More so, in fact, because your primary purpose is telling people what to do or not do. Any instructive value in creative work is understood to be subordinate to entertainment and self-expression, but if you’re out there explicitly advocating for something, you’d damn well be ready to own it. Including all its implications and potential negative effects.
That means: If you’re urging people not to create some kind of fanwork because you think that’ll protect a vulnerable group, you’d better be ready to account for the members of that group who make it, enjoy it, and find solace in it.
That means: If you’re urging retaliation against creators, you are absofuckinglutely responsible for the harm that befalls them as a result, including harm to members of the group you’re trying to protect.
That means: If you’re holding everyone else to high standards about how they could affect someone with a trigger-able mental illness, you need to hold yourself to the same standards, including effects on people whose anxiety manifests as over-scrupulosity or intrusive thoughts.
That means: If you’re shaming erotica you find “gross,” you don’t get to blow off conversations about how that shame plays into conservative sexual-purity enforcement. You don’t get to wash your hands of the implications, whether or not that’s what you meant. Explicit activism has far more duty to consider indirect implications than anyone’s personal pursuit of sexual fulfillment does.
That means: If your activism has garnered you a huge follower count, you are responsible for the exposure you inflict on the people you pick fights with, and the dogpiles or hate mobs you incite. This can be a tough thing to learn if you get popular overnight, and even well-meaning people fumble with it at first, but it’s something you have to figure out. And don’t fucking give me that “it was just a block list, I didn’t mean for anyone to go into their askboxes on anon and tell them all to kill themselves” crap, the only people fooled by it are the ones looking for an excuse to be fooled.
That means: You are responsible for assessing the relative power and influence of the people you’re addressing, and not griefing marginalized subcultural small fry over artistic sins that are far more egregious among canon creators. Especially canon creators who are just as accessible on Twitter as fanwork creators are on Tumblr.
(Pre-emptive response to objections to the preceding paragraph: Only going after people you know you have social power over isn’t activism, it’s bullying with a thin veneer of activist lingo smeared over it. Only trying to clean up your immediate surroundings isn’t activism, it’s complaining to the local homeowners’ association–valid enough if someone’s running their chainsaw at 2am, but if you just can’t stand Betty’s problematic lawn flamingoes, dressing it up as concern for what tacky decorations say about the neighborhood is a little precious.)
If any of that is too burdensome for you, I suggest you take the advice fandom activists tend to have for fanartists and authors: if you can’t do it without doing damage and you’re not prepared to deal with the consequences, abstain. Restrict your activism to shit that’s not going to hurt people, even if that’s just being the best role model you can be.
You want to set yourself up as a moral authority? You want to dictate what people can and can’t create without activist blowback? That’s power–and yes, local power in a community can exist irrespective of society-wide systemic advantage. With power comes responsibility. Use it wisely or not, as you choose, but don’t act like you get to hold anyone accountable for their art’s indirect potential to harm if you don’t want to be accountable for your direct advocacy.
Addendum: if you coerce someone into disclosing an intimate trauma or outing themselves as a member of a vulnerable group on a public blog just to avoid harassment… yes, you bear partial responsibility for any subsequent abuse of that information. Also, fuck you, fuck your “activism,” and maybe try taking a break and minding your own fucking business for a while.
I wonder where the break happened that such wide swaths of younger fans don’t grasp fandom things that used to be unspoken understandings. That fic readers are expected to know fiction from reality, that views expressed in fic are not necessarily those of the author, that the labels, tags and warnings on various kinkfics are also the indication that they were created for titillation and not much more, please use responsibly as per all pornography. The ‘problem’ isn’t that so-called ‘problematic’ fic exists but that some of the audience is being stupid, irresponsible, at worst criminal, at best not old enough to be in the audience to begin with. And that’s on the consumer, not the author who told you via labels, tags, ratings, warnings and venues what their fic was about and what it was for.
I can’t stress enough how important this post is
This post troubles me because I feel like it misses a lot of the nuance of the situation.
No, not everyone who reads your rapefic or whatever is going to go out and rape someone, but your average joe isn’t the person to be worried about. Rapists, paedophiles, abusers, people who would coerce their family members into incest, etc etc etc use the internet. Their victims use the internet. Those who could be their victims use the internet. And they’ll see what you write. Or draw, or voice act, or whatever else. No, it’s not a guarantee, but it’s a very, very real possibility, and one you have to take into account when writing. If it wasn’t a real problem, I wouldn’t know three victims of it.
The issue is not that you should never explore dark subjects ever or you’re a nasty evil badman. The issue is how you explore them. You’re probably not a rapist for writing a rape fic – but how will a real rapist feel about how you wrote it? Will they feel like what they did is okay? Will they feel like it was sexy? How about a victim of rape? Will they feel like what happened to them didn’t matter? Will they feel like their trauma is nonsense, because they should’ve enjoyed it? Will they be able to use your fic to self harm? Do you really want people feeling this way about something you made?
The responsibility doesn’t entirely lie on you, no. But as a creator, you have a lot of influence, and you need to be careful and considerate of other people.
Fiction is not reality, but it certainly has an effect on it. Hasn’t a work of fiction ever made you feel something? Why would women and LGBT people and disabled people constantly be crying for representation in fiction if it was meaningless?
Fiction affects each individual’s reality.
I think it’s important to consider what effect yours will have.
The ‘nuance’ you think is there does not exist. Writers,
artists, creators of any sort, are NOT responsible for what other people choose
to do, period. People of a certain age and level of reason are expected to be
something other than ‘monkey see, monkey do’ about the arts and life in general.
Anybody else shouldn’t be allowed to consume certain media without supervision,
accompanying education and in some case, maybe not at all. That’s the job of
parents and guardians, not random strangers on the internet with their own row
to hoe.
You say you know three victims. The crimes are still the perp’s fault.
Writing didn’t make them do what they did any more than videogames cause school
shootings. To place blame on the media they consumed, to place blame on the
creators of that media, is a tired, old, long-disproven argument, and one that absolves
criminals of their culpability for their crimes. You’d let perps get away with
it, or get reduced sentences, because you’re claiming it’s actually the fic
that’s to blame.What do you want to do, lock the writers up too?
One of the purposes of fiction literally IS to explore all
angles of an issue safely, and that includes perspectives that are not
desirable in real life, or that can make some individuals personally
uncomfortable. It’s a societal release valve, and an acknowledgement of fears.
Sometimes those fears get processed in strange ways, there are people who get
turned on by balloons popping, for crying out loud. Creators have a
responsibility to create. As a courtesy in fandom, we tag, label and warn
almost to excess. That way your hypothetical victim can avoid things they don’t
want to see, things that by the way, may just as easily have been created by
another victim who is dealing with their issues by a different and equally
valid route.
Fan creators also don’t have anywhere near the influence of
mainstream media, where you don’t even get half the warnings fandom will give
you. Media aims to make you feel, but you are responsible for what you do, and
that includes clicking on fics that told you up front there were things inside that would make you uncomfortable. Learn yourself, know yourself, manage yourself. Writers and artists aren’t here to be your babysitter.
And finally, people are definitely not rapists for writing
rape fic, because what makes a person a rapist is actually committing rape. It’s
not rocket science.
Ah, sorry about that last statement, I must’ve been unclear. Of course you’re not a rapist just for writing rape fic. I was underexaggerating, because I have seen arguments against this on the sillier side of things that seem to assume writing things like rape is equatable to committing them.
Of course the crimes are the perpetrator’s fault, and not the author’s. Sorry if I was unclear, again, but I have to reiterate: your average person reading a dark fic will walk away unaffected. Nobody who reads about some guy murdering a bunch of people is going to go on a killing spree themself!
The problem lies in the fact that people who have already committed crimes, or dream of doing so, will read dark fics. They’ll see what they’ve done portrayed like it’s sexy. Like it’s good. And they’ll feel good about it. They’ll feel like it wasn’t a big deal, and everyone else is wrong, and they’re not a bad person. Or, if they were a victim, they might feel like it’s stupid to be so torn up about it. They’ll feel like what their sibling or parent or datemate or auncle or whatever else tries to do to them isn’t so bad. Of course that abuser is entirely to blame. It was their choice to use that writing for something so horrible. The writing is not the root cause of the problem. But it does enable it. Why would you want to risk someone like that feeling good because of something you wrote? Death of the author and all. Your intentions don’t matter. It’s how someone used what you wrote that makes people suffer.
I never asked the victims I know too much about what happened to them, but one pretty readily volunteered that their abuser, their older sister, coerced them into sex by normalising it with incest fics. They were traumatised by it. Real people are traumatised by these things. The fact remains that despite everything, these victims are far from hypothetical.
It’s not the authors’ fault that someone so evil would use their writing like that. I’d like to believe that the people who write this stuff do so with only the best of intentions. Who could guess that something they wrote would be used for something so awful? The trouble is that it happens. It happens, and people suffer, and we as writers can do something to protect them.
I don’t think writing about dark themes like these should be banned! I know plenty of victims use them to vent and process their own trauma. I just think that we should bear in mind that we as writers have an influence over people, whether they are victims or abusers. It might not be a lot. But it’s there. And there’s nothing stopping us from thinking very, very hard about how we make that influence as good as possible.
I think I’d disagree that writers of derivative fiction have less influence than the mainstream, too. How many people do you know who read pretty much nothing but fic nowadays because mainstream fiction doesn’t have what they want? We influence a different group, to be sure, but there’s still a lot of people in it.
Creators have a responsibility to create, to be sure! The trouble is in the distinction between what is reprehensible to someone personally, and what could actually hurt someone. Plenty of things gross me out. Plenty of those things I know better than to gripe about publically. “Don’t like, don’t read” has its place in fiction!
But that place is not everywhere. Fiction is a good way to explore pressing issues through different lenses. But some lenses – and I’m talking here about the glorification of these issues, nothing more! – have the capability to seriously hurt real people. Think how many cases of abusive relationships cropped up surrounding Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey!
All we need to do, I think, is carefully consider how we frame dark topics. Of course rapists and paedophiles and yada yada yada aren’t your intended audience. You don’t want to hurt anyone. But, on the off chance someone like that saw what you created, how would it make them feel? In the same way we carefully handle racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia and similar issues that could hurt people in fiction, we should be careful about how we portray things like paedophilia and all the other stuff I’ve been talking about.
Just that people are considerate is all I’m asking.
Tagging is the consideration you are asking for. Education is the preventative measure you want. We give or show people the tools to protect themselves. We are not obligated to stop creating, ever.
I don’t think tagging is gonna stop my friend’s big sister from trying to screw them. It’s just going to make incest fics easier for her to find.
Education’s not gonna reach everyone. Often it doesn’t until it’s too late. That same friend still shipped incest until recently, because the realisation that it had hurt them never reached them.
I’m still not saying that these things shouldn’t be written about ever! We are not obligated to stop creating! But we are obligated to ensure we don’t create in a way that hurts people.
The fact that I stick pins in my arms isn’t the root of my problems either. Does that mean taking the pins away will do nothing to help me? Take away one of the tools. Make the box a little safer.
All I’m saying is that we need to be careful about glorifying these issues. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.
Telling people they should only write about certain issues one way is advocating censorship. That has a long history of not ending well. Education may not reach everyone, but it should. That is the angle you should be pushing, not censorship. Start directing people to Scarleteen or Go ask Alice or the freaking cops if you think they have real world concerns.
You’re not in a box. You’re in a big wide world full of needles, pins, scissors, knives, any number of things you can hurt yourself with, or other people could try to hurt you with, and in that world are people who have learned how to handle sharp objects safely, or like you, are still learning. And they can be taught. Because we’re not going back to ripping bread apart with bare hands just because you don’t know how to handle a bread knife.
Who decides what’s “glorifying” an issue, rather than “bringing awareness of how it works?” Random strangers on the internet?
i think if you use your brain for a little bit you can figure out when you’re saying “bad things are good actually” and when you’re saying “this thing happens but it’s bad”
glorification: ooh look how sexy and kinky this bad thing is isn’t it great and titillating
respectful handling of a dark issue: get a load of this bad thing. isn’t it horrible? here’s how it traumatises people.
usually the distinction is graphic descriptions of your Bad Thing, but not always. you can still glorify something without them, and you’re probably able to handle it respectfully despite describing it in detail. not sure how you might do that though. i don’t really wanna know either eheheh, that’s for people who wanna write that to figure out.
The only reasonable reply to that patronizing if supposedly well intentioned tirade:
i’ve yet to see one of the people saying that dark fics “glorify” things produce a single actual example of a fic which “glorifies” things and not be wrong.
so, yes, put me down for “if you use your brain for a little bit” being the key missing step.
Every so often a post comes across my dash accusing women who like gay porn (aka slash fandom) of being just as disgusting and exploitative as men who like lesbian porn. I disagree.
I am a gay, nonbinary trans dude. I didn’t really fully embrace this fact about myself until I was in my 30s. But I have known I was genderqueer since I was 19, and felt deeply uncomfortable with identifying as female or straight for even longer. In the 15 years between coming to terms with being genderqueer and actually starting to transition, slash fandom WAS my only real access to a community supportive of my queer identity or queer sexual exploration. Why? Because when I tried to come out to IRL gay friends I was called an attention-seeking faghag, a pervert and a dyke in denial. This attitude of ‘oh you’re just a tourist straight girl and your presence is a threat to our identity’ kept me in the closet for over a decade.
If we want to normalize the idea of queer people, we also need to normalize the idea of enjoying queer sexuality. Gay sex between consenting adults is normal, healthy sex. Enjoying queer porn doesn’t equate to harming IRL gay people or threatening anyone’s queer identity, no matter who is doing the enjoying. If liking queer sex is perverted then by necessity all queer people are perverts.
The grossness of both icky slash and icky mainstream porn do not come from straight people being straight in gay spaces. They come from the gender essentialism and violent misogyny that we have all been indoctrinated with since early childhood. Gender essentialism and violent misogyny are not integral to being straight, and the assumption that they are helps to perpetuate them.
Remember when we had to read fanfiction on our desktops… Not even laptops. having to get get plopped down in the family computer room to pull up your naruto and yugioh self insert stories on lunaescence archives and fanfiction dot net with god & everyone watching you.
me, an aged monarch lounging on my fur-strewn throne, gesturing for my servant to bring me my monacle: Bring them here! Bring them here, I say. Let me look at them.
guards: *drag the unwitting blog before me*
me, peering intently at the new blog and poking them with my scepter: Is this a real person? Hmm? What have you to say for yourself? What are your fandoms? Your interests? Speak up, these old ears aren’t what they used to be.
guards, tentatively: they do seem to be a real person, sire. We found them in possession of several memes and a fandom rant.
me, subsiding back into my sumptuous furs and waving them away: most extraordinary. It has been an age since there was a real person, but just as well, the dungeons have been overflowing with those tacky pornbots. This newcomer may remain in my domain. Make them welcome. And fetch me a quill! I feel a ficlet coming on…
5. Whether this was good or bad is beside the point, because I now realise that I was never a fan of it in the first place; I was a fan of the idea of it, and most of what I found appealing and relatable in it is stuff I extrapolated from the text that was never explicitly present.
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.
An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, Amy S. Bruckman
CHI ‘16: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Session: HCI and Gender
Abstract Rarely
are computing systems developed entirely by members of the communities
they serve, particularly when that community is underrepresented in
computing. Archive of Our Own (AO3), a fan fiction archive with nearly
750,000 users and over 2 million individual works, was designed and
coded primarily by women to meet the needs of the online fandom
community. Their design decisions were informed by existing values and
norms around issues such as accessibility, inclusivity, and identity. We
conducted interviews with 28 users and developers, and with this data
we detail the history and design of AO3 using the framework of feminist
HCI and focusing on the successful incorporation of values into design.
We conclude with considering examples of complexity in values in design
work: the use of design to mitigate tensions in values and to influence
value formation or change.
people in fanfiction are so good at identifying v specific smells. I literally struggle to identify vanilla when I’m sniffing a candle labelled “VANILLA” how are these kids getting woodsmoke, rain, mint, and a whiff of byronic despair from a fuckin tshirt
Once I read a fic where they were like “he tasted like” and I’m expecting the typical formula (1 cooking ingredient + 1 natural phenomenon + “something uniquely [character name]”) but instead they said “he tasted like mouth” and it was one of the greatest fic moments of my life
click and drag to find out what your shitty fanfiction kiss tastes like
Honestly I’ve gotten to the point with fandom where if anyone tries to give me a reason why I shouldn’t like what I like I’m just going to yell I REALLY DO NOT FUCKING CARE and backflip off a pier.
just moving along like everyone else 