It's time to accessorize my walker with a Hazmat suit...
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| Title: | It's time to accessorize my walker with a Hazmat suit... |
| Creator: | monimala |
| Date(s): | May 30, 2007 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | It's time to accessorize my walker with a Hazmat suit... - moni for nothing, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
It's time to accessorize my walker with a Hazmat suit... is a 2007 essay by monimala.
It was written in response to Strikethrough.
Topics Discussed
- fandom as underground
- kinks
- old platforms fans used to use
- Livejournal
- Harry Potter
The Post
The longer I am involved with fandom, the more I feel like the crabby old lady on the porch of the St. Pia Zadora Golden Buckeye Retirement Community, shaking her fist at the damn kids on the lawn. And, believe me, I know it's a crowded porch and all of our "back in my day" grumblings are at the point where they drown each other out and turn into some kind of toothless, gummy, white noise.
But, seriously, back in my day, we didn't have LiveJournal. We had web sites, we had message boards, we had OneLists (that became EGroups, that became YahooGroups), and guess what: We could still get TOS-ed at any given moment. We were always hyper-aware of the spurious nature of fanworks... whether it was FOX cracking down or your secret fandom nemesis tattling to your ISP because you wronged them somehow. Be it the concept of fan fiction or fan art itself OR the content, there's always the danger of getting "caught." I think the problem is that these days, that concept has flown out the window. Fanworks have become so mainstream, have seemingly eaten LJ, and there's so many *new* people who took what we once kept fairly quiet and started screaming about it like it's the norm of fandom... that people have forgotten why fandom used to be more of a secret society. People have gotten comfortable, *too* comfortable, and forgotten that fandom isn't as insulated as it used to be.
Back then, we didn't name entire communities after kinks, we didn't blithely put "incest" or "chan" in the userinfo. Sure, that's mainly because we didn't have an interface like LJ to work with. But, also, guess what: People outside of fandom don't "get it," and a search engine certainly doesn't pick up the "ZOMG! Kidding! I don't have sex with my sister or with kids!" aspect of something like that. It's a computer program. It mines search terms. It can't tell the difference between a roleplayer or a pedophile. So, you know how you get around that? You don't put the naughty shit in your userinfo. You don't name the entire community something like "iheartincestyay." You WHISPER, like it's a library.
And, sure, that sucks, but it covers your ass... and the ass of the person next to you.
I love all the "rebels" reacting, "Well, I'm going to post my smutty smut Dean/Sam epic with a NSFW icon ANYWAY! HA!" And it's the kids citing "freedom of speech" that are really making me laugh. Man, do you know how many people I kicked off message boards back in the heyday who used that excuse for why they should be able to stay? Dude, "freedom of speech" has never applied to private web space, to a corporation like SixApart/LiveJournal. You pay them for a service, yes, but you also agree to their Terms of Service...and I know nobody reads those things EVER, but the brass tacks are that they can choose to deny service to whomever they want on the basis of whatever rules they want and you said, "okay," when you signed up. If they decided not to provide journals to people without shoes, people without shirts, and people with cats named "Fluffy," that would be their right.
You know how we get around that? By keeping certain aspects of our fanworks QUIET. Squee is nice, squee is great, but so is subtlety. There's a certain advantage to NOT being noticed. "These aren't the droids you're looking for."
We don't have the *right* to create fanworks and post them on the Internet -- not unless you own your site and your own ISP -- We have the very delicate privilege. And it doesn't matter if you move to GreatestJournal or Blogger or wherever... unless a certain sense of entitlements shifts, this danger of getting cracked down upon is always going to loom. Hell, it looms anyway, but at least it'll loom from a greater distance.
Now where the fuck are my dentures?
Fan Comments
[medie]: heh. *nods* I remember those days myself (now where did I leave my rocking chair?). I said to a friend, in a lot of these cases WFI fired the gun - fandom loaded it.
[monimala]:What cracks me up is that fandom is so SURPRISED. And I'm just sitting here like..."Um, DUH."
[...]
Exactly. You can't walk two steps in a fannish LJ these days without tripping over Wincest or Petrellicest (yes, I'm guilty of mentioning it myself) or Weaselycest or Snape/Harry or whatever. It's entirely too easily accessible. And, sure, I'm betting the folks at LJ/SixApart know just how much of it exists (or if they didn't, they CERTAINLY do now), but there's that "if no one reports it, then we don't care," thing going on. If someone reports the content, you'd better believe they have every right to
[whisperwords]: Wordy McWord Word. I come from back in the OneList days as well (oh, the days before Yahoo got a hold of them...) and back then it was ALWAYS under-the-table for kinks and questionable morality. It was never communities named "INCESTISGREAT" or anything like that. If it sends up a red flag when people see it, it shouldn't be something they can easily find with a google search, for cripe's sake.
[wasabi girl1]: Wow, you know, yesterday I was pissed, but now that you mention it, yeah, things have become a little too "free" these days...
[life on queen]:You don't put the naughty shit in your userinfo. You don't name the entire community something like "iheartincestyay." You WHISPER, like it's a library.
For realz.
[monimala]:I just think it's a bit silly to be running around going, "ZOMG! Oppression!" and feeling betrayed by LJ.
First and foremost, LJ is a business. Not only that, it is a business that is not just patronized by fandom. And I can't help but laugh at the arrogance of people who think fandom existed here in a bubble. Fen are only a fraction of this site's user community and if we're not wearing shirts or shoes and making even ONE other patron uncomfortable, then we can be summarily booted out. If this is a wakeup call to those who forgot that, then good.
it's an icky mess of fandom's own making.
I'm not even criticizing people for writing the incest or chanfic or whatever. It's not about that. It's about forgetting discretion and common sense.
[thelana]:I always felt it made perfect sense. If livejournal really thinks that it is a better financial decision to have a clean image than to hot fanficcers, by all means. (MySpace for example is much stricter than livejournal when it comes to youth protection, but it is also (1) bigger (2) much more tallied at the youth market. ) It's a simple potential gain vs. potential gain calculation. Only that fen can't proove how much money they are really making livejournal, not can the other side proove how much money they would lose on account of having a bad, porny reputation. It's not like we know the exact numbers of these supposed advertisers that might be pulling out. Anybody can claim that they are writing to advertisers [remembering various "Keep couple X/Y together or I'll be writing the advertisers!!" campaigns]
[I still think that deep down livejournal would prefer it if there was a way to keep both parties. Pecunia Non Olet and all that. ]
I do think that fandom could be really in trouble if it really got discussed in public in a big way. I just really doubt that this will be time. Most likely livejournal had a short freakout and then will quietly withdraw again and everything will just grow back.
[mardia]:Exactly. Aside from the financial aspect, there is actually a serious legal liability, because putting up interests like 'incest' 'child porn', or what have you could conceivably be used to gather other people w/ similar interests together, and if that means a bunch of pedophiles are actually gathering on LJ--which, hey! was actually happening--then LJ is screwed if they don't do something.
Seriously, at last count there were five or six pedophile groups that have been suspended that actually weren't fannish in any way.
And absolutely, LJ's stance is very much 'don't ask, don't tell, we won't look' and I'm sure the last thing they want is fandom collectively exploding all over them.
[thelana]:I still think that real pedophiles would probably be rather bored at a fanfiction community. For once, most fanfiction perusers are slightly more mature females, so it's not really a good place to pick up, err, prospects.
I also think that the kind of stories fanfiction people write and the kind of stories male pedophiles write are rather different (if I go what gets posted on nifty.org). Chances are that if you posted your typical pedophiles fantasy on a fanfiction place people would dislike you not as a pedophile but as a crappy writer.
I do think that pedophiles hang out on lj, just that they probably have their own communities (certain more, err, exotic blooms of the Harry/Snape fandom non-withstanding).
[beatrice269]:First, I love that this conversation is sane and your icon rocks my socks. However,I'm slightly bothered by the fanfic=female pedophiles=male and I just thought I should point out that pedophelia is not an exclusively male problem. I know for a fact that there are women out there who sexually abuse children.
[...]
I just feel there is an inherent danger in seeing any subject in terms of black/white when most things in this world are a horrible shade of grey.
As an abuse survivor I have a real problem with child sexual abuse being hidden under a thin veneer of fanfiction. I'm not saying that any story that involves an adult and an underage person is evil or that the author is a pedophile. What bothers me is that some people seem to think that titillating readers with porn about a 30 something and a 10-14 yr. old is okay because it's "fanfiction which is a female dominated arena and women aren't pedophiles."
[monimala]:Thanks for your two cents, because I do agree with you. It's, sadly, an unpopular opinion and gets shouted down when you try to point out that there are shades of gray, that there IS a sticky angle to fanfiction. People are so quick to deem fanfiction a female space, like females are guiltless, and all these "beautiful, creative, amazing women" don't mean anyone harm. But how do you KNOW that?
There is no way of knowing that women aren't getting off to the 40-something and the 10-year-old in the story and then trolling past the schoolyard for a peep show themselves. Assuming pedophilia and child sexual abuse are solely male crimes is a really, really naive assumption.
[thelana]:I have been pinged in a "Wow, I wouldn't want to meet you in you real life" by stories lots of times. Though admittedly I probably get pinged more often in a "wow, you are probably too dumb to live" kind of way. [*insert rant about underage kids writing explicit fic*]
But the whole cult of mean/cult of nice debate where you can't say anything bad about a bad story has been done to death.
Though I do think that the people who seek out fanfiction with the deliberate attempt to really create stories and deal with characters seek it out precisely because it puts an additional layer between them and reality. It's one more step further removed. It's just just personal fantasy (one time removed) based on non-existing people, it's a shared fantasy that to some extent even gets controlled/influenced by a recognized outside source (the original author)
Still, I wish the whole "thinly veiled personal fantasy" label could be used like the insult it should be. Though I would start with slapping it on every John/Rodney story which reads like Rodney is the insecure helpless little dorkette who can't believe that studly John is in love with her because she's uuuuuugly and faaaaaaat and ooooold! But of course studly John thinks she is the most perfect creature ever!!
[monimala]:Oh, there's a huge, huge, contingent of "too dumb to live" out there. LOL. And I've debated the mean/nice cult thing to death myself. It's too bad we can't tell all the people who shouldn't be writing to just...stop.
Fantasy is fine, but I think that the Internet and fandom have made the boundaries of "shared personal fantasy," a little too thin. It ceases becoming "personal" and becomes "public," and then the rules of judging it change. To some extent, I don't need to KNOW that Rodney giggling like a little girl and getting spanked by Big Daddy John on alternate Tuesdays gets you off. Or Professor Snape performing a little "wand magic" on Harry floats your boat. But thanks to fandom, I do!
There's that TMI factor and it feeds into fears about kinks, about pedophilia, about rape and incest... because knowing what arouses your fellow man (oh, I'm sorry, fandom is a female space...snort) is an ODD conundrum.
I don't know what turns my co-workers on, but I sure know what turns on everybody on my friends list and friendsfriendslist! Is that better or worse?
[thelana]:See, just because I really don't want to read Harry and Hermoine engage in fisting and urine play, these are still perfectly legal activities and are apparently enjoyed by an, if incredibly small, percentage of people.
Pedophilia has the thing that it is both distasteful and illegal in real life. So while you will never be able to ban "Stories I think suck" (after all what you consider a-okay could be what somebody else considers distasteful, like non-canon pairings or even minor age difference like VLamb), pedophilic stories is one situation where there might be a chance that almost everybody can agree. Kinda the "Hilter rule". Just like Germany can consider itself a moderately civilized country even though they have a "you have all rights of freedom, free speech, free press, free congregatin EXCEPT when it comes to Third Reich stuff". Pedophlia is one of the few things where you might get people to agree on "free for anything except this" kind of rules.
Personally, I wish there was a way to just ban bad, OOC, unrealistic writing. I have a feeling that would take care a lot of the things that bug people :D
[lumaria]: I'm glad someone finally said it. I've been rolling my eyes at the flist for a day because of all this crap.
[thelana]:Still my personal theory on the whole is that fanfiction is mostly characterbased. So person X likes Snape, wants to pair Snape with somebody, pairs him with Harry. But as a lover of Snape is also open to Snape/Hermoine (kid) or Snape/Sirius (adult) or Snape/Giant Squid as long as there is lots of Snape while hating Harry/Sirius. Or a different person is a fan of Harry and therefore likes Harry/Snape as that, but is also open to let's say Harry/Hermoine or Harry/Draco where all characters are adults while at the same time hating the thought of Snape/Hermoine or Snape/Ron.
And to me, the less character(s) based a story becomes the lesser the quality of the story (just see all the complaints about Mary Sues or character bashing or other author's opinions in stories). [for the record, tons of fanfiction stories [including tons of non-pedophilic ones] are way too personal fantasy based and not enough character-based: but subsequently, a lot of fanfiction is also crap]
Hence, no, I don't feel ashamed to say that an author writing an original story of exactly the same content as a fanfiction story would freak me out more. Fanfiction imposes outsides rules to some extent. If you write a story where the hero is a severely underage boy described in elaborate pedophilic detail I am going to be freaked out because it means that out of all the possible characters you could have written, you chose *this* one? While there might be good reasons to write about *Harry Potter* as opposed any other fantasy magic series with maybe older characters. Because they are well written, have a good story, an interesting and developed universe, are popular in that there are many fans of the books around, are popular in the sense that they are easy to get, are popular in that several books are out there, are popular in that there are movies, are popular in that there is a lot of material out there.
If you write an original character there are fewer good reasons why you might have picked a character like that (maybe you are a survivor and trying to deal with a trauma, maybe you mean to shock and horrify [Lolita; Stephen King ], maybe... I don't know; I said I can only think of few). While there might be more good reasons why you pick *Harry*, the quality and popularity of the source material that makes you a fan of the source material, the fact that Harry is the main character with the most background, the fact that he might be the one you identify with the most.
*actually to me that is is the more troublesome area. If we assume that women as a whole are more likely to be attracted to characteristics than things like age or size, that's where I would look for them. Innocence, purity, pseudohelplessness (to an extent where you can argue lack of consent even if the author doesn't see it that way) being instilled on all types of characters, regardless of age or whether it fits or not (and usually I'd say such extremes never fit).
I read some excerpts of an rps story about an actor who is of age who gets in a car accident, fondled while unconscious and nursed back to health by the author. Easily freaked me out more than any "underage Harry gets raped by Dumbledore and runs away with Draco" or "Draco gets molested by his father and turns into twisted grown up being but eventually finds true love with Harry". Don't get me wrong, the theoretical examples I cite would still be crap stories. But they wouldn't lead me to conclude that the author necessarily molests children.
In the end, there are stories that *ping* me as suspicious and there are some that don't. And just the presence of underage sex (though admittedly I can't say that I have exactly read a lot of it) doesn't have to result in a ping (just like I'm not pinged by Stephen King even though he has dealt with child abuse in often gory details in his books; then again, his books are very aware and often precisely about the damages it creates)
[ulkis]:I've been reading stuff here and there about this incident, and I've seen some people state that for some people lj *is* fandom, and that's the reason for a lot of panic, and I agree. Well, not the only reason, but a lot of it. But obviously, it's not - there's TWoP, there's ezboard, there are still mailing lists and blogspot and whatever else you can name.
And re: whispering about our kinks. I wonder if people are actually surrounded by 'real life' who find it acceptable, or they just think if they find other like-minded people on the net, well then it's not going to be awkward anymore if you like [insert whatever here]. I dunno, I know if I said, "family, sometimes I read porn about fictional characters on the net!" my reply would be a lot of raised eyebrows. I'm sure you heard about the SPN asylum incident, where JA brought up wincest, and some people said, "oh, it means they think it's funny." Well, they probably do, but in general, people outside of fandom are probably laughing *at* us most of the time, not with us.
In any case, this'll probably blow over, but if it doesn't, it's not the end of fandom. The net is a big, big place.
[karikos]:I *love* being on the fringes of fandom. I got on my computer for an extended period of time for the first time yesterday and saw the posts about it on my FList (granted, there weren't many on mine) and yeah, I was so confused. But I completely agree. People got to the point where they were sticking signs on themselves saying 'I love Weasley/Petrelli/Win-cest' and not caring about the reality that in RL? Stuff like that doesn't go well at all. Sure, to each their own in fandom (which is basically how fandom is), but please, stop screaming it from the rooftops.
Next thing you know, we're going to be reading about this in the newspaper or hearing it on the CBS evening news.
[monimala]:Dude, there are already rumors flying around about contacting the ACLU and various news outlets.
And I'm floored. How fucking dumb do you have to be to bring this outside of fandom and fight for your right to post underage and incest porn? Yes, it's unfortunate that LJ caught fandom journals in their search for legitimate criminals, but it doesn't necessarily make fandom RIGHT.
[karikos]: WHAT? SERIOUSLY? That's just...beyond ridiculous. I can see the news stories now. What, are they going to go on CNN and Fox News and do interviews about their right to post incest and underage porn? And expect for people to take them seriously or not treat them as pedophiles? Because that's exactly what people are going to think or how they're going to make it sound, whether the people are pedophiles or not.