So: I am about to share something that some readers may find disturbing. It's about sex, consent, and respectful love. It applies these topics to the real world, and to the world of Koslow's fairy tale, and to a part of fandom culture that has emerged from Koslow's fairy tale. Also, the linked material contains strong language and more links to online discussions about sex, sexism, and rape. Be advised.
First, some definitions.
My simplest definition of love = A devoted respect for the abundant well-being of the beloved.
Here, the word "beloved" simply means the person, place, or thing that is being loved. When I express love toward myself, I am the beloved one. When I express love toward my husband, he is the beloved one. When I express love toward the rosebushes that grow around my house, the roses are beloved. When I express love toward the community in which I live, my community as a whole is beloved.
"Devoted" means committed, attached, dedicated, loyal. In some contexts, it also includes a connotation of strong affection.
"Abundant well-being" means the sum total of health, contentment, potential, prosperity, dignity, liberty, harmony, and capability that living organisms instinctively desire and pursue. When you love someone, you interest yourself in their pursuit of peace and happiness. When you love someone, you will extend yourself, making significant efforts to ensure that your beloved one's well-being is as secure and robust as possible. When you love someone, you avoid trespassing against their boundaries, their rights, and their agency. Love promotes an abundance of goodness and beauty. Real love invites reciprocation, but does not guarantee that the person, place, or thing you love will love you in return. Thus, it is generally supposed that a truly loving relationship is one in which the two people involved both express a devoted concern for the abundant well-being of each other, and of their togetherness, their unity in love. I also understand that mutual, shared love expands the influence of love in general, growing and multiplying the benefits of love for the primary individuals as well as the world they inhabit. Toss a love-pebble into a pond, and the ripples affect the surrounding environment to greater or lesser degrees. Love is like that.
Respect? When "respect" is used as a transitive verb:
- To feel or show deferential regard for; esteem or admire.
- To avoid interfering with or intruding upon.
- To avoid violating.
- To relate or refer to.
"Respect" as a noun:
- A feeling of appreciative, often deferential regard; esteem.
- The state of being regarded with honor or esteem.
- Consideration or appreciation.
- Due regard for something considered important or authoritative.
If I put the words "respectful love" together into the same phrase, it is actually redundant. Love, by my definition, respects the beloved. That's just how love works. But not everyone uses my definition of "love." People will call all kinds of attitudes and behaviors "love" even when those attitudes and behaviors have very little to do with anyone's overall well-being. What this means in everyday life is that when we observe one person who fails to respect another person, the disrespectful party is not (I repeat, NOT) expressing love. They may be expressing all kinds of other emotions or states of mind, even within the context of a usually loving relationship. BUT: if someone does not respect the well-being of another person (or even the well-being of the disrespectful person's own self), they cannot possibly be somehow promoting that well-being. If we do not honor someone's personhood, we are not loving them. Period.
Which brings me to consent, and the issue in our borked-up culture of consensual sex.
A person who engages in interactive sexual activity without their partner's consent is not respecting or loving their partner (and, I would argue, that person is also not respecting or loving himself or herself). A person who attempts to coerce their partner into sexual activity is not respecting or loving anyone. It is not respectful or loving when a person attempts to persuade their partner to engage in sexual activity after the partner has refused, or indicated reluctance, or communicated ambivalence, or decided at any moment along the way to refrain from further sexual activity. Yes = Yes ; No = No. When no explicit answer is given, that Absence of Yes = No. When Maybe appears, Maybe = Maybe, where one's right is always reserved to say Yes or No at any time.
To sum up. Consensual sex, by definition, requires CONSENT. Love respects everyone's right to consent to sex. If someone has NONconsensual sex with someone, it is NOT an act of love. Period.
A perfect analogy from RDPP:
Consent: Not actually that complicated
Please read the article before proceeding with this "Motes" post.
Thank you.
What does this have to do with
Beauty and the Beast? Specifically, Koslow's B&B?
Well.
I have become convinced that the concept of "romance" in many B&B episodes is badly skewed into appalling dimensions. And the concept of "romance" in many derivative works of fanon is hopelessly anti-loving.
For example:
The opening scene of "Though Lovers Be Lost" does not contain a consensual event.
Nor do the concluding scenes, for that matter, but no one ever claims that at the end of the episode, the protagonist's enemy is in any way "loving" anyone.
The frumious TLBL "exploding roses" is a mask for sexual activity that the story's "Beauty" later describes thus: "We loved." However, if her statement refers to whatever happened to the title lovers in the Season Two / Season Three cave, her assessment violates a very important principle of consensual sex:
RDPP wrote:If they are unconscious, don’t make them tea. Unconscious people don’t want tea and can’t answer the question “do you want tea” because they are unconscious.
Think about that for a moment.
Yeah.
What I find especially creepy about TLBL is that it is, in fact, an ultimate pinnacle of a permanent problem in the title lovers' relationship.
From Pilot to TLBL, the "love" that Catherine Chandler receives from many of her fellow Topsiders is coercive and manipulative, sometimes nonconsensual... AND (although she does make intermittent progress away from this negative pattern during various episodes of the series) the "love" that Catherine frequently expresses is also coercive and manipulative, sometimes nonconsensual. Sometimes her unloving belief or act is simply a failure (or refusal) to respect the person she is supposed to be helping, or even loving. Other times, this disrespect get ratcheted up to astonishing levels of unthinking cruelty. The "love" being promoted via the purported heroine of the tale is not truly love.
In addition to TLBL, I am thinking of episodes like "Arabesque," "The Outsiders," "A Fair and Perfect Knight," "Remember Love," "Ozymandias," "Down to a Sunless Sea," "Promises of Someday," "The Alchemist," "An Impossible Silence," "Masques," "The Beast Within, "No Way Down," "Siege," "Terrible Savior," etc. In addition to Vincent, I am thinking of characters like Edie, Elliot Burch, Joe Maxwell, Brigit O'Donnell, Curtis Jackson, Michael Richmond, and so on.
See? Disturbing. It disturbed the hell out of me when I really started exploring the implications of this story theme. Or character flaw. However one wants to think of it.
I know I'm posing a kind of riddle for folk who are accustomed to approaching this story with a certain set of assumptions in play. What I want to ask is: What happens if you remove the assumption that you can love someone without respecting their personhood at least as much as you respect your own?
Look at the episodes in terms of the pursuit of well-being. Really look. Observe the story with "respect for abundant well-being" as the goal. Not anyone's raw passion or pleasure, not euphoria or "happiness" or violent exhilaration or an emotional high, not Catherine getting her way, not the audience getting its way, not even Vincent getting all he's ever dreamed of. Whose well-being is at stake? Whose well-being gets damaged? Whose well-being benefits? Who is acting out of love, and who is acting out of some other motivation?
I think the non-love in this story is being excused and justified so that someone, whether fictional or factual, can maintain the false belief that it is okay to force tea (or sex, or romance, or cooperation, or submission, or whatever you want to call it) on someone else in the name of love. I also think that uncritically buying the story's premises and imitating it produces a loveless fabrication that can desensitize us to what the online milieu has dubbed "rape culture."
In fanon, the lovelessness is worse than it was in the original series. In some cases, much, much worse. In many stories and conversations, it completely creeps me out to read people's rationalizations for "fixing" Vincent's (or other characters') assumed sexual "reticence"... often denigrating Vincent's (or other characters'; Father comes immediately to mind) loving respect for everyone's (including Catherine's) boundaries... in order to force the relationship to "move forward" at a "better" pace toward some kind of vicarious sexual satisfaction for the audience. This is not a matter of simply removing the original "ban" on physical intimacy that the storytellers wove into the tale, and then leaving the characters to their own devices. This attitude of "acceptable coercion" among some B&B fans espouses exactly what the RDPP post reviles. But this attitude in B&B fandom also picks up the nastiest, ugliest, most dangerous threads that were left dangling from the seams of Koslow's fairy tale, and it spins those threads out along the original trajectory epitomized by TLBL. This attitude defines "happiness"...and "love"... poorly.
The price of this kind of "happily ever after" is not worth paying. Because it's not a real happy ending. It's a deception. A lie to tell ourselves so that we can indulge some needy aspect of our psyches with a detrimental mythology.
RDPP wrote:Whether it’s tea or sex, Consent Is Everything.
And love honors consent.
And finally: Why did I put this link and this argument in my "Motes of Inspiration" thread? Because although the topic is unpleasant, it still inspires me to view in an honest light the elements of the 1980s B&B that brilliantly succeeded and the elements that miserably failed. It inspires me to imagine fresh contributions to the B&B universe that oppose "rape culture" and promote authentic love. And it reminds me to think critically, even counter-culturally, about what romance means and how it happens in fiction and in the real world. And I thought maybe someone else out there might be interested in this frame of reference too.
Besides, the Rockstar Dinosaur Pirate Princess wrote a beautiful article. Everyone should read it.