Have you ever seen a twitter thread (or, in this case, two!) that so perfectly expressed everything you’d felt over months and months of harassment persistent? With all credit to @blackblobyellowcone, who is clearly amazing and completely gets it– not just why us women write and read the erotica that we do, but the history behind the censorship we, as a gender, have experienced. Bravo.
I read “My Secret Garden” as a teenager, and it was still as eye-opening and mind-expanding for a woman in ‘93 as it was in ‘73.
I especially like the part of this Twitter thread where it’s mentioned that men’s fantasies are often trotted out in mainstream media as common tropes. Women, on the other hand, are relegated to sharing our fantasies in fandom and in erotica - areas where some puritanical assholes are now trying to drag women back, kicking and screaming, to a past where the only “acceptable” fantasies to have involve rainbows, unicorns and your all-powerful husband. FUCK THAT.
Women have been fighting for decades to have a seat at the proverbial table, and we’re still only sat at the kid’s table in the rec room, but at least we’re making progress. If you want to halt that progress and SHAME women for having the same wild gamut of sexual interests and fantasies that men have been embracing for centuries, then FUCK YOU.
I think one thing that is indicative of this not-good trend is that a decade ago in a relatively vanilla fandom, we had a lot of free and open discussions about why some of the more “problematic” tropes (sex pollen, shag-or-die, etc.) were appealing. We talked about how these borderline non-con tropes were kinks for a lot of people and desirable to read because of the way we’d internalized societal messages about women’s lack of power with sex. And we celebrated that. Yes, there was drama, but the drama wasn’t about whether it was okay to read or write these stories, it was about the right way to warn for them. These days I don’t see any discussion like that, and as a result I’ve mostly kept my more “problematic” fantasies off the page and in my head.
Of course I understand why, within a shipping community, there will be fans who very much do not want their fave put in a position of doing not-okay things to another person sexually. And I wonder if some of the issues arise out of ship wars, where the existence of a fic where Character A manipulates someone into sex (for example) might be used as evidence that Character A is bad by an anti. But the fact is, that character is not a real person, and everyone’s fic does not make up some kind of mega-canon for that character. And ultimately, we should not take away women’s abilities to explore their fantasies through fandom, because we are all poorer for that. As long as writers tag/warn appropriately and readers learn how to quietly nope out of stuff they don’t want to read, that should be enough. (narrator: it wasn’t.)
Hi how do I like this a thousand times plz
Honestly, my thing with the things I write while at the same time hating it when it happens in media is the warnings. Like, I always warn about what things I write. This thing happens here, so you’re free to nope out if you don’t like reading that stuff, while mainstream media throws that stuff here and there without a single warning (or care) about people who consume those.
It’s just so frustrating that while we’re openly putting warnings and tags and stuff and still we get attacked for making this kind of content, men write those same things for public consumption and editors are completely fine with it. Ugh.
