oxfire

i feel like the way you go about naming ur characters/where you get ur character names from can actually be something that says so much about a certain creator. if you feel like it, rb and tag this post with how you usually find new names for ur characters

I’m literally doing my sociology research paper on them right now.

Ooh? Go on.

There was a point in time when TV Tropes banned entries about an NSFW Tangled fic. The fic was about adults who are canonically married, but because the target audience for Tangled was children, the fic was considered “pedo porn.”

I don’t know if canonical statis necessarily explains #4. #4 (and really all of them, but especially #4) seems to be reflective of this idea that “monsters” have very specific characteristics, tastes, and values - that you can always spot a monster using various tells. And if they dare do something like what #4 suggests, they are hiding those tells, so they are extra monstrous. There is likely a very real anxiety around not being able to tell offhand who is safe and who isn’t, about predators that hide in the midst. “You never know who you’re talking to on the internet!!! They may be GROOMING YOU!!” This may seem to be an attempt at unmasking these predators, these monsters - but, as someone who’s had the misfortune of knowing such monsters first-hand, it’s not particularly effective.

The paper is done! Check out my Tumblr post for the link!

Gotta love how they just respond with insults.  And by “love”, I mean “time to block another one.”

Really looking forward to all this. I also wanted to add a very subtle way in which these mindsets have also started to affect real life people / influence how puritanical antis have started to view the world: the weird insistence I started to get to a funny old story that in denying my supposed “victimization” between my adult self and another adult, I was supporting the perpetuation of pedophilia. I scened with an older guy at a BDSM club, including sexual activity. Afterwards, the guy’s friend and the host of the party came up to me and asked, “Hey, did anyone check your ID at the door? You look so young, I want to make sure you’re safe.” I do look very young - I’m on a fast track to thirty and people still ask me what grade I’m in - so I’m used to stuff like this. This was a generally funny moment for me, and I had a good time that night. The closest thing to duplitious intent I could imagine of those men is the typical “implying a woman looks young to flatter her” cliche - and to be honest, I fully expect that was basically happening here, since BDSM communities tend to have a culture of safety, with a built-in way for interrupting scenes if someone might be in danger (i.e. safewords, DM’s, etc.) But what frustrated me about telling this cute story online was how people started to say that these guys must be pedophiles, because if I really look so young, then what does it say about them that they enjoyed sexual activity with me? This was a real life instance of people projecting those last two types of pedophilia definitions onto me. In theory, if this were pedophilia, I would be the “victim”, both for being chronologically younger than these men, and for looking so significantly younger. It’s particularly infuriating because their worldview is effectively punishing me for appearing the wrong age - which is typical of misogynistic and patriarchal ideals of feminine appearance. Women must be punished for looking the “wrong” age, and while we normally see this as woman being devalued for appearing older than the ‘ideal woman’, this also certainly felt like an instance of being punished for appearing younger than the ‘ideal woman’. Under this logic, I, a 100% consenting adult, can never have sexual activity with anyone, ever. Any actual adult who participates with me is only doing so out of a secret desire to have sex with a child and using me as a substitute, so even if we’re both enthusiastically consenting adults, I’m perpetuating or enabling pedophilia. Meanwhile, if I were to have sexual activity with someone who actually is the chronological age I appear as, they would be minors and thus I would be the predator. The growth of purity culture in fandom, on Tumblr, and the social media world in general is starting to influence how people view real world sexual activity - and the real life people having it.

let me know if you’d like to join our BNHA server 🥰 it’s really fun, active, and we love to make new friends!