Adult Privilege

Since this hellsite might die for real this time. I, ademainalors, have started a Pillowfort and a Pillowfort Community for Youth Rights. If you were active in this community and want to help mod, please dm me on Tumblr @ademainalors before this ship goes down.

I have also started a Dreamwidth and a community for Youth Rights. Likewise, dm me on Tumblr @ademainalors before this ship goes down if you’re interested in moderating.

Since this hellsite might die for real this time. I, ademainalors, have started a Pillowfort and a Pillowfort Community for Youth Rights. If you were active in this community and want to help mod, please dm me on Tumblr @ademainalors before this ship goes down.

I have also started a Dreamwidth and a community for Youth Rights. Likewise, dm me on Tumblr @ademainalors before this ship goes down if you’re interested in moderating.

If you are interested in a career in academia and feel like the tools needed to build that career are not as accessible to you as they are to others, some friends and I have been working on something for YOU! We'll be sharing resources, stories, and, of course, math, all to help you build the career you want.

We wouldn’t talk. They’d tell us to do something and we’d just sit there quietly and do it, until eventually they just said “hey, guys, it’s okay to chat while you work!” and then everybody would start talking.

One teacher described it as creepy.

And I just remember thinking, what the fuck did they expect to happen? We’d all been taught from the age of four or five onwards that talking in class was bad. That if we did it, we’d be told off, or punished, or in some instances maybe the entire class would be punished along with us, just to make sure we really got the idea. It was a whole thing.

But now, because we were sixth-formers and therefore ‘grown ups’, we were suddenly expected to flip a switch and be able to talk as much as we liked? The whole reason we were in sixth-form was because we had worked hard, done well at school, and generally followed the rules— but still the teachers couldn’t understand why we didn’t just talk to each other.

Now I’m at uni, and seminar tutors are having a similar problem. People will talk in seminars, but a lot of them will insist on raising their hands and waiting to be called upon first. “Don’t put your hands up, just shout at me!” the guy keeps saying. But they keep doing it anyway.

Imagine you’re in high school, if you’re not already.  You have a significant other of your preferred gender.  You’ve been dating for a year or so. You’re in the same grade, but you’re older than they are.  You’re 18 years old.  They are 17 years old.  You’re only actually 3 months apart in age and you only just turned 18.  

Antis are the people who would see “18yo dating 17yo” and immediately start calling the 18yo a predator.  I have seen them call a late-20s character dating an early-20s character pedophilia, because of the age gap, which is nonsensical.  I can only imagine the names they would call me, who turned 19 days after first kissing my girlfriend, who was 2 years and a couple months younger than me and so who was only 16 for the first few months we dated, even though we were only a grade apart.  (we’re now married, fwiw, and have been happily together nearly 15 years)

Antis see adults writing teenaged characters bc they enjoy a canon with teenage characters and get invested in their romantic relationships and ship them because they’re cute together, and call those adults pedophiles.  For writing fic that is, essentially, the same as 99% of young adult novels.  Which are almost all written by adults.

Antis say that the act of looking at teenagers having an interesting dynamic or potential dynamic and wanting to explore that in a context where those teenagers HAVE GROWN UP AND ARE ADULTS and maybe writing smut of adult characters who are in canon underage?  Is pedophilia and child pornography. Stories about characters that happen to have been children at one point but are - this is the important part - NOT children in these fics.

And, ultimately, antis are calling fictional stories about fictional characters “child pornography” and anyone who has concerns about purity policing and censorship as “pedophiles” or “pedophile apologists” and are diluting the meaning of these concepts when ACTUAL LITERAL CHILD PORN AND PEDOPHILES EXIST and what they are doing is doing absolutely nothing to combat it.

They’re not angry about people “romanticizing” pedophilia, because 95% of the time even fictionally that’s not what’s happening.  They’re angry because they’ve come up with this idea of what “acceptable” fic is, and they don’t like that people disagree with them.  You can tell it’s not actually about that, because you don’t see them trying to get Game of Thrones pulled from libraries, even though it includes incest and sexual assault and a 14 year old girl being married to and impregnated by a grown man (and all this in the very first book).  You don’t see them calling GRRM a pedophile.

At the end of the day, it is fiction.  It is fictional.  No one is asking you to like it, least of all me, but it is NOT. REAL.  These are not real people and they are not in real situations.  They talk a big game about how fanfiction and shipping will “normalize” these things, but fandom is actually a LOT smaller than it feels, and most fics don’t get more than a few thousand hits at the MOST.  And if you just mass ban anything that includes sexual assault or child abuse, you’re going to probably ban the tiny fraction of fandom that is actually really into that, sure, but you’re also going to ban fics dealing with canonical backstory and trauma.  you’re going to ban fics grappling with dark themes and condemning the things that happen to the characters.  You’re going to ban people trying to heal, or even just trying to have a discussion about it.

We know this because it’s happened before in fandom, look into the LiveJournal strikeout if you want to know more about it.  Look into the various ff.net crackdowns.  When it comes down to it, if I look at 17yo character and a 23yo character and say “I want to ship them during this canon without changing their ages”, there is no minor being taken advantage of.  If someone uses my fic to “convince” a teen that it’s okay to date them in their 20s?  That’s on them.  they are abusers and if it hadn’t been fic it would’ve been music, or movies, or history, or god only knows what.  You don’t get to let abusers off the hook just because they MAYBE could use someone’s fanfic as one of their methods of abuse.  There’s… sorry, there’s just a LOT of issues with anti culture.  I’m not pro pedophilia or anything, I am just anti whatever the fucking hell antis are doing.

TDS, February 11, 2015