the answer to problematic fiction isn’t to ban everything with a whiff of Bad Ideas in it, it’s media literacy. the ability to frame and contextualize what you see, to really know what the Bad Ideas are and why they’re bad, and to figure out what the author was actually trying to say, this is how you lessen the potential real world impact the Bad Ideas can have.
media literacy is what antis should advocate for, but they don’t, because they themselves don’t have any.
THIS. I saw a post the other day that literally said if you do it to a fictional character, you’ll do it in real life.
No. Just NO.
I’m so glad someone put it into words.
In art, we can be fucking nuts.
If someone tells you that what you imagine doing to a figment, a thing neither flesh nor bone nor heart, something that can not hurt, is “just as bad” as if you’d really done it to a living being, do you know what you can do?
Turn your back. And walk away. Damn well walk away. They know nothing.
So I just read up on some copyright laws and found out fanart and fanfic are technically illegal. Now I’m laughing at the thought of someone getting sued in court for writing smut about their favorite character 😂
THIS IS NOT TRUE!!!!!
Fanworks are not illegal. Most all fanart and fanfic are “transformative works,” which fall under the protection of Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law, the statute of fair use. Fair Use allows you to use sections and elements of copyrighted material to critique, expound on, or create using that material as long as you’re creating something new. You can read about fair use here: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-use/. And learn about how to decide if something is fair use using this simple guide of the four factors of fair use: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/.
Why is AO3 built by the Organization for TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS???? Because it stands by fair use and creators of new, unique fanworks.
FANWORK IS NOT ILLEGAL. READ ACTUAL COPYRIGHT LAW.
Also know your fandom history Anne Rice used to literally sue our asses over this shit which is why old school LJ fanauthors used to always have the “don’t own not mine just playing” disclaimers on their shit
fwiw, I wrote my thesis on this and fic is neither illegal nor illegal – it’s a legal grey zone that has never been tested in any court (in the US, unless there’s an explicit law about something, we function in a common law system, meaning most of the rule of law in our country is a mish-mash of court precedents, differing and debating between jurisdictions, like this this case). There has never been a lawsuit by the copyright holder of a commercial, fictional work, against someone producing a non-commercial, derivative fictional work; thus, there is no case law about fanfic and we’re all living in the grey zone. There have been a few lawsuits from the copyright owners of commercial, fictional work against commercial, fictional derivative work; one lawsuit from the copyright owners of commercial, fictional work against a commercial, non-fictional derivative work.
But the fanwork we all make every day *may* be protected under fair use; fair use is the right the hire a lawyer, being an affirmative defense, and is rarely tested. The other affirmative defense folks might be familiar with is self-defense in the case of a murder – you say ‘yes, your honor, I did murder him, but it’s ok for x, y, z, reasons.’ Then the trial is about deciding if x, y, and z, reasons are good enough, not if you did the murder (since you had to admit it to use the affirmative defense). Using fair use is like saying, ‘yes, I did infringe on their copyright, but I believe it was acceptable’ and then you have to pay lawyers about it.
I believe that fair use for non-commercial works should be assumed, and the burden should be on the copyright holder to prove harm and infringement, rather than on the non-commercial producer to prove they are covered by fair use.
But, given that there’s no case law, and no explicit laws, tons of high-powered lawyers for commercial content producers like to make stuff up, like to send scary cease and desist letters, like to threaten fans who don’t have the money to fight back. Most major content producers have decided that terrorizing their fans is Bad Business Practice and they’ve stopped calling us all pirates and thieves and are instead madly catering to our whims (often, not always); but that’s a marketing trend, not an indication of any actual change in the status of fan works.
If you’re interested in supporting folks working to change copyright law or protect fans within it, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Organization for Transformative Works are excellent places to spend a bit of money, if you’re flush. Our current copyright system isn’t fulfilling its constitutional mandate to encourage the arts and sciences, since some of the most amazing creative work in both spaces is happening in exactly the grey zones we all operate in, which is not how it used to be and not how it should be.
</copyright-soapbox>
The thing about law, it’s not some Black Box you push Facts in, and you get a Decision out – it follows certain rules that you can easily study and go over yourself.
Common law countries like the US make this more difficult through the vagaries of a system based on precedent and pontification by judges; civil law countries make this more difficult through judges being biased and on power-trips and refusing to read statutory law in the abstract way it is meant to be read, that is: applied to real life at this moment in time, not in their heads, or a distant past.
(Ya, judges. Can’t live with them; can’t live without ‘em.)
Either way, worry not about your fanfic if you do it the classic way, i.e. if you don’t sell it. There’s a longer reasoning behind that, but I’d consider that the lynchpin reason.
Speaking as one who was affected by the Anne Rice thing when it happened – which was WELL before LJ was a gleam in a Russian bot’s eye – I’d like to clarify that it never got as far as a court of law. She had her lawyer send Cease & Desist orders out to various high-profile members of the fanfic side of fandom. Some of those C&Ds implicated the private businesses of the people involved. Because all of us were poor, we didn’t challenge the C&Ds. Instead we took our stuff off of the websites they knew about and hid the fic away.
Also to be clear: we had warnings on our fic WELL before that (edited to add: I mean the “not mine, no profit made” type warnings). We did that as common courtesy in the fanfic world at the time. And long as I’m going down memory lane and spilling tea along the way, I’m gonna point out that many of us who got those C&Ds also worked hand in hand with Anne, her publisher, and her family business to promote her books and business dealings purely for the love of the fandom. I, personally, left a part-time job at a web company when they asked me to do what amounted to allowing them to profit off of Vampire Chronicles fanfic. When I told them that legally and ethically I could do no such thing they said I could do it or they’d find someone else. I said see ya. (AFAIK they never found someone else).
So the amount of respect those of us in fandom had for Anne’s work and right to profit off of her material was large. What changed in our case was when 1) Anne got some of the rights back to her characters which meant she could profit off of them in ways she couldn’t before and 2) she realized us fans and our fanworks made for GREAT free market research into what her personal company could try to profit off of. The most perfect example of this, and how Anne’s greed ruined so much, was the Talismanic Tour company which was created by fans, worked with Anne and her official biographer to come up with walking tours of New Orleans based on things from Anne’s life and books, fully had Anne’s blessing, then, once it proved successful, Anne gave THEM a C&D and created her own tours at ridiculously jacked up prices.
Karma being what it is, nobody wanted to pay for that bullshit and Anne’s tours ultimately failed. But since she used her lawyers to scare the fan business out of running this then became another example of why Anne is the reason the fandom can’t have nice things.
(Can you tell I have so much tea from the VampChron days? Oh Anne. Bless your fandom-destroying black heart.)
Making this more fandom general, the points to take away here are a few:
Sometimes it’s not about law, or what the law “should” be. If a well known author, or TPTB from a TV show or a movie studio sent you, personally, a C&D letter for your fanworks, would YOU have the ability to thumb your nose at it? Do you have the resources for that lawyer battle and possible court case? Or are you like us Anne Rice fans were, living meager paycheck to paycheck, and not having it in you to even put up the fight with your ISP, let alone a millionaire’s legal team?
The blessing of the original creators means nothing. They love us until they don’t. Relying on their goodwill to keep fanworks safe is like relying on the skills of the person driving you around to keep you out of an accident: sure it’s possible, but you wanna put that seatbelt on and hope the car has airbags just in case.
Appreciate and support those who have done the work to explain WTF fanworks even are, let alone why they should be legally allowed (so let me repeat the earlier links to Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Organization for Transformative Works ). If you can donate money to them, great. If you can’t, at least appreciate and be grateful to the teams of people who took the risk of putting their real names out there (C&Ds are another reason many of us write under pseudonyms) at all, let alone on legal documents, and appeared before the US government in person to defend your right to make fanfic and fanvids.
I met a fan artist from the Hobbit fandom who’s 40+ years old, who sent me a postcard a couple of years back for Christmas with her art on the card.
When I was about 14, I once befriended, and lost contact with, a 40 year old woman with a full head of gray, curly hair, who was one of the best known Good Omens fan artists of the community. She had apparently been in and out of asylums for years, and I worried for the longest time. I even sent her an email when I was around 18, asking after her well-being. But then she resurfaced when I was 21, here on tumblr. It was one of the greatest and most memorable fandom experiences I’ve ever had.
When I was 15 and using slurs I didn’t know were slurs, 30+ year old LGBTQ+ comics fans on scans_daily patiently but firmly corrected me. I felt mortified, but they never attacked me or treated me as anything other than a dumb kid who made a mistake.
I have a long time friend of close to a decade, who was late twenties when I met her in the comics fandom, and I was a teen.
OLDER FANS ARE CRUCIAL TO THE SURVIVAL OF FANDOMS. Not ONLY because they’re literally the ones keeping fandom afloat (AO3 wasn’t created or maintained by kids, let’s just say), but because older fans generally don’t attack or bully or fuck up a fandom by being aggressive or volatile or overzealous, destroying any enjoyment of a medium.
Single women, married women, LGBTQ+ fans, all in the range of 30-60 years old. I’ve met all sorts of older fans, from when I was 12 on deviantart to now, in my mid-twenties, and not a single one of them has ever hurt me or treated me like dirt. I’ve always felt safer with older fans than with younger ones, because of the people I’ve seen harass, accuse, doxx, bully, and generally engage in harmful behaviour in this fandom, they’ve largely been in the 13-21 age bracket.
Obviously most young fans aren’t like that, but the toxicity is palpable regardless.
@younger fans, if somebody older in a fandom acts in a creepy way, then feel free to avoid them, block them, report them.
But this apparent DELUSION that younger fans have that older fans are “creepy” just for existing needs to be eradicated. Just. Stop. You do not deserve the fandoms they built, they maintained, they keep alive in themselves and all the younger fans they took care of, if you cannot RESPECT THEM.
^^^^
You know who saved the devastated 20something fans of BBC Sherlock when Mofftiss shit all over Season 4? Fans who’d loved Sherlock Holmes since before Cumberbatch was BORN, who welcomed the traumatized one-fandom youngsters to their own fan circles, and introduced them to Jeremy Brett and Basil Rathbone and Vasily Livanov and all the other wonderful SH series that didn’t make a mockery of the characters.
I really think that antishipping is a movement that’s gaining ground with the younger & newer arrivals to fandom spaces; a kind of ‘cool trend’, so to speak. In aggregate, antishipping culture is beautifully constructed to be particularly appealing to teenage or college-age people – and especially American people – who are marginalized, oppressed, often social outcasts in real life and often under-educated about their own marginalized identity, and I kind of wanted to get into why.
a brain still growing – until the age of 22-25, the frontal lobe of the brain does not finish development. the frontal lobe handles higher reasoning skills and complex problem-solving. Thus: the growing mind is particularly prone to incomplete reasoning, black and white thinking, and total empathy failure, making it hard for those under 25 to fully comprehend the impact of their actions, sympathize with others, or tackle social problems with nuance. Truly comprehending that others come from entirely different worldviews or have entirely different experiences and that being different doesn’t make them wrong and that most deep-seated problems need complex solutions that require nuance tends to come with this final brain growth. (Not always, of course. but often.)
escaping religious/Christian fundamentalist tenets but not their mindset: for a religion supposedly based on forgiveness, organized Christianity is not very forgiving. Everyone is a sinner & a single sin is enough to doom you to eternal hellfire, if you don’t do the right thing you’ll face Judgement in heaven/your salvation is always uncertain, and sinners must be cast out from your midst: the moral/communal purity that organized Christianity often demands can take years to deprogram (and this is not to mention the gender essentialism, homophobia/queerphobia, and anti-sex/anti-kink messages, accompanied by a strong undercurrent of anti-intellectualism to discourage self-education on these subjects!) teens just breaking away from this toxicity are especially unequipped to untangle themselves & tend to take the same purity standards with them to a more liberal cause instead (such as enforcing ‘social justice’ in shipping), with a side-order of internalized, unexamined anti-lgbt/sex/kink/etc rhetoric that dovetails rather neatly with exclusionist rhetoric.
the particularly adolescent vulnerability to peer pressure (the need to belong & the fear of being ostracized): teens are particularly inclined to be influenced by friendships and maintaining social ties. antishipping is a highly cohesive, insular culture with enforced rules of conduct, striking clear in/out lines & engaging heavily in use of peer pressure. antishippers are encouraged to break ties with those who don’t conform to their rules of conduct, so existing friends are pressured to become antishippers themselves or risk losing their friendsgroup. once ‘in’, friends will abandon you for not keeping the party line & persecution of outsiders is encouraged, further strengthening the need to conform.
to stop antishipping is to lose your entire social media community/support structure and potentially endure a hate-mob of your former associates. In other words: it’s easy to become an anti in order to keep your friends and almost impossible to quit without losing everything, and teens are especially vulnerable to this kind of social structure.
an American (and to a lesser degree, western European) post 9/11 cultural shift from prioritizing personal freedom to prioritizing communal safety; those under the age of 20 were 3 or younger or not yet born when the shift happened. antishipping prioritizes communal ‘safety’ (‘bad’, ‘dangerous’, or ‘inappropriate’ things must never be mentioned to protect people from hearing about them and being either corrupted or harmed) over personal freedom (allowing ‘bad’/’dangerous’ things to be discussed, and it is up to the individual to personally decide what content to avoid).
of course, all of this is conjecture based on my own experiences and observations, and it’s not a set of rules – just circumstances that I believe absolutely encourage young fandom members to end up falling headfirst into antishipping and either never notice how hurtful it is or never get the courage to leave it behind. And I think there’s a lot more the popularity/prevalence of antishipping today, but this post is already longer than I meant it to be.
(I always go light on racism when i talk about antishipping because while antis frequently accuse shippers of racism, it’s disingenuous to class racism as the same kind of oppression as lgbt+-phobia & misogyny, particularly in America – they’re related, but not the same. Centering non-white (and especially black) voices does not get the same focus as centering lgbt and women’s voices in fandom, and I think it’s easy to dismiss legitimate charges of racism as ‘anti bullshit’ when we class all these types of marginalization together.)
I began writing this essay more than a year ago, on the plane ride home from 221b Con 2015. I originally thought that I would post it once the fandom wank had died down, but it shows no sign of doing so. In fact, it’s back with a vengeance, as the fandom responds to the show runners officially refuting T J L C and people have discussed the history of the conspiracy theory and the impact it has had on Sherlock fandom. As fans have spoken out about their negative associations with the acronym, the conversation inevitably turns to what happened at 221b Con 2015 and its aftermath. Since this essay seems relevant again, I decided to pull this out again and finish it.
This is the first of a series of essays I wish to write on the Gender Politics of Sherlock fandom. There are many things I wanted to say at the official panel but was unable to, since it was derailed by a group of individuals who showed up with the intention of intimidating and harassing the panel moderator. In future essays, I’d like to share my thoughts on femslash, Mary Sues and the fridging of female characters, on heteronormativity in slash, and on queer representation beyond slash (bisexual, pansexual, asexual and trans people in fanworks and fan spaces). I’d like to touch on race and being a queer Woman of Color in a fandom mostly interested in White male characters.
Before I get to those subjects, however, I feel a need to return to the original intended topic: the essay I began writing on my phone on the plane.
And that essay is on the subject of noncon fanworks.
This wasn’t on the list of topics we had prepared in advance as a panel, and I didn’t feel I’d been adequately prepared or had done the subject justice. In the first few hours after the panel, when I felt like a group of fellow fans whose respect and understanding I wanted had attacked me for the kind of fic I read and write, I wanted to articulate how noncon fanworks have changed my life, how they have been a source of deep friendships and personal healing. I wanted to convince those people that I wasn’t a bad person, or a bad feminist; that I had thought long and hard about rape culture and my possible contributions to it, and decided in the end that it was more important to try to engage with rape myths, to digest and transform them, than to eject that part of our collective psyche.
And then, as people began to speak to me privately and share their own stories of being bullied by this same group of people, I realized that what had happened at 221b Con wasn’t actually about noncon fanworks or people’s reactions to them. What happened at 221b Con was that a clique used young fans and CSA and rape survivors as a shield to hide behind while they bullied my fellow panelist for shipping the fandom OTP in the wrong way. So instead of writing an essay on noncon fanworks, I wrote about the bullying that I witnessed and experienced firsthand. But I never quite lost my initial desire to explain myself and my writing. I hoped that it would still be possible to have a conversation I thought was actually worth having, in good faith with well-intentioned people.
I’m still not convinced it’s possible to have that conversation in this fandom, which has become toxically polarized on far more benign issues than this one. I also believe that the tendency for arguments to escalate is inherent in the format of tumblr, because of the way that posts are reblogged back and forth in front of an audience of thousands of witnesses egging both parties on. I also believe the current Sherlock fandom climate is one in which individuals are on a hair-trigger, poised to respond with hostility to anyone perceived as stepping out of line. I am not interested in engaging in that kind of debate for spectacle. But I felt it was necessary for me to collect my own thoughts on noncon fanworks. And as several others have indicated their interest in also reading them, I’ve decided to go ahead and post them so they become part of the fandom discourse.
The canon is that they’re friends. We’re allowed to interpret that however we want. You see it as father-son? That’s fine. However we don’t. But we’re not fucking attacking you for your different belief. Let us ship if we want.
it’s very, very American. While there are certainly antis who aren’t American, many of them are.
I have a lot of theories as to why this is, but a lot of them are covered in this post: anti-shipping as the cool new trend (while it’s mostly about the age bracket of anti-shippers as of June 2017 (this time last year), it’s an americentric post talking almost entirely about US phenomena).
tl;dr version? anti-shipping is:
the natural result of growing up both LGBT+/queer and marinated in American-flavored Puritan Christianity/purity culture
with a side order of valuing safety over freedom
b/c you’ve always had freedom of information
but you’ve never known a sense of security
thanks to lifelong internet access
paired with post-9/11 paranoia.
add a dash of radical feminism/exclusionist thinking
never being taught how to think critically, and
zero education on sex of any kind, and
viola: anti-shippers.
someone* added these tags to their reblog of this post, which, uh: this is literally the basic, standard fandom anti-shipper position on ships.
Whether you call yourself an ‘anti’ or not, this is precisely what a fandom anti does: ‘throw down’ if they think someone’s ships are ‘abusive’, ‘pedophilia’, or ‘incest’ (generally with widely expanded definitions, hence the scare quotes).
it’s a pretty solid example of how this works, though:
tag op is 21: too young to remember a world before 9/11 happened or remember a world without internet access
tag op’s strong feelings about fictional ships suggests they flatten fiction and reality to equal levels of potential danger: classic black & white thinking structure that is strongly encouraged by American Protestant Christianity
tag op didn’t read this post with self-awareness and/or application of critical thought, much less click the link that the tl;dr list references
tag op feels justified in limiting other people’s freedom to use fictional ships to explore certain social/romantic/sexual dynamics, threatening to throw down over it.
this is because those social/romantic/sexual dynamics are not safe or healthy in real life.
even though ships are fictional, the safety of censorship is more important than freedom of expression or thought.
the concern is always about ships/sex fantasies: never violence/fantasies about harming others. this is the combined effect of purity culture and radical feminism in a society that glorifies and normalizes violence.
tag op will fight you for bad ships, because it is okay to fantasize about fighting people but not okay to fantasize about unhealthy fictional relationships
Anyway.
I have a lot of sympathy for antis because I think their lives often set them up to favor censorship and abhor education-as-inoculation, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re being jerks to fellow fans on the basis of assuming things about the core of their person because of what they ship.
fandom policing of this sort is assumptive, presumptive, and deeply damaging, both to the victims of anti-shipper cyberbullying and the anti-shippers themselves, who are encouraged in this abusive cycle hellhole behavior by emotional manipulation and coercion.
(I want to end this with a joke about how American this is, but assholes are everywhere tbh. Americans are just especially susceptible to the thinking patterns established by fandom antis at this precise moment in history because of the factors listed above.)
*if you figure out who it is, kindly be a decent person and leave them the hell alone.
In
America, sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world, it’s a
fact. ~
Marlene Dietrich
What I hate is that OP also makes a similar black and white argument. In that it ignores the reality that pornographic content does effect our minds and how we objectify things. If someone consumes incestuous, romanticized rape fic, it does over time make that more acceptable in their heads. If someone likes, sees out, and consumes hardcore pornography of women being brutalized, it makes them more likely to objectify women and see women as less than human (just look at incels). The study I mention is about midway through the article. Now what this basically means is that while by and large, sexism and watching porn don’t go hand in hand, it does show that men who are sexist and violent become MORE SO by consuming content that normalizes it. This is very, very bad. This is how we get incels. This is how we get murderous incels. We don’t have studies on fanfiction but if you think about it, written porn is not all that different from visual.
We do have some degree of responsibility when it comes to the content we produce. We just do. What we put out into the world does effect our society and normalize certain attitudes and that’s really, really dangerous. That doesn’t mean go harass every author ever. That doesn’t mean authors should never ever write problematic content. But I do think there’s a big issue with just saying: just let people write romanticized incestuous rape abuse fic it’s fine. Cuz. It’s not really. It helps normalize a destructive world view for people. I’m just really not into the line of thinking that everything is hunky dory.
Again cuz this is the internet and no one is going to read the nuance of this – please note that the point isn’t that this content normalizes that behavior for everyone. It normalizes it for people already inclined towards that disturbing morality. And that’s a big fucking deal. We don’t need people feeling emboldened to act on those attitudes.
And no, I don’t have a solution. I just wanted to add some god damn nuance to this discussion cuz everyone is like: no rules or all rules and like. you’re all wrong lol
I’ve started replies to this ask twice now and abandoned them because they got overly specific in taking apart this argument. sorry for the lateness of this that resulted from it.
I too am all about nuance. this post is not the most nuanced post I’ve written because it was addressing a very specific aspect of anti-shipping per an ask. If you really are interested in nuanced discussions about this stuff, I have a few tags related to nuance that you might enjoy reading through.
[tw for discussions of csa, pornography*, misogyny, rape, and incest.]
That said: your basic premise seems flawed to me for a few reasons, but I think it’s because you were trying to make one argument and accidentally made another. I believe that you’re making this addition at least partially in good faith, so I would like to address it as I can.
Your comparison of mainstream porn audiences and fanfiction audiences is nonequivalent in scale.
mainstream porn has thousands of times as many consumers as even wildly popular fanworks do, so the potential for serious social damage is significantly different.
the audiences are also different: many, if not most, fanworks are by and for people who are marginalized or silenced; mainstream porn is mostly aimed at (cis) men. fanworks that have problematic elements are more likely to be wrestling with the fear or trauma of being a victim/potential victim of these kinds of relationships. Mainstream porn is playing into an existing social balance that reinforces the cultural message that the expected viewer has power over (perceived) women.
the number of misogynists who are culturally unchallenged in their misogyny is much higher than the number of people who think that abuse/rape/csa are literally okay irl. your imaginary incest rape fan who is reinforced in their beliefs by fanfic is a comparative strawman to the misogynist who is reinforced in his beliefs by mainstream porn.
Further, your mention of ‘incels’ who have resorted to violence to take their hatred out on women in mass shootings, softly implying that incest rapefic fans are liable to do the same if denied access to real life family members to sexually assault, is disingenuous: I guarantee you the incest rapefic fan has not spend their whole lives being told by every cultural message that they are owed a family member to sexually assault the way an incel cis (white) man has been told his whole life that he’s owed a woman. (and porn didn’t drive these men to violence – their own sense of entitlement did.)
now that I have addressed what your argument seemed to actually say …
I think you meant more to point out that both porn that shows abusiveness towards women and incestuous rapefic are dealing with issues of consent, and you are concerned that both can reinforce toxic messages about consent if they portray situations that lack proper consent as positive experiences.
and on that point, I don’t think you’re entirely wrong.
Americans of all genders are often severely under-educated about informed consent to sex. (below examples use ‘men’ and ‘women’ b/c of how we still assume binary genders in our social messaging, but they affect nonbinary people too.)
in general, the attitude that men should chase women, women should play ‘hard to get’, and that women put up an initial resistance against men showing interest in them to test their interest level or increase their interest is still in the US cultural ether.
the idea that men are owed a woman, that women should eventually give in because of being owed to men – that’s still a thing.
the idea that it’s sexy and desirable to be chased by a man and to have him persist until you love him back is still a thing.
the idea that anything but a strict, straightforward ‘no’ counts as refusing sex is still a thing.
the idea that ‘no’ really means ‘maybe later’ is still a thing.
and plenty more besides.
and with these messages existing in real life, they also exist in mainstream fiction. the there’s plenty of examples of questionable consent being portrayed as a positive experience in mainstream media – obvious, long-standing examples of such tropes being put out into the mainstream by women for women being 50SoG, which was itself a fanfic for Twilight. But it’s also action adventure movies, and romcoms, and fratboy movies, and everyday marketing, and porn aimed at straight men, and much, much more.
but which came first: lack of education about healthy, equal consent or popular fiction about lack of healthy, equal consent? isn’t each reinforcing the other?
when people who are on the (so to speak) wrong end of these consent issues – the ones being told that being coerced into sex is the healthy, hot thing to want and experience, which most of transformative fandom is made up of – wrestle with those consent issues in fiction, are they the cause of the problem, or the symptom? or both? why do women/perceived women enjoy or create romance stories featuring these elements? do we blame the people enjoying these stories, or the culture that reinforces the notion that these things are desirable?
and
how much of an impact do transformative fanworks featuring abuse/dubcon/noncon really have on the general consciousness of consent, compared with all these other cultural messages? especially given that we have such a strong tagging culture, which essentially encourages creators to call themselves out for the problematic elements of their works before someone stumbles on them by accident? if a fanfic treats a story about rape as a sexy, good-times experience, but tags it ‘rape/noncon’, is anyone going to be duped into thinking that it was any less rape?
and finally: wouldn’t it be more productive to address the consent issues in society by educating about what true, informed consent looks like, rather than to try to eliminate every depiction of problematic consent from the internet?
here’s some further reading regarding fandom, questionable morality in fanworks, and social responsibility:
– because fandom doesn’t exist in a vacuum, we need to consider why fandom does what it does and its role in society at large, not just within its microcosm
– what’s worse – the story that has a warning for ‘coercion/dubcon’ or the one with coerced sex in it, but no warning for it? why?
hope this gives you some interesting food for thought.
(*side note: the porn industry has its problems, but as I’m more concerned with the safety and livelihood of the workers involved with it, this is not a condemnation of porn as a whole – only its playing into existing cultural misogyny for money. (fix the cultural misogyny and the porn will change too, imho.))
What other people ship, read, or write is NOT YOUR CONCERN or JOB TO STOP IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT.
I really haven’t seen this argument around much, but a big part of the shame of being a survivor–any kind of survivor, of things small and big–is dealing with the part of the abuse YOU ENJOYED. Now, some people go reactive and explode here, and say, “fuck you there is nothing here I enjoyed this is all wrong you’re blaming the victim.” Which is not what I am doing. To have enjoyed a part of it doesn’t mean it wasn’t abuse or you deserved it or it wasn’t bad enough therefore you deserve no compassion, or whatever. But many people stay stuck there, and in staying stuck there, they keep rejecting the part of themselves that enjoyed it and thus stay stuck in the shame.
What do I mean by “enjoyed a part of it”? A non-comprehensive example:
– you liked being groomed
– you liked the attention of an adult, and having an adult give you the time of day for once
– you liked the part that someone thought you were good for something
– you liked the part where you could do something for a person you loved (many abusers work this)
– you happened to orgasm during a rape because of the purely physical stimulation
– you were terrified of how he scared you, but you felt safe from the world under the wing of someone so aggressive and scary
You can insert your own. None of the above “romanticize” what happened or mean that what happened wasn’t abuse, or wasn’t horrible, or you deserve no help for your trauma, or whatever.
But maybe as a survivor you need to make a story about, “you know, I did have a piece of agency there, I wasn’t all a helpless victim” (this=/=victim-blaming, I don’t mean “it was my fault” I mean going through the trauma and on the other side of it. This is re-capturing a sense of agency.)
Maybe you need a story of, “you know, I wouldn’t have even minded, just, why did it have to be *like that*?” Then re-tell your own story in how part of you wish it happened (doesn’t have to be all of you, your rational adult self can still be, you know what, my biggest wish is that this hadn’t happened at all).
The tl;dr: is that we contain contradictions and multitudes and layers and sometimes part of, say, combat PTSD is confronting how much you -enjoyed- violence, confronting who that makes you, etc. Sometimes there’s part of a person that enjoys victimhood–maybe you personally didn’t, but enough people do. People write for so many reasons, their stories serve so many purposes for them. WRITING THESE STORIES CAN BE EMPOWERING FOR SURVIVORS. And you don’t get to tell others they have to recover “correctly” or in the way you think is morally right. There’s no way out but through. Writing these stories can be someone’s “through.” You’ve got no business dictating to them what road they should take to radical self-acceptance.
at the end of the day, when all the censorship debate is over and gone threadbare, we come back to the most important, central issue:
getting rid of stories about sexual abuse will not make real sexual abuse stop happening.
and until sexual abuse stops happening, it’s unfair to demand that stories of sexual abuse stop existing. it’s akin to sweeping a prevalent problem under the rug: if we just don’t say anything, we can pretend it’s gone, right? (except it’s not, and now you’ve silenced the people who most need to be allowed to air out their trauma.)
So there are these two posts rolling around Tumblr, one about the importance of learning to fail which I already reblogged and so gave notes to; and the other about how antis fail to distinguish what people enjoy in fiction from what they enjoy or will enjoy IRL (nametagging @bai-xue so they know I’m replying to their post even though I’m not giving them notes directly), and I’ve been wanting to sort of—hybridize my reply to them. Because my personal theory re: antis (AMONG OTHER THINGS) is that there’s something more complicated
going on than just an inability to understand that fiction is distinct
from real life.
Broadly speaking, I think what the antis are responding to has to do with how we as a society
conceptualize error, failure, and regret. As in—I think antis’ stance on fiction is part and parcel
of the same all-or-nothing mindset that thinks (e.g.) that children
must never fail at something in school, and that the role of their
parents and teachers is to prevent that failure at all costs; and equally that (e.g.) our faves must not be problematic. In other words, I think we are deciding, as a culture, that there is the Right and there is the Wrong, and in our desire—often admirable—to see the Wrong removed from real life—i.e., we want to protect children from pedophiles, and dismantle systems of oppression, and so forth—we are trying to construct a world in whichpeople are never Wrong.
But often, people are Wrong. And—speaking simply pedagogically—being Wrong is often part of how a person learns how to be Right. So trying to eradicate Wrongness actually can, in a way that I recognize can be counterintuitive, make it harder for people to learn how to be Right.
i'll apple your turnover 