Bump, as this has gotten buried and I'd like to hear what you have to say.
@JohnAllenson:
I feel you're misrepresenting my argument.
Your original argument was that there is a long history in literature giving positive images of asking a person out after they've said 'no' which implies it's permissable. I replied that there's a long history in literature of things that we would recognize as rape being romanticized.
Now you say, I should use examples from the past to justify present behaviour. Which you were doing.
I hate to break it to you. YAOI, Bodice-Rippers, and M/M are still being written.
You and I are miscommunicating then.
What I've been trying to say, repeatedly, is that you can't go back in time and lense a story like Beauty & The Beast as supporting rape culture. No. It doesn't work. Those stories were written in a different time which had a different culture from today so if your argument is that there is a long unbroken line of rape culture stretching back millennia, I'm calling bullshit and hypocrisy: If you go that route then the Chrisitan Right and Constitutional Originalists are correct, I don't believe you think that.
I brought up Yaoi because, unless you're fluent in Japanese as I am (20+ year veteran here), then you're pulling the biggest act of white privilege there is and telling another culture what their stories mean.
(To be clear, I don't support the idea of White Privilege but they go hand in hand with reinterpreting the past.)
What I've been saying is that there is an unbroken line from the Troubadours forward that has determined what these stories mean, so that when Disney reimagines B&tB it is connected to the intent of the source material, not the revisionists.
Given all that, I do enjoy cultural critiques using Feminism and Post-Colonial theories but they can not be used to rewrite history, just give an alternative vision to help us think – that's useful. The problem is that cultural critiques are trying to write legally binding laws.
