I find it very hard to find anything particularly unethical about reading or writing sexual material about men who recount their exploits with groupies on buses to VH1 reporters and the world.

That is not to say that I don't think there should be boundaries. Clearly, certain things are over the line. I personally won't read RPF that deals with non-celeb family members or friends of a celeb, precisely because the celeb signed up for public life when he or she chose his or her profession, but his or her SO or child did not, and I think that's going over the line.

But here's the thing. Much as I find that kind of fic unethical, I also acknowledge the right of others to write and read it if they are willing to assume the risks inherent in doing so. What I'm not willing to do is be the person who draws a line in the sand of fandom and says, "No, this is all off limits because it might be legally questionable or offend my personal sense of ethics." I firmly believe that saying that RPF invades a person's privacy too much, but character based fan fic doesn't, especially given that there are at least as many documented examples of actors who play characters who've been slashed being emotionally wounded by knowledge of slash, is drawing a line in the sand in an utterly arbitrary place. It's saying that one kind of potential emotional harm is inherently worse than another, and too often it feels to me like the justification of a person who is unwilling to look too critically at the potentially problematic aspects of what she or he is doing.

I think that everyone writing fan fic is on inherently shaky legal and ethical ground. My experience reading RPS is that the fic that I find to be compelling is not as prurient as some of character slash I've read, and the other way round. Lately, I've found RPS that I think has more claim to "artistic merit" (whatever that phrase means this week, in whichever states you and I are in, and depending on which way particular circuit courts are blowing this year) than I have found in the character-based fandom that happens to have most recently caught my eyes. Given that, as this thread has proved, there is nothing approaching consensus in fandom about this, I think it best to leave the decisions about what to call unethical to fans themselves, rather than declaring entire fandoms out of bounds without also asking the same really tough questions about character based fan fic.

But then, I tend to live my life by the following motto:

Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge: fitter to bruise than polish.

It's very easy to say that RPF is bad, unethical, and an invasion of privacy rights. However, to do so without also questioning as rigorously the ethics of character slash is like a heavy axe without an edge. Fitter to bruise than to polish.

And no, I cannot take credit for that particular tidbit. That was penned by Anne Bradstreet in Meditations Divine and Moral.