“So when I would show my prosthetic leg in my YouTube videos, I began getting age restricted for potentially “disturbing imagery.” So i made a video talking about this, talking about how messed up and wrong that is, and the hardest thing to deal with has not been people being, like: “You do need to have a trigger warning on you.” “You’re gross.” Whatever. Uh, it’s the people who are like: “Dude, I totally get it. I’m on your side. I don’t think you’re disturbing, but–” Uh, like this one: “You kind of do deserve a PG rating in life, because you could be traumatizing to the children.” I just want you to pause for a moment, and think about that. You do realize that there are disabled KIDS out there. You do realize that there are kids with, uh, limb differences and amputations, who have to go to friggin’ school. Are you suggesting that the world and their other classmates need to be protected from the sight of them, because they could be traumatizing? “What if the kids don’t know how to deal with it?” Then they LEARN. That’s part of growing up. This is absolutely absurd. Comments like this make me so frustrated, because it’s like they’re coming at you like they’re an ally, and they just want to help, but what they’re saying is so messed up.”
I’m angered and frustrated by the newest crop of anti-trans, anti-queer, and anti-critical race theory laws in their own right, because they are unjust and detrimental to the whole of our society, even though I am cis and white.
But then, I get occasional reminders that there are people working at YouTube, and people in YouTube’s audience who think Iand other Disabled people, are also“Age-Inappropriate,” and I get a momentary twinge of fear, mixed in with that anger. How much longer until I cannot freely discuss Disability History, without fear of retribution or sanction (not that disability history is discussed at all, now, except within the Disability Community).
And I also realize that that twinge of fear is evidence of my own privilege, because it’s surprising when it comes, and it’s brief, until it comes back. And that reminds me of how I’ve been protected by White and Cis privilege, all the rest of my life.
I’m just so tired.
I mean… people will literally say that my wife, who has visible self-harm scars, which used to be incrediblyandimmediately visible but are now far less so, requires a trigger warning just for existing with their sleeves pushed up.
No one’s body requires a trigger warning. No matter how those injuries or disabilities came about… unless they are posting actively bleeding fresh injuries (which, yeah, that’s something you have control over, and isn’t cool to inflict on people who don’t expect it)… that’s the body they’re living in. No part of that needs to be warned for. Even if the injuries are fresh. Even if they’ve got a tapestry of raised red scars, or visible fresh scabbed over wounds… that’s their fucking body. That’s their human fucking existence.
You don’t get to tell anyone that’s inappropriate.
My grandmother had a prosthetic leg when I was a small child and nobody told me that I needed a content warning to see it or that it was disturbing imagery.
I would be vastly more sympathetic to the “the term purity culture should refer only to a specific religious system of misogyny and using it to talk about antis elides its origins, thereby devaluing a serious issue” argument if anti culture wasn’t functionally defined by using the word “pedophilia” to mean “what happens when anyone of any age writes stories where a character younger than eighteen kisses someone or is otherwise sexual.”
Like. I’m just. I’m sorry, but you cannot grossly misuse such serious terms as pedophilia or incest by arguing repeatedly that depiction is always endorsement, that there’s no difference between fictional people and real people, and that any sexual fantasy a person enjoys precisely because it isn’t real is indistinguishable from a fantasy they want to see enacted IRL, then get mad when someone points out that you’re morally policing the sexuality of strangers using strikingly similar arguments to the purity culture people.
When someone writes gory, gruesome murder stories, even if they’re written from the POV of a psychopathic killer, our first thought is not, “oh shit, that person is either an aspiring serial killer or they have bodies in their basement,” because we understand the distinction between fiction and reality. But if someone writes about dark sexual themes and suddenly you’re freaking out about their sexuality IRL? That is because you’ve absorbed puritan views about sex, ie, the idea that your sexual imagination and your sexual desires are one and the same, such that, if you indulge in “sinful” fantasies, it’s as bad as doing those things.
The reason religious purity culture is so obsessed with female chastity to the point of demonising masturbation or premarital anything is due to the belief that female sexuality exists solely for male pleasure, and therefore male approval. A father ‘owns’ his daughter’s chastity until he ‘gives’ her to a husband; therefore, she must stay ‘pure’ for their sake, because any indulgence on her part will ‘taint’ that purity. Crucially, the belief is also that one woman is potentially representative of all women: one ‘loose’ woman can make all women loose in the eyes of men, and therefore you aren’t just protecting yourself and your chastity by acting modestly, but the reputation of other women you’ve never even met. You’re simultaneously responsible for the virtue of women as a category while also being the keeper of such specific chaste value as, through you, belongs to your father and future husband. This is also why ‘pure’ women are encouraged to shun ‘impure’ women - impurity is transitive by association, such that if you, a ‘pure’ woman, are seen to associate with an ‘impure’ woman, well; that must only be because you, too, are secretly impure. This being so, it’s likewise expected that men, being more sexual creatures, will be lustful and sexually desirous, such that women are expected to curtail the presentation of their own sexuality in all forms to avoid ‘tempting’ them to sin, both against themselves and, potentially, other women; this is both deeply misogynistic and a way to blame victims for ‘leading on’ their assailants.
It’s also the exact same logic that antis use - not because antis are misogynistic patriarchs, but because they, too, argue that an individual’s sexuality must be curtailed in order to prevent hypothetical strangers from being ‘tempted’ towards their worst inclinations or, if they didn’t have those inclinations beforehand, made to ‘stray from the path’.
“You can’t ship those two underage characters - someone might use that fic to prey on a minor!” Such a thing, if it happened, would inarguably be the fault of the predator, who did not magically spring into existence the second the fic was written, even if the fic in question was actual darkfic and not just two 16yos consensually getting to second base; nonetheless, anti logic - like purity culture - will blame the ficwriter for ‘inciting’ the predation.
Bottom line: when you tell someone, “your sexual fantasies are bad and wrong, if you’ve EVER found X concept arousing in the privacy of your mind or in a fictional context, that means you want it exactly the same way IRL and are therefore either a predator or the willing inspiration of predators,” YOU ARE ENGAGING IN A LITERAL FORM OF PURITY CULTURE. The underlying dogma you use to shore up your claims is less important than the logic you use to enforce them: and that logic is, “you must strive to meet my specific moral definition of sexual purity, because if you don’t, you’ll provoke sexual malfeasance towards yourself and others, and when that happens, it’ll be your fault.”
The rest of society absolute will and should reject yall for reading graphic depictions of sex between minors. You are grown ass adults and frankly its nasty as fuck. And no, having the very easily not crossed boundary of “children are off limits to adult sexual fantasies” does not make you some fundie patriarch. To clarify this is specifically about children. Like yall are really trying to justify why its ok to have the same fantasies as Woody Allen and R Kelly bc I guarantee they wouldve liked this shit too.
I was sixteen when I very consensually lost my virginity to someone a year older than me, in a place where sixteen was the age of consent; I was not a child, and even though I’m older now, those experiences and my feelings about them remain valid. If I, as an adult, read fic about make-believe teenage characters doing what I did at that same age, what does it matter? The only real person in that equation is me. You might as well argue that it’s creepy for adults to read YA novels with romantic plotlines, or to watch shows like Teen Wolf where the teenage characters have sex.
Like. Never mind the fact that, by comparing fanfic readers to Woody Allen and R. Kelly, you’re proving my point about antis not being able to distinguish between actual pedophilia that happens to real underage children in the real world and stories about fake teenagers fucking; never mind how a large number of people who *do* write sexually about fictional children are victims of child abuse themselves looking to process their trauma - why is the baseline assumption that, when *anyone* reads or writes darkfic, they must be sexually identifying with the abuser and not the victim? Not to break your brain, here, but people fantasise about dark things happening to them a hell of a lot, and that’s both normal and healthy - as is fantasising about things specifically in the context of them not being real.
Because that’s what this boils down to, really. Why do you care what someone does in their brain or in fiction if it doesn’t affect their actions or hurt anyone? Nobody’s asking you to join in, and it’s easy to avoid something if it’s not what you like. If you can’t understand why someone would or could fantasise about a particular thing in the abstract without ever wanting it in person, then go read up on human sexuality.
*pinches bridge of nose* this is just… AUGH.
Look.
Here’s the thing. You cannot talk about minors as a monolith in sexual terms, because the different between a 6yo being molested and a 16yo having consensual sex is *massive*. Rendering that distinction as flat and meaningless is not only wildly inaccurate, but dangerously irresponsible. Because of rhetoric like this, there are now actual human teenagers who think they’re pedophiles for finding someone slightly younger than them attractive. This is now a real problem that exists because of anti discourse: teens who think “oh fuck, I’m a monster” because of how indiscriminately and inaccurately the term “pedophile” is used.
If someone is sufficiently sexually mature to be having sex with a person around their own age, then BY DEFINITION, the term “pedophilia” CANNOT AND DOES NOT apply in that case. It’s infantilising to teenagers to act as if they cannot consent to sex; yes, there are adults who, IRL, make a habit of pursuing teens, which is gross, but the word we have for those people is PREDATOR. Why does this distinction matter? Because predators don’t exclusively prey on the young; they prey on the *vulnerable,* which is not always the same thing. And the distinction especially matters when we’re talking about fiction, because IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO PREY ON A PERSON WHO DOESN’T EXIST.
A fictional teenager is no more a pre-pubescent child than they are a real person. By your logic, a 20yo who reads or writes about a 17yo having sex is a pedophile, which makes absolutely zero sense. At 17, I started dating a guy who was 24; I turned 18 about a week later, and did not magically develop a whole new Adult Body or Adult Sensibilities the second the clock struck midnight, because *that’s not how it works.*
When adults write or read graphic smut about teenage characters, it’s not morally wrong, and it’s sure as hell not pedophilia. It harms literally no one, because the characters aren’t real, and stems from a completely different set of impulses to what we’re after IRL. You might as well claim it’s adultery for married people to read or write smut of any kind unless it’s about their spouse.
I said this before and will say it again: adults have memories of being teenagers, and those memories inform our interests. If I read about two teenagers having angsty sex in a high school AU, I’m thinking about how it felt when *I* was having angsty sex at that age, or what it would be like to be those characters. You’ve got this overly simplistic, wildly inaccurate idea in your head that there’s only one way to fantasise about something and only one thing it can mean, and there’s entire fields of study that prove how wrong you are, and responding with “but I think it’s gross!” isn’t an argument.
Back in the Sixties and Seventies, the Romance genre exploded, starting down the path toward becoming the billion-dollar engine that it is now: a woman-dominated industry, cranking out self-made millionaires by the dozen. But feminists hated it in those days, because so many of those early bestsellers were romances in which the heroine got raped, usually by the man she eventually ended up in love with. (No, those kinds of romances haven’t vanished, and yes, A/B/O is a variation on the same theme. But this comment is long enough already, and I’m speaking in generalities.)
Did the authors who wrote those things want to be raped? Hell no. Were they advocates of rape-as-meet-cute in real life? Absolutely not. Had some of them been raped themselves? Almost certainly, given the stats on rape. Did they write about it because they enjoyed it or wanted to promote some kind of pro-rape ideology? Fuck no. Were they creating one anyway? Not really; we already live in a rape society. But then… why did they do it?
The actual cause of the popularity of rape fantasies is societal. At the time – the start of the Sexual Revolution – women were raised amid twin, conflicting societal pressures: 1) women should enjoy sex [this was before ace discourse; at the time, women who didn’t want sex were derided as “frigid”] so men can get more and society can get more babies, and 2) women who openly desire sex are sluts and should be ashamed of themselves. These two pressures are diametrically opposed to each other. Women responded to this Catch-22 by fantasizing (and writing) about having wild, amazing sex… but only when men forced them into it. This freed them from the “slut” shame, because they weren’t the ones who initiated it! But it allowed them to imagine that sex could be amazing, because the kind of man who would rape a woman was presumed, at the time, to be somehow extra-virile, with a big cock and lots of prior experience and the skill to make a woman enjoy herself, even if she didn’t want to. These were effectively fantasies of being free from the utterly stupid layers of patriarchial bullshit that society puts on women, and just having a good time without having to worry about what others would think. Nancy Friday, author of My Secret Garden, explained it this way: “Rape does for a woman’s sexual fantasy what the first martini does for her in reality: both relieve her of responsibility and guilt.“
Saying “Women shouldn’t fantasize about rape” makes about as much sense as saying “Women shouldn’t live in rape culture.” We shouldn’t! But we do. We are a patriarchial, misogynistic society that holds women to impossible standards, so our fantasies reflect this. By indulging these fantasies, women start to understand themselves better, and process the internalized shame in a healthy way. Many of the same women who wrote these books then went on to change society so that spousal rape is no longer legal, rape is no longer considered a property crime, and so on. Still lots of work to be done. But it’s very clear from their actions that these women might have indulged in rape fantasy but they were as far from being “pro-rape” as you can get.
Our society is one that also fetishizes youth. This shit is not normal; few other societies obsess over youth the way that ours does, and there’s no good reason for it. Young people are bad at sex. They don’t know what they want and they don’t know what they’re doing; that’s just how inexperience works. (There’s no good evolutionary reason for the youth fixation, either, to head off the evopsych weirdos at the pass; teen pregnancy has a much higher mortality rate than with adults.) And until modern times, even the elites of our society didn’t particularly hyperfocus on youth the way that they do now; a very young woman was a “risky investment” because she might turn out to be “frigid,” barren, or die in childbirth. The only reason our society does obsesses over youth the way that it does now is because of purity culture’s grotesque focus on women’s sexuality as a commodity, to be traded between men as a status symbol. They like their merchandise unused or “like new.”
All of us are, or were, young at some point. None of us were ready to be the focus of so much societal pressure, sociopolitical/economic power, or psychosocial weirdness, at the time that we experienced the worst of it. It will take all of us a lifetime to process those experiences – and some of us will process them through sexual fantasy. Saying we shouldn’t is basically saying that we shouldn’t live in a youth-fetishizing society. Well, sure, we shouldn’t, but we do, and until that changes – which a lot of fanfic writers are doing their damnest to facilitate – we have to find a way to live with that pressure. We have to find a middle ground between the contradictory ideas of our society: 1) that youth is the peak of desirability and importance, and 2) that minors are non-sexual beings who are vulnerable to adult power and desires. Both are bullshit. But we need a way to process our own experiences of being young and being very much sexual beings, without guilt. Are we all trying to become pedophiles? Fuck no. But the reason these fantasies exist is because they are a normal, healthy way to cope with our abnormal, unhealthy society. And the way to address them is not to try and shame people for the way they cope, but to change society.
It’s easier, not to mention viscerally satisfying, to just wag a finger at a few fanfic writers for committing a “thoughtcrime.” The world feels better when it can be broken down into simple black-and-white, good-or-bad binaries. But the world is not binary or simple.
Want to cut down on sexual stories about under-18s? Acknowledge that young people are sexual beings. Acknowledge that older people used to be younger people, and there isn’t some neat sexual demarcation line between adults and minors. Notice how many of the people telling you that fanfic writers are evil are themselves abusers and pedophiles, projecting their own grotesquerie onto others and pulling a DARVO to deflect attention from their own misdeeds. Learn more about how the human mind works and how trauma, especially ongoing collective trauma, is processed.
i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
Youdo not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibilityto try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderouslyoppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
Andnobodyshould have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Pleasestop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as theactual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actualelementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginaryand you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault. (It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
Iget wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.
Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
I like this last addition.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.
So we did.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.
This thread keeps getting better.
It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over
Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y'all, so y'all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.
You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.
Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.
Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.
Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.
I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”. If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:
Apreview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!
I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.
1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)
2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.
3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding alltheir shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men.
Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.
Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.
(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)
The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.
Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable.They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.
This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.
History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.
(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)
Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.
He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyonegot them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.
There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.
You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.
Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.
It’s been touched on a little before but really it’s hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.
Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didn’t know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.
Also FanFiction doesn’t really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) It’s only years later, reading fanfic history posts that I’ve started to piece together what happened.
Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didn’t even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.
Hot damn, this post just keeps going!
I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and you’ll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblr’s purity crusade.
If you haven’t been TOSsed you really don’t get it, imo.
If you haven’t spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really don’t get it, imo.
Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going “I really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.”
A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we don’t remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.
Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.
I hated - hated fandom back when this LJ shit happened, but I was there. I’m both glad this thread is here, and irritated that it was felt necessary. How many times do we need to learn this lesson?
David Foster Wallace: But, again, the last twenty years have seen big changes in how writers engage their readers, what readers need to expect from any kind of art.
Larry McCaffrey: The media seems to me to be one thing that has drastically changed this relationship. It’s provided people with this television-processed culture for so long that audiences have forgotten what a relationship to serious art is all about.
DFW: Well, it’s too simple to just wring your hands and claim TV’s ruined readers. Because the U.S.’s television culture didn’t come out of a vacuum. What TV is extremely good at—and realize that this is “all it does”—is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. And since there’s always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering, TV’s going to avoid these like the plague in favor of something anesthetic and easy.
LM: You really think this distaste is distinctly American?
DFW: It seems distinctly Western-industrial, anyway. In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that’s causing you to suffer, they view this as basically healthy and natural, a sign that your nervous system knows something’s wrong. For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire’s still going. But if you just look at the number of ways that we try like hell to alleviate mere symptoms in this country- from fast-fast-fast-relief antacids to the popularity of lighthearted musicals during the Depression—you can see an almost compulsive tendency to regard pain itself as the problem. And so pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It’s probably more Western than U.S. per se. Look at utilitarianism—that most English of contributions to ethics- and you see a whole teleology predicated on the idea that the best human life is one that maximizes the pleasure-to-pain ratio. God, I know this sounds priggish of me. All I’m saying is that it’s shortsighted to blame TV. It’s simply another symptom. TV didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression. Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
From “The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2
No longer is this about the rights of students to access books. It’s now about the rights of private businesses to sell books. Anderson suggests this is a new avenue for parents to fight.
“We are in a major fight. Suits like this can be filed all over Virginia. There are dozens of books. Hundreds of schools,” he said.
Holy shit this is a BIG FUCKING WARNING SIGN. Challenges to school and public libraries aren’t cool obviously, but they’re not unusual and we have a framework for handling them. This is something new and alarming in a whole new way
Republican “free speech” y'all and don’t you forget it.
This is a direct challenge to the freedom of the press and if it isn’t struck down at the first hurdle we need to make sure it never sees the second one.
On the miniscule off-chance that anyone who sees my reblog might be thinking “oh, it’s just queer books that they’re trying to ban” - A Court of Mist and Fury is a het romance. It is a het romance containing het sex scenes, written by a straight white woman.
People have been warning all along that the right-wing thought police were never going to stop with queer lit or ‘woke’ lit, and that every time they got an inch they were going to take a mile until they’d banned absolutely everything that didn’t conform to their strict right wing fundamentalist Christian views. If you were waiting for proof of that, here it is.
