this is how you fight capitalism
“straight” guy in porn: I’ve never bottomed before.
me, doubtful:
It’s like the studio who makes the Pokemon anime doesn’t know how to draw Groudon
look at this
what a fucking disaster
2001-2017: smash mouth is the shrek band
2018: shrek mouth is the pussy eating band
the typo i made on this post is funnier than the original joke
Please spread #boycottadam on all social media
It’s a book now becoming a movie, about a cishet man who is 17 lying and saying he’s a preop 21 year old trans man so he can rape lesbians. In the book he lies and says he’s using a strap on when he has his actual dick inside a lesbian without her permission, which is downright rape. This book is a transphobic and lesbophobic mess (calls trans men lesbians throughout the whole story)
Please put effort into stopping this from hitting screens. Please don’t let this lesbophobic and transphobic mess spread.
steve literally never goes Anywhere without bringing sam with him lmfao
like literally why was sam at the party in age of ultron other Than to make it more bearable for steve? there was no expected danger where he wouldve been there as backup? No One else bought a date?? none of them besides steve and natasha even Knew sam? steve just saw that invitation and was like ‘ben affleck smoking.png’ “sam if you dont come with me i will literally die” and sam was like “dam okay…uh are you Good?” ldsmksflksdmk
and THEN in civil war, sam at peggys funeral??? it gets me Every Time!!! like out of all the character that were there, sam was the Only one with absolutely NO connection to peggy carter. like sharon and steve have their obvious connections but even natasha was a shield agent and so would have a respect and sort of work relationship with the founder of it. but Sam Never worked for shield!! Sam Doesnt Even KNOW her!!! he had absolutely no reason to be There, in a whole different country?? BUT he Was There!! for Steve!!! bc hes an ICON
How about this: no *explicit* material involving minors under 15 on AO3. That seems reasonable. If you admit that teens get around age restrictions AND that abusers can groom with them, then something has to change. That involves placing a fair chunk of stories under more stringent lockdown. Yeah AO3 can't go, and you fandom vets are always harping on about how censorship sank previous spaces, but goddamn is there no way to protect the the more vulnerable fans without raising your hackles?
1. How do you define explicit? Does this mean no depictions of child abuse, even for the purpose of telling a story about how wrong it is and showing a victim’s recovery? Can younger teens have realistic sexual encounters in stories so long as nothing is shown on page, or is it wrong to imply explicit goings-on even if they’re not depicted? Where, exactly, do we draw the line between heavy petting and sex? Can a character have a wet dream or masturbate? Can a character think about sex in detail, even if they’re not depicted having it? I’m not trying to be difficult: I’m just trying to make it clear that what you’re proposing, even when you phrase it simply, is inherently difficult to implement. Stories would have to be vetted and actively moderated, a massive undertaking that AO3 isn’t equipped to manage, and any such process would still ultimately hinge on individual judgement, which means you’d still have people dissatisfied with the outcome.
2. Teenagers who choose to ignore age-ratings and warnings for the material they consume are responsible for their own experience beyond that point: it is not the job of authors or the website to say, “Okay, we know this content is explicitly meant for adults, but let’s make it less adulty just in case a teenager gets in here.” You can’t protect people from their own bad judgement and its consequences without making their lack of responsibility someone else’s responsibility, which is decidedly unfair.
3. Abusers groom victims with a wide range of material and arguments, and have done so long before the existence of AO3. Whenever this happens, we blame the abuser, not whatever story they used to justify themselves. This is also why, when murderers or other criminals take their inspiration from crime fiction novels or psychologically darker works, as has happened on multiple occasions, we blame the criminals, not their taste in fiction. Locking down on what can be written about child abuse won’t get rid of paedophiles, but it will make things more difficult for victims who use fanfic as catharsis.
Here’s the thing: tagging works on AO3 is how we protect vulnerable fans, by giving them tools to navigate away from distressing themes or content. Taking something away from one person so its mere existence doesn’t upset someone who was never going to read it anyway isn’t a protective act, but a judgemental and dismissive one. To use an analogy, there are plenty of people in the world with deathly nut allergies, but that doesn’t mean we ban an entire food group: it means we label things that have nuts in them, even trace amounts, so that nobody gets hurt. Do accidents still happen? Yes! Are some people assholes about food allergies and dietary restrictions? Yes! But does that mean the solution is to ban nuts entirely? No! And it’s the same with fanfic.
The pressure to disclose information (especially about trauma) to obtain permission to write questionable material is more dangerous than someone writing questionable material for the “wrong” reason.
Is it just me or do you feel some internalized misogyny in the purity wankers? Whether it's a ship they feel is morally repugnant or an individual blogger/author that they hate and want to feel justified in bullying. It's always women or women's works they want censored. They don't care about filmed incest/rape/abuse porn, either because they can understand it's not real, or because "boys will be boys" and they are holding men to lesser standards.
Honestly, I think it’s the fact that fanfic writers are accessible and non-professional that makes them vulnerable to this sort of thing. I don’t doubt that a great many of the people up in arms about content on AO3 also have beef with mainstream porn, to say nothing of particular novels, films and TV shows - but they know they can’t target those industries, because they’re big and distant and protected.The best they can do is vote with their money by vocally boycotting things they dislike; and of course, they’re completely within their rights to do so. But as they can’t attack those content creators directly, they turn their anger instead on their fans, because even if they can’t stop a canonical work from being created, they can sure as hell punish people who publicly admit to liking it.
Which is what recently happened with Call Me By Your Name. The amount of discourse I saw describing anyone who liked or appeared in that film as a paedophile apologist was staggering, which is yet another reason why, in this current conversation, I remain mistrustful of the claim that it’s obvious which works and fanfics are irredeemably Bad and Harmful and Need To Be Deleted. CMBYN was about a consensual relationship between characters who were 17 and 24, and it was still called paedophilia. I wrote about it and fielded questions about my response then, too, and I’ve kept that conversation in mind this time around.
Because the fact is, there are far too many people in the purity camp who seemingly don’t have any idea what paedophilia actually is. More often than not, their working definition of the term is presented as “anything where a character aged eighteen or under is paired with someone a year or more their senior in an imperfect context or for a ship I dislike, or where a Known Adult is writing anything above a T-rating with characters younger than twenty”. Like. That is honestly, genuinely what I’ve seen argued - and if that’s the starting point for deciding what should or shouldn’t be allowed on AO3, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s a Bad Idea.
And that’s before you even touch on the nature of kink and the hugely complex issue of human sexuality, let alone the psychology behind why so many people enjoy reading or creating dark content. Just as it’s common for rape victims to experience orgasm or arousal against their will during the act itself, itself also common for survivors of sexual abuse to have intrusive reactions to their experiences - meaning, in essence, that their arousal becomes tied to what’s been done to them. This is not their fault, and it’s not something they should be shamed for; so when people single out the kind of fics that are classed as badwrong porn without considering that they might play a role in the sexual enjoyment and healing of victims, it’s very difficult to accept the simultaneous claim that all this moral crusading is for the benefit of victims.
And beyond that frame of reference: BDSM is a thing. Kinks are a thing. The difference between written and visual pornography is that, whereas videos and photos involve real human people being subjected to real sexual contact, stories do not. This means we don’t need to check in with the characters to make sure they’re willing and comfortable, because the reader is the only sexual participant. When we construct fantasies in our head, as opposed to enacting them with a consenting partner or partners, our ability to separate fantasy from reality - to know that what we’re imagining isn’t real - is what serves as a safeword. This means that the character we’re imagining doesn’t need to give their consent to roleplaying the situation, too, because the character doesn’t exist; which allows us to imagine them enjoying or experiencing things which, in real life, we would never countenance.
Do people do this because they’re gross and predatory and broken? No. They do it because they’re people, and because we understand the difference between doing something in a safe, controlled environment and risking actual harm to ourselves or others. If a gamer goes on a killing spree in a first-person shooter, that’s not them priming themselves to murder people in real life, even though they’re engaging in a visual proxy for a horrific act that’s coded as entertainment - because we know it isn’t real. Are there still conversations to be had around the normalisation of violence, misogyny and other evils in such properties? Yes! But does that mean that every single person who’s ever played Call of Duty is a killer in the making? No!
Sometimes, we fantasise sexually about scenarios that frighten us in real life: because that gives us ownership of the fear and allows us to overcome it, to turn it into something controllable. Sometimes, we fantasise sexually about terrible things that have already happened to us: because that gives us ownership of the trauma, an ability to reclaim ourselves. Sometimes, we fantasise sexually about things that are monstrous, or impossible, or forbidden: because we’re excited by the what if in a way we’d never feel for the reality.
There’s a difference between fantasy and reality. The fact that they overlap should never be ignored, but that they’re two different circles in the Venn diagram shouldn’t be up for discussion.
Honestly, blaming fanfics for child grooming is like blaming kitchen knives for murder. I mean, kitchen knife is a common murder tool but murder is always a murderer’s fault, not a tool’s fault. Just like child abuse and grooming is abuser’s fault, not their tool’s fault. Putting the blame on tool only puts the blame off the criminal and educating minors on consent and predarors would do much better job than banning certain kind of fanfics.
My mom told me to stop vapeing in the house and my dad just texted me this
Update:
A good chunk of the Internet right now.
Hollyleaf – black she-cat with green eyes
(Thunderclan)
improvising is always funny, right
I’m really glad this took off because my dad almost peed his pants at dinner
Thanos, a philosophy and economics double major who thinks once you eat a plant it will never grow back: i have to slaughter half the universe’s population with the infinity stones, so that no one ever runs out of resources and starves
Thor, a phys ed and linguistics major with a minor in women’s studies, taking a sip of his strawberry protein shake: can’t you just use the infinity stones to create more resources tho?
Thanos: blocked
Thor: Unblock me I need to tell you something
Thanos: What?
Thor: Bitch