Microaggressions Make For Bad Art

I've been reading romances all my life (even when I was a little kid and could barely read, I was enamored with fairy tale romances). I've been reading yaoi and then M/M romances for approximately five years.

All good romances are about two basic ideas:

1. Self-recognition.
2. Recognition of the other. 

In order for these two things to occur, the characters need to have flaws, undergo a journey where they recognize their individual flaws, and undergo a journey where they accept, forgive, embrace, and love the other person and that other person's flaws.

And yes, Pride & Prejudice is still the seminal text here. Most of the narrative occurs through Elizabeth's experience, so she is the one we readers see change and grow the most. However, Darcy also changes and grows (there's a lot happening in that middle panel). We know this not only from his final actions but from the various ways he tries to adjust even when still at Netherfield (I attempt to give more of Darcy's point of view in my novella A Man of Few Words).

Although both Elizabeth and Darcy have thrown labels at each other, they both come to realize that labels are not a pathway to understanding but a hindrance. True understanding is accomplished through insight into the other person's individual motivations, emotions, beliefs, background, and desires.

So far, every romance I have read that has retreated to labels based on offense at a word or phrase or gesture or expression ("You did that because you are _________phobic! I've been taught what that phrase you think is so innocent really means--I'll put you in your place before you offend me more!") has been absolutely dreadful.

In other places, I discuss why I disagree with this kind of thing politically. But here, I will say emphatically, IT'S BAD ART.

Art is individual humans or groups of individual humans (because like it or not, we are all born in our own heads and bodies and we die in our own heads and bodies) presenting a story or lyrics or images that reflect experience, belief, ideas, daydreams, desires, imagination. They reflect the human condition. They add to it. We simultaneously discover more about ourselves and more about others when we pick up a novel or view a painting or read a poem or watch a play. We are entertained. We are exalted. We are curious.

Labels come from the same mental

 gyrations that produce vicious

cliques and murderous mobs--as

Golding skillfully captures.

Labels destroy this. In stories that utilize labels--not in passing but as part of the stories' raison d'être--there's no character development, no arc, no growth, no change, no self-recognition. The stories devolve instead to one character, the main protagonist, successfully parsing, then categorizing everyone else's words and phrases and expressions.

Gold star! Congratulations! You passed the "I can put every person in a room into a box and nail it shut it" test! You can now go back to high school and successfully maintain a mean, self-righteous clique that mocks all the people who don't think exactly like you (and don't read your mind)!

This is not art. It's not civil or truly tolerant either. But it is especially not art. Art is big and messy and makes mistakes. Art embraces experience. Art delves deeper beneath appearances and labels. Art loves the individual. Art enlarges rather than flattens. It entertains rather than scolds. Art is stupid sometimes and silly and kitschy and cliched. And awe-inspiring and fun and weird. And sarcastic and serious and spoofy. And even, shock shock, offensive. Or not. Sometimes, it is sweet. And clever. And kind.

Art is not "look how many labels I can smother the world with!" or "I've learned to heave myself up by putting other people down!"

That's politics.

Keep the politics. I'll take the art.