A question of music, gender, faeries, and ill-advised fictional hookups

[usernamenumber]

As I've mentioned before, Stranger Ways has been tossing around ideas for lyrics, tunes and a story that we hope will eventually coalesce into a Big Concept Album. We'll see how that goes, but it's fun in the mean-time anyway.

At last night's rehearsal we were playing with some story ideas and it led us (or at least me) to a quandry to which I haven't been able to find a satisfactory answer. I'm going to put the details under a cut, and with a possible trigger warning for the intersection of drugs, sex, and gender stuff. Also cruelty to faeries.


Ok, so the premise of the story we've been working on is kind of messed up to begin with: after eons of the fae royalty capturing humans to make their playthings, the ebb of magic in the world, which is what led to the rise of human civilization in the first place, causes the barriers that keep the faerie courts hidden to fall, and a backlash led by escaped changelings turns the tables. Now there are events like "Sprite Fight Night", which is like dog fighting with supernatural creatures, and faerie dust (usually made by grinding them up) is a popular human drug.

Apparently we are out to prove that Stranger Ways is indeed nigh-incapable of writing songs in which anything nice happens to anyone.

The specific part of the story that came up yesterday has to do with a human and a faerie who meet and make a connection before the faerie is bagged by the Sprite Fight Night crew and has to be busted out. More happens after that, but I don't want to spoil the whole thing. :)

My favorite idea so far for how to have that initial connection happen is this:

1. Human is wandering through the woods tripping like whoa on faerie dust (I like this because it makes the character start out as a product of the world, warts and all)
   
2. Human is so full of dust that zi encounters a fae and is mistaken for some strange kind of faerie.
   
3. They hook up (like you do).
   
4. The above is told by way of a duet, which ends with them both essentially going "umm... holy crap, what did I just do... and why am I not running away now?"

Ok, so here's the question: what should the genders of these characters be? It seems like every combination has problems.

We'd initially been thinking of the human as male (teen boy, specifically-- old enough to act in the world and for the suggestion of sex to not be automatically sketchy, but young enough to lend the less dark parts of the story a certain fairy-tale quality), and defaulted to thinking of the faerie as female, but besides being pretty standard it makes the faerie Yet Another Princess who has to be rescued, albeit from a cage fighting match.

Here's the thing, though: re-read the bulleted list above while imagining the human as female and the faerie as male. Does it skeeve you? It did all of us, I'm just... not sure it should. We've pretty much decided not to go this route but I'm kind of torn, as a thought exercise if nothing else, with regard to whether this is one of those things that needs to be poked at and re-thought, or if it is one of those ways in which gender informs one's interactions with the world that needs to be acknowledged, whether we like it or not.

The thing that strikes me most is that when it's a guy in the scenario, my mind wants to frame it as him being the victim of his own drug-addled wanderings (if anything), but switch the genders and it gets framed as her being the victim of the faerie, or at least being victimized more than the guy, whatever the source. If that's how others' minds also react (which seems to be the case from those to whom I've talked about it), isn't the reason for the sketch-reaction that we're trained to think of women as inherently more vulnerable, and less capable of sexual agency?

As a separate but related question, could the scenario be handled in a way that avoids invoking sketchiness? As written, there's no implication that the faerie is intentionally misusing anyone, but that doesn't seem to make a difference. Then again, it's never talked about explicitly either way, so maybe the difference when you flip the genders is in how we want to fill in the blanks of motivation.

For the record, we also tried making the pair same-gendered, but that has problems too. I don't think there's any way I could write songs about drug-addled lesbian faerie sex without coming across as a complete sketchball, whatever my motivations (and anyway, we only have one female voice in the band), and talking about an accidental gay hookup in a song that is already going involve saying "faerie" a lot is just a minefield we don't want to have to walk. Relatedly, I somehow actually hadn't known how offensive (as opposed to just outdated and kind of weird) many people consider the term "fairy" to be in that context, so mentioning it here as a PSA in case it's not just me.

So anyway, at this point we're back to the original M/F pairing, with all the issues that that entails. Those issues can be mitigated somewhat by how we tell the rest of the story, and I'm glad we're at least thinking about these issues in any case, but the stuff that came up as I started turning the sketch-reaction thing over in my head prompted me to toss this out on LJ and see what others think.

...and yes, it has occurred to me the sex is not essential to the situation and we may just opt to eliminate it entirely. The implications of the fact that it seems easier to denote discovery of unexpected compatibilities and an intense connection between mostly-strangers by way of sex than, say, having a conversation, is a whole other post.

Comments

[valadil.livejournal.com]

Was wondering when this post would show up. BRB, /popcorn.

[preraphaelite.livejournal.com]

Can you pass some over here? I brought Raisinets!

[turtletoturtle]

I'm actually not particularly skeeved by the gender reversal, as the story is currently told (faerie man thinks human woman strung out on faerie dust is also a fae, interacts with and hooks up with her). It depends a lot on his behavior, but I don't find it inherently skeevy. It gets WAY more sketchy if he's aware that she's human. Maybe just because in Stardust I strongly identified with Dunstan in the initial seduction scene, but there we are.

I *do* think, though, you may not be able to have his reaction to the reveal of her being human raise the issue of consent. Because the stereotypical behavior of the fae doesn't leave a lot of room for "guilt at screwing someone who was too addled to give consent." Would he be revolted at himself for hooking up with a human? And would her reaction be one of being violated? Or of "ooh, faerie sexin' is awesome"? Or somewhere in between?

I guess the bottom line is, you may have to figure out a little more about who these people are before you know how they'll respond.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

The idea (at least as I imagine it) would be for them both, for different reasons to say to themselves "I should be creeped out/terrified/humiliated... but I'm kind of not", like discovering a kink you didn't know you had, and have that be the root of their initial interpersonal connection.

Ideally I would want to handle it such that they as individuals also factor into the equation, so they're not just both fetish objects for one another... but heck, it could maybe work starting that way-- it is, after all, kind of a messed up story. "Messed up story with a heart of gold" is kind of what we're going for, I guess you could say. So even if they start out fetishising one another, they don't end there.

How would that affect your interactions with the story? (other are, of course, invited to answer as well)

[turtletoturtle]

I think I like the idea of "even if they start out fetishizing one another, they don't end there."

I am sure I am lacking significant knowledge in faerie,

[(Anonymous)]

but:
did you not act in a Midsummer Night's dream and should be able to take some pointers? It is, if you remember, not quite as straightforward as you sketch it to be. Quote Wikipedia:
"Titania is awakened by Bottom's singing and immediately falls in love with him. She lavishes him with attention, and presumably makes love to him."
Not like Titania has especially empowered/feminist things happening to her-she is more like the victim. I also have to say I find all the magic potion/fairy dust = being on drugs a bit simple for an approach, and maybe Shakespeare did, too, seeing how many twists he crammed into that single play, with most of the magic actually being applied to the faerie, rendering her powerless, as opposed to the human.
I am aware that magic potion=drugs is pretty much the course the director of the Midsummer Night's dream you acted in seemed to take, without dwelling on the finer points of who is whom and but...I am just too little informed.
Would definitely love a song about someone wanting to be pyramus and thisbe and the lion at the same time.

[rhosyn-du.livejournal.com]

Really, I think you've just got to own that sex when one person is severely intoxicated and the other is sober is skeevy, regardless of the genders involved, and go from there. I'd personally go with fae man and human woman, because otherwise the relationship just gets way, way unbalanced in terms of power differential (one partner with social privilege in both species and gender, and the other partner needing rescue), and it's really hard to pull that off without it coming off as seriously creepy.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Here's the thing, though: re-read the bulleted list above while imagining the human as female and the faerie as male. Does it skeeve you?

Not at all, and the only reason I can think it would've skeeved y'all is that there are more nuances to this interaction than you've been able to verbalize in this post. I mean, I'd actually be happy with what you've detailed above--wouldn't this happening without omg-horrific-consequences be (as much as I hate the word) empowering? You've got a woman making choices for herself as to what to do with her body, both as far as drugs and sex go, with the negative outcomes all being how the world outside is wrong and not that their actions were wrong, correct? Sounds awesome to me.

[londo.livejournal.com]

That's a rough dilemma to be stuck in.

If it makes you feel any better, Matt Groening hated this kind of problem, which is why Akbar and Jeff were so identical. He didn't want any of the relationship stuff he was making fun of / pointing out to be interpreted as "men are like that" or "women are like that", so he made them both dudes, and totally indistinguishable from each other.

[archangelwells.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I'm either missing details or misreading the reaction, but I don't find the female human/male fairy skeevy. My underlying assumptions: cross species sex is GENERALLY not ok, so the not running away is species based, rather than consent based. As someone else said, sex with drugged up person of EITHER sex/gender is skeevy, so no more or less so the other way. Also, the female human needing to rescue the fae male is a cool twist on the gender norm.

'Course, you could make it so that the genders are either unclear or confused. One singing the other's lines, type thing.

[lowellboyslash.livejournal.com]

I should probably lose my soapbox for this, but I can't figure out why swapping any possible combination of genders around in this situation makes it more or less sketchy. I guess it's sketchy to hook up with someone while your reason is impaired by substances, but presumably you made the choice to be impaired by those substances... so.

Also, because I'm a narcissist, I always imagine protagonists as being gendered like me, so I assumed the human was a cisgendered woman when I read it the first time.

I have no idea whether any of that helps.

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

I'm going to start by asking, what do you find interesting about the scenario? What themes, questions, concepts are you exploring?

More directly to your second question, it seems like the sketchiness is kind of inherent to the scenario, if both the sex and the drugs are absolutely essential. If you believe that a person cannot give meaningful consent while on drugs, then what you've described is a rape scenario and nothing you change otherwise -- the gender of the characters or anything else -- will change that.

Now, that said, one of the ways that we assess how to respond to something in stories is by judging how the characters themselves respond. If both of them wake up the next morning, sober, and look at each other and ask -- however explicitly or implicitly -- "so, are you okay with what just happened?" and both answer "yes" with full knowledge of what happened and neither coerced into that answer, then it's acceptable to the characters, and it is more likely to be acceptable to the audience. (Audience members might personally respond differently in an analogous situation, or may not believe that those conditions hold for those characters. It's your job as storytellers to sell that. If the audience members do believe those conditions hold, then it's logically inconsistent to say that the characters shouldn't find it acceptable. Someone saying "you should want X" and forcing it over another's objections is kind of the nature of rape, after all.) It sounds like the characters are kind of wrestling with the question of how okay they are with each other anyway much more broadly, so maybe that's part of why it's an interesting situation -- it's a small conflict which reflects a much larger one. Maybe you can pull that out more.

Alternately, if the song is sung in such a way as to allow it (eg. third-person rather than first-person), one or both "narrator" voices could comment on the sketchiness of the situation, which would at least reassure your audience that you aren't *personally* in support of rape. That falls quickly into Aesop, however.

Overall, I'm firmly in support of the right of creators to create works about potentially- or definitely-bad people without punishing them for being bad or editorializing about it. Art reflects life, and people make morally-ambiguous or outright bad choices all the time, and sometimes the bad people do get away with it, and sometimes what's bad changes depending on who you are and where you're standing. As an audience member, I don't need the author telling me every time to know that bad things are bad, or at least reflect morals neither I nor the author share. I'm an adult; I can apply my own moral judgment, and I don't usually assume that it reflects some unusual deep inner monster of the author's. I will often be looking in the work for cues as to what the creators find interesting about it, however. :-)

[turtletoturtle]

This :)

[real-green-tea.livejournal.com]

I'm confused. Is this controversial because of racism? Is this some kind of consent thing (what with the drugs and all)? (Both/neither?)
Personally, I'm weirded out by the themes of Happily Ever After; you can write what y'all like, judgers gon' judge.

[mindways]

Good to think ahead on this one!

The skeevy-level for me depends much more heavily on the details of #1, #2, and #3 than it does which is male and which is female. (The latter is relevant, but as a secondary factor.) For instance:

* How mind-altering (and in what way mind-altering) is the drug? Is someone under its influence pretty much incapable of giving informed consent? Or is it like, say, caffeine, which undeniably has a mental effect but which isn't something most consider to be an impairment of agency?

* What sort of fae does the actual fairy mistake the human for? If it's "I dunno", that's sketchier than if it's some sort of wild-sprite that tends to be high on the sex-drive and low on the inhibitions - ie, an actual misapprehension instead of not just knowing what's going on.

* How do they hook up? Who pursues whom, who initiates what? "Fairy seduces drugged-out human" is very different from "Fairy mistakes drugged-out human for amorous fae and says 'sure, why not?' when sex is proposed" is very different from other scenarios.

[khyros.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this mostly, especially 3. There's a big difference between

"Oooh you smell like magic."
"You're pretty, let's knock boots"
"Ok"

And some sort of out and out seduction where someone expresses resistance and needs to be persuaded into something.

[mindways]

Oh, one other thought: if the human is female, the rescue of the male fairy from human bondage is an interesting reversal of Tam Lin.

(Whether you want to de-emphasize that contrast or play with it I don't know, but I figured I'd mention it so you could think about it. :)

[sarah t. r. (from livejournal.com)]

The things mindways said. Also, so all the kinds of genders fairies and people can have are male or female? Why can't the fairy's gender be "uh...what..." To me, at least, fairy implies at least a little gender-fluid.

BUT FAIRIES, THO!

[faerieboots.livejournal.com]

As people above have alluded, this is a very interesting and nuanced topic, and one that I think is more conducive to a traditional discussion form (so that everyone involved can take part in an evolving dialogue).

That being said, my tl; dr response is this: Spend some more time thinking about exactly WHY a woman tripping on drugs and having sex with a mystical woobie bugs you. Then spend some time thinking about why a man tripping on drugs and having sex with a mystical woobie doesn't. Then work from there--you can't really find a framework that avoids invoking sketchiness without understand what creates the sketch reaction, so to do anything else first seems to be kind of putting the cart before the horse.

Oh, also as an aside, I think someone said this already, but is there a reason why the faerie has to have an explicitly stated gender?

[heiligekuh.livejournal.com]

What distinguishes the fae from humans? My perception of that relationship is entirely dependent on how the fae are established as a (for lack of a better term) species. Even given that faeries might represent along human-esque sex model, does gender carry any of the same meanings in that culture?

[freetobeme18.livejournal.com]

Cruelty to faeries, nooooo! :(

In all seriousness though, this seems like a pretty awesome concept. At least there are no actual faeries harmed in the making of the album. ;-)