I find it typical that the racist bigot who professes a desire to 'protect our women!' from the racial Other is the same person as the sexist bigot who, if 'his woman' is raped, is the first to tell her it was her own fault.

The implicit contradiction highlights the fact that neither the racial-other nor the gender-other is the real point of the bigot's complaints. The bigot himself is; he is the center of his universe and the only real points that he can imagine being made are ones about him.

This is why he is often the same person who, in any discussion centering on the perceptions, problems and possible solutions of women, will stand up and proclaim that the discussion is "exclusionary" or "reverse sexism" because it is not about him. Or he may be the one who insists on telling everyone, and calling on everyone to witness and agree, that he is distressed and injured by the hostility of the discussion, because he is most certainly not one of the bad men the women in question are angry at. This is a slightly more subtle attention-grab, but it results in the discussion being hijacked and recentered on him just as surely as the first example.

The one thing that this kind of person fears most is finding out that he is not the center and turning point of the world.

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I'm always fascinated by thoughtful posts that ask whether we should put limits on what we create, in fandom. It's like some kind of reflex--the resonance of hostility to some particular story/trend/moment reaches critical and a recoil of skepticism is triggered.

The thoughtful posts generally seem to ask whether it's a good idea, artistically speaking, to censor creativity. They may well point out that whatever instance is currently targeted bears a remarkable resemblance to some other major category of fic/art that is widely accepted.

The latest round of this made me think about the mechanics of limits.

Practically speaking, limits are only ever possible in a small area. This archive won't post het; that archive won't post slash; this community will post translations but not scanlations. Only the small scale is controllable and, sure as the sun rises, the archive or comm next door is accepting whatever the first archive or comm denies, and vice versa.

Those are the limits that are written down, though. They're the obvious ones. They are not, I think, the strongest ones.

To take the current example, FFN should not remove/ban things like the HP-Holocaust-love-story fic; tackiness is not covered by their user agreement. That does not mean the story is being "allowed"; the author is, instead, inundated with comments to the effect that she is a sick, perverted, disgusting hack, and an historical ignoramus to boot.

Just because the rules aren't written down in a user agreement doesn't mean they don't exist. Nor that they aren't enforced. What it does mean is that the rules are being constantly re-made, by the very process of arguing over them. They are, you might say, the live rules.

I'm always amazed at how many people overlook this particular, and particularly vital, stage of rule-making.

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There are always reasons for preferences.

They do not exist in a vacuum, they do not spring, full formed, from the head of the prefer-er.

Preferences, even the most trivial, have reasons. Causes. Histories. Maybe it's as simple as "I don't like dogs because one bit me". Maybe it's as old and basic as "I like lemon better than apple because, way back during fetal and infant formation, there was a preponderance of Chemical X in my mother's blood-stream/milk, and that's how the stem cells developed into taste buds".

There are always reasons.

What everyone seems to miss is that, when it comes to personal preferences that harm no one else, we have no obligation whatsoever to explain the reasons. There's no call for you try to track down the reason you like sunrise better than sunset, or Sailor Moon better than Harry Potter, or women as lovers better than men--not unless you want to.

That doesn't mean the reasons don't exist.

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Sometimes, in I Ching, hexagrams go in pairs. Heaven over Earth and Earth over Heaven is one of those pairs.

One of the most common readings of this pair rests on the point that the movement of Heaven is upward while the movement of Earth is downward.

So Heaven over Earth, rather than being the happy, natural way of things, is a recipe for instability. Each of them flies off in its own direction, without any countervailing influences at all. It's a model of solipsistic extremism.

Earth over Heaven, on the other hand, is the concept of balance. The movement of each presses against the other and is held stable. Earth over Heaven can move in any direction at all, as long as both choose and move together. It's freedom, but also constraint, because, without that partner to balance against, it all unravels again.

Another interesting thing about I Ching is that each of the six lines in a hexagram can be stable or moving. A moving line will change into its opposite, solid to broken and broken to solid. So, for example, Heaven (three solid lines) with all three lines moving will be on its way to becoming Earth (three broken lines).

And now we come to the point of this. Our online text interactions with each other can be either Heaven over Earth or Earth over Heaven.

In either case, though, the lines are invariably all moving.

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