Author Topic: EP248: Spar  (Read 96980 times)

Darwinist

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Reply #25 on: July 10, 2010, 01:38:56 AM

Which is why this piece basically is pornography. There's nothing else at play. Only the simulated gratification of a particular itch. Her boyfriend and the poems are meant to be forgotten, not only by the narrator but by the reader as well. Her rescue is little more than a punctuation mark.

Well put.

What a mind-blowing piece of fiction that is.  Great narration.   Yow!

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.    -  Carl Sagan


Scattercat

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Reply #26 on: July 10, 2010, 02:45:26 AM
She is literally fucked senseless. Fucked out of any and all attachments to her life. Which is kind of the appeal of bondage. No choices mean no responsibilities, which is a very liberating feeling in the face of the omnipresent obligations life throws at us. A very liberating feeling for about an hour in the dungeon. Or the length of a short story. It's a nice place to visit and we don't have to live there. Bondage, in short, is healthy fun.

Which is why this piece basically is pornography. There's nothing else at play. Only the simulated gratification of a particular itch. Her boyfriend and the poems are meant to be forgotten, not only by the narrator but by the reader as well. Her rescue is little more than a punctuation mark.

Just because someone could get off on it doesn't mean that it's meant to be gotten off on.  You say, "There's nothing else here."  Except her boyfriend.  And the poems.  And her rescue.  But those don't count?  Then why are they in the story?  If the piece was meant as a pornographic celebration of actual rape (there's no play here, no consent and control, no safety and sanity), then why is the rest of it there?



stePH

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Reply #27 on: July 10, 2010, 02:47:33 AM
And a lot of stories have "survival" as their main goal - the entire genre of wilderness survival fiction and autobiography, for example (my mother-in-law-to-be is a big fan of this genre). The aptly named "survival horror" is another. Sometimes a story is just about somebody wanting to get out with their mind and body intact, and that's not a bad thing.

Such stories typically feature the main character actually doing something toward furthering their own survival.  All this character did was fuck the alien, with occasional breaks only to eat or shit.

If this one wins the Hugo, I will lose all faith in the process.

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Talia

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Reply #28 on: July 10, 2010, 02:56:16 AM
Which is why this piece basically is pornography. There's nothing else at play. Only the simulated gratification of a particular itch. Her boyfriend and the poems are meant to be forgotten, not only by the narrator but by the reader as well. Her rescue is little more than a punctuation mark.

Again, I disagree. I don't see gratification taking place here. I see replacement.

She lost her love. She lost seemingly everything. She seemed to be taking the sex as a replacement of sorts, and .. as a way to forget, because she was hurting too much.

That's why ultimately the story to me is not mere pornography. Because of the underlying of tragedy, and the extreme suffering thinly veiled. (perhaps not so thinly, judging by people's responses... heh).




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Reply #29 on: July 10, 2010, 03:14:05 AM
Such stories typically feature the main character actually doing something toward furthering their own survival.  All this character did was fuck the alien, with occasional breaks only to eat or shit.

She does do something: she fucks the alien.

Remember, just because we see only her point of view doesn't mean there isn't another one.  The alien is dealing with her just as she deals with the alien.  She takes an active role and 'attacks' as well as 'defending.'  There's just not a lot of room to maneuver, as it were, physically or mentally.  She is blocked, and so she endures and fights skirmishes that lose ground even as they gain it. 



Talia

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Reply #30 on: July 10, 2010, 03:19:30 AM
Also, she did do something towards her own survival. She left.

The bulk of the story demonstrated how she was emotionally dying. The conclusion, as I saw it, showed, given the opportunity, she instead chose to live, despite her grief.



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Reply #31 on: July 10, 2010, 03:52:24 AM
How can Spar be considered porn? It has an artistic purpose and therefore redeeming value. Porn, says SOCTUS, does not. It reminded me of such works as The Story of O or Venus in Furs which also had lots of sex but very limited erotic appeal. And just like those two classics of the genre I am kinda at a loss about what Spars artistic purpose actually is.



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Reply #32 on: July 10, 2010, 04:19:20 AM
I'd like to go out on a limb now and say - as I sit here preparing rope to tie my fiancee up with later - that Spar is not an erotic BDSM story. That's not to say that some people wouldn't find it erotic - some people will find anything sexy - but I think there's a clear intent to tell a story here, not to titillate. For one thing, the market for alien fuck stories is pretty small. Most of us kinky folks aren't into that sort of thing. Just sayin'.

Like it or hate it, Spar is not about sex. Spar uses sex, which is a different thing altogether.

Whether or not Spar uses sex to tell a story you find interesting or compelling, that's the question.


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tamahome

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Reply #33 on: July 10, 2010, 05:09:04 AM
So when does the novel come out?



ElectricPaladin

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Reply #34 on: July 10, 2010, 05:13:17 AM
So when does the novel come out?

Oh, I'm still in the rewrites stage, and I haven't even found an...

Oh, you weren't talking to me, were you?

I'll be going now.

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Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #35 on: July 10, 2010, 05:21:19 AM
How can Spar be considered porn? It has an artistic purpose and therefore redeeming value. Porn, says SOCTUS, does not.

That's the authority you go by?  ... More to the point, you allow someone else to decide that for you?

"People commonly use the word 'procrastination' to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working." - Paul Graham


Scattercat

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Reply #36 on: July 10, 2010, 05:35:48 AM
Pornography is erotic material that doesn't have a purpose beyond being erotic.  You use porn to masturbate. 

This is the commonly understood meaning of the word.  Obscenity without artistic merit. 

A story can have explicit sex without being pornography, and something can be porn (in a looser linguistic sense) without nudity or even sex.  (Witness "blank-porn" as slang for something which only titillates rather than having a deeper or broader use.  "Gadget-porn" for ad-like photos and gushing descriptions of new electronics, "torture-porn" for movies that display gore for the sake of shock without other meaning, etc.)



Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #37 on: July 10, 2010, 05:52:13 AM
Pornography is erotic material that doesn't have a purpose beyond being erotic.  You use porn to masturbate. 

This is the commonly understood meaning of the word.  Obscenity without artistic merit. 

I doubt you needed the Supreme Court to tell you that.

Also, that definition puts pornography - like beauty - in the eye of the beholder, even outside the intent of the material.  One person might define, say, "Spar" as pornography because they don't see a purpose beyond titillation (erotic or otherwise). But others see an artistic purpose and so to them, it isn't pornography.

It isn't something with an objective measure.

It also raises* the question of the definition of obscenity (or even erotic).  I'm sure, for instance, that yours and my criteria for what is obscene overlap greatly but do not match exactly.  Again, no objective measure.


*but does not beg.

"People commonly use the word 'procrastination' to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working." - Paul Graham


Schreiber

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Reply #38 on: July 10, 2010, 06:59:15 AM
I certainly don't think anyone would deny that the story has artistic aspirations. If intention is really what counts, maybe pornography is the wrong word. That being said, it does feel...well, masturbatory. I'm going to take a shot in the dark and say that roughly 90% of the words in this story are devoted to describing and contextualizing  sex with the alien. Songs and poems can get away with that sort of thing, but fiction runs out of steam awfully fast.

I had a similar feeling about "Lust for Learning" back in the day. All speculative fiction has to spend a certain fraction of its energies on the What If angle of the story, but that's all these two stories seem to be interested in. What If you could hardwire people to get off on academic learning? Well, wouldn't that be cool! What if you crashed your spaceship into an alien spaceship and it brought you on board and ceaseless, brutal sex with you? Well, wouldn't that be horrible!

"This My Body" was a more successful take on the subject, in my humble opinion. "Little Worker" too. Stories like "Spar" and "Lust for Learning" are masturbatory not because they deal with sex but because they can't move past their preoccupation with their conceits. The fact that the conceits are sexual in nature might have something to do with their respective authors' lack of interest in expounding upon them, but that's just a speculation.



ElectricPaladin

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Reply #39 on: July 10, 2010, 08:27:11 AM
To be honest, IMHO, the term "pornography" is so vague as to be useless. If I think it has artistic merit, it's art. If you object to its degree of sexiness, it's porn. Porn isn't a category, it's a pejorative. Think something is inappropriately sexy? Want to ban, limit, or otherwise control it? Call it porn! Even porn doesn't want to be porn - it wants to be "erotica."

So, porn is a meaningless word.

I think this conversation would be a lot more interesting if we abandoned it and moved on. Spar is what Spar is; without the use of a dismissive label, what did you think about it?

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stePH

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Reply #40 on: July 10, 2010, 02:34:15 PM
I think this conversation would be a lot more interesting if we abandoned it and moved on. Spar is what Spar is; without the use of a dismissive label, what did you think about it?

Pointless waste of time.

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Sandikal

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Reply #41 on: July 10, 2010, 03:10:38 PM
I just couldn't listen to more than the first few sentences of this story.  I'm not even much of a prude.  I do read books that have graphic sex in them, including sex that disturbing and/or against my personal preferences.  However, the first few sentences of this story were so disturbing to me, I couldn't continue.



stePH

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Reply #42 on: July 10, 2010, 04:11:59 PM
I just couldn't listen to more than the first few sentences of this story.  I'm not even much of a prude.  I do read books that have graphic sex in them, including sex that disturbing and/or against my personal preferences.  However, the first few sentences of this story were so disturbing to me, I couldn't continue.

I own the Urotsukidouji Perfect Collection on DVD, and I still found nothing to like in this story.

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dreamophelia

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Reply #43 on: July 11, 2010, 03:55:59 AM
....Stories like "Spar" and "Lust for Learning" are masturbatory not because they deal with sex but because they can't move past their preoccupation with their conceits. The fact that the conceits are sexual in nature might have something to do with their respective authors' lack of interest in expounding upon them, but that's just a speculation.

I kept thinking that it might make a stronger story as flash fiction, cut down to it's barest bones and unabashedly just an interesting idea that could be taken so much further. As it is, it felt to me like a very long writing prompt.



Seraphim

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Reply #44 on: July 11, 2010, 04:49:56 AM
I'm glad this one had a warning. I've no interest in any of the territory this story is purported to explore. To this day I've never encountered any sex scene in any book or story that had any serious purpose beyond titillation I could discern. I found if I read them anyway I could not see what those scenes added and was generally disgusted by having let those images inside my head. Since then whenever they occur, I skip ahead and apparently miss nothing of substance to the rest of the story. So if a story such as Spar is so heavily invested in sex and blue language about sex then it is one that I might as well skip from the get go. I tried the first few lines of this story...just to be fair, but my reaction was (as expected) yuck, yuck, and yuck and that was all I could stand and I was sorry I had even bothered at all. Stories about sex, with sexually graphic scenes, with scads of obscene reference and a vocabulary seldom untethered from the scatological...just leave me reaching for a handy gallon of Purell. It grosses me out every time and not in a good way.
« Last Edit: July 11, 2010, 04:51:30 AM by Seraphim »



Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #45 on: July 11, 2010, 05:20:10 AM
It grosses me out every time and not in a good way.

I can't think of the good way to be grossed out...

"People commonly use the word 'procrastination' to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working." - Paul Graham


deflective

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Reply #46 on: July 11, 2010, 08:17:53 AM
this story wasn't really my thing but i respect the author for the effort.

what does interest me is that i remember escape pod running five first contact stories over the last year (this, Almanac, Strangers, Ambushes, Thargus), four had female protagonists, all of those had the woman losing their partner in some way.  a couple spent more time on the breakup than the aliens.

since scifi often uses it's speculation as an analog it seems like, from a woman's perspective, losing the comfort of a familiar relationship and going out to meet new people has the same qualities as meeting an alien species for the first time.  i'd be interested to hear female perspectives on this trend.



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Reply #47 on: July 11, 2010, 01:19:29 PM
This, to me, is an extraordinary piece of work and I nearly missed it because of the warning about graphic language. No criticism, I'm just inclined to avoid what is often the tedious over-use of some common expletives as a badge of 'authenticity'. Nevertheless, some words do make me squirm even though I can also see that offence arises simply because social convention says it should. We live in a world where sex and violence are standard TV fare (cf CSI) but the particular arrangement of a few letters gives some of us apoplexy.

I'm glad I wasn't put off. To me, this was not pornographic although with a different voice it very easily could be and if it were a film, how it came across would depend on what the director thought it was about. To me, neither the content nor the language were gratuitous, put there to shock me, or lacking in any purpose other than to capitalise on titillating exploitation. I don't know who was the victim here; the woman, the alien, or maybe both. There is no guarantee that the bipedal creature appearing at the end was a saviour to either of them and so no ultimate salvation. She may have been climbing to her death or to further exploitation, who knows?

What I do know is that the sense of dissolution of personality, reason, hope, and time created by the endless sexual encounters of each insular and solitary individual gave insight into the lengths human cognition will go to maintain its sense of self and to rationalise its actions. I don't know if the alien was experiencing something siliar but it felt pain and it locked the woman out after something inside it broke. I don't need to know what that was, I was happy to conceptualise it as a part of its spirit, its own survival repertoire, a valuable something that had to be protected.

The story didn't end but then some don't. It didn't leave me hanging either because I could occupy my thoughts with the uncertainties. Where was she going? Was she rescued? Or was the alien being rescued from her? Or were both about to be subject to further de-personalising experiences? In the end, the sexual content and the language seemed to be just vehicles for the expression of attempts at survival in the context of desolation, depersonalisation and loss.

Science is what you do when the funding panel thinks you know what you're doing. Fiction is the same only without the funding.


alllie

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Reply #48 on: July 11, 2010, 03:55:34 PM
To this day I've never encountered any sex scene in any book or story that had any serious purpose beyond titillation I could discern. I found if I read them anyway I could not see what those scenes added and was generally disgusted by having let those images inside my head.

I wonder if that is deliberate, so they can be censored, if necessary, without losing any of the plot.



ElectricPaladin

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Reply #49 on: July 11, 2010, 04:14:54 PM
It's interesting that some of you react so negatively to sexy scenes. In the novel I'm writing, I'm actually running into the problem of there not being enough sex. That is, it's a combination of two things: first, the romance between two of the main characters isn't really selling itself without more obvious displays of affection, and second, the setting is supposed to be this incredibly lush, striking, and vital place. Adding some sexier scenes - maybe not actual screwing, but something a little sexier than the stiff conversation I wrote in my first draft - would give the piece a lot of kick.

And while I'm defending sexiness, there are books where the sex is incredibly important. In the Kushiel's Legacy series by Jacqueline Karey, for example, every sex scene serves to develop a character, explicate the setting, or both. Hell, remember Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequals? I know you read that as a kid - probably scarred me for life. Anyway, while it was certainly a little over the top, most (ok, some) of the sex in those books served a purpose in describing the development of the characters' relationship and cavegirl's sexual and mystical awakening.

So yeah. Don't undersell the sex.

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