Is Fantasy Escapism?

I was at a women's symposium in Penn State in 2011, and after my talk, one of the lecture attendees asserted that F+SF is just plain "escapism." "Why," she asked, should we as feminists consider this [F+SF genre] as serious? What does it do for us except provide young people (read: males) with a means for fantasizing about sex? It is just a means for escaping reality!" Thus, to her, F+SF was a bad thing to be avoided and dismissed.

Recently, a young artist friend of mine writing to me expressed the opposite sentiment and illuminated for us the great utility of the genre: fantasy literature and art provided her a means of mental escape during a violent and ugly childhood. However, her current definition of the genre's use still extends mainly to cover what we might consider the typical-beautiful -- the light-filled, innocent, colorful images that populate children's books and fairy tales. That her use of it didn't go so far to include the genre's typical-horror (such as the work of popular HR Giger, designer of the Aliens trilogy) means that F+SF, like any art, is experienced through the subjectivity of one's own life.

These views are not unanticipated. To the first woman's complaint, I point in the direction of my friend's statement: the genre does indeed provide a place for escape from "the real world." As Jack Zipes has written in his book, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, the fantasy genre has long been the place whereby the storyteller (writer) and listeners (readers) generate a certain psychic outcome for a reality that seems to lack justice. In early western Europe's era of feudal rule, where law and justice was a random occurrence, life was hard and bleak. Obtaining a just outcome for a wrongdoing was often not possible, so redress was sought by other means. Fairy tales and fantasy satisfied the need to feel that the world was right somehow and that life was worth living.

The main thing that I pointed out to the woman at the conference was that the genre provides an imagined space for safe existence. In addition to providing a child an emotional escape to a better family life that was full of love instead of pain, the F+SF genre was also home to the early underground LGBT movement: the mass market Pulp Fiction paperback genre during the 40s and 50s is yet another perfect example of the way in which this genre functions to allow that element which doesn't exist; for the unnamed, it is a place to be.

If we extend these rights to all seekers of the unimagined, then we must admit the less attractive underbelly of F+SF also lives there. All of this too, has a function, which I've discussed elsewhere on this blog.

The woman at the conference saw F+SF as just a haven for the unexamined privilege of a ruling class. While her assessment is absolutely right, the face of it is rapidly changing as the digital world democratizes the medium. This also means that there are more audience members, thus more eyes on monitoring the edges of the social contract and contributions made within all aspects of speculative fiction.

One last thought: imagining a better world for people doesn't mean you need to sugar-coat it. Children, in particular, deserve to know the truth of our world so that they can negotiate their way through it and out of harm's way. Safety of the escape doesn't mean that one turns one's back on the truth; it just means that one has to find ways to deal with it, let it out, find coping mechanisms for the ugliness. It means to find ways to not succumb to the darkness, but confront it, identify it, name it, and show it in all of its terrible aspects. This is how we can, as a social species, take evil's power away and reclaim it for the good.

Changing Tides

In my undergrad, I took feminist courses in which the class, Women in Religion, really stood out. It became a defining semester for me. During the course, our professor explained that in old Judaism, they used stories to delineate the law. Stories became the Talmud, the book of the covenant between a people and their god. This very specific set of stories, The Old Testament, became the foundation upon which the Christian Bible was made. What I didn't know is that modern feminist theologians have been looking at these stories for a while to find ways to pull apart the stories and “re-read” them for a different interpretation. 

Sometimes these reinterpretations and reading in-between the lines of story lead to different conclusions in the stories. Huh? Of course, re-interpreting is what many translators have done for centuries, but why would anybody do this? Because if you change the interpretation of a story, then you can ultimately change the law that protects the story. Wow and duh. Laws protect, and enshrine in a way, the stories of a group of people; the laws that govern a people are based on stories. Who tells these stories? Well, anybody who wants a hand in shaping culture.

What does it matter if the law changes? Who cares? Well, millions of women in 1920  cared when they got the right to vote. Millions of blacks cared when slavery and segregation was abolished. And when marriage laws change, gays and lesbians can live their lives without being criminalized or treated differently.

The persistence of one story over another is the essence of cultural struggle. We can witness it today in the political arena between the conservatives' stories about the plight of the business class vs. the progressives' stories about the plight of the poor. Stories are packages of information that disseminate the ideology of the teller. 

Le Petite Chaperone Rouge, or Little Red Riding Hood, once a pagan folktale to help girls to psychically navigate female sexuality, menstruation, and rape, was “moralized” by Charles Perrault, to reflect conservative French court values of marriage.* This version has persistence because of the Christian church’s hold on western culture and the subsequent wide dissemination of said story in the technology of publication. Parents today may be frustrated if feel that they have no say in the ideology of a culture that bombards their kids incessantly with flavored stories.

However,  you actually DO have a say in culture, and as an artist you are in a unique position to do so. You have an interesting weapon to change the predominant ideas and stories out there in culture. Every science fiction illustrator has contributed to the imaginations of countless science professionals, geeks, dreamers, anyone who thinks that going to the stars would be the coolest thing ever. Every funny political YouTube video-maker out there has the power to influence an audience (I'm looking at you, Nicepeter!).  Every creator of a graphic novel, whether building worlds or tearing them down, is offering the viewer some other alternative to the present state of things. Inch by inch, we move culture forward. Inexorably. Surely.

  

This is how bigotry and small-mindedness is changed in America. One story, one image at a time.

* Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. Psychology Press, 1991.