Note to minors on Tumblr: The world doesnât revolve around you.
I realize this might be a shock to hear. You grew up in or after the Think Of The Childrenâą and It Takes A Villageâą era. Itâs possible your mommies and daddies took you everywhere â bars, tattoo parlors, $100-a-plate restaurants, cocktail parties â without regard to how well you behaved. You concluded, therefore, you were welcome everywhere, and that all adults, everywhere, must cater to your presence or theyâre just a bunch of big olâ meanieheads.
Free clue: You are not, in fact, welcome everywhere. Nor is every single place, whether in meatspace or on the internet, obliged to think of you and your needs before anyone elseâs.
Because adults have our needs, too. And, yes, writing stuff that gets us off or otherwise tickles our fancy is a need for some of us.
Hereâs another free clue: Every single adult you encounter is, likewise, not obliged to but your needs first and foremost. Including⊠women. Strangers on the internet who happen to be women are not your mommies, not your aunties, not your big sisters, not your therapists. They did not sign up for the job of protecting and coddling your precious little asses. Not even the ones who have children themselves. The only ones theyâre obliged to look out for are their kids.
Iâm not one of those women. I never wanted children, I donât care that much for children, and I feel absolutely no responsibility to mother them myself. If a minor whines at me for not making them my highest priority, I block them with extreme prejudice.
I can hear you gasping in shock right now. But the idea that women are obliged to nurture everyone out there is a really, really regressive idea. Oh, I can see how it gained currency on a site where the âsocial justiceâ crowd thinks that nail polish is feminist, Hades was Mr. Right and Demeter was an abusive mother, and if youâre a not-very-feminine woman you canât be a cis woman. Itâs bullshit, peddled by dipshits who donât want to examine their underlying beliefs but who want cookies for being all moral and upright.
Now, getting back to spaces. You are not categorically unwelcome on fanart and fanfic websites. Many of them are considered perfectly safe in their entirety for your delicate little psyches. Others are a mix. If you go, for example, to AO3, and you see a fic rated G (general audiences) or T (teen)? You can read it.
If, however, you see a fic that is rated M for mature or E for explicit⊠or it has all those terrible tags like âRape,â âNoncon,â âDubcon,â or whatever else sends you into a shaking ânâ crying fit? You have two choices:
1. Donât click through.
2. Click through and pretend youâre an adult. Which means:
a. Donât tell the author or the other commenters your age.
b. If you liked the story at all, feel free to give feedback about it.
c. If you didnât like the story and it upset you, take responsibility for having clicked through, then go do some self-care.
Note that none of the above options include âClick through, get offended, whine at the author for having written something that upsets you, and maybe get a posse of your fellow antis together to hound the author off the internet.â
Those tags? Those were all the author owed their audience. Those tags give you the information you need not to click through if you donât want to be offended, triggered, or disturbed by the fic. You do not have the right to insist that the fic not exist in a public forum.
As for âprotecting young women and girlsâ blah de fucking blah: again, you are not going after abusers. And thereâs another very regressive meme: that by policing the shit out of womenâs self-expression, you can âprotectâ them. Nope. You protect them from abusers by targeting the abusers. And writing something âproblematicâ isnât abuse. Because fiction isnât reality and depiction isnât endorsement.
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