“Self-harm is intentionally harming or injuring yourself, and intentionally triggering yourself is a form of self-harm.”
Oh. I knew that. I know I knew that. I just never put it together with some of my behavior before. Jinkies.
A friend whose kinky smut I desired to read sent me the thing they were most proud of, I started reading, and nearly immediately ran across something super, super upsetting to me, and I spent the next two days shaking my hands out and growling because it brought bad thoughts to the surface.
That was not his fault. That was not my fault. It’s just a thing that happened.
Sometimes, folks, when you get triggered, there’s nobody who can rightly be blamed.
Blaming people who write content you find disturbing are not obligated to stop writing or sharing it because it upsets you. They aren’t actually even obligated to tag it, even though that is A) now commonly accepted fic manners, and B) something that I absolutely 100% would do.
I get that fandom is supposed to feel like a haven away from all the nasty bullshit that the world foists upon us. And it can be. I even think that yes, to an extent it should be.
That does not mean that there aren’t adult spaces within fandom. That doesn’t mean that fandom itself, all fandom, is a safe space and that everyone in it is obligated to try to take care of you.
You need to do that yourself. You need to be comfortable with the idea that some people will like things you personally find awful or upsetting. And you need to learn how to disengage.
Anon is not a bad person. It was not their fault they were traumatized. Nobody should be. What happened doesn’t make anon disgusting, and it doesn’t mean that what happened was their fault. Nobody should hate them.
But fandom content has literally nothing to do with what was done to them, except for reminding them of it. That’s extremely unpleasant, but it’s not a reason to tell everyone “Stop doing this thing!”
Even if somebody is forcing you to look at it (I don’t mean you stumble across untagged adult content by accident, I mean someone actually makes you look at it) it’s not the content creator’s fault (unless they ARE the person making you look at it, in which case it is obviously very wrong).
So please, stop. It’s not that we don’t care.
It’s that we figure you’re old enough to find your own way around, and come up with your own ways of protecting yourself from content you don’t want to see.
Most of y’all grew up in a VASTLY more permissive cultural context than I did. Most of you don’t understand how terrible, patronizing, stifling, and stunting it is to have fandom spaces sterilized of all but the most wholesome content. You may think you do. You really probably don’t.
Please stop trying to drag us back there. It’s only going to wear you out. Those of us who lived through it once? We’re not going to tolerate it happening again, even though, this time, it’s coming from within fandom itself.
