aurora light

obviously, you should support taboo authors

with literally a single look at my page, you can tell i support taboo authors. it’s a bit of a, “of course i know him! he’s me!” situation — i write stuff that some other authors who consider themselves taboo won’t even touch with a 10-foot pole, i’m big into guro & necro & noncon & all that wack shit.

sometimes, it’s a coping mechanism i can specifically trace back. sometimes, it’s just sort of something god blessed me with. sometimes, i just like feeling some type of way!!!

regardless, as i like saying on this platform, you don’t have to enjoy a specific kind of art to support its status as art. you don’t have to like taboo stories to support our ability to write them.

but that’s not what i’m here to REALLY talk about.

i’m here to bring communism into it, because of course i am! ☭

what makes something “taboo”?

by its sheer nature, “taboo” art relies on the cultural context it’s surrounded by. this includes both the wider context and individual context. my girlfriend and i talk about guro very openly and casually; to an average lighthearted romance reader, it would be shocking and possibly upsetting.

“taboo” has to do with our general cultural understanding of what is “proper,” and therefore, what is “improper.” anything that is “improper,” infringing on general societal boundaries, can be considered “taboo.”

in the west, we have developed these boundaries over decades and centuries as forms of oppression and violence against our enemies — often, the indigenous people who live in countries we are colonizing.

“taboo” as an act of cultural defiance

the first point i want to make here is that when writing taboo content, authors don’t have to be showing that the taboo is wrong or illegitimate. they don’t have to be making ANY kind of statement on the taboo.

sometimes, simply partaking in the taboo questions the society that delegitimizes it. it asks, “why is this society telling you something is wrong when it feels good?” it asks, “if this is enjoyable, could other things that this society tells you is wrong also be good?” in doing so, it asks you to continue to question and criticize the society you are part of, encouraging social revolution through hedonism.

you are, of course, free to critique authors who choose to present their work this way. but this is a legitimate artistic angle to take.

the taboo as colonialism

taboos exist in nearly every culture, and there are VAST reasons for them to exist. some taboos may be meant to protect people, to form group cohesion, and to back up religious traditions.

however, in the west (and ESPECIALLY in north america, which is where the current conversation is largely taking place), taboos have often been enforced as an intentional method of colonization.

an extremely effective tool of colonization is casting the colonizer group as “advanced” and the indigenous group as “backwards.” one method of doing so is to single out that culture’s traditions and present them to the colonizer culture as “savage,” reassuring them that they’re doing a good deed by colonizing these people. this can be so effective that the indigenous culture can internalize this rhetoric and self-perpetuate it, as we see in some modern turtle island indigenous peoples’ treatment of what we now refer to as two-spirit people.

when taboo is so intricately connected to this type of oppression, it is impossible to escape backlash to the taboo without meaningfully interacting with the reason it exists in the first place.

supporting taboo authors is GREAT. without support from other authors, taboo authors can never get anywhere!!

but more than this, to meaningfully break down this reaction, you must be willing to break down why it is so effective. you must be willing to listen to indigenous cultures with traditions that you have been taught are taboo and to ask why you think this way.

if you do not support decolonization, you do not support taboo artists. without decolonization, we’re just playing whack-a-mole, preserving certain artists’ continuing platform, NOT the ability for all to meaningfully interact with the world.

corporations are full of cowards and worms

on top of the connection to colonialism, it’s also important to think about the methods used to suppress art surrounding the taboo. in the current conversation, it’s primarily reporting taboo art to amazon, one of the more widespread distributors of ebooks on the internet.

amazon is very likely to take down a book if it gets enough reports, then request that the author prove they deserve to be put back up. amazon wants to outsource as much labor as possible to you, because even though you’re providing the product they sell to make money, you are not amazon’s prime interest. they care about people who are spending money on them — customers who buy, advertisers who spend, and, possibly most importantly, credit card processors who allow them to take payment.

corporations do not care about anything other than making money. there is no way for a corporation to be “good” or “bad”; a corporation’s board or stockholders may make some more or less moral choices, but under capitalism, corporations must exploit workers’ labor to provide excess profits that they funnel toward executives and shareholders.

advertisers and credit card companies care A LOT about brand image. credit card companies especially have proven that they are willing to pull support from NSFW sites if the site gets some amount of backlash higher than normal, regardless of why the backlash is happening.

because these sexual mores are largely shared by the general public (hence why they are perceived as taboo), amazon knows they are more likely to lose money from their main customer base pulling support than from a small slice of their product providers no longer providing said product. it’s a numbers game; they don’t have a moral opinion, they just need to make the most money.

what can you do?

supporting taboo authors is important, but it cannot be the end of your journey.

• support decolonization efforts, including cultural revitalization and landback: this is the most effective tool we have to build a truly sustainable and inclusive society in what is currently called north america. this can help us combat the puritanism that runs rampant in western society among both religious and non-religious groups.
• get communist with it: until we are no longer beholden to the flow of commerce, our society cannot take art seriously. amazon will never care about your art. open your mind to the idea that art exists outside of commerce (and then join your local SRA chapter)
• sharpen your critiques: learn to stop judging art, including taboo art, on a scale of “how much did it condemn things i think are bad?”. taboo art is of course still critiqueable, but really think about the goal of the art and whether it achieved that goal.