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@grumpy-ass-fandom-old
@grumpy-old-fandommom is back!
Although I reckon I like this new name better. I think it’ll be a good time to change it and tag this as -remade for the simplicity of having one main account
Since I’ve gained more followed than I think I had on that account, feel free to follow the above link 👍
@grumpy-old-fandommom is back!
Although I reckon I like this new name better. I think it'll be a good time to change it and tag this as -remade for the simplicity of having one main account
Since I've gained more followed than I think I had on that account, feel free to follow the above link 👍
For anyone who wants to go without shipping discourse, you have Amino! It is moderated by actual people and its coding isn’t shit. Antis are pretty much non-existent there, and those that do exist have no power. It does not allow NSFW content though, which is because it is 13+ instead of 18+. I recommend it for mainly minors and just people unwilling to see nsfw content or shipping discourse. @midoriya-ships-it @antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx I’m not sure who else to tag, but I want to signal boost(?) it so that people who’d rather go to a safer place rather than the dumpster fire that is tumblr.
Just Anti Things: they’re all straight women pretending to be bi
@rottenboysclub check out this dumpster fire
ok but my friend has her bf whip her ass when she wants to cut herself and how is that not abuse like hes taking advantage of her mental illness to get off with his sick rape fantasy at least if she was cutting herself he wouldnt be aroused by it even if shes still hurt yanno
Are you. Uh.
Are you saying that self harm and massive blood loss are. Healthier. Than being spanked by a partner in a controlled fashion because. I.
There’s.
There’s so much happening here. Do you think mentally ill people can’t fuck? Do you think doms are rapists? Do you think hitting someone is rape? DO YOU THINK CONSENSUAL SEX IS RAPE????
I don’t even know where to. To begin so just.
Listen.
Listen, okay.
Step one on the staircase of “stop trying to punish your body for being sick,” also known as “stop self harming,” is to replace high risk forms of self harm like trying to kill yourself with much lower risk ones that still provide you the sense of control, relief, or physical grounding that you are seeking.
This NECESSARY INTERIM MEASURE is what allows you to begin dealing with the extremely painful, difficult process of healing.
Also, did you just fucking say you would rather your friend RISK DEATH than do kink??????????????????????
Just.
Like.
I would rather risk death than deal with you right now, holy shit.
Hey, anon, here’s a quick guide to how to deal with being in your situation:
1) Evaluate your discomfort. Are you uncomfortable with the situation because you’re worried that your friend is being taken advantage of, or because it’s something you don’t understand or have built up an irrational sense of righteousness about? Hint: if you’d rather your friend risk extreme personal injury or death, it’s probably the latter, and you should probably just deal with that on your own.
2) If you are actually genuinely concerned about your friend, the first thing you should do is go talk to them, and let them have a say in how the situation gets handled. I mean, if you really respected their agency, you would probably not be so willing to label a situation they’re in as “definitely rape” because you have some vague idea about what they can and cannot consent to, but hey, maybe shit is really bad and you just don’t know how to deal with it. It’s possible.
3) Don’t drag your friend’s situation out in front of a bunch of strangers on the internet as a way to support your moral superiority. That’s taking advantage of them and speaking over them and it’s gross and just don’t. If you need support or advice, that’s one thing, but bringing it up as a talking point with someone you disagree with is not that.
Also notice the anon’s wording.
“my friend has her bf whip her ass”
That’s clearly someone who WANTS to be spanked, it’s not even a case of where the guy has a spanking fetish himself (which, y’know, is just as valid) but it’s clearly the woman who has the impact play kink, and her boyfriend is participating in it at her request, not the other way around. So how is it possible that he’s ‘taking advantage of her’ ?????
Also
How is impact play ‘rape’? Not that there’s anything wrong with consensual noncon play either but ????? They’re two completely different things.
Anon, do you think that throwing out a million buzzwords and hoping that one will stick is any good way to create an argument? Because it’s pretty much the opposite of that. Please lay off the swerf kool-aid and pet a cat or something.
“at least if she was cutting”
Holy shit, anon, you are a terrible friend just for thinking that.
I want people to look at this and examine this. Because of out of all the miserable fuckery in that post (such as equating consensual sex-acts with rape, but let’s face it, that’s just standard radfem modus operandi) the absolutely chilling part is that anon outright admits they would see their friend do permanent damage to themselves and put their life in danger, purely because the boyfriend wouldn’t be ~*~getting off~*~ on that.
I repeat – this person would rather have their friend commit undeniable self-harm, rather than engage in a relatively danger-free kink, purely because there’s even the slightest possibility that the boyfriend might be deriving pleasure from that kink (how very interesting that they make no mention of the friend’s own pleasure).
This shit is the logical end-point of the rabid demonization of deriving sexual pleasure from non-normative sexual practices (impact-play, in this case) that this place is marinating in. This is how you also end up with nuclear-level hot-takes such as ‘abuse’ (defined in an incredibly loose manner, to the point where consensual BDSM ends up falling under the umbrella) being somehow worse than murder.
Just Anti Things: actually self harm is better than participating in kink
there's a lot to unpack here, but let's torch this entire three piece luggage set
https://critical-elise.tumblr.com/post/180504611327/literally-any-sane-person-pedophilia-incest-and
people who have critical in the url (unless it’s idk critical role or some fandom shit) have drank the radfem koolaid and Are Not To Be Trusted
I wouldn’t be surprised to find a lot of overlap between radfems and fandom criticals either, but I agree with the sentiment
https://critical-elise.tumblr.com/post/180504611327/literally-any-sane-person-pedophilia-incest-and
people who have critical in the url (unless it’s idk critical role or some fandom shit) have drank the radfem koolaid and Are Not To Be Trusted
I wouldn't be surprised to find a lot of overlap between radfems and fandom criticals either, but I agree with the sentiment
OP of that sex responsibility post clarified they didn't mean anything to do with fandom, and they meant really dangerous kinks like body modding/bug chasing. Their wording is still sooo bad. also in another reply went on to say about fantasizing about kinks that "the fantasy will almost always inevitably lead to harm being done" so post is still cancelled, fuck you OP
insert “you tried” meme here. but yeah, fuck op
Here you go! 👍
anyone else’s skin crawl when they see this post? like maybe they mean well and had good intentions when making this post, but it seems so full of anti kink dog whistles
also could they have come up with a catchphrase that sounds any more conservative than “sex responsibility?” seriously, it sounds like something someone who preaches abstinence until marriage would say
Remember kids in order to understand sex responsibility, don’t have sex or you will
DIE
“but what if I want to have sex before I get married?”
“well then I guess you just have to be prepared to die”
Me looking at that screen cap:
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
We’re making some overdue improvements to the code that powers our login system. When we make these changes, all Archive users will be logged out of their accounts.
To avoid permanently losing access to your account, please make sure you know your password and/or can receive password reset emails by December 13.
For full details, please refer to the post.
Did grumpy-old-fandommom get nuked?
Yep! Another down for the count. I know their personal but it wouldn’t be chill for me to give it out without permission.
Do you know if they ever remade?
@grumpy-ass-fandom-old :)
*waves* :)
(I am going to leave soon because Tumblr sent an email saying my account was restored, only to find it's still nuked and this level of absolute scattershot management is not to be endured. But I'll be here at least until PF comes back online! 👍❤️)
part of why the "you must kick anyone who is under 18 out of fandom" stuff makes me, as an adult even, uncomfortable is: i'm autistic. & certain portions of fandom are already on discourse about how developmentally disabled people inherently cannot consent to sex, plus the overall cultural narrative of disabled people being eternal children, PLUS the recent upswing of "autistic ppl are being brainwashed into being queer", sounds like it'll turn into denying autistic ppl of any age queer content
this is what I mean when I say that anti antis are increasingly ageist. like well done blaming antis on minors when minors are also targeted and hurt by anti-shipping ideology.
fandom is literally one of the safest spaces for queer minors. I’m sorry, but if creating a safe space for fandom is predicated on locking out the people who need it the most then fuck you.
Perhaps that OP may come by to explain themselves (I won’t tag out of respect), but from what I’ve gathered, that individual isn’t ageist and was possibly speaking from a place of understandable frustration with the atmosphere on this hellsite. That’s also the third account in as many months as they’ve had to create in part from whiny crybaby brats who cannot understand things like sarcasm and humour.
That being said, whilst I agree that fandom is a great safe space for young queer folks (especially back when I was a teen myself, when many could not be openly gay/lesbian/bi/trans IRL, it was also presumed that most were of age to monitor their own consumption of what they read or didn’t read. And I saw a lot of rather fucked up shit that made that MLP fic Cupcakes look like a soft coffee shop AU in comparison in my day, much of which was untagged beyond any ship(s) involved. It never occurred to most of us to harrass the author or use our age as a reason to act like bints, especially when doing so would get us removed on those grounds alone.
I’m gonna go on a limb to say that’s very likely what that user is calling for moreso than straight up age discrimination for the sake of ages. You’re right, I personally would rather we go for as little gatekeeping as possible (which is why FF.net was such a gold mine at the time it was created and so many teenagers who could not afford servers or webspaces posted fic there), but the people who have been here living their lives online for decades in some cases also deserve protection from ignorance as well. I do my best to reach out to those asking sincere questions about why I feel the way I do, because fighting ignorance with facts is the only tool us discourse bloggers have.
I don’t know what else to do or say about shared spaces like this, except that anyone who can use the internet can also learn to use a block list and learn to take breaks from the net. Teens in online fandom is still a fairly new thing and some folks aren’t used to it…or at least, not to ones so blatantly entitled and spoilt as the ones here are. I’m more than willing to meet them half-way: I tag my fics appropriately and they learn to avoid sites with content they dislike.
the framing of the op acts like teens themselves are the problem, like radfems didn’t deliberately brainwash half the userbase into thinking kinks are gross and dangerous.
the majority of big-name antis are adults. that’s not to say teens are free of blame, but let’s not forget that teenagers who ship sheith and thorki are also prime targets for antis
in addition to that minors, can and do have kinks. locking them out of spaces which have room for them to safely explore their sexuality, without coming into contact with predators, will pretty much directly lead to abuse.
like I’m not saying op is a bad person, but these are things they are aware of, or should be aware of, and making that post anyway is bit, you know, not good. actively detrimental to teenagers who are not antis
like I’ve said before that teenagers on the pro ship side face a lot of generalisation and ageism from adult pro shippers, and this is a form of that.
most teenagers I know know how to use their blacklist. the fact that antis don’t isn’t on them.
I’m not saying you’re wrong—i pretty much agree with you, but this is a thing I’m increasingly frustrated about.
i mean op seems to think the problem is teenagers posting lewd photos of themselves in fandom tags and that we need 18+ spaces so that there aren’t lewd pictures of actual teenagers floating around
like they don’t seem at all to be concerned with antis at all?
and while i agree that teens should be allowed to explore their sexuality safely and fandom can be the best and safest place to that for a lot of people, if i thought that teens posting what amounts to cp of themselves was what caused the recent tag shutdowns, i would want a place without teens, so that teens couldn’t post their nudes there and get it shut down.
There should probably be an etiquette rule widely-discussed around here, along the lines of ‘if OP hasn’t blocked you, it would be preferable and polite to reblog their original post and add your thoughts to the discussion there, instead of screenshotting part of the post.’ I’m not saying this to be a wise-ass, it’s just something I believe in, as a matter of courtesy.
As for why I specifically made the ‘18+ across the board’ point? A number of reasons:
yes, most of the ant ringleaders are 20+ adults (looking at you, strange*uthor) but that doesn’t change the fact that they specifically use the presence of minors on a given platform as their most effective and efficient sledgehammer against any sort of adult (or even all-ages) content on that platform that doesn’t match their sensibilities. I’ve been here long enough to see the screeds get more and more extreme, starting from the very reasonable ‘adult content should be flagged, warned-for and put under a read-more’ to the present ‘such content should be policed and sanitized, no matter the warnings and tags’, with the presence of minors being the go-to-argument that allowed ants to push for more and more draconian standards of content-elimination. I’m very aware on a platform that would officially ban underage users they’d just shift tactics, going from a predominant ‘the existence of this content harms minors’ to ‘the existence of this content harms survivors / women / [insert other relevant group here]’, but at the same time I’ve reached such a point of complete and utter fury and frustration with ants and purity culture that I’d take away as many of their weapons as I can.
one particularly effective tactic employed by ants, that I’ve witnessed directly, is the following: they teach one or more of their followers who are minors to go into adult-only spaces on a given social-media platform, make sure to not disclose the fact that they’re minors, wait a bit in there and be exposed to NSFW material. The next step of the plan is for the minor(s) to then publicly and loudly implode, accusing the adult-only space of everything from having directly harmed them to grooming them (my own country defines knowingly showing sexual content to a minor, as an adult, as ‘corruption of minors’ and classifies it as a very serious crime; if someone is able to lie convincingly enough in the above case, they can put a ton of innocent people in a world of hurt). The same tactic can be employed on an 18+ from-the-word-go site, yes, but there’s a bit more protection offered by the fact that the ant-encouraged minor was directly violating the ToS with their actions, instead of just contravening against informal fannish community norms.
I’m dead-serious when I say that Tumblr had a very big problem with what, at least from a legal point of view, was self-posted C/P. I’ve had multiple people confirm to me that significant swathes of cosplay tags in particular were a minefield for adult users, because a significant number of underage people used them in order to post ‘lewd’ photos of themselves in cosplay. Again, that ran the risk of putting a lot of people in danger – the underage users themselves and the adults who stumbled onto the content. At least a chunk of the underage images reportedly not in the FBI database were minors posting their own ‘sexy’ cosplay pictures and, even worse, minors actively engaging in sex-work (camming).
Here’s the problem. In theory, I agree with everything @ace-inclusionist is saying, in regards to the place of minors in fandom. I was a young, isolated queer girl years ago – and fandom was very much my lifeline, the place that actively taught me everything from no longer hating myself for my queerness all the way to how I could recognize IRL abusive partners and how I could safely engage with my kinks, either in a fictional environment or with consenting partners. I was in this same situation.
In practice, however, the greatest problem is that, from a social-attitudes point of view, we’re not living in the same kind of online community I was growing up in, fifteen years ago. It boggles the mind and reads as entirely alien to me – and yet, the truth is that we now exist in online spaces where the slowly-prevailing cultural norm is to be intensely suspicious of adult-minor friendships or even consistent adult-minor social interaction. Let’s not even mention the sort of valuable consent-culture education I was getting as a teen – I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me, in so many words, that any adult online offering even the most run-of-the-mill sex-ed to a teen from some fundie family, is a predator. Paradoxically, we’re reached a point where LGBTQ+ elders are now treated as an outright danger by young ‘progressives’, in the same manner we’ve always been treated by social-conservatives.
This wasn’t a widespread problem when I was growing up, but it’s a daily reality now. And a lot of adults are going to reach a point when we decide that, between rabid ants. radfems and everyone else, we’d prefer to legally protect ourselves from some semi-feral neo-puritan trying to destroy our lives by convincing all and sundry that we’re child-abusers purely because of what we ship or because we discuss kinks in a positive way, on a platform where minors are also present.
There’s also an intensely personal aspect to this whole thing. I’m committedly childfree. And I’ve reached such a point of absolute rage against ‘THINK OF ZE CHILDREN!!!’ arguments that I’d give anything to be on a platform where the argument would simply have no legs to stand, on account of who is and isn’t allowed on the platform.
But, because I know what it’s like to feel alone and without any guidance, let’s think up a compromise. I’m open to any and all suggestions. Right now, the best thing I can come up with is a social-media platform with two separate wings, so to speak – an all-ages one, allowing registration of people 13 and up and a secondary, adults-only one, restricted to 18+ users and intended specifically for fannish adult content. On the all-ages version, allow teen-focused sex-ed such as Scarleteen resources and create a teen-focused resource that could be of benefit to LGBTQ+ teens, kink teens, etc, with links to any and all objective information that would allow said teens to be informed and keep themselves and their partners safe.
I’m sincerely sorry about not @ing you. I had just woken up, and did not trust my ability to come up with full sentences, and I didn’t want to add garbage to a post I largely agreed with.
I don’t have a coherent response (yet) because my problem is
I agree with everything you said.
all of it.
But locking teenagers out of fandom spaces that contain nsfw stuff would have majorly messed up my sexuality back when I was figuring it out. I don’t know what I would have done without fandom to hold the line for me, or what I would have fallen into. And I am deathly afraid that locking children into a culture of shame with voices of reason around is going to hurt them. That it’s going to hurt them I have no doubt about - my questions are about numbers. How many. How much is too much.
[This ties into a larger problem I have with pro shipping as a whole - the idea that minors are the problem and not one of the primary targets of fandom anti shipping. Yes, adults are targeted, but so are minors, often survivors themselves, who are drawing or writing totally unobjectionable content. People have been harassed off tumblr and been sent death threats over this. It’s terrifying, and I wish there was more acknowledgment of it, and the ways in which anti shipping is damaging to minors with kinks and sexualities, especially minors who realise those sexualities before it is socially acceptable. it gets worse when said minors are kinky or queer or both. I would know, and so I imagine, would you.]
The other thing is that locking teenagers out of adult spaces isn’t feasible because they will lie to get in. Of course, this does work in that adults aren’t at legal risk (which is one thing I care deeply about - I wouldn’t want anybody I talk to to get in trouble for no fault of theirs) but it leads to an atmosphere where accidently finding out that a fellow user is a minor could be extremely traumatic (for want of a better word) on the adults around. Not to mention dangerous for the minor/s. This means that they’d work really hard to keep their age a secret. I don’t know how good that is. I’m sure it worked out for those of y’all from the LJ era, but I benefit from having spaces where people know my age.
A website like what you’re talking about solves most of those problems. Now we just need somebody to code it.
A lot of good food all the way around here. 👍
Back in the LJ days (much of the big activity having happened during the early to mid 2000s), no one gave out all their personal info, least of into a public form such as this. Not minors, not adults, no one. It just didn't happen because no one truly trusted the people on the other side of the PC and for children especially, we were warned about online Stranger Danger and of blokes trying to have at us online.
And just as kids lied back then to get into spaces, so too did adults to get around kids...and still do. There was a rather infamous anti named Ollie who weaseled his greasy mitts in the Finnrey fandom and raped a girl there and the lot of them bent over backwards to defend him because he said all the right world's about abuse is wrong uwu . He's still floating about under the @ imfuk-d name, entirely unaffected by the purge. Because of course he is. But I digress.
That's why I personally am far less concerned about the age of abuser as much as the behaviours of such. Because historically the biggest instigators of wank (and the ones that run the longest in the tooth to spread poison) are the older fans encouraging others below them to show their arses, but there just so many more young posters who think this is okay--the same as I did around the fanfic snark communities I visited when I was young, where flaming someone's Mary Sue was considered a productive way to make a point.
I'm not going to lie, it was the antis here and the damage they've inflicted that made me truly reevaluate everything I did in my teen years moreso than any true realisation that my trolling had stopped anything. I wished I'd met more adults who explained why my thought process was entirely rubbish--that censorship doesn't stop creators and only harms the most vulnerable targets. Both adults and teens both deserve safe spaces for their art and to enjoy fandom in the manner of their choosing.
this is what I mean when I say that anti antis are increasingly ageist. like well done blaming antis on minors when minors are also targeted and hurt by anti-shipping ideology.
fandom is literally one of the safest spaces for queer minors. I’m sorry, but if creating a safe space for fandom is predicated on locking out the people who need it the most then fuck you.
Perhaps that OP may come by to explain themselves (I won’t tag out of respect), but from what I’ve gathered, that individual isn’t ageist and was possibly speaking from a place of understandable frustration with the atmosphere on this hellsite. That’s also the third account in as many months as they’ve had to create in part from whiny crybaby brats who cannot understand things like sarcasm and humour.
That being said, whilst I agree that fandom is a great safe space for young queer folks (especially back when I was a teen myself, when many could not be openly gay/lesbian/bi/trans IRL, it was also presumed that most were of age to monitor their own consumption of what they read or didn’t read. And I saw a lot of rather fucked up shit that made that MLP fic Cupcakes look like a soft coffee shop AU in comparison in my day, much of which was untagged beyond any ship(s) involved. It never occurred to most of us to harrass the author or use our age as a reason to act like bints, especially when doing so would get us removed on those grounds alone.
I’m gonna go on a limb to say that’s very likely what that user is calling for moreso than straight up age discrimination for the sake of ages. You’re right, I personally would rather we go for as little gatekeeping as possible (which is why FF.net was such a gold mine at the time it was created and so many teenagers who could not afford servers or webspaces posted fic there), but the people who have been here living their lives online for decades in some cases also deserve protection from ignorance as well. I do my best to reach out to those asking sincere questions about why I feel the way I do, because fighting ignorance with facts is the only tool us discourse bloggers have.
I don’t know what else to do or say about shared spaces like this, except that anyone who can use the internet can also learn to use a block list and learn to take breaks from the net. Teens in online fandom is still a fairly new thing and some folks aren’t used to it…or at least, not to ones so blatantly entitled and spoilt as the ones here are. I’m more than willing to meet them half-way: I tag my fics appropriately and they learn to avoid sites with content they dislike.
the framing of the op acts like teens themselves are the problem, like radfems didn’t deliberately brainwash half the userbase into thinking kinks are gross and dangerous.
the majority of big-name antis are adults. that’s not to say teens are free of blame, but let’s not forget that teenagers who ship sheith and thorki are also prime targets for antis
in addition to that minors, can and do have kinks. locking them out of spaces which have room for them to safely explore their sexuality, without coming into contact with predators, will pretty much directly lead to abuse.
like I’m not saying op is a bad person, but these are things they are aware of, or should be aware of, and making that post anyway is bit, you know, not good. actively detrimental to teenagers who are not antis
like I’ve said before that teenagers on the pro ship side face a lot of generalisation and ageism from adult pro shippers, and this is a form of that.
most teenagers I know know how to use their blacklist. the fact that antis don’t isn’t on them.
I’m not saying you’re wrong—i pretty much agree with you, but this is a thing I’m increasingly frustrated about.
i mean op seems to think the problem is teenagers posting lewd photos of themselves in fandom tags and that we need 18+ spaces so that there aren’t lewd pictures of actual teenagers floating around
like they don’t seem at all to be concerned with antis at all?
and while i agree that teens should be allowed to explore their sexuality safely and fandom can be the best and safest place to that for a lot of people, if i thought that teens posting what amounts to cp of themselves was what caused the recent tag shutdowns, i would want a place without teens, so that teens couldn’t post their nudes there and get it shut down.
There should probably be an etiquette rule widely-discussed around here, along the lines of ‘if OP hasn’t blocked you, it would be preferable and polite to reblog their original post and add your thoughts to the discussion there, instead of screenshotting part of the post.’ I’m not saying this to be a wise-ass, it’s just something I believe in, as a matter of courtesy.
As for why I specifically made the ‘18+ across the board’ point? A number of reasons:
yes, most of the ant ringleaders are 20+ adults (looking at you, strange*uthor) but that doesn’t change the fact that they specifically use the presence of minors on a given platform as their most effective and efficient sledgehammer against any sort of adult (or even all-ages) content on that platform that doesn’t match their sensibilities. I’ve been here long enough to see the screeds get more and more extreme, starting from the very reasonable ‘adult content should be flagged, warned-for and put under a read-more’ to the present ‘such content should be policed and sanitized, no matter the warnings and tags’, with the presence of minors being the go-to-argument that allowed ants to push for more and more draconian standards of content-elimination. I’m very aware on a platform that would officially ban underage users they’d just shift tactics, going from a predominant ‘the existence of this content harms minors’ to ‘the existence of this content harms survivors / women / [insert other relevant group here]’, but at the same time I’ve reached such a point of complete and utter fury and frustration with ants and purity culture that I’d take away as many of their weapons as I can.
one particularly effective tactic employed by ants, that I’ve witnessed directly, is the following: they teach one or more of their followers who are minors to go into adult-only spaces on a given social-media platform, make sure to not disclose the fact that they’re minors, wait a bit in there and be exposed to NSFW material. The next step of the plan is for the minor(s) to then publicly and loudly implode, accusing the adult-only space of everything from having directly harmed them to grooming them (my own country defines knowingly showing sexual content to a minor, as an adult, as ‘corruption of minors’ and classifies it as a very serious crime; if someone is able to lie convincingly enough in the above case, they can put a ton of innocent people in a world of hurt). The same tactic can be employed on an 18+ from-the-word-go site, yes, but there’s a bit more protection offered by the fact that the ant-encouraged minor was directly violating the ToS with their actions, instead of just contravening against informal fannish community norms.
I’m dead-serious when I say that Tumblr had a very big problem with what, at least from a legal point of view, was self-posted C/P. I’ve had multiple people confirm to me that significant swathes of cosplay tags in particular were a minefield for adult users, because a significant number of underage people used them in order to post ‘lewd’ photos of themselves in cosplay. Again, that ran the risk of putting a lot of people in danger – the underage users themselves and the adults who stumbled onto the content. At least a chunk of the underage images reportedly not in the FBI database were minors posting their own ‘sexy’ cosplay pictures and, even worse, minors actively engaging in sex-work (camming).
Here’s the problem. In theory, I agree with everything @ace-inclusionist is saying, in regards to the place of minors in fandom. I was a young, isolated queer girl years ago – and fandom was very much my lifeline, the place that actively taught me everything from no longer hating myself for my queerness all the way to how I could recognize IRL abusive partners and how I could safely engage with my kinks, either in a fictional environment or with consenting partners. I was in this same situation.
In practice, however, the greatest problem is that, from a social-attitudes point of view, we’re not living in the same kind of online community I was growing up in, fifteen years ago. It boggles the mind and reads as entirely alien to me – and yet, the truth is that we now exist in online spaces where the slowly-prevailing cultural norm is to be intensely suspicious of adult-minor friendships or even consistent adult-minor social interaction. Let’s not even mention the sort of valuable consent-culture education I was getting as a teen – I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me, in so many words, that any adult online offering even the most run-of-the-mill sex-ed to a teen from some fundie family, is a predator. Paradoxically, we’re reached a point where LGBTQ+ elders are now treated as an outright danger by young ‘progressives’, in the same manner we’ve always been treated by social-conservatives.
This wasn’t a widespread problem when I was growing up, but it’s a daily reality now. And a lot of adults are going to reach a point when we decide that, between rabid ants. radfems and everyone else, we’d prefer to legally protect ourselves from some semi-feral neo-puritan trying to destroy our lives by convincing all and sundry that we’re child-abusers purely because of what we ship or because we discuss kinks in a positive way, on a platform where minors are also present.
There’s also an intensely personal aspect to this whole thing. I’m committedly childfree. And I’ve reached such a point of absolute rage against ‘THINK OF ZE CHILDREN!!!’ arguments that I’d give anything to be on a platform where the argument would simply have no legs to stand, on account of who is and isn’t allowed on the platform.
But, because I know what it’s like to feel alone and without any guidance, let’s think up a compromise. I’m open to any and all suggestions. Right now, the best thing I can come up with is a social-media platform with two separate wings, so to speak – an all-ages one, allowing registration of people 13 and up and a secondary, adults-only one, restricted to 18+ users and intended specifically for fannish adult content. On the all-ages version, allow teen-focused sex-ed such as Scarleteen resources and create a teen-focused resource that could be of benefit to LGBTQ+ teens, kink teens, etc, with links to any and all objective information that would allow said teens to be informed and keep themselves and their partners safe.
I’m sincerely sorry about not @ing you. I had just woken up, and did not trust my ability to come up with full sentences, and I didn’t want to add garbage to a post I largely agreed with.
I don’t have a coherent response (yet) because my problem is
I agree with everything you said.
all of it.
But locking teenagers out of fandom spaces that contain nsfw stuff would have majorly messed up my sexuality back when I was figuring it out. I don’t know what I would have done without fandom to hold the line for me, or what I would have fallen into. And I am deathly afraid that locking children into a culture of shame with voices of reason around is going to hurt them. That it’s going to hurt them I have no doubt about - my questions are about numbers. How many. How much is too much.
[This ties into a larger problem I have with pro shipping as a whole - the idea that minors are the problem and not one of the primary targets of fandom anti shipping. Yes, adults are targeted, but so are minors, often survivors themselves, who are drawing or writing totally unobjectionable content. People have been harassed off tumblr and been sent death threats over this. It’s terrifying, and I wish there was more acknowledgment of it, and the ways in which anti shipping is damaging to minors with kinks and sexualities, especially minors who realise those sexualities before it is socially acceptable. it gets worse when said minors are kinky or queer or both. I would know, and so I imagine, would you.]
The other thing is that locking teenagers out of adult spaces isn’t feasible because they will lie to get in. Of course, this does work in that adults aren’t at legal risk (which is one thing I care deeply about - I wouldn’t want anybody I talk to to get in trouble for no fault of theirs) but it leads to an atmosphere where accidently finding out that a fellow user is a minor could be extremely traumatic (for want of a better word) on the adults around. Not to mention dangerous for the minor/s. This means that they’d work really hard to keep their age a secret. I don’t know how good that is. I’m sure it worked out for those of y’all from the LJ era, but I benefit from having spaces where people know my age.
A website like what you’re talking about solves most of those problems. Now we just need somebody to code it.
Lots of good food from you both
When does a villain become an abuser?
I’ve been seeing people refer to antagonists as ‘abusers’ a lot lately, and I don’t think that word really applies. At least not in the way people mean it.
Abuse as a word implies that the abuser has power over the abused. It’s mistreatment, but in the specific case where the abused is already at a disadvantage because of preexisting factors or where an uneven power dynamic is created. For example, a parent hitting a child would be abuse. Obviously the child is to some extent at their parents’ mercy and would have a harder time reporting the abuse, since people in general don’t listen to children. The parent also has the ability to convince the child that physical violence is a normal part of parenting. In more complicated abusive relationships, the abuser might have a physical advantage over the abused or control of their shared financial assets. In short, an abuser is in control of the situation for one reason or another, and they misuse that control by harming the vulnerable party.
When one person hits another person (or otherwise harms them), that’s not necessarily abuse. It can be, but it isn’t always. If I punched a stranger, that wouldn’t be abuse. It would be assault. Still illegal, but a different act entirely. If I really hated someone and said their face is stupid, that’s not abuse. Now if I got my mob of internet friends together to make fun of them, that would be abuse, but now we’ve introduced a power dynamic. I have more people on my side than the person I’m harming, and that makes my opinion look more correct. As long as there’s a roughly even playing-field, we’re not talking about abuse. The co-worker who I compete with for promotions is not my abuser. We may work at cross-purposes and actively try to prevent each other from gaining rewards, but we both have the same low-level job. There’s no reason why they would inherently have power over me. The same could not be said about my boss. My boss can fire me, so they have the ability to control me to some extent. And they can misuse that control.
Abuse becomes ambiguous once you leave the personal level. You wouldn’t say that two countries at war are in an abusive situation. They’re just enemies. One might have more resources and a stronger military, but it’s a country and whole countries can’t be abusers. Similarly, a politician who makes a decision in government that ends up harming vulnerable people can’t really be called an abuser either. They’re shitty, but they haven’t misused their control on a personal level, so we don’t call that abuse in the same sense as child abuse. We call that abuse of power, which is simply misuse in general rather than harming a specific person.
Now let’s talk about fictional villains. I’m going to use Star Wars as an example, since it’s where I see the most people talking about villains as abusers. Kylo Ren gets called Rey’s abuser. It’s obvious he has more troops at his disposal, and more knowledge of the Force. He is a trained Sith, while Rey has limited experience in lightsaber combat. So we’re talking about a pretty clear advantage. But Kylo Ren lacks the element of control over Rey. She has friends and supporters and a whole rebel movement behind her, and yeah they’re the underdogs, but it’s clearly portrayed as a civil war. The rebels are a separate faction. Rey and Kylo are enemies on different sides of a war. Kylo does not have any specific personal control over Rey, and his advantages when fighting this war (an organized and well-supplied military, domination over certain parts of the galaxy, etc) are advantages against all the rebels, not just against Rey. So Kylo is a villain, but he’s necessarily an abuser. A better example of abuse in Star Wars would be how Darth Vader treats his subordinates. He has the power to kill them or torture them without recourse, and he does just that. Their lives are in his hands, and he misuses that control by harming them. Kylo and Rey are different, because Kylo does not have any personal control over Rey.
Enemy doesn’t mean abuser, and conflict doesn’t mean abuse. Those words have specific usages and shouldn’t be extended to mean things they don’t. Please stop calling villains abusers for actions that don’t qualify as abuse. It’s just an easy way of saying “I don’t like them and no one else should either.”
I don’t agree with every single point made in this post (for example that abuse of power is misuse in general rather than harming a single person) but I won’t dwell on it because I feel like many examples have been written to fit the definition and vice versa, which caused a bit of “Not all X” syndrome in me as I read. Still, OP makes an excellent point that is, imo, truly important to highlight:
“Enemy doesn’t mean abuser, and conflict doesn’t mean abuse”
I’ve read one too many times “abuse” being used as an umbrella term for any kind of negative feeling ever, no matter the circumstances that generated them, and no matter the context that might justify them. Fiction that explores negative feelings tout court is bad, the characters are abuser/abused, the author is abusing the characters and indirectly the readers, and shippers are abusing the characters and indirectly the readers by focusing on causing negative feelings. At some point, making someone feel bad* (the most generic expression ever) became abusing them, and therefore it’s forbidden.
*I’m sure I’m not the only one noticing the irony, but antis and those looking favourably at anti-rhetoric have added the little note that it’s not abuse when it’s “righteous”.
This is a good post. The one thing I’d want to highlight is that emotional manipulation can still count as abuse, which is why I think there’s something to saying that consistent harassment of someone online can be considered abusive.
Intentionally causing someone to feel guilt, shame, and fear, and using those emotions to manipulate them, is abusive. The power isn’t as obvious as in a relationship between a boss and an employee, or an age difference, but I think it can be exploited just as much.
But still: abuse is a systematic exploitation of power, not merely conflict.
All of these are great points. I admit that my knowledge of abuse is somewhat limited and could use some improvement, and I was really just writing off the top of my head. And I didn’t mean to leave out emotional abuse. Oops.
So thanks, people who know more about this topic than me. Your additions are very helpful.
@fiction-is-not-reality2 if you want this response back on your new blog 👍
I feel like a lot of anti-antis get sidetracked talking about why x ship is not actually problematic, but… why does it matter? I know i myself have done this, but it’s kind of playing by antis rules.
There shouldn’t be an assumption that problematic ships are inherently wrong. They’re not, because they’re fictional.
This is why even in casual discourse I don't try to justify my ships or site canon as "proof" anymore. What's even the point? I like certain interactions and even if I were gonna change my mind...it's fiction. 😐
Still hilarious to me (and frustrating as hell) that fandom wank 10-15 years ago was “oh, that character is too perfect. Special snowflake. Mary Sue. Give them some flaws to make them more realistic.”
and now it’s “that character isn’t pure enough. They have all these flaws. You must be a bad person if you like them.”
what the ever-living fuck, fandom
