One last thing before I get to the infohazard proper:
Looking back a lot of the distinctively ‘90s sexual imaginary was basically aestheticized caricatures.
The whole ‘80s S&M thing, Mapplethorpe and Madonna, left us with a strong image of the dominatrix, in black leather wasp-waisted corset and whip. (The outfits in the Matrix were intended for an audience with that figure in mind) The “teen” in cheerleader outfit and pigtails and a lollipop, the bleach-blonde bimbo with breast implants and inch-long painted nails. Even if you did that last one well - Pamela Anderson - it was still over-the-top. They didn’t try to have porn stars act anymore but gonzo hadn’t come in yet so you’d have a movie that was like, the woodsmen in firefighter gear doing it on a firetruck. (With women, I should specify.)
And that stuff was so abstracted from any real referent as to be weightless, cotton-candy fantasy.
You heard a lot about “asian fetishes” and I’m sure part of that came from the kids of the ‘70s immigrant wave coming of age but part of that was that Japanese porn was making the American market, and you had hentai with its own over-the-topness but also the live-action stuff hadn’t lost the knack of “here’s the prettiest girl you saw on the street today, undressed, in a tableau that sets up accessible fantasies”.
And it’s striking how the defining fantasy figures of our current moment seem to be running a lot closer to bare metal, and a lot more hostile.
Maybe “step-“ family members who molest you, “daddy” as a figure who when not your actual father is fetishized as an older and more powerful, controlling man groomimg you for his use. Cuckold/bull, “the guy who steals your girl”. The crazy stalker girl you literally have to fight off (or fail) because she’s trying to get pregnant by you to own you.
Like, these fantasies are all based off the actual dynamics of real people who will ruin your fucking life, and that’s something.
An interesting thing is how softer, more abstracted versions now seem to use a vocabulary borrowed from the Japanese - monster girl stuff tends Fdom as loving GFE, “stuck in wall” as a weightless rape scenario, ahegao and public use toilet stuff so over the top as to be completely removed from everyday experience.
Some of that’s the “re-enchanting heterosexuality with power dynamics” trend. Like, in an open parking lot, who outranks who, the firefighters or the party girl? That’s… not even an axis, really.
But a lot of it really seems female-led. Maybe it’s not even so much the girls are into Fsub as they are into eroticizing social power dynamics. God knows that’s the traditional charge of romance novels, from bodice-rippers to whatever the fuck Wuthering Heights was, the value went totally over my head at least at the time.
Maybe I don’t even appreciate how much of that is topping from the bottom. Like when I had been saying “so much Fsub” part of it I had noticed some crossover from ASMR and therapy culture like “reassurance” or “appreciation”. “Small dick appreciation”. Reassuring an anxious guy, a shy virgin. And from my perspective I took that as loving Fsub, but now that I think of it, “appealing to someone’s vulnerabilities, inferior social position and/or mental illness to recruit a sexual bond with them” is kinda ambiguous, isn’t it?
A LOT of the appeal of traditional romance novels was that the power dynamics of the situation were WEIRD. Like, prototypical bodice ripper has this class and social status thing going on in the background too, but like, the rich handsome captain of industry with a broad chest getting caught in the rain in a gazebo with the rich headstrong impoverished orphan Lady or whatever, and she’s resisting but really turned on, and he is a man of immense personal control, but he’s “overwhelmed” by his attraction to her and can’t help himself, despite his prodigious self-restraint. Often, the hero will flee the heroin’s presence because he doesn’t think he can contact to not ravish her if she’s right there.
It’s not merely a female fantasy of getting exactly what you want despite your protests to the contrary, it’s also a fantasy of being powerfully attractive and borderline having involuntarily mind control powers or something.
yo what was the SF novel where it was like “totally incidental to the main plot, this space station is manned by five identical clone sisters that have the hottest lesbian incest orgies?”
Titan, by John Varley!
“I don’t want to make it sound too brutal,” August had said on that occasion, a night when some glasses of Bill’s soybean wine had been consumed. “Those scientists were not monsters. A lot of the behaved like kindly aunts and uncles. We had just about anything we wanted. I’m sure a lot of them loved us.” She had taken another drink. “After all,” she said, “we cost a lot of money.”
What the scientists got for their money was five quiet, rather spooky geniuses, which is just what they ordered. Cirocco doubted that they had bargained for the incestuous homosexuality, but felt they should have expected it, just as surely as the high I.Q. They were all clones of their mother— the daughter of a third-generation Japanese-American and a Filipino. Susan Polo won the Nobel prize in physics and died young.
Cirocco looked at August as the woman studied a photo on the chart table. She was exactly like her famous mother as a young woman: small, with jet-black hair and a trim figure, and dark, expressionless eyes. Cirocco had never thought Oriental faces were as similar as many Caucasians found them to be, but April and August’s faces gave nothing away. Their skin was the color of coffee with lots of cream, but in the red light of the Science Module August looked almost black.
Only two of the siblings are on the space ship and feature in the sex scenes, though.
Ah yes, that’s exactly right. I was a big Varley fan off of Steel Beach, at one point the most important book in my life
yo what was the SF novel where it was like “totally incidental to the main plot, this space station is manned by five identical clone sisters that have the hottest lesbian incest orgies?”
Like, I knew all along that Quentin Tarantino movies were all about The Movies and moviemaking, but I just now thought to realize that his “dead nigger storage” scene in Pulp Fiction was taking the piss out of himself as a director, and directors in general
Like, Samuel L. Jackson was an experienced professional who’d been doing his thing for decades at that point, but he still had to politely let this reedy, coked up San Fernando Valley whiteboy scream abuse about how to do his job, uselessly melting down and then getting saved by a producer-fixer (“The Wolf”), and then giving the stars shit over the outcome of his own creative decisions (“They look like a couple of dorks/They’re your clothes, motherfucker”)
me: it’s funny that cyberpunk got associated with the Jan Hammer synths of the sun-soaked Miami Vice and not the dub reggae originally set up as the soundtrack of its grimy, shady future
also me: illustrating that both aesthetics were merely veneers and the “neon noir” rediscovery of the morally grey *detective story* was the load-bearing element of the ‘80s
me: With time to reflect, maybe the rise of active, "transformative" fandoms and "remix culture" we so celebrated in the '90s really did have a downside.
me: At the mildest, with the splintering of audiences, TV viewer-creator interaction has gone so far past alt.tv.simpsons and alt.tv.x-files to the point some shows and creators seem to see their role as *servicing* a social media following in a way that seems like eating seed corn
me: And then getting to the "toxic" fandoms that claim ownership of a media property and viciously defend it even from its creators... I almost wonder if those authors like Anne Rice who cracked down on fanfiction were on to something, to say "no, this is not a LEGO kit of themes, characters, and plot elements to assemble and reassemble according to the instructions or not as you will, it is a coherent and mutually supportive work of art"
me, five hours later: Alternately, "Lestat c'est moi"
So I heard about Ready Player One, it sounded interesting, finally got a chance to read it.
Jesus.
Like, I would describe the prose as “workmanlike”, in the sense of Homer Simpson making that spice rack. The thing is seriously held together not only by ‘80s geek pop culture references, but ‘80s geek pop culture references that get called out by name and explained in depth when they appear, like the novelization of a fucking Seltzer-Friedberg movie.
and this is all set in the what, 2020s? 30s? but the plot at least accounts for that, foregrounds it even and I guess there is that weird geek retro thing, girls at Ground Kontrol with 8-bit Samus tattoos across their colllarbones like wow I"m pretty sure we were into the 32 bit era by the time pooping became volitional for you
Also it’s got this quest narrative that gets interrupted for a bizarrely long middle section that’s all boy meets girl/boy gets girl/boy loses girl, except it’s really boy impresses girl on the internet through nerd trivia and then obsesses over her in a way that ultimately skeeves girl out, and maaaaybe this is a riff on John Hughes movie structure?
But it was a decent page-turner and I kept reading it, up to right before the end boss fight, and yes it was shaping up as a literal boss fight because of fucking course it was, and –
okay I’m not a “good guy” here. I’ve been reading a lot of tumblr “voice of the underdog” communists lately and honestly feminists for years, I came to tumblr by way of Sady Doyle, and maybe picking a bit up from them and that’s kind of conscious and intentional because I’ve long been aware of how impressionable I am by good writers and recently my superego was getting its eyebrow pretty high about how firmly I’d been nodding to fascists and white nationalists, and
while I’ll understand how people different from me are totally real and have totally legitimate desires that kind of only reaffirms me in looking out for #1 because I realize with everyone being real and legitimate there’s not a way everyone can win, there’s just not, fulfillment of one is always experienced as limitation of another and I want good people to win but myself first of all –
okay, when the book made the point that the liberating thing about the internet is that it enables School Choice, so that the smart deserving poor can escape the violent undeserving poor – I mean I’ll nod and affirm the critiques, but allowing the smart deserving poor to join me in ruling the world is basically the extent of my fantasy social uplift politics so whatever.
When it made the point that the liberating thing about the internet is that it makes cool old guys who think of themselves as wizards rich, so they can wisely use their money to enable the deserving poor persecuted geeks to escape their lives towards Oregon, I mean, that’s not how I’d put it but wow glass houses.
But when it made the point, and I’m barely even paraphrasing, page 320 of the Broadway Paperbacks first edition, that the liberating thing about the internet is that anyone can pass as a thin straight white boy, as long as they like Rush and objectifying women, I honestly yelled “fuck this!” and threw the book on the ground.
I would’ve used it to pick up dogshit and thrown it in the trash, too, if it were my copy.
The wonderful thing about genre fiction is the way it’ll be spiced with completely unreflective takes on the author’s kinks.
you know theres some fanfics especially AUs where by the later part of the story it bears absolutely no resemblance to the original work in any meaningful way well DuckTales is basically that but for A Christmas Carol
reminder once again that the film Birth of a Nation, which inspired the formation of the Second Ku Klux Klan, was an adaptation of a sequel to a gritty AU/Confederate fix-it fic version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was a popular trend at the time
So “Tales from the Crypt” was the respected early ‘50s horror comic from EC that got squashed in the “Seduction of the Innocent” scare
In 1989 HBO used the brand for a horror anthology series, at the same time Sandman was recasting that comics era as deep myth
It was kinda Twilight Zone in its irony but more visceral, with gore and tits. HBO’s premium cable original programming brand was always “with gore and tits”, before SatC they had an aging boomer sitcom called “Dream On” where the conceit was his retro-themed sexual fantasies were shot as part of the plot
This is at least one notch better than the usual “everything in culture is actually about Trump and his eeevil” hogwash.
(“Hogwash” means “shit”. You know, what hogs roll about in, as if to bathe?)
More than that tho, it moves me to put on my kontextgoggles and look at Stephen King in relation to his period of American culture.
King’s work always reflected on the culture around it, if only by the print era pulp-prolific tactic of filling pages by shoehorning every stray thought you have into whatever you’re writing at the time (Colin @spacetwinks reports his latter-day works are full of transparent, charmingly Maine-centric axe-grinding).
But his “golden age”, say, Carrie to Needful Things, was in the 70s-80s period that, if my cyclical understanding of history holds (it does) resembled the one we’re currently going through, so it’s particularly worth considering now.
One significant thing – as the cities were emptying out, to the point of memory-holing that the US had been a predominantly urban country since the 1930s, King’s work focused on rural small town life, often about outsiders moving into said. Pet Sematary, for example, it’s very significant that the narrator moved out to the sticks – long driveway off a truck route, charming local historic ruins, undeveloped enough to still show traces of precolonial life – to raise a family.
(A thing to do would be to contrast King’s use of of rural New England with Hawthorne and Lovecraft’s, but tbh I don’t know them that well)
Similarly, I occasionally hear guffaws that Cujo has a whole subplot about cereal branding, but it just serves to remind that Vic is a yuppie who moved out of NYC to protect his young family only to confront the fact that the countryside is actually uncivilized and bestial too. There is some woo “reincarnated spirit of evil” in there, but all the fundamental threats to his family – unreliable transportation and sparse services, unmanaged wildlife, irresponsible white trash neighbors – are real rural dangers.
There’s a lot of stuff about gender relations and changing expectations of marriage. In Sematary, the narrator’s wife grows alienated, channeling her attentions away to others; before Gage he revives her cat. For fear of abandonment he goes further and further to hold on to a family – embittered wife, bad seed child, evil cat – the last generation’s men might have abandoned themselves. In Cujo, there’s lingering issues with recent infidelity.
(You laugh about how 50s-80s High Literature was so obsessed with adultery, but if not “orienting your life to duty, purpose, order vs. orienting it to animal sensation and personal satisfaction”, I dunno what period art should’ve been concerned with.)
The Shining is very much about a guy born into the old dispensation – that men create and carouse and mount their genius to chase their passion while women tend the home fires – dealing with new expectations that he be an emotional provider to his wife and child, that he act as a supporting character in their life-plots rather than the reverse.
What else? It, and more grounded companion piece The Body (known in adaptation as Stand by Me) honestly strike me most as a exploration of the Boomer-era “generation gap”, how the culture of the previous generation may have brought about the “broad middle class” ‘50s but was unsuited to address the problems encountered there.
“To beat this evil clown, we’ve gotta gangbang our chick friend” seems weird as hell, but “to progress, we’ve got to create a New Adulthood that doesn’t define itself against childhood but instead adds sex” is pretty much the Boomer story.
(Also, people who live in group houses shouldn’t throw stones.)
Carrie is very much about the ‘70s reintegration of a long-isolated religious fundamentalism to a mainstream that had only grown more secularized and libertine (appreciably more so than in the “family values”, “bourgeois bohemian” 80s-90s, which was the synthesis of this opposition) since. Particularly, it layers the discrepancy in mores – showing your dirtypillows vs. not, say – over an even deeper gap in worldviews, between bucket-of-blood materialism and a numinous, supernatural world.
And that’s just the stuff I dignify as serious. Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, and I guess The Stand all focus on psychic/telekinetic kids, which is a reminder that the 70s were full of woo, ESP was a serious topic, and the idea of the “gifted child” started out a lot closer to today’s “indigo child”.
(I like to think that Bill Murray’s researcher in the stylistically thrownback The Royal Tenenbaums was a callback to Venkman’s “negative reinforcement” introduction from Ghostbusters, like “back in the day we went looking for psychics but instead we just discovered autism")
I’m in kind of the opposite position, having read most of Lovecraft’s works, but only a couple of King’s.
Regarding Lovecraft’s relationship to rural New England: while a lot has been made of Lovecraft’s longing for an idealized New England aristocracy, it’s worth noting that this was a specifically urban aristocracy. His scenes of comfort and remembered glory are full of gambrel roofs and collegiate libraries, not the plantations of the Southern Gothic authors. Celephais and Kadath, the chief loci of longing in Lovecraft’s fiction, are both envisioned as supernatural cities.
By contrast, his treatment of rural settings and their inhabitants ranges from disdain to terror. The rural poor in Lovecraft’s stories are generally nice enough people, but also a bit on the too dumb to live side. Rural elites, meanwhile, are among Lovecraft’s most common villains: examples include Wilbur Whateley in The Dunwich Horror, the Marsh and Waite families of Innsmouth, and the twisted descendants of the Martense clan in The Lurking Fear. There’s also some fear of the untamed corners of the natural world evident in Lovecraft’s work, though it doesn’t show up as clearly and strongly as in some of Lovecraft’s predecessors, like Arthur Machen.
One of the central concerns in Lovecraft’s writing is the pollution of blood and the degeneration of human genetic stock. Commentators have mostly noted this with regard to fears of race-mixing and exogamy, and they’re right to note these things, but Lovecraft was equally concerned with excessive endogamy. The Lurking Fear, which centers around a seemingly abandoned mansion full of the man-eating, semi-simian descendants of a wealthy rural family that became so inbred over the course of centuries as to no longer be recognizably human in body or mind, is the starkest example of this. As far as I can recall, incest isn’t brought up as an explicit plot point in his other fiction set in rural New England, but it’s strongly implied in many of these stories, including The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Thing on the Doorstep.
In short, Lovecraft generally viewed rural New England (and probably rural areas more generally) as frightening and dangerous, and a potential corrupting influence on the virtuous urban elite that supplied most of his protagonists and sympathetic characters.
