Honestly I don’t even care why ao3 was created

Meta
Title:	Honestly I don’t even care why ao3 was created
Creator:	magnusbene (mothbian)
Date(s):	September 7, 2016
Medium:	Tumblr post
Fandom:
Topic:	AO3 policies
External Links:	magnusbene.tumblr, Archived version [Dead link]
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Honestly I don’t even care why ao3 was created... is an (untitled) tumblr post by magnusbene that was part of a larger discussion about content on the Archive of Our Own. The original post was made in September, but may have seen a resurgence of interest during the OTW October Drive, as magnusbene made two follow-up posts on October 14 ^{[Dead link]} and October 17 ^{[Dead link]}.

As of July 2017, the post had 15,733 notes.

In the News

In the wake of China blocking AO3 in 2020, the tumblr post was cited by Procuratorate Daily, the mainland Chinese state-run legal newspaper, as an example of how "AO3 has always been controversial."

Some Topics Discussed

• pairing Alec from Shadowhunters with any woman is homophobic
• AO3 should delete horrible works
• "it’s super gross that a bunch of fandom elders (who are most likely at least in their thirties) continue the tradition of citing 'don’t like don’t read'"
• the AO3 board has had some "disgusting members"
• "fuck ao3"
• censorship

The Post

honestly I don’t even care why ao3 was created, if you defend their policy of not deleting horrible works, or are otherwise completely uncritical/forgiving of their mistakes because “but they’re by fans for fans”, you’re a piece of shit

horrible tropes and abuse have always been a part of fandom and fanworks, but it’s super gross that a bunch of fandom elders (who are most likely at least in their thirties) continue the tradition of citing “don’t like don’t read” as a good enough excuse to write child porn, abuse, rape, sexual slavery, etc. AND they collect thousands of dollars each year to fund this through donations

like. they are literally putting money into abusive content being published on their site. where people of any age, even pre-teens, can access it. for example, I could never report people posting alec/women stuff despite it being homophobic, because it doesn’t violate their terms. I can’t report pretty much anything, because as long as you’re not plagiarizing, it’s all good

yeah, ao3 is great as a concept, but allowing abusive, homophobic, racist, etc. material to be published on your site because “fuck the pc police/moral crusaders” is appalling and fuck ao3 tbh. not to mention they’ve had really disgusting people as members on their board, so it’s pretty obvious what kind of people are in charge of this site.

Some Fan Comments

[yourshipisfine]:

If you do not like AO3′s policies, don’t donate to them, don’t publish your fic there and don’t read fic there.

AO3 was created because people were unhappy with the policies of other websites and fanfiction archives.

If you are unhappy with AO3′s policies, there is nothing stopping you from setting up a fanfic archive of your own where you can decide on the policies.

As for pre-teens accessing the site and reading porny fic… yeah. They’re gonna do that. And you know whose responsibility that is? Those kids’ parents.

If I post explicit fic on AO3, it is my responsibility to categorise it as mature/explicit, to tag the relationships and to mention in the tags/summary that it contains sex. That’s it.

[kimuracarter]:

Free speech DOES NOT just protect speech you LIKE, kids. Then it wouldn’t be free. Remember that, because we are not about to start going backwards.

[unecessaryevil]:

Gothic Literature uses sodom such as rape etc. to challenge the norms of society to subvert it, however, especially in fanfictions these malpractitions and representations of such acts of sodom are terribly horrible to feature and shouldn’t enter the realm of fanfics. In my opinion, featuring such things in texts that are pornographic, especially when it involves a child, is terribly distasteful. One thing I want to be taken away from this is that there is a fine line between Smut/NSFW texts and distasteful, fetishised and repugnant texts.

[lizdexia]:

actually you know what i didn’t get to say what i was going to say before because i had to rush off but now i’m just gonna say this – this post is garbage. if little sally doesn’t understand how road signs work, the appropriate question to ask isn’t “how can we make the highway safer for 8-year-olds,” it’s “hOLY FUCK WHY IS LITTLE SALLY DRIVING A CAR?!” when work is tagged appropriately, marked nsfw/inappropriate for those under 18, and warned for everything that requires a warning, the creator’s side of the contract has been fulfilled. period. this is why parental controls and safe search exist. it’s not my job as a hobbyist purveyor of casual filth to prevent someone else’s child from accidentally reading what i’ve written. it’s not my job to parent anyone else’s children. it’s not ao3′s job to convert a twelve-lane highway into a go-kart track for those plastic fisher-price cars you pedal with your feet because hypothetical children might read something they shouldn’t have access to in the first place.

and for that matter, if the argument is “kids will lie about their age to look at that stuff anyway” – yeah, sure, of course they will. funnily enough, i got into harry potter fandom young – started reading fanfic when i was around 10 and 11. you know what i did when i saw things that were tagged in a manner that disturbed me? I DIDN’T READ THEM. I WAS CAPABLE, AS A CHILD, OF CONTROLLING MY OWN MEDIA CONSUMPTION EXPERIENCE. and then i got a little older and turned 13 and read wuthering heights and david sedaris and augusten burroughs and a confederacy of dunces, and then i turned 15 and read lolita and anais nin, and you know what? i. could. handle. it. by. then. yeah, i was a precocious kid (my favorite book at 13 was a fucking confederacy of dunces, for god’s sake), but i was not permanently damaged by anything i read. funnily enough, i was permanently damaged by my ABUSERS, not the literature i read, and sure as hell not by the fanfic.

despite all of my issues with moral wank and purity culture, historically, fandom is a remarkably safe space for younger people to read things that toe the boundaries of what they can find in the YA section at their library, and to try creating things that toe those boundaries as well. it’s not a perfect space by any means, but it served that purpose for me. i can’t say enough good things about what it did for me as a teen who was not allowed to date and whose school stressed abstinence-only sex ed which taught us that masturbation was immoral and condoms would give you cancer. if your argument is “ao3 and content creators have a responsibility to the community” – yes. and we fulfill it by TAGGING THINGS CORRECTLY. if the argument is “but kids will read tagged things anyway” – sure. some will. but as someone who did, i can tell you, kids aren’t fucking stupid. they can differentiate between fiction and reality, and for that matter, they can differentiate between things they want to read and things they don’t. i am not anyone else’s parent. neither is OP.

s t o p.

[raccoonhi]:

The entire reason AO3 was created was to give all those “horrible” fics OP hates a safe place to be posted. Most antis seem to be too young to remember what it was like on LiveJournal. Hell, I’m too young to have been there but fandom elders are well aware of how difficult it was to have fandom communities anywhere after all that Strikethrough nonsense. What antis are doing is literally along the same lines, but worse. Strikethrough targeted the same types of works OP has a problem with, along with plenty of other things we would object to being removed. Instead of doing anything good, it just fucked people over. It literally infringed on their rights- and yes, depicting whatever horribly immoral things you want in fiction is, in fact, a right that everyone has. So yeah, fuck the moral police. All this movement has ever done was hurt people. AO3 was created to get away from that. And if you don’t want to read something, you don’t even have to fucking see it. There are warnings for a reason. I’m really sorry OP finds it horrible that things they don’t like exist, but they and everyone who thinks like them needs to get over themselves and really think about what good it’ll do. Is it worth stealing resources from people who might need them? Is it worth taking away fiction survivors use to cope? Is it worth denying the fact that many abuse victims learned about their abuse through fiction and taking away future victims’ chance at realizing that the way they’re treated isn’t normal? If the answers to these questions is yes, congratulations, you’re an abysmal excuse for a human being and you’re actually worse than all the ~horrible~ people who write about abuse and other deplorable things. At least the people they’re hurting don’t exist. how difficult it was to have fandom communities anywhere after all that Strikethrough nonsense. What antis are doing is literally along the same lines.

[lordhellebore]:

This. Back in 2007 with Strikethrough (link to the fanlore article here) it was conservative Christians targeting any works they found distasteful, these days it’s young “progressive” people clamouring for precisely the same censoring of fan content in the name of social justice. It’s the same kind of policing, the same conflation of fiction and reality, and although the arguments are different on a superficial level, the reasoning behind them is, in essence the same.

[julesdrenages]:

It’s not even a matter of putting things in the perspective of ‘means of coping’/’resources that someone might need to recognize future abuse’ and so on, in my opinion.

They are absolutely valid reasons for keeping those works where they are, of course, I’d never say the contrary.

But the core of the matter here is that I have the right to write whatever the fuck I want, for the sake of fiction, and I have the right to publish my work online, to share it with people who enjoy the same kind of fiction.

In a system like AO3, with a very wide range of filters, tags and tools to narrow your access to stories, it is my responsibilty as an author to tag and classify my work sensibly, but what to make of those tags is up to you. I can’t and will not be held accountable for distressing you with a graphic depiction of assault if you willingly opened a one-shot of your otp tagged rape/non-con.

As for minors stumbling on unsuited content: it’s still not my responsibility. As long as my work is marked as mature, if you kid lie about your age, browse it anyway and get upset over it it’s still not my fucking business. Not when you actively chose to not follow the rules. You wanna complain? I’ll have a talk with your parents, then.

You want a safe, sheltered space to suit your demands? Go build it yourself, or customize the already existing archives to your fancy, because guess what? You can do that.

(sincerely, an author that mostly writes harmless vanilla sex and has far more squicks than kinks).

[desert-neon]:

Reblogging for that last comment, because I agree wholeheartedly. Censorship is a great evil. It doesn’t matter why an author chose to write it – past trauma, secret kink, honestly just wants to help start a dialogue about the issue – all that matters is that they want to and that, in any free society, it is their right to do so.

Lolita is a classic. Though many misinterpret it as a romance, it isn’t. It was never meant to be seen that way. It was meant to be a character study, a discussion piece. An eye-opener.

Is every fic a Lolita? No, of course not. But the danger of censorship is: Where do you draw the line? Why is Lolita okay but not a 20K sexual slavery fic posted on Ao3? Because it’s in book form? Because Nabokov got paid? If we banish the slave fic, how do we tell the moral police who want to “protect their children” from all things gay that they’re wrong but you’re not? If you crusade to shut down Ao3, what’s to stop other “watchdogs” from banning book they find offensive, curating school reading lists and libraries to only include what they deem acceptable?

Because it still happens. Did you know To Kill a Mockingbird still gets challenged? Morality police throughout the country try every year to ban a work that educates kids about racial history in America.

So does Of Mice and Men, which teaches compassion and empathy for those who aren’t neurotypical, and points to the falsehood of the “American Dream” for anyone who isn’t in the majority.

Or what about 1984, a book warning about overreaching governments. Note the irony.

If you in any way agree with OP, I suggest you read Fharenheit 451, and cherish the fact you live in a society that still allows it on the shelves.

[decepticonfetti]:

I just don’t understand this whole attitude of younger fans in fandom telling older fans to GTFO because we’re old™?

First off, the people making the book/show/movie/comic your into are also old™. Let’s just get that out of the way. With very few exceptions, the media you consume is made by bonafide adult individuals who will continue to make it while aging because they are human beings and human beings eventually become old™. Like it or not, fan fiction is an art form and like all art it should be allowed to encompass the entire range of human experience (or outside of human experience, for you paranormal enthusiasts, ghost kinksters, robots, and possible extraterrestrials).

I, for one, find it rather gross that there are some artists out there who use period blood to paint self-portraits. But…they are free to express themselves that way and I wouldn’t dream of trying to stop them from expressing themselves. That’s what freedom of expression is all about! I also do not like the ship Reylo for various reasons, but I’m not going to go out of my way to yell at people for shipping it because it really doesn’t affect me whatsoever.

I’m rambling, but my point is that especially with AO3, their tag system makes it so that you find exactly what you are looking for. So OP, I’m sorry that you went looking for stories with your boy Alec in them and found that some of those stories featured him paired with a lady you don’t like. Maybe next time, if you’re looking for a specific ship with your boy Alec, search for who you ship him with instead of just running a general search for his name. That way you don’t trip up any entries of things that may upset you. Just like, you know…if I’m searching for fics with my main bot the great and glorious Megatron doing the deed with his old flame Optimus Prime in a pre-war time - I, being the savvy person I am, will search for Megatron/Orion Pax instead.

You understand?

Secondly, there are a hell of a lot of franchises that became popular because people who are old™ like them!! The Anime you watch today wouldn’t have been translated or subbed our distributed in the US if it weren’t for us old™ people making the original imports so popular. Are you a fan of Star Wars or Star Trek or any Marvel/DC movie in existence?

Those franchises were made popular and continue to exist because old™ people in fandom did fan things and bought stuff and wrote stuff and drew stuff and petitioned for de-cancellation of stuff and organized conventions to enjoy stuff. Your fandom is built on the shoulders of the fans before you, and you have the audacity to stroll in here and say we can’t continue liking it or writing stuff for it because we’re old™?

Fuck that shit, I’m writing fic for the rest of eternity. I will continue tapping out fic until the heat death of this universe and when the new one is born from the ashes of the dead one I will through sheer spite generate myself into existence again to continue writing. Why? Because you said I’m too old™ to do so.

Thirdly, I wrote smut of Marik from Yu-Gi-Oh and my OC when I was in high school, set in during the battle city arc. Marik is 16 at that point in time and my OC was 14. You want to tell me I was wrong for exploring my sexuality that way, OP? That I was wrong for writing an abusive relationship? That I was wrong for not shipping Marik/Bakura? That I should have been banned from writing because you may not have liked one particular aspect of it?

Because that’s what happens, OP.

You ban a thing for one specific reason, then all the other reasons someone might want to write that thing get caught in the crossfire. Want to ban stories with rape or rape mentions in them? Boom, you’ve now banned people writing for coping purposes. You’ve banned writing canon characters who have had that happen to them in the past. You’ve banned writing OCs that have had that happen to them in the past. You have banned writing about rapists getting their just desserts for being shitheads. You’ve banned writing about Ace Attorney Phoenix Wright successfully prosecuting a rapist. You’ve banned just writing a fic that’s based in an imperfect world like our own where it exists as a thing that can happen. All because you want to prevent a certain type of fic that falls under that category from being posted?

OP, if you ever sat through banned books week at school and wondered how the hell books become banned, it’s people like you.

It’s people like you.

[shakespearedidnothavecumsh0ts]:

yeah that’s the problem you don’t even care and you’re quite awful, dogmatic, irrational, ignorant, toxic and self-important yourself. it isn’t obvious to you, but the reason ao3 exists isn’t to safeguard evil but to fend off idiots with a savior complex who have no genuine capacity for critical thinking, like you.

fuck your religiosity and your exploitation of sensitive subjects -like rape culture, child abuse, misogyny, queerphobia, racism and oppression- to build a fictional high-ground for yourself at the expense of other people: you do not belong in fandom, because you use the platform to proselytize, and you don’t belong in a serious cultural conversation on complex topics, because you aren’t equipped to tell the reality of your own garbage communities vigilante behavior, the sociological and psychological realities of these subjects, or the necessary medical information about mental health.

you’re toxic and you’re a disservice to the oppressed. you only serve yourself and your ghosts, circle jerk in hermetic spaces, and virtue signal out of your self-importance. you’re the last to give a fuck about how the world could be better, and honestly that’s the most repellent hypocrisy of antis, so no one has to put up with that. real shit matters more than your indulgent emotionality and it always will. prepare people humor fanatic zealots less each day. shakespearedidnothavecumsh0ts </ref>

[wreckingballfic]:

say if AO3 decides to ban child porn, abuse, rape, sexual slavery. Not a bad idea. Those things are horrible. But nobody is going to go read every damn fic, go through a committee deciding what is good what is bad, than slowly ban one by one. What would happen (and what has happened in LJ and FF.net) is all fics tagged with those themes (e.g. For underage, whether it be “bad” fics or pretty much every other teen wolf fic out there, because ya know, schooling age) is banned, their authors chased out. The entire community feels restricted and confined by this invisible ban hammer, which deletes fics and bans accounts without warning (sometimes in complete error too). They move on and find another platform. AO3 becomes dead.

Also, do not think for one minute bigots will not make use of such a system to throw some of the themes they don’t like under the bus too

I WANNA ADD TO THIS POST SO BAD WITH SOME SHIT OH MAN BC I FEEL LIKE IT'S REALLY A DIFFERENT SITUATION IN COMMUNITIES LIKE RT WHERE THERE ARE REAL PEOPLE INVOLVED - THEIR PERSONALITIES YES BUT WE'VE HAD PERMISSION FROM THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES THAT IT'S OKAY TO SHIP THEM AND WRITE EXPLICIT FIC OF THEM AND THEN SOME PEOPLE COMPLETELY IGNORE THE FACT THAT THESE PEOPLE CAN ACTUALLY SEE FIC OF THEMSELVES IN GROSS SITUATION AND THEY MIGHT FEEL VIOLATED - AND RIGHTLY SO! THEY HAVE EVERY RIGHT TO SET BOUNDARIES THEY ARE COMFORTABLE WITH WHEN THEY GIVE US THAT PERMISSION AND YET I HAVE SEEN GROSS FIC INVOLVING A LITERAL REAL CHILD IN THIS FANDOM - WHOSE FATHER SAID NOT TO INCLUDE IN FIC AT ALL - AND AO3 DIDNT DO A DAMN THING ABOUT IT AND IT REALLY PISSES ME OFF SO YEAH I FEEL LIKE THE SITUATION IS VERY VERY DIFFERENT WHEN IT COMES TO RPF FANDOMS LIKE ROOSTER TEETH AND AO3 SHOULD ALSO LISTEN TO ANY SET BOUNDARIES THAT A FANDOM ALSO SHOULD LISTEN TO (LOOKS SO HARD AT THE RULES ON FYRTFF)

[feynites]:

Notice what’s not anywhere on that book [Game of Thrones]?

Warnings.

There are no warnings for rape, incest, violence, abuse, slurs, character deaths, rape, nothing. A twelve-year-old kid who likes fantastical stories can and probably has picked this up at a local library, sat down in one of the library chairs or even signed out with it, and gotten to reading.

I know, because once upon a time that kid was me. Not withGame of Thrones, but most assuredly with comparable stuff.

We put adult-oriented television on after nine pm. There are definitely kids who stay up later than that. We put ratings on our movies. I’ve seen toddlers in R-rated films. We make laws to try and keep kids safe, and actual, real-life horrific stuff still happens to them. That’s life.

Fanfiction at least, as mentioned, warns people what they’re getting into. Generally, way better than any other media does, in fact. And that might even be part of why people get so up-in-arms about it. When you go into a book store, you just see glossy covers and titles and generally innocuous quotes. People can happily walk among the stacks without ever knowing how many of those books contain stories that would actually offend the hell out of them.

When you browse through fanfiction, though, you get warnings. And anyone just casually looking at AO3′s archives will see those warnings first, long lists of them, and they might think to themselves that fanfiction is uncommonly depraved.

It isn’t.

I promise you that AO3′s archive is not more racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise rife with questionable content than your local library. But you do have better odds of being warned about what you’re getting into there

Here’s a thought. Instead of constantly berating ao3 for not catering to your needs (which newsflash: will change as fandom trends wax and wane, who’s to say that the next big thing won’t be appalling to me personally) you go create your own fucking purity based content sharing platform where you feel safe. Literally nothing is stopping you.

Get a lawyer, learn to code, write your own TOS. Seriously. If fandom needs to change to accommodate this, then it most certainly can, which is why all the tools exist. Someone would probably even write your code for free. You can put all the donate links you want and have four hundred kinds of warnings. Just, leave the existing platform out of it.

[jabletown]:

k but, writing with incest, abuse, rape, guro, shota, whatever, it actually doesn’t harass people by it simply existing. i’m not a particular fan of any of those things myself, but those things are almost always clearly labeled as such.

and yeah any underage person could click on them and read them, but they are clearly labeled as such. ao3 does a better job of warning people of story content than any other format i’ve been on. i can’t imagine if you read a story with the “tags: non/con, incest, parent/child incest,” etc anyone can claim they didn’t understand what kind of material was going to be discussed. bc clearly your problem here isn’t a community wide problem about mis-labeling–which much more of a tumblr problem than an ao3 problem.

and going further than that to say, no this writing just shouldn’t exist, and we have to pass a moral purity test in order for writing to be read, that’s an entirely different argument. all you’re saying here is there should be no bad things written about at all– and no one can control that.

you may be right, it might be harmful for very young readers, or anyone, to read very explicit sexually violent stories–but that’s besides the point, because those stories almost always have say in the tags exactly what’s happening inside. i’ve been a fic reader/writer since before ao3 and yes there absolutely were more instances of those things going un-labeled in the past.

you’re literally saying because children exist and might possibly read violent and/or violent pornography, it has no right to exist in the community. bc i can’t imagine anyone things underage people are being forced to read shota or incest fics? right, you know that’s not happening. if it’s not a problem with minors forcibly being exposed to violent themes, or people habitually not using warnings or tags, this is just a plea for moral censorship, no different than the way any right wing christian wants to make sure young people aren’t exposed to anything but abstinence only and creationism.

[ischemgeek]:

Do you folks know why AO3 was created in the first place? I was new to fandom at the time that it was going down, lemme tell you:

Back before AO3, most of the fandom scene was split up among different communities like fanfiction dot net (which still exists to my knowledge), livejournal, deviantart, and a few others. I’m going to focus on livejournal because LJ was where most of the breathing community was (fanfiction dot net and deviantart were more platforms than communities in my experience at the time). LJ functioned kind of like a combination Tumblr, Wordpress, online messageboard and AO3 at the time - it was primarily a journalling site but they also had “communities” for group discussions and this was where fandom lived on that site.

At some point, LJ was trying to clean up for a sale and some folks from conservative groups (including the Warriors for Innocence) started raising hell about “pedophilia” and “indencency” on the site, threatening to be all moral panic about it, and they gave a hitlist of blogs they wanted gone (some of which were genuinely gross and criminal - but the majority of which were fan communities writing stuff like slashfic and porn. Which, yes, slashfic and porn but nothing illegal was happening - in fact, all of the communities I was in had two really strict rules: Nothing explicit involving characters who were mentally or physically underage, and explicit posts were age-locked. LJ since they were trying to sell was worried this would become a scandal and ruin their deal. LJ just up and deleted hundreds of accounts and communities without warning or justification. There was no apparent rhyme or reason to it - communities for age play and what have you were left untouched by HP fanfic communities were gone, that sort of thing. I should note also that the case was at the time (and continues to this day) that the overwhelming majority of the fanfic porn and slash blogs were written by marginalized people for marginalized people. Most of what I’m referring to as “porn” had less in common with the porn you’ll see on tv and more in common with a kickass work of fiction that happens to have explicit sex scenes written out - even the most porny I saw only ever rose to the level of something you’d find in the romance/erotica section of the book store. It should also be noted that actual porn communities - and by this I mean like “explicit photos and video of sex” type of thing - were untouched. The hit list was not about porn or moral purity,, it was mainly about women daring to have sex drives not in the service of men.

There was huge backlash in the fandom communities against Lj and they promised to do better and did revise policies. But it didn’t work because a few months after that boldthrough happened for pretty much the same reasons, and that was when the moves to Dreamwidth and AO3 happened.

But you need to understand what the environment that AO3 sprang from was - it was one back before fandom was widely accepted. Nobody wanted to go to bat for fans, let alone them there perverts writing porn and fanfic and plaigiarizing and profiting off other’s IP! (never mind that is not and never has been what fanfic is about but whatever). AO3 was made as a place by fanficcers, for fanficcers (there’s a damn good reason it was titled “Archive Of Our Own”). When it was being formed, there was in-depth discussion over what limits should be placed when and how - and the decision was made at the time that limits of the sort LJ had at the time could be exploited to make the entire fandom unsafe. It’s a decision I support.

If you weren’t around for strikethrough, you do not have the background to know why AO3′s policy is necessary if they want a safe space for fanfic. Any limit would be exploited by WFI and similar as a wedge to try to break these communities apart - because they’re not at their core about protecting kids or some bullshit like that - they’re about enforcing sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia, and they will use any excuse, tool, or opening they get.

If you weren’t on Lj at the time, you don’t know what it was like to log on as an abused kid dealing with a lot of shit in meatspace at the time to the one place where you know you’re safe to be you and suddenly it’s gone. Your one safe space, your one community, where you can get support and help - where people talked you in to seeking mental health help when you were suicidal, where people offered advice on navigating bullying situations that was actually helpful, where people told you what language to use to get the school to pay some fucking attention and act, where people told you that being an androgynous bi kid was not wrong and you’re perfectly fine just the way you are, where you could see people like you in fiction works by authors like you, and it’s gone. For no apparent reason. No warning. No explanation. Stonewalling from LJ for months when we were looking for a reason. And it’s just gone.

You have no idea how damaging that was to me and to others who were kids like me at the time. And yea, sure, I lied about my age and read porn sometimes (I think most kids in my age cohort did, back in the days when your entire identity online was your screenname and your age was what you said it was), but that didn’t damage me. If anything, it helped, because the porn I read modeled consent and healthy relationships in a way that very few things aimed at teenagers do. What did damage me? Bullying. Harassment. Abuse. Having my one safe space on the net - a place that was my lifeline - pulled away because some asshole homophobes didn’t like slashfic. Going from almost alone in dealing with my troubles to literally alone. That was damaging. Reading fluffy romance with explicit, consensual sex scenes? Not damaging, and frankly I do not think we’d be having this discussion if USian culture was not so wrapped up in Puritanical Christian bullshit around sex and women’s pleasure.

[aetherium-aeon]:

One of the things that I think also isn’t discussed enough re: fandom policing, is that enforcing the tagging system and normalizing tagging Bad Content is a huge fucking step in the right direction.

Do you think kids don’t find this type of content outside of ao3?

Many of the books we covered in middle or high school or college were chock-full of awful themes and dangerous ideas and shitty content, and many of the kids reading them didn’t even realize why until the class discussion started. Part of the class discussion devolved into explaining differing morals of the time the piece was written, and explaining why X behavior was bad, and even then, the teacher often doesn’t use strong language to explain Bad Content. It’s not “violent misogyny” in a high school classroom, it’s “times were different and women weren’t treated well.”

If you tag your shit for “tw abuse, tw rape” then the audience knows before they’ve even opened the work, that you don’t condone characters’ actions. You are highlighting the fact that there is Bad Content in this piece, and it takes out that incredibly uncomfortable moment that the audience feels elsewhere, on other less-precisely tagged corners of the internet, characterized by a little voice in the back of your head that says, “but does the author know that this is actually kind of rapey? Does the rest of the audience know this is actually Not Okay?” If someone leads with a “dubcon” or “noncon” tag, the answer is yes.

This pretense that ao3 is somehow the worst or whatever for tagging its Bad Content and allowing it to continue to exist is honestly a fucking farce.

And, finally, to reiterate since I don’t see it on this version of the post: sometimes people write scary and Bad Content to deal with that shit happening to themselves. Victims of CSA will write CSA to cope. As an adult, it’s incredibly uncomfortable to consider, but not everyone writing porn on the internet is of age, and not every character they empathize with well enough to write about will be of age.

American sex education is notoriously terrible. As above reply states, I can’t fucking emphasize enough how important it was to me, a child raised on abstinence-only education, in a very rural and puritan town, to have a safe space to discuss and explore sexuality on the internet