roachpatrol:

manyblinkinglights:

curlicuecal:

rollerskatinglizard:

So there’s yet another post going around about adults vs teens in fandom, and it’s around 6k notes right now, the vast majority of the responses being from adults arguing the side that I am pretty much on. But there’s a subcurrent that’s bugging me.

OP asked that adults in fandoms with a majority of teens ‘be careful’ about how they interact with teens and about what content they produce and post. Needless to say, ‘be careful what you produce’ spurred a lot of backlash from adults who a) have had enough of being told they shouldn’t write/draw/make certain content because it’s morally impure/think of the children, b) are careful to tag and warn thoroughly so anyone who doesn’t want to see that content can avoid it, and c) have no idea what the teen-to-adult ratio is in their fandom–I mean, I’m not even sure how you’d figure that out, or why you’d need to.

OP’s post seemed to a lot of people to be asking adults to look out for kids–interpreted by the adults as monitoring/restricting the content that’s put out so kids can’t run across it. And yeah, that part we’ve seen before, and no, so long as you’re tagging correctly, you should be able to produce and post whatever you want.

But ‘be careful how you interact with teens’ isn’t the same thing. Some of the teens responding to the post weren’t talking about restricting content, they were talking about inappropriate ways adults had behaved towards them, things that had creeped them out. Content that had been sent to them after they’d explicitly said they didn’t want to see it, offline harassment and abuse at cons. Reasonable boundaries being trampled and ignored.

And it dismays me that as far as I could tell, the adults didn’t notice and therefore didn’t respond to those concerns. At least to say, ‘That sucks, I’m not here for that, I will respect your boundaries and not force attention or content on you that you don’t want’. (Not the same as not making that content at all, but tagging it correctly and not being a jerk.)

Granted, most of us adults on here aren’t creeps, and the ones who are aren’t going to read any of the reblogs of that post and go ‘oh, I guess I’ll stop doing creepy stuff now’. (‘Fill-in-the-blank don’t interact’ doesn’t work on the people it’s meant for, because it’s setting a boundary and they don’t care.) And there’s very little we can do, afaik, to protect anyone from jerks like that online, except to say that the block button is your friend. (In irl, in a situation like a con, it should really be different.)

But the least we can do, while standing by our hard-won rights to make whatever content we want, is to listen to these scared kids and say ‘I hear you. You have the right to set your own boundaries, to read/watch/avoid whatever you want, to interact or not with people older than you, and I support you in doing that.’

At least that might help us stop talking past each other.

Really, really good points.

Tumblr face-blinds you and it’s easy to forget that you’re talking to another human with a different context than yours, much less that you might be talking to a kid.

So, yeah.  Be careful how you interact with teens.

And, just as a thought: when I was younger I had no idea how to disengage from a fight.  And I would hurt the fuck out of myself because I could not back down when I was upset.  It’s something I still struggle with.  Like.  A lot.

But I’m a grown up and I’m better at recognizing now when everybody involved in a conversation is triggered and when everything has gotten non-productive.  I don’t actually need the last word.  (I tell myself, still not really feeling it.)

Internet facilitates pile-ons like whoa.  Learn how to disengage (or not engage) when the other person can’t.

Kids and teens cannot be relied on to set and defend their own boundaries. “Be careful” means self-regulate, so that you don’t trespass where the fences haven’t been put up yet.

It doesn’t mean don’t interact–it pretty much means DON’T PURSUE. In any sense. (Except maybe a judicious checkup here and there that one you know isn’t in any trouble and is okay.)

in a lot of ways, the reflexive ‘eww, grownups!’ reaction younger fans have for older fans is a good thing. it keeps them suspicious of adults motives, which is cool because they are vulnerable and the people who will be taking advantage of that vulnerability are manipulative creeps. wariness has to substitute for experience when you’re young. 

unfortunately, manipulative creeps are gonna manipulatively creep, and one way a lot of them have found is to be yelling ‘eww, grownups!’ the loudest– except of course, they, the creep, are the good grownup, the one who knows all about bad the bad grownups are, and just wants to protect you from them? annnnd also isolate you so you’re easier to retraumatize and control. 

ultimately i think it’s perfectly fair for teens to ask adults leave them alone to their own societies, but it’s not a perfect– or even all that great– solution for the fact that abusive creeps are going to invade kids’ spaces and ignore their boundaries no matter what. 

of course, if any of this had an easy, simple solution, all us grownups would have been able to fix it back when we were teens ourselves. this is just something we’re all going to have to try to work out as best we can, which isn’t gonna be that great for anyone, unfortunately.