It's Okay to Like What You Like

She may have created the fandom but we’ve been taking care of it and will continue to do so without her.

me, immediately:

Anonymous said:

just checking, are you sure you want to be using some of these prompts wholesale? like ‘white slavery’ or ‘pro-nazi’.

Hello, anons.

To start, allow us to apologize for the delay in answering these asks. They deserve a serious and complete answer. These are incredibly important questions to ask and they get to the heart of what this bingo is about. We were hoping someone would ask. So: Thank you both!

Settle in - this might get long. There’s enough here to unpack that you could teach a class on it.

Balancing Values

Let's start at the beginning: values. A society may value many things: justice, safety of members, religious freedom, freedom of movement and association, freedom of expression, intellectual exploration. It's a long list!

But it is impossible to value all of those things equally at all times.

Many of these values exist in tension with each other and context requires that one value take priority over another. Freedom of expression may fall before safety when it comes to yelling “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. Intellectual exploration may take priority in an educational setting.

For this bingo, our focus is on combating censorship. Which means we are prioritizing values of intellectual exploration and freedom of expression.

Balance in Banned Together Bingo

Funnily enough, censors often see contradictory reasons to ban a work. Historically works have been censored as both "Pro-Communist" and "Anti-Communist" (1984 by George Orwell) and would qualify for multiple prompts in our bingo. Works have also been banned for “promoting” content they are, textually, very much against (Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov). Because of this inherent contradiction, we believe that tagging is the better solution to this problem.

That’s why we will be reviewing the tags for submitted entries to make sure they are tagged properly. This means all the tags. If someone has written a fill for their Witchcraft square that also includes sexual assault, that will need to be tagged for as well. We’re also considering creator comfort, which is why we’ve got rules in place to help creators avoid prompts they don’t feel like they want or can tackle.

So, back to the main question: how could someone answer the “Pro-Nazi” prompt while they themselves are loudly anti-fascist and anti-racist? As one of our previous asks answered: We do accept subversion as a prompt fill, and a prompt does not necessarily dictate the approach the creator must take.

For example: A work in which Steve Rogers sits down to read Mein Kampf and systematically dismantles it quote by quote - or one in which Richard Spencer gets through most of a speech before getting soundly pummeled on camera - would count for the prompt.

After all, Pro-Nazi content would, undeniably, be contained in the work and need to be tagged, so as to not catch a reader by surprise. And this work could also be a valid fill for the Anti-Nazi prompt.

It is important to remember: the content of a work does not necessarily reflect the intention of the work.

The Failures of Censorship As a Tactic

Censorship is a hammer and everything is a nail.

Problems become obvious when you consider who wields that hammer and why. Historically censorship is wielded by those in power against those not in power, and has served to reinforce existing power structures. That has certainly been the case in fandom's experiences with it.

Denazification and Reconstruction were both efforts that have only been partially effective. The majority of that work is not driven by censorship, but by removing supporters from positions of power and enforcing laws and education to address root causes.

Part of that education is knowing your enemy. Why and how they think the way they think is critical to knowing how to fight them and how to identify them. Without being allowed to study them in their own words and beliefs, we will not be able to recognize them when we see them in an updated form. There is simply no room for that kind of nuance in a censored environment.

Modern Nazis don't wear Hugo Boss and throw salutes every five seconds like they do in Hollywood movies. They wear khakis and get called “dapper” by the US media. Modern Klansmen don't dress up like the ghosts of Confederate soldiers to terrorize their neighbors on horseback. They flash OK signs on national television and harp on Southern “culture” and white “heritage” to avoid being taken as a serious threat by those in power. The first tool of recruitment is being able to hide behind “It was just a joke.”

Instead of censorship, we would suggest taking a de-platforming approach when dealing with Neo-Nazis. Almost every mod in this event is in favor of de-platforming as an anti-racist tactic. Those that aren't support de-programming as a preferred approach.

De-platforming is not the same thing as censorship. Censorship removes a topic entirely from discussion and analysis. De-platforming removes the opportunity to use public speech as a recruitment tool.

Tl;Dr;

You're right.

The prompts we selected do include those we would consider “in poor taste” at the very least. Topics we might personally never approach outside of this event.

On purpose.

This doesn't mean we don't get it. We know that freedom of speech cuts both ways. But we would be the very worst of hypocrites, self-righteous hypocrites, to practice censorship while championing a fight against censorship.

These are questions we face as a society, not just in fandom, and determining the best and most effective way to balance conflicting needs is at the very heart of this event.

References

To ban or not to ban? Why we shouldn’t be hasty about book censorship - Marion Wynne-Davis, January 5, 2016, Times Higher Education

Hitler and Censorship: Is there Value in ‘Mein Kampf’? - Lisa Hoover, April 24, 2018, Intellectual Freedom Blog

Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism and Violence (6th ed) - The Staff of the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, 2011, The Southern Poverty Law Center

Strikethrough and Boldthrough - Fanlore

Fanfiction.Net’s NC-17 Purges: 2002 and 2012 - Fanlore

Also why is everyone ignoring the main issue, which is that Sonic somehow imgregnates Pikachu’s ass? Please focus on the real issues.

Yes god. I’m super susceptible to the anxiety over hurting others and it’s just… bullshit.

Like, yeah, we can and should be critical of the media we consume, and we should be aware of -phobic and -ist tropes, but at the end of the day, enjoying a piece of fiction does not in any way make you inherently -phobic or -ist of any sort.

So, first of all, it’s important to note that AO3 doesn’t run these collections, or any others to my knowledge. AO3 hosts them. That’s an important distinction, because, if you have a problem with AO3’s posting guidelines, you need to be very clear what it is you are criticizing. It’s neither fair nor useful to call out AO3 for running a collection of works you object to, because they absolutely don’t.

So let’s rephrase your question: How do I feel about AO3 hosting collections of pedophilic works and defending their hosting of such works?

How do I, personally, feel about it? Well, friend, I think that’s kind of a silly question. AO3 was founded with the express purpose of hosting any fannish work that anyone wanted to post to it, provided the work was legal and belonged to the poster, and to then defend the legal rights of the creator to create and publish the work. That is literally what AO3 is for. That’s what the people who made it designed it to do, that’s how the people who run it direct its resources, and that’s what the people who post their work to it expect of it.

So asking what I think of AO3 hosting any particular kind of fannish work and defending their hosting of it is sort of like asking what I think of a pickle jar containing pickles. I don’t know, man. It’s a pickle jar. It’s got pickles in it. If it didn’t have pickles in it, it wouldn’t be a pickle jar, you know?

That’s not to say people aren’t entitled to have problems with AO3’s goals and policies. But those goals and policies aren’t going to change, because those goals and policies are what AO3 is. So whether or not I like that pedophilic works exist, they will continue to be hosted on AO3 as long as AO3 exists to host them. And if you or anyone else has a problem with that, the solution isn’t to tell AO3 to stop being AO3. If you want a jar that isn’t full of pickles, get a different jar. And if you want a fanwork hosting platform that doesn’t host works you don’t like, make a new hosting platform.

Anon asked a question relevant to this blog’s content in a polite, non-harassing way. There is nothing wrong with anon’s ask. So, @people in the notes calling anon an asshole: anon did nothing wrong. Stop it.

This post is not actually about the morality or ethics of the existence of pedophilic writing. Like, I literally said nothing about that in the post. I deliberately said nothing about that in the post. This post addresses a very specific question (how do I feel about AO3 hosting a particular category of work) and gives a very specific answer (how I feel is irrelevant AO3 is what it is). So, @people in my askbox calling me a pedophile or an anti: I am neither of those things, and even if I were, there is no evidence to support either accusation in this post. Stop it.

I’m getting a lot of messages clearly trying to bait me into supporting one side or the other in whatever the fuck kind of argument this is. @people sending me such messages: I have no interest in playing this game. You are literally responding to a post in which I lay out why I think this whole argument is stupid. Stop it.

I’ve never (to my knowledge) raped any children. So, @the person in my askbox accusing me of raping children, what the fuck is wrong with you how did you get from this post to me raping kids I don’t understand you at all. Stop it.

I’m not one of those people who gives rousing speeches about how fandom needs to stick together and not have internal arguments. Healthy disagreement is good for a community. It helps each of us refine and clarify our ethics and values. We’re a big and diverse group of people with different needs and priorities; of course we’re going to argue! But this… Guys, this isn’t a healthy argument. This is a shitshow.

The problem of fanworks about problematic and potentially triggering subjects is a complicated one. There are a lot of dimensions to the solution, including technical work like designing good filtering systems, educational work like teaching people how to tag properly, community work like providing support to trauma survivors, and moderation work like creating hosting communities whose content is restricted against specific topics. All of these are important jobs that people are putting time and effort into, and our community is better and safer for their work. If everyone currently spending their time harassing and counter-harassing each other on tumblr devoted their energy instead to these or any number of other projects, our community would be better still. Here, I’ll even give you some ideas.

If you oppose underage/non-con/etc content and want to productively improve the community, you can:

I totally mean it, use AO3’s code to make your own archive.

If you want to stay on AO3, curate collections in your fandom of works that don’t have whatever triggers you’re trying to avoid. You can create a collection on AO3 in about 10 seconds, let people add to it, and moderate it.

Work on/fund the creation of a browser extension allowing people to have a permanent AO3 blocklist of specific tags, so that people don’t have to input a long list of tags every time they want to search.

If you run into a work that should have a warning tag and doesn’t, leave a comment (politely) letting the creator know. They are likely to add the tag, and then you’ll have made the archive safer for everyone.

Provide emotional support for abuse survivors using fandom as a place to shelter from triggering content

If you write or consume or support underage/non-con/etc content and want to productively improve the community, you can:

Volunteer for AO3 or donate to them

Work with creators in your fandom to standardize your tagging. That way, people won’t have to list 10,000 variations of the same tag in order to filter it.

Let creators know (politely) if they’ve missed a warning tag

Work with people in your fandom to get creators to add some resources to their notes on potentially triggering content. (How nice would it be if a non-con fic had a link to RAINN in the notes, in case someone needs it, huh)

Provide emotional support for abuse survivors using fandom as a place to explore their traumatic experiences

Voluntary tagging helps only people who don’t need to be helped. The people who would actually seek out such works will still be able to see them, and so corruption will flow without limit. There is no point in creating our own archive when AO3 is still out there hosting and propagating corruption into the world. 

AO3 was founded with the express purpose of hosting any work whatsoever, but when that is taken seriously even to the hosting of works that are terrible, then that purpose is bad and must be destroyed. Instead, AO3 should host any work that is not terrible, while applying a very liberal approach to moderation. This is the minimal position that is consistent with having any standards at all. 

You do not agree with the basic idea of Ao3, at all. Its basic idea is to host all fanfic, while you want it to only host the fanfic that you, specifically, deem ‘moral’. 

Transcription with pauses:

oh i do not like this article not one bit. this makes it seem as though the people getting harassed are minors who are writing about people their age (which i’m sure happens in small percentages), when in reality the hate is mostly directed towards adults who create content that sexualizes minors or puts them in age gap relationships in a way that gets them off, which is indisputably pedophilic behaviour and incredibly dangerous to minors who may see this content and think it’s ok, or at least become desensitized to it (speaking from personal experience from when i myself was an abuse victim on the internet at an early age). this article is literally just abuse apologist rhetoric

See this? This is the steady escalation of a relatively innocuous thing into a quintessentially demonic, absolutist horror.

Minors writing stories about minors –> Adults writing stories about minors

Presumed: the article ignored instances of adults as targets for purity wank (false)

Adults writing stories about minors –> Those stories sexualizing minors

Presumed: sexually mature/explicit stories, rather than merely stories

Those stories sexualizing minors –> Adults getting off from it

Presumed: adults getting off specifically to the involvement of the minor, as opposed to any other part of the story

Adults getting off from it –> Pedophilic behavior

Presumed: attraction to/enjoyment of something involving minors is indicative of or analogous to attraction to minors

Pedophilic behavior –> Desensitization of/acceptance from minors

Presumed: minors as an audience to the reactions of adults

Desensitization of/acceptance from minors –> Dangerous to minors

Presumed: minors respond to social norms rather than critical thought or intuition

Dangerous to minors –> Abuse apologia and/or abuse

Presumed: minors who think stories about minors are okay will be abused

This is a trauma response. Trauma responses are not rational. This progression is not a syllogism, it’s absolutist catastrophizing. Note just how many assumptions you have to buy into in order for this escalation to be coherent. This is precisely the kind of spiraling, fixated boogey-man spotting chain of thought that most kinds of cognitive behavioral therapy will seek to address and cut short. A feedback loop of perpetually inflating rhetoric which only stops when the greatest and most horrendous absolute has been reached is not an argument.

I, myself, am traumatized. I, myself, do not have the resources I need to seek out professional therapy at this time. I mean this with all sincerity when I say that if this is where your brain brings you with only the slightest provocation, you need to stay away from discourse and from the people who tell you that the world really is as dark and bad as you think it is. There’s a reason why people with intense climate grief are so easily swayed into ecofascism, there’s a reason why people who were hurt by transness get taken in my terfs, there’s a reason that anti-Clinton psyops so effectively achieved a demographic of leftists who supported Trump in 2016; people who tell you that everything is irredeemably bad and unfixable are preying on your vulnerabilities and priming you to hurt others.

Reactionary movements rely on trauma to suck new people in. They keep you in their grasp by stoking your most primal concerns and convincing you that the rest of the world is cruel, immoral, corrupt, fearsome… but that you’re safe with them. You’re safe with them and you have access to their love, their community, their affirmation, their protection… so long as you inflict new trauma onto others and browbeat them into submission as well.

Your mental health is more important than being judge, jury, and executioner. You do not need to be a martyr for your cause by putting yourself on the front lines again and again. It’s not noble to put your traumas on display over and over again for the public to fear–it’s just painful. And airing out your traumas to the world as a gotcha for discourse sympathy authority points isn’t coping or processing, either. Being praised for being traumatized and learning that being traumatized is an admirable trait will eventually hurt you and your relationships beyond measure. Trauma is a fact of life and we should neither pedestalize it as a knowledge base nor expect to ever eradicate it completely. But we do have a civic responsibility to create a society which can support people and minimize the damage done to them by traumatic experiences.

However, meaningful conversations about ethics cannot happen without measured responses. Measured doesn’t mean tone policing, but rather a meaningful effort towards being articulate, precise, practical, unobfuscating, etc. Continually burying ideas by using the most reductive and affronting turns of phrase possible doesn’t contribute to progress or good faith philosophizing–it just diverts resources to having to disentangle and deconstruct the misinformation in order to proceed with talking about it. Antis don’t want to talk and they don’t want to collaborate on a functional plan of action–they want to scare people away and shame them for thinking meaningful conversation was ever on the table. Antis don’t believe in following evidence-based protocols or understanding the wealth of life experience that exists within society–they merely want everybody to shut up and be what they’ve declared is right. And that is puritanical authoritarianism in a nutshell, and that kind of reactionary idealism which falls apart as soon as you account for the diversity of real people.

Links:

What purity policing fans get wrong about censorship (the article in question)

The Alt-Right Playbook: The Ship of Theseus (the entire series is worthwhile for understanding radicalization, but this video in particular deals with moral outrage via inflation of rhetoric)

The Alt-Right Playbook: Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship (live)

Shipping is for fun, not for politics, and your ships are valid even if they’re not perfect.

I’m always willing to explain! I’ll try not to make this so long that you’ll want to throw your device out the window, but chances are that’s what’s going to happen.

First off, thinking dark fiction is gross is okay and not what I’m against. I really don’t like bloodplay, for example, and if someone asked me what I thought of that kink I’d say “bleh gross nty”. It’s the making judgements on people for not also finding it gross that I have an issue with. So if you “switched sides”, so to speak, anyone who would expect you to magically like problematic shit is misunderstanding the point.

Anyway. To the real stuff! Psychology is a relatively new field, I admit, so there haven’t been hundreds of years of official studies run on the effects of dark fiction on the human brain. But so far they show a correlation in increased aggressive behaviour in some people. So, definitely some people will not do well with it. However, this discounts some important other factors. Let’s get into those:

Aggressive behaviour ≠ violent behaviour in psychological terms. There isn’t any proof that aggressive behaviour transfers over to violent behaviour automatically, and in most cases we can safely assume it doesn’t, because other things correlated with increased aggression (sleep deprivation, high temperatures, etc) happen often without violence. This makes a very small sliver of the population vulnerable to this risk factor. Good news! Risk factors can be mitigated with protective factors. This includes education, especially programs (called primary prevention programs) designed to promote communication, problem solving, and anger management. The basics of education are really up to parents and school faculty, not fanfiction authors. But tagging and trigger warnings are a good way to bridge that gap as much as we can, as labeling behaviour specifically with a “this is abuse” sticker in bold letters teaches people to recognise what abusive behaviour looks like. You can frame it romantically, but if you read the warning labels, which you always should, you can see through the romantic framing and into the true nature of the actions. For example, a Bakudeku fic labeled “unhealthy relationship”, “abusive behaviour”, “Bakugou has issues to work through”, etc, acknowledges the nature of Bakugou’s bullying. If there’s fluff, it’s still in a sense overwritten by the warning labels. And real life abusive relationships can have fluffy moments, too. Mine did. That’s part of what makes them insidious, because you get used to the black and white “if they do bad things they can’t also be shown to do good things, so if my abuser does good things, is that really a bad relationship?” kind of mentality that’s common here. It is a bad relationship. Fluff doesn’t discount abuse.

Next of course is that violent people can be attracted to violent media. So when antis draw causation from the correlation of aggression and media violence, they’re not viewing the whole picture, which is vital in all statistical analyses.

Okay, you say. Right. But if we encourage problematic stuff, that means all fanfic will be problematic stuff, and that will normalise these awful things. Well, no. Not really. Underage tagged works (a tag that also includes teenager/teenager relationships) on AO3 are something like 1 percent of all works. That implies it’s not going to be written about too often, and also shows that it doesn’t have a great reach. The most popular fic of all time has, what, 600k hits? 600k people is a lot of people, but it’s still not enough to normalise something as horrific as child abuse or rape. That’s a societal moral. Changing something like that is a top-down process that requires A LOT of reach. And frankly, for the average person with the average moral compass, normalising that would be very, very difficult. People can definitely experience deindividuation and a sudden disregard for morals, but it doesn’t usually come from the media they consume. It’s usually a sense of freedom from reprimand and encouragement by a higher authority. And take again that it’s only 1 percent of the fics on AO3, and therefore has halved traffic. It’s not a significant threat.

Okay, but why would you want to write it in the first place? If it could be used to hurt someone else why even bother? A lot of things can be used to hurt someone else. It’s about proportions. How much hurt vs how much good. Most predators are going to be using some other tool instead, so banning those fics and art that’s disgusting doesn’t make a significant dent in predation, and also limits the good effects that can happen (which include freedom from censorship, which is hugely important in maintaining a democracy). Another good effect is cope shipping and catharsis. Sure, this isn’t always going to work. Hell, a lot of therepuetic techniques themselves don’t work on everyone. But it’s a legitimate method that, using the principles of exposure therapy, doesn’t automatically mean retraumatisation. Whether the technique is helpful to a particular survivor should be up to them and their therapist. A random stranger on the internet doesn’t know them well enough to make that kind of judgement.

And finally, even the most repulsive of fictional content doesn’t depict things that have directly happened IRL. You can make fictional characters suffer and nobody IRL suffers instead. This is good for exploring things that can’t be explored IRL. It can help curb impulses. When antis compare the suffering of fictional characters to real people, they’re implying real people and fictional characters have equal rights. Real people always matter more than fictional ones. Fictional characters aren’t people in the first place. No real person suffers as a direct result of dark fiction being written. Implying that the suffering they cause is equal trivialises the true gravity of real abuse. Real abuse always harms someone as a direct result. Always.

Is it so awful to have to make that judgment for yourself? To be shown a morally gray or even totally black situation that isn’t presented like a sermon? You are allowed to come to your own conclusions about a character. An author’s failure to condemn problematic characters doesn’t mean they condone them. It means they’re asking you to make up your own damn mind. 

Also, I feel like it’s much closer to real life to see casually bigoted characters going ignored than to have them ham-fistedly called out for it at every turn. Because sometimes people who are racist are good people in other ways. Sometimes people who are explicitly anti-racist are terrible people in other ways. Because people are whole people, and I’m sick of the idea that authors have to explicitly condemn or condone them. My job as a writer is to depict people. Not to judge them. To let the audience do that for their damn selves.

But it’s a mistake to go from “this thing isn’t pleasant for me and I avoid it” to “it’s bigoted/ignorant/wrong/evil to write that thing”. There are hella competing needs in the world of fiction. There are people who need independent characters who scorn romance and people who need healthy supportive romantic relationships and people who need unhealthy manipulative disasters of romantic relationships. There are people who need honest narratives about bigotry that faces no consequences, there are people who need stories set in a world that feels a little more just. Sometimes the same person needs conflicting things at different times!

Actually, yeah!

You seem rather scandalized.