Sometimes being the mum who exists in fandom spaces leads to awkward, even concerning, conversations. Such as the one which happened this morning. The mum of my daughter's best mate asked me if one of their mutual friends had sent her a specific message. This message was a link to a fic on ao3, if this had been a G rated fic this conversation would not have happened. It was not G rated. It was an E rated fic. Our kids aren't even 12 yet. As it happens, both of our kids have their internet access heavily locked down and monitored. They have phones because of how their school manages homework. The mutual friend, however, is not so monitored. Or she wasn't, given what her mum found she's about to be. This kid had found a fandom, joined it, and found it chock full of antis. The fic had been sent to her by one of them as an example of the sort of terrible people out there who need to be harassed and attacked because they wrote a smutty story.
Someone thought it was appropriate to send written porn to an 11 year old to encourage her to attack the author.
This resulted in a very awkward conversation where I had to explain to multiple horrified parents the anti culture that is becoming so prevalent. The fact that there are adults who use that purity message to groom kids. The way they escalate and how it bleeds into real life. One parent told me she'd wondered why her 14 year old was suddenly concerned about the two year age gap between her parents. The more I explained, the more absolutely ludicrous it sounded and the more baffled these poor mums looked. More than once I was told "but the characters aren't real, it's really weird but it isn't hurting anyone". Which is the point. The fictional situation isn't hurting anyone. The person who sent porn to an 11 year old is.
Was the person who sent it the author? Doubtful, that thing was tagged in the extreme. Was the person who sent it an adult? Almost certainly. The parent who's child received the original message has found more concerning stuff and gone to the police, but from the language the person doing the sending was in the US. We aren't. Did my daughter receive it? No, she isn't interested in that fandom and therefore wouldn't have bothered with it. Is this the fault of the author? No, they didn't send the link, they didn't ask to be harassed, they wrote a story and put it on ao3, the website created in response to rampant censorship and designed to allow for all kinds of fiction. Is this the fault of the parents? Partially, they should have been looking at their daughter's internet use and clocked what was happening sooner. Is this the fault of the child? No, she's 11, she didn't know better.
This has been a difficult day. Multiple parents have had their eyes opened to parts of fandom culture they had no idea existed. And the thing of it is, they aren't concerned about the why of anti rhetoric. They don't care about the adults writing about teens or rape or incest or torture or any of the rest, because they looked at the clearly tagged and rated fics and figured that it worked the same as a warning on any streaming service. They only cared because some utterly vile individual decided to expose their child to something this girl might not have looked at for years.
Proshippers did not cause what I have spent afternoon helping several sets of parents navigate. Antis did. Normally I'm fairly quiet about the whole debate because I just want to get on with my life and share my experiences. Today I got dragged into that mess in my every day life and the adults in the equation didn't react the way Antis like to think they would. They didn't condemn the author. They condemned the anti who shared the work with a preteen.
This has kicked off, so a brief update:
I don't know all the details and can't share a lot of them because of legal stuff. What we do know is the anti responsible is in the US so whatever happens with them is out of our hands (kiddo's mum relayed this, don't ask for details because I don't have them). Turns out this poor kid had also been exposed to NSFW fanart and a few other fics before we caught on. She is not in a good place, and breaking the mindset is not easy.
So fuck the anti rhetoric. All you're doing is protecting works of fiction at the expense of real children, and I despise that.
Ok, so I don't have an update about the child most hurt by all of this. Mostly because investigations into stuff like this is slow at the best of times, and international investigations are even bloody slower, but also because it's none of anyone's business at this point and I'm not going to spread anymore of this kid's business over the internet. The awareness of the harm done to them is enough. I do, however, have something I need to add because some people lack the critical thinking ability to do the really fucking bloody obvious:
Do not come onto this post with your comments or your reblogs that contain the phrase "I don't agree with proshipping but...". Alright? Just don't.
"Pro" a prefix meaning "for". "Anti" a prefix meaning "against". Alright. End of. Proshipping is simply ship and let ship. Shut up and mind your own business about whatever that person is shipping. Because this post isn't a discourse about whether there are things people should be allowed to ship and write about or not. This post is about the very real harm the so called anti community is doing to very real people in order to protect fucking pixels.
You think proshipping is the thing causing the harm? The people who make their work and tag it to shit before posting so that the people who want to see it can, and the people who want to avoid it are able to avoid engaging? The person who wrote an E (for explicit, this was ao3 remember) story, posted it on the website created so that people could ship their ship and write their dark and nasty fic without having it deleted or being persecuted for it, and tagged it so clearly that I didn't even need to open it to know it contained specific themes. That person? You think that person did the harm when it was actually some purity obsessed asshole who sent it to a literal, physical, real child? You really think the person who tagged their stuff so thoroughly to protect people who didn't want to read it from reading it is the person responsible for the harm done to that child? And you're going to come into the comments on this post and go "I don't agree with proshipping but..." at me. Fuck right off. If that's your first thought, get off the internet, go take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror and contemplate why you're getting your knickers in a twist over works of fiction. Because people like you are the ones on the slipperly slope to harming real, living, breathing children. Not the poor bugger who just wanted to write and share a work of fiction for reasons of their own.
We've been saying for years that this culture of exposing minors to NSFW, dark, and disturbing content in the name of callout posts actually ENABLES predators to groom and traumatise minors, and here you have it. Yet another anecdote showing the harm done. When will this stop?
