donger;

me, doubtful: 

what a fucking disaster

It’s a book now becoming a movie, about a cishet man who is 17 lying and saying he’s a preop 21 year old trans man so he can rape lesbians. In the book he lies and says he’s using a strap on when he has his actual dick inside a lesbian without her permission, which is downright rape. This book is a transphobic and lesbophobic mess (calls trans men lesbians throughout the whole story)

1. How do you define explicit? Does this mean no depictions of child abuse, even for the purpose of telling a story about how wrong it is and showing a victim’s recovery? Can younger teens have realistic sexual encounters in stories so long as nothing is shown on page, or is it wrong to imply explicit goings-on even if they’re not depicted? Where, exactly, do we draw the line between heavy petting and sex? Can a character have a wet dream or masturbate? Can a character think about sex in detail, even if they’re not depicted having it? I’m not trying to be difficult: I’m just trying to make it clear that what you’re proposing, even when you phrase it simply, is inherently difficult to implement. Stories would have to be vetted and actively moderated, a massive undertaking that AO3 isn’t equipped to manage, and any such process would still ultimately hinge on individual judgement, which means you’d still have people dissatisfied with the outcome.  

2. Teenagers who choose to ignore age-ratings and warnings for the material they consume are responsible for their own experience beyond that point: it is not the job of authors or the website to say, “Okay, we know this content is explicitly meant for adults, but let’s make it less adulty just in case a teenager gets in here.” You can’t protect people from their own bad judgement and its consequences without making their lack of responsibility someone else’s responsibility, which is decidedly unfair. 

3. Abusers groom victims with a wide range of material and arguments, and have done so long before the existence of AO3. Whenever this happens, we blame the abuser, not whatever story they used to justify themselves. This is also why, when murderers or other criminals take their inspiration from crime fiction novels or psychologically darker works, as has happened on multiple occasions, we blame the criminals, not their taste in fiction. Locking down on what can be written about child abuse won’t get rid of paedophiles, but it will make things more difficult for victims who use fanfic as catharsis.

Honestly, I think it’s the fact that fanfic writers are accessible and non-professional that makes them vulnerable to this sort of thing. I don’t doubt that a great many of the people up in arms about content on AO3 also have beef with mainstream porn, to say nothing of particular novels, films and TV shows - but they know they can’t target those industries, because they’re big and distant and protected.The best they can do is vote with their money by vocally boycotting things they dislike; and of course, they’re completely within their rights to do so. But as they can’t attack those content creators directly, they turn their anger instead on their fans, because even if they can’t stop a canonical work from being created, they can sure as hell punish people who publicly admit to liking it.

Which is what recently happened with Call Me By Your Name. The amount of discourse I saw describing anyone who liked or appeared in that film as a paedophile apologist was staggering, which is yet another reason why, in this current conversation, I remain mistrustful of the claim that it’s obvious which works and fanfics are irredeemably Bad and Harmful and Need To Be Deleted. CMBYN was about a consensual relationship between characters who were 17 and 24, and it was still called paedophilia. I wrote about it and fielded questions about my response then, too, and I’ve kept that conversation in mind this time around. 

Because the fact is, there are far too many people in the purity camp who seemingly don’t have any idea what paedophilia actually is. More often than not, their working definition of the term is presented as “anything where a character aged eighteen or under is paired with someone a year or more their senior in an imperfect context or for a ship I dislike, or where a Known Adult is writing anything above a T-rating with characters younger than twenty”. Like. That is honestly, genuinely what I’ve seen argued - and if that’s the starting point for deciding what should or shouldn’t be allowed on AO3, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s a Bad Idea.

And that’s before you even touch on the nature of kink and the hugely complex issue of human sexuality, let alone the psychology behind why so many people enjoy reading or creating dark content. Just as it’s common for rape victims to experience orgasm or arousal against their will during the act itself, itself also common for survivors of sexual abuse to have intrusive reactions to their experiences - meaning, in essence, that their arousal becomes tied to what’s been done to them. This is not their fault, and it’s not something they should be shamed for; so when people single out the kind of fics that are classed as badwrong porn without considering that they might play a role in the sexual enjoyment and healing of victims, it’s very difficult to accept the simultaneous claim that all this moral crusading is for the benefit of victims. 

And beyond that frame of reference: BDSM is a thing. Kinks are a thing. The difference between written and visual pornography is that, whereas videos and photos involve real human people being subjected to real sexual contact, stories do not. This means we don’t need to check in with the characters to make sure they’re willing and comfortable, because the reader is the only sexual participant. When we construct fantasies in our head, as opposed to enacting them with a consenting partner or partners, our ability to separate fantasy from reality - to know that what we’re imagining isn’t real - is what serves as a safeword. This means that the character we’re imagining doesn’t need to give their consent to roleplaying the situation, too, because the character doesn’t exist; which allows us to imagine them enjoying or experiencing things which, in real life, we would never countenance. 

Do people do this because they’re gross and predatory and broken? No. They do it because they’re people, and because we understand the difference between doing something in a safe, controlled environment and risking actual harm to ourselves or others. If a gamer goes on a killing spree in a first-person shooter, that’s not them priming themselves to murder people in real life, even though they’re engaging in a visual proxy for a horrific act that’s coded as entertainment - because we know it isn’t real. Are there still conversations to be had around the normalisation of violence, misogyny and other evils in such properties? Yes! But does that mean that every single person who’s ever played Call of Duty is a killer in the making? No! 

Sometimes, we fantasise sexually about scenarios that frighten us in real life: because that gives us ownership of the fear and allows us to overcome it, to turn it into something controllable. Sometimes, we fantasise sexually about terrible things that have already happened to us: because that gives us ownership of the trauma, an ability to reclaim ourselves. Sometimes, we fantasise sexually about things that are monstrous, or impossible, or forbidden: because we’re excited by the what if in a way we’d never feel for the reality. 

Hollyleaf – black she-cat with green eyes

Thor, a phys ed and linguistics major with a minor in women’s studies, taking a sip of his strawberry protein shake: can’t you just use the infinity stones to create more resources tho?

Thanos: What?