butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:
Look, I think I’ve made it quite clear:
If you can explain to me how I am fetishizing queerness by being queer, I will take your words into consideration.
Nonie has the sheer audacity to call you incoherent.
Yet does not use an apostrophe, space-key or question mark where it is clearly needed.
I assume- and it’s an assumption made on little evidence other than personal experience- that they’re typing poorly because they’ve got the shakes because they’re very upset that someone pointed out that their behaviour is unacceptable.
Trauma responses are Like That, and the majority of antishippers, especially those who are angry enough to send me detailed fantasies about post-mortem rape torture, tend to be dealing with trauma.
They’re dealing with it badly, but I try to cut them a little, little bit of slack in that regards.
That’s actually heartbreaking.
It’s a very common kind of reaction to the abusive manipulation that dominates antishipping “discourse.”
People with severe trauma are collected and preyed upon by a small group of aggressors, usually sex-negative radical feminists, and turned into a self destructive police force.
They are then praised for harming themselves, as long as they also harm others.
It’s actually one of the many ways that anitshipping discourse models itself, consciously or not, after cult dynamics which claim that it is noble to suffer as long as you make your enemy suffer too in the name of righteousness.
You also see this kind of thing a lot in extremist Christian sects, for example.
You make the right choice in trying to leave situations that are harmful for you. That is one of the healthiest coping mechanisms out there.
But it’s also something that has to be learned. At least in the context of abuse. If you grew up in a situation where abuse was unavoidable, you rapidly lose the “flight” stress response, and it takes conscious effort to regain it. Instead you rely very heavily on your other fear responses (fight and friend, usually, and sometimes freeze). This makes you extremely valuable as a tool for future abusers, as your “friend” response will tend to make you more accessible to them, and your “fight” response will tend to make you a useful attack dog against others.
Now, of course, I imagine the great majority of antis aren’t trying to indoctrinate themselves into an abusive cult dynamic. They’re victims here, too. They deserve an escape from the shithole they’re stuck in, and if they ever want to leave it all behind, I support them wholeheartedly.
But just because they don’t know better doesn’t make it acceptable for them to do the things they insist on doing.
An incisive, lucid and important analysis.
Now, of course, I imagine the great majority of antis aren’t trying to indoctrinate themselves into an abusive cult dynamic. They’re victims here, too. They deserve an escape from the shithole they’re stuck in, and if they ever want to leave it all behind, I support them wholeheartedly.
word. I will welcome them with arms wide open, just as I would any trauma survivor.
@
fangasmagorical, if you have time and interest, could you talk a bit about the “friend” response? I’ve never heard of it before, and I think it may be something I do. I think I and others could benefit from your thoughts.
“Friend,” also called, “fawn,” is one of the primary ways human beings react to fear. It’s like fight or flight, but there are other ways people respond to fear, especially people dealing with trauma.
- Fawn types seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs and demands of others. They act as if they unconsciously believe that the price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences and boundaries. –Pete Walker, Psychotherapist
Trying to talk your way out of a stressful situation. Rather than Fight, Run, or Freeze on the spot, we decide to reason or rationalize the situation. This can be anything from flattering the abuser, cringing in obedience, attempting to please and seek favor, offering alternatives; doing whatever we have to do to save ourselves by talking our way out. –Surviving My Past, abuse support group
- [T]he inclination to cooperate or submit oneself to one’s threat or captor. –Curtis Resinger, clinical psychologist
It basically involves trying to turn the thing that made you afraid into an ally, or getting help from existing allies to face the threat. It’s part of why humans are so super social.
Unfortunately, in people who have been traumatized or abused, this natural response to fear can become overactive. You may have heard that people who are abused once are more likely to find themselves in abusive situations later in life?
This is because the friend/fawn reaction is very easily taken advantage of, and abusers know it (albeit often a subconscious knowledge). People who are overly likely to respond to fear by ignoring their own needs in favour of pleasing others are much more attractive to abusers, including cults.
While it’s called a fear response, friend/fawn is a response to stress of all kinds. You don’t necessarily have to be afraid of the person you’re appealing to, just experiencing stress that you’ve learned can be reduced by appealing to others, especially to authorities.
The way you see this work in the context of antishipping, since that’s the discussion at hand, tends to be a little bit like this.
- Victim: I saw something that set off my PTSD, and now I am in a stress induced panic and I don’t know what to do!
- Manipulator: Don’t worry, if you just listen to me, I will tell you what to do and you will be fine.
- Victim: Okay! I completely believe you, because you are offering me safety from my trauma, and by subconscious mind perceives this as you literally saving my life.
- Manipulator: Great, so since I saved your life taught you how to repress your fear, you should do anything you can to please and appeal to me.
“Manipulator” here refers not only to the handful of “ringleaders” in antishipping circles, but also to the social group of antishippers as a whole.
Social pressure is one of the most important reasons the friend response exists, and the larger or more aggressive a social group is, the more likely people will fall in line with it just for that feeling of safety.
This is also why major political movements that rely on fear-mongering are so effective: they create a stress response in the populace, and then say, “come with me and we will eliminate your stressor.”
This is so true though. I’ll never forget the shock and almost trauma of being bluntly told by my therapist that it isn’t wrong for people to like things I think are misogynistic and predatory. It took a longer time to understand that people who consume media I hate are not a direct threat to my well-being. It’s not at all an age thing either, I didn’t receive access to proper care and a safe environment till my late twenties and was therefore extremely volatile and reactionary. Less now but it’s a work in progress.
The fawn response makes so much sense. I’m mad confrontational but also takes a long time to call out the bad behaviour or wrong arguments of anyone who is nice to me or sides with me because it feels like ingratitude and I’m afraid of them turning on me.
I appreciate OP’s empathy towards triggered people so much. Regardless of whether you’re right or not, a hyper-aroused brain is an awful thing, like an earthquake in your head, shakes, mutism, nausea, inability to disengage. At no point are you more convinced that the ferocity of your emotional response matches reality than when you’re triggered.
Absolutely true. During the throes of a flashback, I’ve done and said some truly fucked up things to try to get away from the stimulus.
One of the more horrifying things that abusers manipulating victims in this way do, is ensure that their victims are in a state of hyperarousal as often as possible. This makes their victims more reliant on the abuser for guidance, and much more vicious to their targets if their abuser tells them to fight someone.
This cocktail is something that antishippers do to each other constantly, even without any organized leadership, because it’s what they’ve been taught. At this point they are a self policing group, and the law they enforce is “be constantly on the edge of stress overload.”
But you can’t live in a state of constant hyperarousal. If the over taxing of your adrenals and sympathetic nervous system don’t kill you, the sharp decrease in impulse control and altered concept of self preservation will.
Constantly exposing yourself to triggering material to gain the approval of a group that is abusing you is self destructive.
Unfortunately, I’m not trained to help people escape the fear conditioning of group abuse, and if I was, it would certainly be unethical for me to do so online and outside a clinical capacity.
But I know enough about the problem to know that sometimes the people who come in this blog looking for a fight will see discussions like this, and that can be the start to realizing that the “help” they’ve been getting is dangerous, and that there are alternatives.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This just keeps getting more important and relevant.
Interestingly enough, online clinical work is becoming more and more accessible for trained workers to offer to clients, and is, in fact no longer an inherently unethical practice. There’s still a lot of grey area that clinicians are working out how to make as beneficial as possible, but the combined rise of internet’s own cultural linguistic quirks and telemedicine means that more and more clinicians are able to offer some level of support to people seeking this kind of work online. I’m pretty excited about it actually, and figure I’ll probably make some arrangements for people to be able to hit me up if they like in about *checks watch* four years.
Oh, well, I had no idea about the shift in practice on that front, but that’s great news!
Tag: fandom
The fall of fandom etiquette and the rise of the ship war
In a pre-social media age, none of [the Harmonians] could really reach or touch Rowling unless she, for some reason, actively sought them out, but, nevertheless, something had changed; the Harmonians, facing extinction, had decided to double-down and bite the hand that fed them. The ship meant more to them than the fandom did.
This is the moment that birthed zero-sum shipping, a kind of blind gamesmanship that only values a ship for whether it not it wins, not whether or not it is enjoyable. Add in the peculiar moralizing of the Harmonians, and, voila, you’ve got the recipe for fans antagonizing creators over appearing to support ships that are, in their eyes, morally unacceptable.
Were these dynamics at play in other fandoms and other ships before the Harmony Wars? Undoubtedly. Heck, there’s an entire documentary about the push and pull of the Star Wars fandom and George Lucas, entitled, fittingly enough, The People vs. George Lucas.
But you have to remember that the Harry Potter fandom was one of the largest fandoms in history. As of 2017, it has more posted works on FanFiction.Net than any other fandom. Its enormity meant that it was a threshold fandom for an entire generation, and that meant it set precedent.
At the height of their activity, the Harmonians did not have sufficient power or a sufficient platform to weaponize their ire towards Rowling into anything but petty, personal insults. But imagine if they had Twitter…
Well, I suppose you don’t have to.
exac:
“this character did a problematic thing-” its a story helen, commonly including things like conflict and drama
If you don’t want to answer this, I understand, or if you want to answer it privately, I get that too. I just want to understand something. Are you saying that other people writing underage sex, or things between an adult and a minor, specifically for sexual reasons- while not something you like, is something you don’t think should be taken down on that site? Because yes, there is a very stark difference between something talking about experiences, or it happening in story, than the above.
Because those are specifically what I’m talking about. The argument
isn’t about it catering to children, it’s about not catering to people
who consume that kind of content. Which there is thousands of, if you do
a quick search of any of the tags used to find shit of that like.I’m saying that while I personally abhor such things on such a visceral
level to the point where even thinking about it in a fictional context is making me shake and want to throw up as I type this, that doesn’t give me the right to decide who to censor and who to not. Cause where do you then decide that censorship ends? Once you allow the one to be censored, it allows for the censorship of the personal as well which is exactly what happened before. And anyone naive enough to believe that it wouldn’t happen again is in for a very rude awakening. We’re already seeing it come into effect with Microsoft censoring what they deem to be “explicit content”, which includes a lot of things from explicit imagery, right down to swearing.This is actually something that’s been hashed out in courts of law over and over and over until we have come up with the laws that we do have, which are very helpfully explained here and are well worth the time to read:
And it has already been decided that legally, fictional depictions of certain acts even between adults and minors, can only be judged on a case by case basis to determine whether something has artistic merit or if it can be deemed too obscene as to be harmful.
And people making reports to the FBI over this kind of thing, is going to obliterate fandom again, and all the safe spaces the generations even before mine worked so hard to build are going to go with it. Again.
Just because I’m anti-censorship and losing my fandom spaces, doesn’t mean I want those stories on there, it doesn’t even make me okay with them existing on a personal level because I am not.
But I am aware of the consequences of what will happen if we do allow for that kind of censorship, and it’s not as clean cut as a lot of people believe. In an ideal world, maybe it would be. But we’re not in that world.
Now if you’ll excuse me. I’m going to go throw up.
This is, to me, a pretty solid example of why sometimes learned history and empirical examples trump good intentions and feelings.
Because every part of me screams that of course banning luridly ephebophilic content on creative platforms is the right thing to do. (And pedophilic content too of course, but that’s actually pretty heavily policed already). Especially platforms that minors frequent, where minors regularly consume content labeled ‘not for minors’, and there’s no good way to keep them out of such content. And it’s not immediately obvious to me why this would be a difficult issue to selectively police. Arguments for why it’s a slippery slope tend to sound like apologist arguments to me, rather than legitimate difficulties.
But you know what? I’m wrong. How I feel about this is demonstrably, historically wrong. Countries around the world have struggled, really fucking struggled, to decide how underage sexual acts should be legally handled in media and absolutely none of them have come up with an easy solution. The most common one is “the legal system will handle it on a case by case basis, when it’s clear there’s something to be looked at”. And I mean … damn. When that’s the best legal scholars can do you know it’s bad. I don’t even want to imagine what law school courses on this subject are like.
And in fanfiction specifically, there are horror stories of how this kind of policy was abused. How well-intentioned efforts had awful far-reaching consequences and how malicious actors abused the policing systems. The effects of this in the past unmade creative fandom on the internet and forced it to basically start from scratch so far as platforms went.
I wish, I wish, that simple common sense policing policies for this stuff worked. And it feels to me like they should! That makes it really hard for me to let go of the idea that there should be some way to make it work. But all the world’s lawyers and all the world’s committees haven’t managed to do it, so I’ve just got to bite my tongue and admit I’m not that smart. I will not succeed where they failed. So for fandom, we’ve just got to let fandom be posted and hosted as is.
Thank you, you just summed up exactly how I feel about all of this. And I’m so incredibly bitter that I’m having to be the one to make the “slippery slope” argument cause it just feels wrong. But this isn’t about my feelings. It’s about protecting ourselves against those who would silence us entirely, and if you think this whole thing is “just” about fanfiction, you are absolutely dreaming.
And as I’ve said during kink discussions— this slippery slope ends with the burden being predominantly taken by young women and queer folx who are just trying to explore their world. No one’s talking about MLP fandom or actual loli fans. This doesn’t hurt people with social capital to burn, like straight men sexualizing young girls. This is all within an community most specifically used by marginalized people. LGBTQ writers and people with trauma in particular bear the brunt of these attacks.
just as A Thing: this doesn’t just include fandom.
Sex education is so shitty in the US because there is a strong, real fear that any frank discussion of sex or how to do it will entice children to be sexual before they are ready. The common idea is that sexual discussions should be between parents and children because only parents can appropriately gauge both what moral lessons they want to impart to their children and what information is appropriate for their own children to hear, even though parents don’t actually provide their kids with basic sexual instruction or do so in a patchy, gender-biased, and non-comprehensive way.
Anything non-cis and non-het is still thought of as inherently more sexual than anything heterosexual. This is the reasoning behind double standards regarding, for example, nonsexual public displays of affection between same-gender couples instead of different-gender couples. This is often linked to a “conversion” theory of queerness where impressionable children become queer from being exposed to it through interactions with other queer people and through the media. This is inexorably linked with pedophilia and the idea that queer people are all pedophiles who “make new ones” by molesting children. (This is further complicated by the fact that LGBTQ people, more often than straight people, are fine with and interested in relationships with 10+ year age gaps)
But of course you don’t mean sex education. But of course you don’t mean queer couples. But of course you’re fine with people who write stuff out of trauma, or are minors themselves, or are portraying it as a bad thing.
Fun fact: the law doesn’t give a shit about that. There is no “but only if it’s portrayed as bad” law. There’s no “but only if it’s a result of trauma” law. There’s no “it’s okay if you’re a minor yourself” law, as kids find out all the time. You can have your philosophical discussions about where to draw the line all you want, but you cannot then assume that the law has come to the same conclusion you have about it.
I think you have an idea of what should be inexcusable underage content. Surely, even the staunchest defenders of free speech can understand the difference between exploring tough/dark/realistic themes of child sex abuse or teenage sexual awakening and “the 13 year old wanted it so bad even though she struggled against her daddy’s grip, and her tight little [redacted] was soaking her panties”. Would deleting those fics also betray the concept of literary freedom?
The problem doesn’t lie in differentiating the obvious extremes: the problem is in moderating everything that falls between them; in determining which kind of sexual fantasies are “allowed,” and under what conditions, and how to make those judgements consistently.
Here’s the thing: when we conjure up a sexual fantasy for masturbatory purposes, it’s designed to pop like a soap bubble once we come. The very act of fantasising about anything means putting a barrier between the realities of the situation and the reasons we enjoy it in the moment, and that’s especially true of sex. What we want in fantasies, what we enjoy in fantasies, very seldom maps perfectly to what we want in real life, which is why it’s so very dangerous to start judging people’s real morality on the basis of what they wank to. That’s not to say there’s no correlation between morality and what gets people off – there are plenty of racist fetishes, for instance – or that we shouldn’t interrogate our preferences. What I’m saying is that there isn’t a clear binary of Good and Bad in the majority of cases, and acting like there is will get you in trouble.
A very common example: in real life, communicating about sex can be difficult or embarrassing, even though it’s necessary, so people fantasise about perfect sex that happens without communication. Sometimes, this is because both parties are so perfectly in sync that words aren’t necessary, but other times, the fantasy is of one party taking control because they ‘know’ what the other person wants. In real life, that sort of behaviour is generally a red flag – but in fiction, the fantasy is explicitly a what if: in this case, what if they actually did know?
Another example: in real life, people enjoy sexual roleplay, where consenting partners act out non-consensual or dangerous scenarios. In fiction, the ‘consent’ aspect of engaging with those same fantasies is inherent in the act of deciding to read them in the first place; the characters don’t need a safeword, because the only real sexual participant is the reader, who has complete control over their immersion in the story. These are the kinds of stories that tend to make people the most uncomfortable, because it often looks like the narrative is romanticising toxic or abusive dynamics by giving sexy descriptions to terrible things. But this is precisely what tags are for, which is one very strong argument in favour of fanfic being better at consent than many traditionally published stories: the very act of tagging content means that the reader knows that the author knows the thing they’re writing is bad in real life, but that it exists here for the reader to indulge in as a fantasy, whether sexual or otherwise, just as they would with a roleplay. By contrast, when you encounter similar dynamics in a published book, you have no idea whether the writer knows the thing they’re describing is Bad unless they explicitly say so in the narrative, which makes a lot of readers – myself included – uncomfortable about engaging with it.
Overwhelmingly, sex written as pure pornography doesn’t strive for perfect realism, because the whole point is to focus on a specific definition of arousal or pleasure detached from any negative real-world consequences. This is just as true of happy, loving sex depicted between consensual adults, where nobody ever gets a cramp or has an inconvenient period or tears the first time they try anal, as anything darker or more disturbing.
So, yeah – there is absolutely written content on line that I personally find gross and bad and disturbing, but I genuinely don’t believe there’s a safe, reliable mechanism for excluding it that won’t massively fuck over a whole bunch of other stuff in the process. If you want to pay for a website to try and walk that line – and you’d have to pay; there’d be no way to ensure good moderation otherwise – then that’s your call, but I don’t believe you get to decide that for everyone else, no matter how honourable your motives.
Uh-huh. I lay out one single, very clear rule–no straight-up graphic porn about minors under 15–and you invent grey areas. Older people say that shit has to go, you scoff at their hysteria. Actual teenagers say the same, you promise they’ll grow up and see that touching yourself to child rape is just part of life. We all agree fiction affects reality when black kids see themselves in Black Panther and feel proud, but god forbid anyone says the same of your porn or they’re delusional puritans.
I’m not inventing grey areas: I’m pointing out that they already exist. You’re insisting that it’s impossible for anyone to argue about whether a given work does or doesn’t fall within the parameters you’re setting, because you’re pretending the only salient examples are the most egregious ones, but as I keep saying, they’re not. Once you set out to ban a particular type of content, there will always be borderline cases, and if you can’t figure out a coherent means of dealing with that, then you’re not going to do any good.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Stephen King’s It, V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic, Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple, George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones – those are all published novels that feature graphic sex either with or between underage characters, nor are they anywhere near being the only such narratives that are legally available. You keep insisting that this is only about badwrong porn (as though abuse victims with intrusive symptoms that tie their arousal to their assault don’t exist – which, spoiler alert, they do), as though there’s no overlap between “sex scenes that aren’t written as porn” and “sex scenes people treat as porn anyway”.
I’m not arguing that fiction has no impact on the reader: I’m saying it clearly does, to both positive and negative effect, which is why tags exist to help readers navigate difficult content. Beyond that, the onus is on the individual to curate their experience.
Good morning! I’m salty.
I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.
This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.
You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.
“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.
If you’re not prepared to see adult content, created by and for adults, don’t fucking click through this. And if you do, for all that’s holy, don’t blame anyone else for it.
^^^^^^^^^^^
[HULK SMASHES THE REBLOG BUTTON]
also you know what
you know what really fucking pisses me off about the whole “GASP ADULTS WRITING ABOUT KIDS” discourse
you know what really fucking pisses me off?
hi. i grew up in the bible belt of the midwest. as a young queer slowly coming to terms with being Super Not Straight, I grew up a town where there was one grocery store and eleven churches. on nice sunny days, before real summer heat set in, the chances of well-dressed smiling proselytizing boys with free copies of their holy books showing up at your door approached 100 percent. in my high school, there were to my knowledge about four queer kids, myself included in that number, and one of them was terrified to come out or even be seen with other boys because he grew up in the kind of household where you would absofuckinglutely be thrown out for being gay.
i did not have a queer childhood. this was just as the proliferation of the internet was starting to become a thing, but your best bet to get on a computer would be to go to the local library. the librarian, btw, was a devout christian and was part of the baptist church across the street. so the idea of using free resources to reach out or research what the fuck it meant to be queer was literally not an option.
i did not get queer literature. i did not get queer media. i subsisted on fandom, because it was the only type of content i knew that talked about being queer, that was positive about it, and was often created by adults who would point you to resources to help. this was before scarleteen and teen vogue and other sites.
fandom was my queer community, because i had zero alternatives. society gave me no alternatives.
and now I am looking at all these fearmongering puritanical moralizing shitheels go on and on about how any adult who writes about younger people is a predatory pedo
I did not get a fucking queer childhood. And if I want to sit down and write or read a story about queer teens who get a better shot, who do find love and feel comfortable experimenting with their sexuality instead of treating it like a potential death sentence,
you do not get to sit there and tell me what a fucking terrible human I am. I was a fucking kid too, and these are my stories too. they, in fact, are the stories fucking owed to me by a world that taught me to be afraid. and that part of my history as a human did not get erased when i passed some arbitrary milestone of time.
Society already stole the upbringing I should have had and locked me in a fucking closet until i was in my mid 20s, and you puritanical myopic shits have the fucking audacity to say me reaching back to try and remember something better makes me a pedophile, you dogwhistling dumbfucks.
you are literally on the same side as the people who made my best friend afraid his dad would beat him to death for coming out. that is where you stand. you use the same tactics and the same scripts. “oh if you are interested in these things…… that means you’re Wrong and will probably go to Hell 😦 why do you want to be such a bad person when you can be Straight And Pure?”
fuck off
I think this is the part that hurts the most: it’s mostly people who did get a queer childhood trying to shut down those of us who didn’t from talking about it.
I just want to really really really thank you for what you wrote about badwrong porn being comparable to sexual roleplay and how the consent of the reader as the only real participant functions in those kinds of fantasies. As someone whose taste in sexual fantasies predates my trauma by a wide margin and doesn’t feel particularly related to it I often feel thrown under the bus even by people on “my side” of this issue and I can’t say how much it means to have at least one person not doing that
I’m sorry that you’ve been put in that position. The amount of doublethink that goes into holding up certain kinds of fantasies as morally bad while validating others as fine and normal drives me absolutely nuts, because we already know that when it comes to things like sexual orientation and behavioural preferences, you can’t get “converted” away from your inclinations because of media. Contrary to the fears of conservatives, playing violent video games doesn’t make you violent, just like watching stories with queer couples in them doesn’t make you gay – and the same goes for making that content, too. Certainly, there are instances where people seek to validate or explore their existing impulses through their choice of fiction, and that’s equally true of negative impulses (violent people enjoying violent games) as positive ones (queer people enjoying queer representation), but in either case, the fiction itself is not the cause.
But when it comes to darker sexual fantasies, people suddenly start confusing “I personally can’t think of a reason why someone would want to read or write this unless they’re an abuser” with “being pro-abuse is the only way such content could exist.” I mean, I have seen, on this actual website, people make the genuine argument that anyone who willingly engages with or supports BDSM is either an abuser or someone so indoctrinated that they don’t realise they’re a victim. Like… I’ve seen that discourse. It exists right alongside the claim that it’s not feminist for women to enjoy being sexually submissive, and I just Cannot with that bullshit.
Here’s a misogynist argument: what women enjoy in bed defines them in all other aspects of their lives, which is why it’s Right and Proper that women lie down for men like Eve lay down for Adam. And I’m using that phrase in the sexual sense as well as the metaphoric one: in the old Talmudic story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, her desire to be on top rather lying meekly beneath him was cited as one of the reasons why she fled the Garden and turned into a demoness. There’s a reason why the missionary position is called what it is, and that reason ties into a longstanding tradition of Christian sexual hangups in the West. For as long as Europeans have been thinking about women and sex, the assumption that women are defined by their arousal and their submission – or by their refusal to submit – has existed. So as much as it infuriates me, the idea that getting aroused by something dark in fanfic, roleplay or the privacy of your own head = wanting or supporting it the rest of the time has a long cultural lineage. It’s just also fucking wrong.
My personal way of looking at it is this: human beings are, to the best of our knowledge, unique in our sentience, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still animals. What arouses us – what our bodies like, and what our brains then analyse – doesn’t always have a rational, intellectual origin, but that doesn’t stop us looking for one and feeling frustrated if we can’t conjure up a justification that fits our social context. That conflict leaves a lot of people feeling ashamed of themselves or their desires, but shame doesn’t help anyone to live well, and especially not when we start wielding it against one another. And so we have fantasies: things that let us compromise between our bodily desires and our human intelligence without endangering ourselves or others. Fantasies didn’t create that dichotomy between the physical and the mental – they’re what we created to deal with its existence.
one more thing, i can’t help but notice that a lot of tumblr’s popular ideas about what 30+-year-old women — and it’s almost always women — should be doing instead of having fun online seem to line up pretty closely with very conservative beliefs about what women’s options should be. especially that women should have children and that once they have children their lives should revolve around those children completely, with no time for breaks or hobbies or internet discussion or other selfish, frivolous, unmotherly activities. to be a mother or a woman old enough to be expected to be a mother is to be a specially regulated class of person, judged by her performance as a self-sacrificing caregiver and exemplar of chaste maturity.
it’s hard to escape the influence of these ideas. but if you don’t hold yourself to this standard at age 22 or whatever, if you want more than what patriarchy has planned for you, then it’s worth it to try to let go of this standard when it comes to older women too. and not only because you will one day be one of them. but also because it’s the right thing to do.
i'll apple your turnover 