do all of you on here know you’re allowed to enjoy a show or artist without making up excuses for everything bad about it or writing five paragraph posts on tumblr dot org about how “Thats Good Actually, this is the msot progressive show in modern time and if you dont watch this show youre a Demon” like……. its okay… you can watch a show and acknowledge that it’s not 100% aligned with your morals and politics like its FINE no one is gonna come to your house and MURDER you for it
you have a brain, you are capable of critical thinking, you can sift through the material and keep what is edifying for you and discard what isn’t
flaws don’t necessarily make material worthless
all right i queued this last night because i was already posting a lot and didn’t want to flood anyone’s dash but you guys i need to talk about this more.
like, okay. i grew up REALLY STRICT christian. like. every piece of media i consumed underwent a fine-toothed comb by my parents to be sure there wasn’t anything “sinful” in it. I got into a tearful, screaming fight with my mother over whether I was allowed to watch a piece of educational children’s material on PBS because one of the characters said “damn” once.
(I’m still not sure they did. In retrospect, I think my purity-focused mother misheard something and, having her suspicions confirmed that you couldn’t trust any “secular” source not to be sinful, reacted accordingly.)
(Pay attention, that parenthetical was also relevant.)
Do you know what my teenage rebellion was? Listening to the oldies station in the car when I had my driver’s license and could go places on my own. That was my big fuck-you to my parents: listening to the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel and the Fifth Dimension when they couldn’t tell me how I shouldn’t be listening to them because the creators of that music were drug-addled, free-loving atheists whose own disregard for God and religion might just infect my impressionable spirit. Like I was gonna listen to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and go do LSD and become an atheist. This was my teenage rebellion in the year 1999.
I’m 35 now. And all right so I became agnostic. But I didn’t become a drug addicted prostitute because I loved listening to psychedelic rock music as a teenager. (And you know what? Even if I had become a drug addicted prostitute, I’d still have worth as a human being, so dissect that one.) And it wasn’t even the psychedelic rock music that turned me agnostic: It was Christianity itself. But that’s another story altogether.
My point here is: Y’all are on here acting like my goddamn parents, “don’t watch this” and “don’t listen to that” because this character does XYZ problematic thing and this author said ABC ignorant thing two years ago at a con when they were put on the spot in an interview. If you watch this movie where a teenager falls in love with someone five years older than them, you’re going to become a pedophile! If you read this book by an author who once used an outdated term for someone in the trans community, then you’re a transphobe!
Y’all need to sit the fuck down and stop acting like nobody ever taught you to think for yourself, because I know damn well that you’re capable of critical thought and you don’t need your media chewed up and spit into your mouth like a baby bird. And I’m an adult and I sure the hell don’t, so stop telling me I’m going to choke because I’m consuming something complicated, complex, and not already pre-morally-dissected for me.
Really? You think I haven’t thought about this issue? Is a story about recovery or dealing with trauma, is that “normalizing sexual relationships with children”? Should that be forbidden? Is that harmful? Should someone trying to deal with their own trauma by writing fiction that addresses it directly, should that be forbidden because it’s harmful?
Should I write only the sunniest, most proper fiction that never mentions anything disturbing or awful just in case some reader, somewhere, takes it as normalizing that awful? Is it my job to purge my work of anything that some kid, somewhere, might take in a way I didn’t intend and maybe be messed up by? Fuck no. Because let’s be 100% clear here, you actually can’t entirely predict what a reader will take away from a piece. One does one’s best. And I can’t tell another writer what to write, I can only tell them to be sure they mean to write what they write.
And the problem here is the sweeping condemnation of, what, the number of fics with particular tags? Seriously? As if it’s that simple?
Are you absolutely sure that every work tagged “pedophilia” on AO3 is wankfodder? Every one? None of them are stories where characters experience and process it, or just talk about it? None of them are stories where the authors are trying to process their own experiences? It’s never permissible to even mention pedophilia, lest someone be influenced wrongly? Should survivors never talk about or fictionalize their experiences? Really?
Do not lecture me on the responsibilities of authors–I have thought long and hard on the issue, and have come to the very considered conclusion that I have no interest in purity tests. Rape is bad, but not all stories about rape are bad. Racism is bad but not all stories about racism are bad. Pedophilia is bad but…you get the picture. Just saying “look at all these fics tagged “pedophilia” AO3 is doing a bad thing hosting them!” is so incredibly stupid I just don’t know where to begin. Are some of those fics toxic? Surely. Pretty much every other tag has toxic fics in it, too. Are all of them? I seriously have my doubts.
I am prepared to say that adults having sex with kids is bad, no nuance. I am NOT prepared to say that any fic about that topic is unambiguously bad. Because that’s not true.
I’m not in the business of telling people what to read or what to write. And you can take your list of things people somehow can’t write about because they’re bad and fuck all the way off.
What she and Foz said. And as to the anon’s point of fiction affecting reality re “Birth of a Nation” helping the KKK – let’s be super-clear, here, everyone. BoaN by itself did not resurrect the KKK. A toxic combination of economic motives, political cynicism, cowardice on the part of supposedly non-racist white people, and vicious opportunism caused that. BoaN was simply the best propaganda available for use by white supremacists who already existed, and who had long before implemented Black Codes and the Lost Cause myth and other means of retrenching America’s racist caste system. If BoaN hadn’t happened along when it did? The KKK would have found, or made, something else to use as its rallying cry.
Do I hate racist art? Yeah. But I deal with that by a) heeding warnings about it, and picking when (or if) I want to engage with it so that I minimize harm to myself, b) complaining about it when the people who publish it seem oblivious to the fact that it is racist art, and c) when I’m ready, writing anti-racist fiction that engages with it. I believe wholeheartedly in the notion that the job of the artist is to speak truth to power. But truth is many things. Truth is, sometimes, people writing out their rape fantasies so they can try to understand themselves better. Truth is people erasing the black characters from fanworks featuring their favorite media properties – and then getting called on it, and learning from the ensuing discussion. (Or not learning, and getting dismissed by a big chunk of fandom for it… and meanwhile, more quietly, truth is other fans learning from their fuckups.) Truth is critique, not blanket condemnation. (And not uncritical aggrandizement either.) This shit is too complex to handle with simplistic, black-and-white thinking. Love it or hate it, discourse ™ is the way to go.
Word.
Also read @nkjemisin’s books if you haven’t already.
Because those are specifically what I’m talking about. The argument
isn’t about it catering to children, it’s about not catering to people
who consume that kind of content. Which there is thousands of, if you do
a quick search of any of the tags used to find shit of that like.
I’m saying that while I personally abhor such things on such a visceral
level to the point where even thinking about it in a fictional context is making me shake and want to throw up as I type this, that doesn’t give me the right to decide who to censor and who to not. Cause where do you then decide that censorship ends? Once you allow the one to be censored, it allows for the censorship of the personal as well which is exactly what happened before. And anyone naive enough to believe that it wouldn’t happen again is in for a very rude awakening. We’re already seeing it come into effect with Microsoft censoring what they deem to be “explicit content”, which includes a lot of things from explicit imagery, right down to swearing.
This is actually something that’s been hashed out in courts of law over and over and over until we have come up with the laws that we do have, which are very helpfully explained here and are well worth the time to read:
And it has already been decided that legally, fictional depictions of certain acts even between adults and minors, can only be judged on a case by case basis to determine whether something has artistic merit or if it can be deemed too obscene as to be harmful.
And people making reports to the FBI over this kind of thing, is going to obliterate fandom again, and all the safe spaces the generations even before mine worked so hard to build are going to go with it. Again.
Just because I’m anti-censorship and losing my fandom spaces, doesn’t mean I want those stories on there, it doesn’t even make me okay with them existing on a personal level because I am not.
But I am aware of the consequences of what will happen if we do allow for that kind of censorship, and it’s not as clean cut as a lot of people believe. In an ideal world, maybe it would be. But we’re not in that world.
Now if you’ll excuse me. I’m going to go throw up.
This is, to me, a pretty solid example of why sometimes learned history and empirical examples trump good intentions and feelings.
Because every part of me screams that of course banning luridly ephebophilic content on creative platforms is the right thing to do. (And pedophilic content too of course, but that’s actually pretty heavily policed already). Especially platforms that minors frequent, where minors regularly consume content labeled ‘not for minors’, and there’s no good way to keep them out of such content. And it’s not immediately obvious to me why this would be a difficult issue to selectively police. Arguments for why it’s a slippery slope tend to sound like apologist arguments to me, rather than legitimate difficulties.
But you know what? I’m wrong. How I feel about this is demonstrably, historically wrong. Countries around the world have struggled, really fucking struggled, to decide how underage sexual acts should be legally handled in media and absolutely none of them have come up with an easy solution. The most common one is “the legal system will handle it on a case by case basis, when it’s clear there’s something to be looked at”. And I mean … damn. When that’s the best legal scholars can do you know it’s bad. I don’t even want to imagine what law school courses on this subject are like.
And in fanfiction specifically, there are horror stories of how this kind of policy was abused. How well-intentioned efforts had awful far-reaching consequences and how malicious actors abused the policing systems. The effects of this in the past unmade creative fandom on the internet and forced it to basically start from scratch so far as platforms went.
I wish, I wish, that simple common sense policing policies for this stuff worked. And it feels to me like they should! That makes it really hard for me to let go of the idea that there should be some way to make it work. But all the world’s lawyers and all the world’s committees haven’t managed to do it, so I’ve just got to bite my tongue and admit I’m not that smart. I will not succeed where they failed. So for fandom, we’ve just got to let fandom be posted and hosted as is.
Thank you, you just summed up exactly how I feel about all of this. And I’m so incredibly bitter that I’m having to be the one to make the “slippery slope” argument cause it just feels wrong. But this isn’t about my feelings. It’s about protecting ourselves against those who would silence us entirely, and if you think this whole thing is “just” about fanfiction, you are absolutely dreaming.
And as I’ve said during kink discussions— this slippery slope ends with the burden being predominantly taken by young women and queer folx who are just trying to explore their world. No one’s talking about MLP fandom or actual loli fans. This doesn’t hurt people with social capital to burn, like straight men sexualizing young girls. This is all within an community most specifically used by marginalized people. LGBTQ writers and people with trauma in particular bear the brunt of these attacks.
I remember when fic communities were being removed from livejournal because of claims of ‘pedophilia’ – and the people campaigning to remove the sites had another agenda, to remove LGBTQA communities. It’s the sharp end of the spear that starts widening to take everything out that a small group want to censor.
jinlinli 