I have to say that it wasnt always that bad. Now its full of BDSM, but like, a decade ago it was very tame. It had the casual sexism that we are teached since we born, but it was as sexist as romance movies are, for exemple.
After this whole public efford to normalize porn consume for woman and desistigmatization of BDSM is that things turn upsidedown like this. Now you cant find erotic fanfiction of any fandom that doesnt contain sadomasoquism.
Fanfics really show how womans fantasies are. In the beggining they were very romantic and now everything is very violent, and what changed? Womans now whatch porn. If I didnt believe how much porn changes our whole view of sex, fanfics would have show me that
Yeah I’ve been reading fanfic for close to 20 years. This is all sooo new. Like I came across “lemons” at a pretty young age, and would read long fics that included them (mostly just skimmed the sex parts, but still processed enough to get the jist), and I saw none of the stuff there is now.
On AO3 I see so many E rated fixes tagged with rape, BDSM, chocking, anal (het), bukkake, “cock slut”, etc. And these aren’t necessarily pwp fics. It’s romance fics.
Meanwhile 15 years ago I almost never saw this shit in fics. I’m sure it existed, but it wasn’t as mainstream. I wasn’t super likely to find it in a plot heavy fanfic. Now I do.
Eh, yes and no. I do think it’s gotten worse. Even kink memes from a decade ago wouldn’t get as dark as some run of the mill Avengers fic on AO3 these days. But there were pockets. I wasn’t IN Star Wars fandom at the time but later discovered archived sites when they were being eaten up by AO3. Like there were whole sites for Qui/Obi slavery aus. In like 2000.
I also think ff.net’s anti smut rules kept probably a lot of darker stuff on 4chan or individual authors sites or adultff whatever beforehand.
i definitely remember making an account on the restricted section (or something like that) 18+ Harry Potter archive In the early 2000s and reading with bated breath
but they weren’t anal sex “cock slut” slave fantasies. they were explicit, but romantic. it was erotica, not porn. like one that sticks out to me was snape making hermione sit on his hand (flat hand) in public with a skirt on. no explicit scene, no slurs, no violent imagery - Would it be considered BDSM, yes, but compared to now? now I get stuff on my dash on tags I would never expect like real person a/b/o styles and I’m just… horrified.
and not even x-rated stuff - like I remember being THRILLED by this story called “orange crush” which was a Harry and Ginny slow burn like 12 chapters and they played a highly charged game of footsie and one fairly chaste kiss.
I’m not even certain you can find stories like that any more. The half dozen times I’ve looked in the last 5 years across fandoms there’s just… nothing out there that I find even close to normal. I miss the days where mpreg was the most taboo thing you would find.
I've been reading fanfics since 2005 at least and there has definitely been a shift in the last decade. The influences of porn are extremely evident. Also, tags are practically irrelevant if I'm reading what's supposed to be a romance and out of nowhere one character slaps another during sex and it's presented as okay. No warning no nothing. That's how normalised violence and aggression have become in smut. Porn rots the brain.
