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olderthannetfic · 3 years

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Hi! I'm really impressed by how calmly you've been replying to asks about upsetting topics. Mind if I share a different pov? It's cool if you want to be done with the subject, but if it's okay, here it is: even though it's true that people already know csa is bad, there might be some rationalizations or confusion about where to draw some lines, and abusers can use stories that push those lines to groom children. However, what we need to do about it is not count on our ability to eliminate every one of those stories and any other pedo propaganda, but instead make sure everyone knows where to draw the lines and that those rationalizations are bs, so they can see that it's pedo propaganda and not be fooled. I know people won't agree on all the lines regarding exact ages and age differences that are acceptable, but there are other things that slip through the cracks, like pretending the age of consent is only relevant to some sex acts and not others (incorrect in most countries, and even then it's just a different age of consent for different acts, there are no sex acts that have no age of consent), or that if it's non-sexual it can somehow exist as an acceptable romantic relationship (incorrect, that's not a relationship). And having that information is useful both in cases of for real pedo propaganda and in cases of darkfic that was written to be creepy and wrong on purpose but the reader might not recognize that.

This comes up a lot. Really, really a lot. And the arguments are extremely repetitive, as are the asks going "You haven't thought about this, have you?" that I see waiting for me in my inbox, yet again. When I'm ready to tap out (or just get busy with RL) I usually just stop answering asks for a while.

Here's the thing: a lot of people look at this only in terms of potential victims and an audience that doesn't understand what it's being exposed to. I agree that it's important to protect people.

However, these kinds of conversations always erase another, much larger group: people who are making or consuming dark art because it is meaningful or hot or fun for them. To me, it comes down to that infamous 1995 Time Magazine cover:

From a boingboing writeup:

"In 1995 Time magazine published a cover story about online pornography that gave grandstanding politicians an excuse to try to censor the Internet. The politicians would have succeeded, if it weren't for the efforts of civil libertarians, especially Mike Godwin, who was staff counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation at the time."

I was 14 when this fight as going on. It sounds like a long time ago, but people who built AO3 were mostly teens or college students or young professionals, and we remember this fight vividly.

I was already in fandom, reading some racy Mulder/Scully porn, and elsewhere on the internet reading snuff erotica and other things far worse than most fanfic.

(And yes, I do go hunting on AO3 when people tell me they've seen something nasty in the woodshed. There's some pretty out there stuff if you search really hard, but it still almost never reaches the heights of anything I read on Usenet as a teen. AO3 is really tame as porn goes.)

When I was a teenager forming my understanding of art and ethics and this bullshit scaremongering happened, the US had a conversation. The topic was this:

Is it worth sacrificing adults' entire lives and spaces in the service of protecting children?

On the conservative douchebag side, we had the argument that children might be there because it's a general space.

On the winning side--the winning side so far because this fight is never over--was the idea that it is not reasonable to expect public spaces to conform to what's appropriate for the kindergarten classroom. Children are not the default, and they do not set the tone for spaces that are not specifically for them.

So these were my formative teen years: do we get an internet where we can be adults? Normal adults who are allowed to have fantasies or discuss our queer sexuality or breast cancer or whatthefuckever! Or is the internet a gated playground with foam over all the play structures because we are obligated to think of the children at every moment of every day?

I agree with you that some actual abusers use arguments of the type you describe and that it's important for our youth to understand what those arguments look like.

I have yet to see even a single AO3 fic I thought was actually espousing any such thing, let alone a significant number. This simply isn't an accurate representation of most of the fic that these endless fandom wanks are about.

AO3 does allow you to make an account if you're 13 and up, but it was built by a bunch of adults for other adults. It's very writer-oriented. Its mission is saving art. That's not a space that can or should be primarily concerned with the subset of readers who can't contextualize what they're looking at.

The way to help those readers might be by people who want a clean archive making one or by making an AO3 collection of vetted stories. Much more likely, the only thing that will help them is fighting purity culture and getting some real and useful sex ed into their country's educational system.

You've made some very good points, anon, but they're not very relevant points to the fandom debates about AO3.

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