to be 100% clear: OTW volunteers are getting CSAM in their emails. as a protest against AO3’s content. I repeat: someone is sending actual literal child pornography to actual literal human people in order to protest fanfic they think is inappropriate.
So many anti friend groups are just straight up cults and it’s genuinely terrifying to see and be part of.
If you’re scared of your friends for whatever reason, it you’re scared of liking being in a specific fandom or liking a specific ship because you think you’ll lose all your friends over it, if your friend group is essentially built on the idea that you’re all good and everyone else is bad, if your friends use social ostracization and online stalking and harassment campaigns as threats and weapons, if your friends use fear and moral panic to keep people in line… . .
Please get out of there. This isn’t even about shipping or fandom or whatever, it’s about staying safe and not getting sucked into a literal cult. Cut them off, block them on all your social media, remake accounts if you need to, and make new friends who don’t leave you feeling like you’re walking on eggshells around them. Just stay safe.
Having to reblog the right call outs, memes, and discourse at the right time, or come under suspicion or attack yourself? Getting scolded or called out for delay in responding to messages, even if you were away from your computer? New friends must be vetted by powerful members of the group? Private discussions may be screenshotted and shared at any time? Behavior control.
Extensive block lists with social consequences if your friends find you still follow any of those people? Mainstream books or news sources with conflicting opinions dismissed as “problematic” or out of touch? Information control.
Being expected to adopt the newest language, positions and targets without explanation even if they rapidly change? Any concerns or objections dismissed as evidence of incurable stupidity at best, unforgivable moral corruption at worst? Lumping wide varieties of info and theory together in simple good and evil categories? Thought control.
Effusive praise for complying with group demands, including and especially behavior that may make you uncomfortable, like bullying others? Seeing your friends send dissenters death threats? “Hot and cold” treatment, favoritism, competition for attention by powerful or BNF members of the group? Guilt trips about spending time and attention elsewhere? Emotion control.
If you don’t recognize all of these things but recognize some of them, still take it seriously. Not every abusive relationship will look the same. Start with the question “Am I afraid to express that I disagree with this person or people in anyway?” and if the answer is ‘yes’, something is wrong and it’s worth examining that further.
i can’t believe “adults writing fanfiction about teenage characters is kinda creepy even if it’s g-rated” is a take that i have had to read with my own eyes on more than one occasion.
like…buddy. where do you think the source material came from? exactly how old do you think the original creators of your blorbos are? i am begging you to think about this for ten seconds.
Foz has been hosting a really great discussion lately on fanpolice and why it’s appropriate to call their mindset “purity culture” and see it as consistent with sex-negative Christian patriarchal views, even if the fancops in question aren’t Christian, or are LGBTQ+. I thought I’d add some perspective, as a Christian who hears perspectives from a lot of different denominations, about just where these attitudes are coming from.
Because Foz is right and I can provide details: the trends of thought we see in fandom about how shipping the wrong thing is dangerous and destructive almost precisely echo what is taught about sexuality in many Christian churches.
Largely, conservative Christians have been clinging to an old interpretation of Scripture that says sexual desire is destructive and bad, and ignoring all the research that’s come out that says, no, it’s a lot more complicated than that. They frequently try to use scientific studies to prove their point and disguise their Christianity to appeal to a secular audience, but they’re still trying to quell a wealth of research that says:
You see, a lot of Christians reject the research on sex because it goes against their religion as they understand it. In Matthew 5:28, Jesus says, “[A]nyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
Traditionally, most Christians have interpreted this to mean that entertaining sexual fantasies and viewing pornography is fundamentally harmful and bad. The Christian view of lust and sexual desire is largely that they are, except in the very particular setting of a monogamous marriage, injurious to the self and to others. This is an attitude that many Christian groups have backed away from, but by no means all.
One of the Christian efforts I’ve seen gain traction is Protect Young Minds. Its explicitly stated purpose is to teach children to “reject pornography”, because it views sexually explicit media as fundamentally harmful and bad. Its emphasis is on teaching children to close their eyes and turn off the screen if they see any sexually explicit images, ever. There is no plan, anywhere, for when kids become old enough to want to seek out sexual content–because they think that adults should never view porn either–but they don’t emphasize that bit, instead focusing on protecting the children.
So when everything a person is saying lines up with these attitudes, except with the tiny proviso that your One True Destined Soulmate You Will Spend The Rest of Your Life With is now allowed to be the same gender as you if you want?
Yeah. That’s conservative Christian purity culture in a gay hat.
(New rule: Anyone who expects me to seriously engage with their disagreements and provide research and analysis in my reply has to send me $20 first. And anyone accusing me or anyone else of being a sexual predator without proof can fuck off into the sun. I’ll just block you)
Seconding all of this and adding: you do not have to support the type of Christian dogma mentioned above to perpetuate a similar pattern of thought. The comparison lies in the subject matter and the way the arguments function, not in the big emotional/spiritual Why of how you come by those arguments in the first place. It’s disingenuous to say “one of these things is about controlling women for the church while the other is about saying darkfic is bad, how can they possibly be similar?” while pointedly ignoring the parallel chains of reasoning used to support both causes.
It’s not a competition as to which group has caused more damage globally or historically, nor about which has the bigger reach. It’s simply a matter of saying, “counter to what we provably know about human sexuality and psychology, both these groups insist that specific types of sexual fantasies, which they deem Morally Bad, are inherently linked to your real-world desires, such that failing to suppress those fantasies makes you a Bad Person whose indulgence in them will cause Bad Things to happen to you and/or others, because there is no moral difference between fantasy and reality.” That you also get antis unironically echoing right-wing religious talking points about how all fiction should be moral and educational lest it corrupt the youth, to the point where certain books or ideas should be banned from schools or libraries, only adds an extra dimension of irony to the comparison.
seems rather aphobic to me
No $20, no substantive response for you.
(Short response: No, purity culture isn’t good for ace/aro people either, and while it’s your absolute right to go “I personally am repulsed and disgusted by sex and want nothing to do with it” it’s NOT your right to say “Sex is objectively disgusting, gross, and dangerous, and anyone who feels otherwise is a dangerous sexual predator who should be stopped.”)
If anyone else wants to reply to this be my guest, but I have work to do.
Sex being regarded as just a thing people do if they want to, rather than it being normative to obsessively center your life around it, whether positively or negatively, would be better for ace and ace-spec folks as well, because that obsessive expectation is detrimental to everyone’s well being, whether or not they personally experience sexual attraction, or want to or have sex themselves. On the aro side, since iirc about 80% of aro and aro-spec folks are allosexual, there’s a similar argument to be made for decentering romance, which does get caught up in the above purity culture ideas of when someone’s “allowed” to want and have sex, invariably involving romantic love, so there’s a direct line to how the dictates of purity culture harm aro and aro-spec folks as well, by insisting that one must experience romantic attraction and undertake all the amatonormative trappings thereof.
And aroace folks get parts of both sides of this while those same champions of purity culture harass and ostracize those who neither experience those attractions nor desire them because it disrupts their entire framework of control. Purity culture’s ideal person experience sexual attraction and sexual desire but feels bad about it, and also experiences romantic attraction, because then its proponents can hook into that shame and those desires and press their dictates onto their targets. Anyone who not only doesn’t fit that mold but can’t be pushed into it either, they fundamentally want that person to not exist, not too dissimilarly from proponents of patriarchy and how trans people upend all of its dictates and truisms.
Anything that provides an alternative viewpoint or even a path to questioning their control, they wish to erase from the world. That’s a whole lot of us. They want complete control of the rest. All of it is wrong. Controlling people will never lead to a better world, and it will never actually bring a feeling of safety to those trying to do so, because there’s no level of control that’s enough for that. It’s a bottomless well and we all suffer for their effort to fill it.
The core of purity culture–whether Christian or fandom–is saying “we define what normal is, we know what thoughts and feelings Good People have and what thoughts and feelings Bad People have.” That is, at its core, what it’s all about. Good=normal=what we like, and people are good or bad depending on how well they fit inside that very narrow range.
In theory, ace and aro people would be welcome in purity culture, because if you’re not interested in sex you’re not interested in the bad kind of sex. However, the emphasis is so much on control and normality, that in practice aces and aros are likely to face almost as much problems as kinksters. Because we don’t fit that idea of “normal.”
Also, while some aces are sex-repulsed, not all of us are! Some aces have libido (a sex drive), it’s just not connected to any form of sexual attraction to other people. Some aces have little/no libido, but still like the feeling of orgasm. There’s a wide range. And guess what! Some aces like sexual fantasies! And some of those sexual fantasies are kinky or dark! There are aces who happily read and/or write really filthy porn. They’re still not sexually attracted to anyone, they’re still ace, but they enjoy explicit fantasies, both their own and other peoples’.
All of which is really threatening to purity culture people, for two reasons. First, the obvious, they don’t want anyone having kinky or dark fantasies. But second, because it is a really obvious threat to the foundation of their core argument.
Remember, their core argument is that having a fantasy about something means you want to do that in real life. If people whose whole sexual identity is that they don’t want to have sex still have sexual fantasies? Then obviously people can have fantasies that they don’t want to act out in reality, and therefore their whole foundation crumbles like dust in the wind.
An ace person having, reading, or writing, the mildest, sweetest, most vanilla sex scene in the history of sex scenes is a direct threat to purity culture.
full offense but none of you would have ever survived fanfiction.net in 2009
remember when writers had to be all like: “omg omg lemon starts HERE”
y’all are lucky that ao3 has tags andfilters you can set
Sometimes shit was marked “lemon” and it’d just be them making out, and sometimes they’d just start pissing on each other
No rules, no laws, you took your life into your hands opening fics
A/N: this contains SLASH, that means TWO MEN, if that makes you uncomfy, DON’T READ!
A/N: please don’t sue me, o anime overlords, I’m not making any money off of this! I’m just a broke student! I don’t have any money!
A/N: I totally wrote this while high off 10 Red Bulls wheeeeeee!!!!!
A/N: COMMENT if you want me to continue the next chappy!!!
No, no, no
remember when there’d be interactions with the author and the characters?
InuYasha: I don’t get why I have to be here for this
A/N: Because it was in your contract!!1!1 *revs chainsaw*
god those were lawless times.
…I’m fucking SWEATING
this is literally giving me flashbacks
Flash forward to 2022 and there are people who read all 100 tags, the spoilery summary, the initial fic note AND the new update note reiterating not JUST possibly triggering content but chapter-specific warnings about content—
AND THEY STILL COMPLAIN IN THE COMMENTS
Physician, heal thyself
And never time travel to the early aughts. You’re weak and would not survive the winter.
