posting because some people see the united states as a monolith run by a crazy person (that part is true), but we also have individual state governments trying their best despite all that.

As an Iowan I'm genuinely glad when we're mentioned outside of corn jokes... except I'm pretty sure all of Iowa is a joke to our bloody governor. Like honestly she is like 'Let's talk about theatres and malls' 0.o Like dear God why?! It is already bad enough that she kept Iowa Ham open after multiple were positive... for god sake it would probably still be open if the main branch had shut it down.

i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes

it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!

although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.

you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.

this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.

but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.

eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.

THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.

AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.

LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.

IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.

I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics.  They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross.  But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!”  Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it.  So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that?  No.

In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.

Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality.  And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.

Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?

1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse.  It was not meant to titillate or arouse.  It was meant to horrify.  It was seldom explicit.

2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.

3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half.  When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia.  Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex.  And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.

Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we?  I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too.  But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:

1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.

2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.

3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).

Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like.  And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them.  No, this was step one on a moral crusade.  If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands.  This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted.  It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit.  But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality.  Then anything with teen sexuality.  Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con.  Then whatever is next on their list.  It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.

Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service.  You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call).  You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising.  And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids.  Other than that?  It’s fair game.  You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge.  There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.

We’ve been down that road.  It doesn’t lead anywhere good.

Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.

During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.

If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.

reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.

AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.

This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.

^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary

Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received. 

tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.

This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.

And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).

You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!

I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!

People were terrified during Strikethrough.  I was there.  Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down.  People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ.  Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread.  Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.  

LJ was, for many people, central.  

It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.  

Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary.  People didn’t know who was next.  Every day, the list of stricken journals grew.  And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content.  Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest.  It was a bad time.

You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable.  Tagging is a thing.  And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience.  It is not right to expect it to be curated for you.  And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.

I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that.  If you get triggered, that’s upsetting.  That could be considered harm.  And I have sympathy for that.  I do.

I have run across fic that triggered me.  I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people.  Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this.  So I’ve been blindsided by it before.  And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.

That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation.  It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.

That was not the fault of the site!  The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.

That was not even my fault!  It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.

When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.

Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit.  My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship.  I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate.  She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That?  He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy.  (She was lucky to escape.  I have immense respect for her.)  And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it.  And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.

“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.

But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.

“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves.  You should learn to say those things!  It will help you!

But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.

And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected.  I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops.  I couldn’t talk about it before that.  Couldn’t!  And it was over 20 years ago!

I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic.  I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.

All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.

Fine, I don’t like it either!

But that fucked up shit?  That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today.  You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe.  It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on.  It doesn’t make me feel safe now.  I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was.  It actually makes it worse.

Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like.  It’s a skill, you get better with practice.  Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.

Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it.  Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids.  The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims.  The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim.  A g a i n.  

The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people.  The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault.   (It worked!  The neighborhood rallied!  He was arrested for violating parole!)

Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being.  Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it.  And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.

I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.

An author is not a perpetrator.  Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.

I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.

Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.

If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.

Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.

When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.

Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.

How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.

Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.

And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.

At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.

Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.

One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.

I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.

Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.

So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.

I like this last addition.

When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)

We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.

So we did.

Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.  

This thread keeps getting better.

It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over

Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y'all, so y'all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.

You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.

Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.

Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.

Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.

Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.

I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”.  If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:

Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights by Nadine Strossen

A preview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!

I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.

1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)

2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.

3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores.  Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men. 

Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.

Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.

(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)

The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.

Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable. They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.

Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.

This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.

History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.

(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)

Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.

He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyone got them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.

There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.

You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.

Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.

It’s been touched on a little before but really it’s hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.

Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didn’t know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.

Also FanFiction doesn’t really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) It’s only years later, reading fanfic history posts that I’ve started to piece together what happened.

Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didn’t even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.

Hot damn, this post just keeps going!

I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and you’ll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblr’s purity crusade.

If you haven’t been TOSsed you really don’t get it, imo.

If you haven’t spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really don’t get it, imo.

Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going “I really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.”

A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we don’t remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.

Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.

Please, please, please, read this in is its entirety.

I remember when I had written my first stories they were on Fanfiction.net. They weren't explicit in nature but they were about Tom and Harry*. Imagine my shock when I got notified that I broke FanFic's rules but posting it. I spent an hour re-reading the guidelines and then reposting the fanfic... two days later I got banned. I was devastated and didn't get why my stories, and myself, were taken down and banned. Then I saw stories and authors I loved posting about stories they wrote were being taken down without warning. Authors were making double accounts and backups in case their fanfic was next on the chopping block. Comments were flooded with people screaming at authors about going to hell and reporting stories for supporting 'vile and unnatural people. These stories and authors hadn't done anything wrong except post slash fics or talked frankly about sexuality.* Some, like myself, stopped writing all together because of the negativity surrounding it all. *sexuality ie talking about sex in a non-shameful way without actually writing sex scenes.

I don’t think people understand what canon disabled Iron Bull means to me. 

Iron Bull who, in canon, wears a leg brace and has an eye patch.

Iron Bull who has chronic pain.

Iron Bull who laughs and grunts when Stitches says “you’re not supposed to drink it chief,” because he knows you’re not, but a poultice doesn’t quite treat those wounds.

Iron Bull who tells you that after the second drink most of the nerves in your throat are dead, but neglects to tell you it aches a little less in the old places as well.

Iron Bull who falls just a bit behind on the treks up the mountains but stops to take in the scenery, Iron Bull who is no less fearsome, no less accomplished of a warrior, no less dedicated, no less.

Iron Bull who is a master of pain, who knows pain so intimately he employs it in battle as a specialty, but for whom pain follows him off of every field and after every foe into the bed chamber. Iron Bull who knows what it means to keep fighting anyway, to keep that pain as a part of yourself and keep moving forward just the same.

Disabled Iron Bull is canon, and words cannot express how important it is.

Salt of the Earth (1954), dir. Herbert J. Biberman

Damn, son.

EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH SALT OF THE EARTH

Salt of the Earth actually has a crazy interesting history- OP already said it was made in 1954, but that was in the middle of the Red Scare (communism scary cold war hysteria)

Congress’s anti-communism target fell hard on Hollywood, and those in the industry who were suspected of communism at all were blacklisted from all jobs, because studio’s didn’t want to face backlash from Congress

Salt of the Earth was made nearly 100% with blacklisted crew members from Hollywood, and had such difficulty finding actors that they hired local citizens and miners from the actual strike the plot is based on. There were only 5 trained actors involved, and one of them (Rosaura Revueltas, the woman in the gif) was deported to Mexico before they finished filming on accusations of communism, with no proof and no substance. The filming was plagued with police harassment and threats (according to my professor they were shot at more than once), and the local union hall was burned down.

The movie itself not only covers a real 1950′s labor strike demanding safer and more equal labor conditions for Mexican-American employees, but after the miners were facing arrest, their wives and children took up the strike in their place. The movie’s combination of blacklisted crew, civil rights and feminist message, and pro-union plot (during the red scare) got the movie blacklisted and only 12 theaters in the entire United States would show the movie- it was successful in Europe, but didn’t actually achieve viewership in the US until the 60′s

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/10/salt-of-the-earth-labour-workers-blacklisted-filmmakers

“When the weather gets cold in a few months you will complain about it then, so enjoy this heat” I will bitch about it now, I will bitch about it then, I will bitch about everything there is ever to bitch about, because guess what, Im a bitch

I feel like this needs to be Seussified. 

I will bitch about heat.  I will bitch about cold.  I will bitch about sunshine, and about growing old.  I will bitch about everything, inside and out. You will find there is nothing I can’t bitch about. 

I’m laughing so hard at this post right now omg.

Perfection.

I love it

I just. I don’t like this view of “millennials vs Gen Z”. This is NOT supposed to be a competition of who got fucked over the most and who’s “actually fighting back”.

Millennials are fighting back just by surviving in a job market where the minimum wage doesn’t cover the living cost. Millennials are awesome at “killing” the diamond, golfing and napkins industries. Millennials are using the internet to make sure things that corporations want to keep in the dark are exposed. They’re open LGBTQIA-friendly business, they’re supporting each other with online donations so everyone can survive this shitty economy.

And the Gen Z kids? The Gen Z kids are rad. I remember a post about something like the millennials making a collective promise to never become a disenchanted generation that only criticizes the next one and I want to point out that this “millennials vs gen z” trend is trying to do exactly that: split us apart. Prevent millennials from being the older siblings that teach the younger siblings to throw a good punch and turn them into the annoyed adult complaining about “those kids” on their lawn. We are the two groups that grew in a connected world of information. We are two very unique generations.

I think that it’s our duty for us millennials, as a disrespected, underpaid, very angry generation to stand up by our younger siblings, and fight together the oppressive systems that brought us all to this point.

They’re trying very hard to pit Millennials and Gen Z against each other because I honestly think they’re terrified of what the two will accomplish together.

@little-boyking @anacondas-sacred-buns

As I said, fuck it up kids.

“representation shouldn’t be 

- a secret between u & ur audience 

- a spoiler 

- an outside of canon factoid 

- a word of god retcon not showcased in canon 

 representation should be 

- visible 

- in your canon 

- something the audience can pick up on without a creator giving explanations”

@kiseing

(When someone suggests an Avengers Game Night)

Tony: *grabs Peter by the arm* Alright, everyone partner up.

Tony: *whispering* If we lose, you’re out of the will.

Peter: I was in the will?

A gentle reminder that this blog is LGBTQ friendly.

sketchinthoughts:

Just 12 hours remain to get today’s Last Chance Tee: “Sunflower Field” on Qwertee: https://www.qwertee.com/nn-qhqwru

£11/€13/$14 till the timer reaches zero then it’s GONE!

Be sure to “Like” this for 1 chance at a FREE TEE today “Share” it for 2 chances and “Comment” on it for a 3rd chance. Thanks as always:)

36. Money

PREACH

Let’s be real. If little girls’ knees, shoulders, and clavicles are a problem for male teachers, you don’t have a dress code issue. You have a pedophile issue.

Y. E. S.

When the author deletes your favorite fanfic:

Gather around, children. I’m about to tell you a story of ye olde fandom. (Real life fandom friends, I’m sorry. You’ve heard this story a thousand times, I know.)

Long before Disney bought Star Wars, long before the new trilogy, before even the prequels, and themselves predating the “remastered” versions of the original trilogy, Star Wars experienced it’s second renaissance in novel form. And comic book form. Skim the pages of the dozens upon dozens of Expanded Universe (”EU”) novels and you’ll find lots of foundations for the things you see on screen these days. Ben Solo, for sure, has his origins there. 

But it was also a different era for the fandom. The 90′s saw the transition from fanzine culture to online fan fiction archives. The programming ability and computing power you needed to make a fan fiction archive that the authors could edit themselves did not yet exist in an accessible way. Series based archives popped up, mostly hand curated by webmasters posting .txt files of chapters and stories that they’d received from authors via email. Or usenet. Or mailinglists. I spent many of my teen years on Gossamer, the X-Files archive, and Fanfix.com, my favorite Star Wars archive. I remember haunting a Babylon 5 archive at the time, too, but it’s lost to history. 

I read everything. Everything. But, by far my favorite fan fiction of all time was, and I will always remember this, “As Simple and as Complicated as All That” by Xia Sang Li. It was epic. Four novels. NOVELS. Dozens of chapters. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. It follows Luke Skywalker’s decision to finally throw caution to the wind and fall into bed, and in love, with Mara Jade. Written in the sweet spot after her character was introduced and explored, but before permission was given to the licensed authors to marry Luke off, it was an amazing indulgence. And, it was epic in scale and scope. The great plot twist in book one was that, spoiler alert, when Gaeriel Captison died, leaving Luke to look after her orphaned daughter, she didn’t tell the whole story. You see, Luke and Mara had indulged each other before, had a secret love child, and this brief period of time was erased or minimized in their memories. Slowly, the two come to realize, through their haze of lust and passion, that something is conspiring to keep them apart, and that this little girl isn’t who she seemed. Themes of family, and duty, and passion, and trauma. Force visions, original characters, and sex sex sex. It was amazing. 

Epic right??? Right?? Wanna read it?? 

It’s impossible. The Fanfix.com archive zipped the textfiles, so the Wayback Machine hasn’t archived them. The Geocities page went down before the Geocities archive was published after its closure. And, the original author’s blog, not updated in a decade, features only a few chapters of a rewrite, an AU of her original epic. 

But it’s not dead.

Starting in 1998, my teenage self printed the whole fucking epic. I did one chapter at a time. It took more than a year. I had it all saved, too, on a 3 ½ inch floppy that got destroyed. Beyond the author’s own hard drive somewhere on this green earth, I think this might be the only copy. 

Every few years, when nostalgia overtakes me, I reread it, from front to back. The gender politics are very different. The interpretation of Luke, too, vastly different from modern fandom’s take. Sometimes I wish I could find the author, buy her dinner, and tell her how important her work was to me. But, that’s probably impossible. Sometimes I think about re-digitizing it and, like a different kind of pirate, putting it back into circulation. But, that’s just a wish. A whimsical dream. The notebook is at least 3 inches thick, with front to back printed pages of text. It would take… years. Certainly it took years to write. But, it was part of the floating world of fandom. And, it faded away. Stuff like this should never fade away. 

Fan fic authors… I implore you. Never delete your work. 

You can’t know the impact you make. You might think it not good, embarrassing, or irrelevant. It’s not. Not to someone. Not to me. 

Seriously. You have no idea how many fanfics I had wanted to print and bind just so that I can keep it in my personal library to read. Some fics are so damn GOOD that they deserve to exist binded as a physical copy. Save them please!!! All fics matter to someone

PUT THAT BOOK IN A SAFE BOX OR A MUSEUM (is there a fandom museum? we should make one)

It’s not quite a museum, but there is the Fan Culture Preservation Project, which is a join venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries. It’s a place to preserve hard copies of fanworks and fandom memorabilia. 

(Though it seems likely that @mizunocaitlin would like to keep a beloved fanfic.)

Dear fic readers: Save it before you lose it! authors have pleanty of reason to delete their shit, sad as it is, but you can still have it!! do what that person did, use https://www.lulu.com/ like i did for my faves stuff (tho already archived on gdrive by someone else), but find a way to PRINT IT OUT if you love it so much. dont just rely on digital copies because shit happens.

This is my current printed library of fanfics. This way works best for fanfics up to 20000 words, but I’m learning basic bookbinding for the longer ones (an experiment of that can be seen in the right side of the picture - “This, You Protect” by Owlet), because I LOVE HOLDING THEM WHEN I READ THEM and also, what will I read if the power goes down? Exactly.

Another reason why you should also follow the  Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries on Tumblr… 

Same. I am crying still about the loss of old favorites. But I also found a print out of an old Melissa_D fanfic from the turn of the century. Early days Draco/Hermione. It’s called “A Night at the movies” and I will defend that hard copy with my bare fucking teeth if I have to.