Problematic Faves and Guilty Pleasures

We all have them, the books or movies or TV series we love which have problematic contents. Stuff we shouldn’t love, but love nevertheless. They’re like comfort food - not always healthy for you, but there’s times when you just need them to feel better. Whether it’s sitting down with an old-fashioned romance novel when you’re stressed out or whether it’s a pulp novel you take to the pool during your summer vacation, there’s books you just love and turn to when you want to be really comfortable.

Everyone has at least one favourite which is problematic to a degree, since no author is perfect and so there’s usually something in a novel which isn’t ideal or shouldn’t be there. Some stories are more heavy on this, others have only a slight problem that could have been avoided. It’s not uncommon to call something you love even though you know it’s flawed a guilty pleasure, but I’m not a fan of that. Pleasure should never be guilty, unless it involves hurting someone else.

Reading an old-fashioned romance novel where the female lead has next to no agency and just swoons into the hero’s arms is not hurting anyone. Sure, it’s not a feminist take and may not do any of the main characters justice, but it’s not hurtful. The same goes for reading a pulp novel which might be not only sexist (most are, turning their female character either evil or into damsels), but quite often also have racist undertones. It’s not hurting anyone to read it, either. As long, that is, as you are aware of the problems. As long as you not blithely claim that there’s nothing wrong.

As a matter of fact, the older your favourite story is, the more likely it is to have some aspects which don’t hold up well by today’s standards. Sensibilities were different in the past and what is considered wrong today wasn’t necessarily considered wrong twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago. That doesn’t mean every story which is that old (or older) must be avoided and is too horrible to keep in print. If a book as old as a hundred years is still in print, that usually means the author didn’t just do things wrong, but must also have done at least one thing right.

I love “Dracula”, but I’m also aware it has quite some issues by today’s standards. I’m a huge fan of pulp novels, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get the sexist and racist undertones especially the old stuff has (and the new stuff sometimes copies without really thinking about it). Do I write the same things into my stories? I hope not and I look out for it, but I can’t guarantee there’s no scene in my stories which doesn’t have its problems as well. I’m just human and I do make mistakes.

Problematic favourites become a problem when you refuse to acknowledge that a story has problems and say ‘it’s fine and you’re just misinterpreting it’ instead. If you fight others over how they get the sexist, racist, or other part wrong and it’s all different and means something else which is good and right.

Does “Huckleberry Finn” have racist parts? Yes (also lots of cussing). Does that mean there’s nothing good in the novel? Hell, no. Does it mean that Mark Twain was a bad writer? Nope, definitely not. It just means that, because of different sensibilities, we can see today that some of the content isn’t okay and shouldn’t be seen as right.

Is most of Lovecraft’s work racist as hell? You can bet your soul on that. Does that mean he wasn’t a good writer? No. He came up with a completely new aesthetic for horror, a complete opposite of the gothic horror which came before. He gave us gods so horrible that just reading about them might drive you utterly mad. That is quite something. It doesn’t excuse his racism (which even surpassed that of his fellow citizens at the time), but it doesn’t have to. We can talk about the racism and condemn it and still accept that he wrote good horror. Only don’t try to copy his racism when you go for a take on the Great Old Ones today, m’kay?

I’m certainly not going to tell you to give up all those novels you love and have read more than once, just because parts of them are problematic. I’m not going to give up my occasional rereading of “Dracula” or Stoker’s other novels. I’m certainly not going to give up my pulp reading. I’m aware there are problematic parts and I would never try to excuse them or argue they’re not there. I just don’t let them get in the way of enjoying the rest of the story. Would I like it if they weren’t there? Sure. Do I want people to rewrite and censor old books? No, definitely not. There’s something to learn from them, something to learn about the time they were written in, something to learn about how not to do some things.

I do expect something more from modern authors, admittedly. Twain or Lovecraft or Stoker were not really aware of some of the problems in their books (although Lovecraft must sometimes have been told ‘dude, that’s racist’ even at his time), an author putting the same things into their books today should know better. That doesn’t mean that I will throw away every modern pulp novel just because it copies the sexist (not so often the racist) parts of the old pulp stories. There are nice exceptions (like the way the Brother Bones series handles both women and suggests an interracial relationship in the 1930s), but there’s a lot of stories which just sideline women and turn them into damsels, just as it was ‘always done’. Which, by the way, is a bad excuse - if we always went on doing things as they were ‘always done’, we’d still be living in trees (which would be better for our planet, no doubt). I can see why not everyone wants to have a female lead and there’s no reason for that, either. It would be nice, though, if more women were shown as their own person with their own agenda and a few male friends of the hero got themselves kidnapped and locked up instead. If you could top that with a few queer heroes - all the better.

Do not feel ashamed about your favourite books. They’re your favourites because they touch some part of your soul. Be aware they have problematic parts and don’t try to argue they don’t, but cherish them for what they are: comfort food for your soul.