Because this isn’t an activism movement. It’s a bullshit campaign of bullying and harassment hiding behind activism.
It’s hurt people I love more than life itself. It’s damaged their careers, it’s made them delete archived content of characters who were their own age when they drew it. It accuses victims of being pedophiles without evidence. It convinces people that normal sexual urges are Bad and Wrong and Evil and Abnormal. It led people to feed someone needles, to break other’s property, to tell suicidal youth to kill themselves, to make friend after friend after friend abandon fandom because the things that can get you crucified seem random, menial, unavoidable.
It’s because someone can make a solid attempt at ruining an artist’s life by associating their real name with pedophilia accusations, and then commission someone 2 months later for suggestive art of characters the same age.
It’s because “pedophile” is a go-to accusation. It gets thrown at me 5 times a day and I don’t know a SINGLE big-name artist who hasn’t heard the same. Multiple times. (Despite the fact that I am vocally, vehemently against NOMAP communities on tumblr.)
It’s because someone can have their blog, their primary source of income, deleted due to a false report campaign – their career destroyed overnight – because they made sfw art of the wrong fictional ship. Because I traded off suicide watch with their fiancé and after all that, it’s still happening and nothings fucking changed.
It’s because the bravest fucking person I know broke down in tears because someone who wanted to get back at her pulled out some homestuck art she posted on deviantart in high school, and sent it to her highest grossing client accusing her of being a pedophile. And nothing changed.
It’s because this IS bullshit. It’s fucking bullshit. And someone had to say something. Something has to change.
Hey anon! In light of some recent Discourse™ I have been seeing the last few days, I’m going to take a short break from silly tags to talk about censorship!
Ok. It is illegal in the United States (and in most other countries I think) to produce, distribute, or possess pornographic images of minors. A thing that is not illegal: writing.
Why is that, you may ask? Why would we want it to be legal to write about adults having sex with children or children having sex with each other? Well, a variety of reasons. First of all, if we treated writing about children having sex the way we treat images/video of that, a large percentage of YA literature would suddenly be illegal. So would writing about adolescent sexuality in other ways, including potentially educational literature or even studies about adolescent sexual health. That would be really bad.
But what about writing about full-on sexual abuse, statutory rape, pedophilia? Shouldn’t that be illegal? No. Banning such writing would risk censoring research and education about sexual abuse. It would also prevent survivors from writing about their own experiences. And it would ban works of real literary merit, like, say, Lolita, which deconstruct and address the psychology of sexual abuse in a literary setting.
Fundamentally, the reason that society bans images of child pornography is that, in order to make them, you have to put children in a sexual context and take pictures/video of them. In other words, to make child pornography, you have to harm children. That’s why it’s illegal. Writing, on the other hand, harms no one in its creation. The only harm it can do is to those who read it, which literally no one has to do. Freedom of speech means we have the freedom to say what we want, so does everyone else, and we don’t have to listen to them if we don’t want to.
So no, AO3 isn’t breaking any laws. And if they were, it would be because the law was wrong.
If you have comments, complaints, or want to scream at me, you can find me at my personal @boytranscending. I won’t be addressing this subject any further on this blog.
LMAO ME AT YALLS THIRSTYNESS FOR HOLLANDS SPIDERMAN, YOURE ALL GROWN STOP THAT
I SAID SPIDERMAN HOE, CAN YOU READ??? SPIDERMAN S P I D E R M A N MAN OF S P I D E R S 15 YEAR OLD, ADULTS JACKING TO A CHILD ISNT FUCKING GOOD U WIERDO
I
I do not know how to explain to you the extraordinary difference between being attracted to an adult man performing a fictional character
and sexually harassing a child
I’m not equipped to even have that conversation
oh my god you pedos are on a roll, I said Hollands Spider-Man as mcu spidey, and this is a 15 year old character people are jacking to, knowing that’s a kid, I don’t care if they think the actors hot, they should just jack off to the actor but making nsfw headcanons of this character and making porn art of him is fucking gross, children look up to this character,us minors don’t want to see him shipped with adults in the tag you fucking nasties
I don’t know how to explain to you the extraordinary difference between
“I don’t want to see fictional content that grosses me out”
and sexually harassing a child
jacking off to a character that’s not an adult is pedophilia, stop arguing to a MINOR about this you weirdo, are you going to jack to shuri too??? what about groot?? vin diesel is old is that an excuse????
this is the funniest thing you could have possibly said and I now ship spiderman with a tree
I’m sure this observation has been made before, but having read MANY posts over the past few days on the state of antis and their bullshit, I just want to point out:
You could inscribe “For the Least Problematic” on some sort of metal fruit, toss it into a crowd, and stand back and watch with popcorn.
Really? You think I haven’t thought about this issue? Is a story about recovery or dealing with trauma, is that “normalizing sexual relationships with children”? Should that be forbidden? Is that harmful? Should someone trying to deal with their own trauma by writing fiction that addresses it directly, should that be forbidden because it’s harmful?
Should I write only the sunniest, most proper fiction that never mentions anything disturbing or awful just in case some reader, somewhere, takes it as normalizing that awful? Is it my job to purge my work of anything that some kid, somewhere, might take in a way I didn’t intend and maybe be messed up by? Fuck no. Because let’s be 100% clear here, you actually can’t entirely predict what a reader will take away from a piece. One does one’s best. And I can’t tell another writer what to write, I can only tell them to be sure they mean to write what they write.
And the problem here is the sweeping condemnation of, what, the number of fics with particular tags? Seriously? As if it’s that simple?
Are you absolutely sure that every work tagged “pedophilia” on AO3 is wankfodder? Every one? None of them are stories where characters experience and process it, or just talk about it? None of them are stories where the authors are trying to process their own experiences? It’s never permissible to even mention pedophilia, lest someone be influenced wrongly? Should survivors never talk about or fictionalize their experiences? Really?
Do not lecture me on the responsibilities of authors–I have thought long and hard on the issue, and have come to the very considered conclusion that I have no interest in purity tests. Rape is bad, but not all stories about rape are bad. Racism is bad but not all stories about racism are bad. Pedophilia is bad but…you get the picture. Just saying “look at all these fics tagged “pedophilia” AO3 is doing a bad thing hosting them!” is so incredibly stupid I just don’t know where to begin. Are some of those fics toxic? Surely. Pretty much every other tag has toxic fics in it, too. Are all of them? I seriously have my doubts.
I am prepared to say that adults having sex with kids is bad, no nuance. I am NOT prepared to say that any fic about that topic is unambiguously bad. Because that’s not true.
I’m not in the business of telling people what to read or what to write. And you can take your list of things people somehow can’t write about because they’re bad and fuck all the way off.
Because let’s be 100% clear here, you actually can’t entirely predict what a reader will take away from a piece.
The pressure to disclose information (especially about trauma) to obtain permission to write questionable material is more dangerous than someone writing questionable material for the “wrong” reason.
At surface level, this is concerning because they are awesome stories, and everyone’s life is made a little better when they find an awesome story.
On more serious levels, fandom is a wacky place, full of people doing wacky, occasionally damaging things to each other. Some of that has evolved, but some of it is the same as it ever was. History rocks because you can learn from the mistakes of others, and maybe hurt people a little less in the future. Fandom being a giant, convoluted web of passion, some history that could use sharing goes missed.
The two stories linked are from early 2000s Harry Potter fandom. The Ms. Scribe Story is a tale of one person’s aggressive use of sockpuppets to work their way up fandom hierarchy. The Cassandra Claire Debacle is about how the top name in that fandom hierarchy is a plagiarist.
They’re prime examples of fandom being fandom in intensely negative
ways. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a brand of fandom toxicity that isn’t on display in some way within these write-ups, and while that is admittedly sort of depressing, having things to point at that make you stop and think, “Wait, I’ve seen this before, this is not a thing I want to be part of,” can keep you out of some of the deeper fandom pitfalls.
They are also deeply fascinating reads. If you haven’t explored them before, or only know the summary versions, give them a shot.
i'll apple your turnover 