I realize this might be a shock to hear. You grew up in or after the Think Of The Children™ and It Takes A Village™ era. It’s possible your mommies and daddies took you everywhere — bars, tattoo parlors, $100-a-plate restaurants, cocktail parties — without regard to how well you behaved. You concluded, therefore, you were welcome everywhere, and that all adults, everywhere, must cater to your presence or they’re just a bunch of big ol’ meanieheads.
Free clue: You are not, in fact, welcome everywhere. Nor is every single place, whether in meatspace or on the internet, obliged to think of you and your needs before anyone else’s.
Because adults have our needs, too. And, yes, writing stuff that gets us off or otherwise tickles our fancy is a need for some of us.
Here’s another free clue: Every single adult you encounter is, likewise, not obliged to but your needs first and foremost. Including… women. Strangers on the internet who happen to be women are not your mommies, not your aunties, not your big sisters, not your therapists. They did not sign up for the job of protecting and coddling your precious little asses. Not even the ones who have children themselves. The only ones they’re obliged to look out for are their kids.
I’m not one of those women. I never wanted children, I don’t care that much for children, and I feel absolutely no responsibility to mother them myself. If a minor whines at me for not making them my highest priority, I block them with extreme prejudice.
I can hear you gasping in shock right now. But the idea that women are obliged to nurture everyone out there is a really, really regressive idea. Oh, I can see how it gained currency on a site where the “social justice” crowd thinks that nail polish is feminist, Hades was Mr. Right and Demeter was an abusive mother, and if you’re a not-very-feminine woman you can’t be a cis woman. It’s bullshit, peddled by dipshits who don’t want to examine their underlying beliefs but who want cookies for being all moral and upright.
Now, getting back to spaces. You are not categorically unwelcome on fanart and fanfic websites. Many of them are considered perfectly safe in their entirety for your delicate little psyches. Others are a mix. If you go, for example, to AO3, and you see a fic rated G (general audiences) or T (teen)? You can read it.
If, however, you see a fic that is rated M for mature or E for explicit… or it has all those terrible tags like “Rape,” “Noncon,” “Dubcon,” or whatever else sends you into a shaking ’n’ crying fit? You have two choices:
1. Don’t click through.
2. Click through and pretend you’re an adult. Which means:
a. Don’t tell the author or the other commenters your age.
b. If you liked the story at all, feel free to give feedback about it.
c. If you didn’t like the story and it upset you, take responsibility for having clicked through, then go do some self-care.
Note that none of the above options include “Click through, get offended, whine at the author for having written something that upsets you, and maybe get a posse of your fellow antis together to hound the author off the internet.”
Those tags? Those were all the author owed their audience. Those tags give you the information you need not to click through if you don’t want to be offended, triggered, or disturbed by the fic. You do not have the right to insist that the fic not exist in a public forum.
As for “protecting young women and girls” blah de fucking blah: again, you are not going after abusers. And there’s another very regressive meme: that by policing the shit out of women’s self-expression, you can “protect” them. Nope. You protect them from abusers by targeting the abusers. And writing something “problematic” isn’t abuse. Because fiction isn’t reality and depiction isn’t endorsement.
Yes, this.
Also, I’ve been meaning to add to this Discourse going around for quite awhile and it hasn’t been the right moment- and maybe now isn’t either, but here’s this-
All of this is true, and it is not anyone in fandom’s job to control what anyone else in fandom reads….and this post touches on the point I’m going to make a little, but in addition to ‘we aren’t here to be your mom’, can the collective act of pretending we didn’t read adult content until we were over 18 please stop?
I mean…come on, guys, I know good and damn well from talking to hordes of other fans over the years, the /vast/ majority of fanfic writers/readers started around the same age I did- 12.
I was 12, and I was reading straight up porn any time I could get my hands on it, and you know what, it was really, really fucking good for me.
Not only was it the first (and only, for many years) source to tell me that sex wasn’t shameful or terrifying or that it was okay for women to be interested in it, it gave me a way to begin to explore my own interests. To learn alll kinds of things about sex and relationships that weren’t- and never would be- taught in school…and to go beyond that into exploring my own tastes.
People by and large like to forget that kids around that age are developing sexual interests and urges and that isn’t fucking shameful and it isn’t something they should be forbidden from exploring or discussing. I was smart enough not to give my age (and I didn’t interact with authors back then anyway except once in a blue moon), but if I’d had I’d hope to God that instead of slamming the fucking door in my face someone would have welcomed me. Like, Jesus, people, don’t act like you didn’t do the very same exact thing; it’s straight up hypocritical to put headings on your blog that say things like “DON’T FOLLOW ME OR READ MY FIC IF YOU’RE UNDER 18!!!!!!!!” when you yourself have probably been reading/writing porn since you were 13.
Yes, fandom is full of adult women writing about sex and kink and all manner of non sexy things as well, but it’s also full of young women writing and reading the same…and that’s okay. We can coexist. We did it for fucking years. I literally don’t remember witnessing a single incident like some of the whining I’ve seen on tumblr- and there, this post is right. A big difference is probably in how we were raised.
Our parents /could not know/, full stop, what we were doing- and most of them had no idea to even check. There were no parental controls on our computers to get around; we just had to keep from being straight up caught red handed. My mother was incredibly strict in other ways, but she was not tech savvy and didn’t have the skills to police my internet usage- a fact for which I’m eternally grateful.
She did ‘ban’ me from reading fanfiction (I think because she found out some of what was out there), but it was laughably ineffective; all I had to do was stop actively talking about it and hide my tracks.
My point is, I took care of myself, and hordes of other people did, too. On the rare occasion I did stumble into something that was too much for me, I just stumbled back out. My horizons began to expand, and have continued to widen ever since.
I sing the praises of fic’s early influence on me any chance I get, and there’s many reasons for that, but here’s another one-
Without being exposed to slash at such a young age, I literally do not know when I would have thrown off the homophobia I was raised with, because even WITH being exposed to slash it took me about….a good 6-7 years at least to fully rid myself of it, and it happened in stages.
That is entirely thanks to fandom.
Would I have realized the truth eventually without it? Probably; I hope so. I have to believe so. But I’m sure as hell glad I didn’t have to find out.
So basically just. Yes, we’re no one’s police. But that doesn’t mean those kids shouldn’t be here. They need to be here, and they have every right to be. We shouldn’t be trying to keep them out any more than they should be trying to keep us out; we should be encouraging them to take ownership, and learn.
Part of the issue is that we in the older crowd who consumed pornograpic material while underage maintained the polite fiction that we weren’t when we engaged with that content.
The “don’t read if under 18” warnings and the “click here to confirm that you are 18 or older” buttons absolutely existed, and were probably even more obnoxious back then. Agreeing to the terms that you’re only engaging with this content because you’re of age and then turning around and complaining that you shouldn’t ever be exposed to it because you’re underage is completely fucking hypocritical.
You don’t get to say “I’m totally not a minor give me the porn” and then yell at those creators for supplying minors with porn that might give them bad ideas because they can’t distinguish the difference between fiction and reality yet!
I agree; that is also hypocritical and ridiculous- and I really think it does go back to the whole shift in culture/the way children are being raised. Parental lock options are all over the place, and way too many parents use them. I mean, I (among many others in my generation) was often overparented, but the level of overparenting these days is just getting ridiculous. There are parents out there who straight up read their kids fb and phone messages.
Which, I know there’s also plenty of kids learning to get around those things and learning to navigate and look out for themselves, but my point is, I think there are disturbingly large swaths of young people out there who literally think they should be unable to access certain things, or should be able to create spaces other people can’t access- and unless they’re talking a group chat on their phone that doesn’t ever get posted, that’s just unrealistic.
We were taught- there are dangerous people on the internet, look out, and so we didn’t give our ages and we hid our identities.
They were taught- there are dangerous people on the internet, look out…and in response, they change zero percent of their behavior and seem to expect utter transparency from everyone else. They’ve grown up with facebook and twitter and teenagers making names for themselves as youtubers- they don’t have the same concept we did of the need to be a liar up to a certain point- and sometimes even beyond it.
We reveled in the facelessness of the internet, but the internet to them has never been faceless…and while I feel like the answers of all the things that changes are more large and varied than I can tackle here, I feel like that’s the root of the difference in their behavior. I just have to hope they can learn, because I know we could; I know it’s not a case of being too young to tell fiction from reality, because I knew the difference, and I know I’m not the only one. It’s a shift in culture, and one that isn’t helping.
Something I think about every time this discussion topic comes up again – before I had regular internet access, which I didn’t get until I was 13 or so, do you you wanna know where I got all my erotic content?
The public fucking library.
Nobody gatekeeps you their, either, and none of the porn comes with warnings. You probably wouldn’t walk up to the librarian, as a teenager, and ask where all the smut is hiding and can they recommend some with pirates an werewolves in it – but you could. They would probably think you were adorable, too, because librarians are awesome.
The internet is just a really, really big library, but with more people shouting at each other.
I started reading sci-fi when I was 8 and fantasy & horror when I was about 14, and I read other stuff too. Some of the books I read had sex scenes, including rape and graphic incest. There were no content warnings; the only thing that said that the books may not be suitable for children was that most were in the “adult” section, not in the kids/YA with Nancy Drew etc, just like the majority of the other sci-fi and fantasy books were. (There was no Harry Potter back then – the first book was published in 1998 in Finland and I first heard about them years later.)
I was a “good kid” so I didn’t migrate to the adult section when I was in the single digits, but soon enough the kids’ section got boring and I went digging in to find more sci-fi and supernatural stuff. As an underage teenager I could borrow these books – some of which had sex, rape and incest scenes – from the library and read them with no one taking notice. I also had no real choice in whether I wanted to read stuff like that or not because I had no way of telling what the books would contain unless I had read other books by the author before. Some series with repeated brother-sister rape I stopped reading because I found it so disgusting.
So yeah, I have zero sympathy for people who get offended by specific tags or ships or by people posting high-rated, clearly labeled
content. The only reasons I see to get offended by fan fiction are a) if it’s not properly labeled & rated or b) if it’s plagiarized. Other than that, you’re perfectly free to skip it, if you don’t want to read it. I do that quite frequently. That’s what the tags are for!
P.S. I started reading fan fiction when I was over 20. Not all of us read it as kids. And most people I knew in fandom back them were many years older than I was, some way over 40.
I’m sorry I was totally on board until the bullshit hit on trans women. I literally could not read past that point.
Where in the fuck has it been thrown around that women who aren’t feminine must be trans? Seriously?
I get this isn’t the point of the very condescending rant above (and tbh while I agree that each person is responsible for their own media consumption and as long as I label it I’ve done my job) the callous disregard and pure snideness of the op has me recoiling. You know, I don’t like kids either but at least I’m not an ass about it.
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