this was probably one of many ill-advised things i did today

[wembley]

So this young teen I know, a real sweetie, was getting bullied a bit online by her peers, peers who are antis or are turning into antis, and I got mad and leapt on Twitter and had a normal one, as you do. I'm middle aged and have attained zero wisdom. Zero percent.

Instead of working on becoming a better person, I started thinking: mid-2000s Harry Potter fandom on Livejournal was a Caligula-esque orgy of skullfucking, incest and beastiality. Meanwhile, here in 2023, the kid I mentioned above said one sentence -- "I headcanon that [Rarely Appearing Antagonist Guy] is a rapist," used Discord spoiler tags to censor the word "rapist" -- and that one sentence is what initially made her peers so mad.

How in the sweet frosty fuck did we get here?

I'm gonna try to untangle my thoughts. I'm worried I'm about to sound like some right-wing Substack concern troll scumbag, which is absolutely not what I want since I'm a liberal Democrat. I'm also worried these thoughts are so obvious that it's pointless to share them. But, I still want to try hashing it out, and I'd love your help hashing it out with me in the comments.

What I'm wondering is: did three good, important, vital, progressive ideas accidentally pave the way for all this?

I'm about to talk about ideas but before I do that, quick detour:

So antis have ideas. Why do they believe these ideas?

One of the arguments I find most compelling: they don't.

Someone on FFA (I know, I know) genuinely blew my mind by arguing that all fights that use anti arguments ("you shouldn't write/draw/headcanon/etc. this because if you do you're a racist/pedo/fetishizer of gay men/hate women/etc.") are actually fights for resources. Someone wants more content for their ship/fave and less content for that other ship/fave. Or they want more content to their liking and less content not to their liking. All the political reasoning is secondary. It's just there to make the person feel progressive when in actuality they're just being a dick.

I find this answer the most convincing and the most compelling.

Some other ideas I've heard over the years: backlash to having lots of live-action porn pop-up ads and stuff shoved in their face at an early age (maybe!); rebelling against the Caligula-esque 2000s (sure, why not); folks (in the US) not unpacking our deeply ingrained cultural Puritan sex negativity (probably!); needing to exert control over an increasingly frightening world threatened by existential, extremely complex problems -- fixing climate change feels impossible, making a call-out GDoc about a peer who committed the crime of writing age-gap romance is easy (makes sense!); seeing all these sexual predators in every major industry get outed makes the youth fear that everyone is a predator or a pedo???? plus QAnon splash damage? (probably); there are way, way, way more people online than ever before and a lot of people in fandom now are vanilla normies that never would have joined in the past (yeah, probs); this is all a giant TERF plot (no; there are TERFy and SWERFy strains running through some anti ideas, because it's sex negativity but from the left, but I don't think this is like... an organized TERF psyop or something; at the very least, show me the receipts).

That said, even though it's unlikely that most folks spouting this stuff truly believe it, I have seen one or two folks who really do seem to. So let's just pretend that they do believe these ideas. How did they get there? I'm typing this wondering if part of what's going on is that two big ideas are in tension with each other:

Idea 1: Humans have a vital, primal need to share ideas and feelings through art. Some of the art is horny.

vs

Idea 2: Some ideas are so dangerous that they should never be shared.

Let's take these apart.

Idea 1: Humans Gotta Share Their Horny Art. This is self-explanatory, right? Fandom -- the version of fandom that I came up in -- relies on this idea. It is the backbone of fandom as I practice it and understand it. We have a deep, primal need to express ourselves as human beings. Some of us do this through writing stories, creating songs, painting, sculpting, making videos, and on and on. Some of us feel a similarly deep and primal need to share this art with others. That includes the horny art. Sharing that stuff helps us make friends. It makes us feel less alone. If weird stuff turns us on -- if we're into BDSM or rape fantasies or we're furries or what-have-you, knowing that we're not the only ones makes us feel less like freaks.

You already know this (but I'm worried younger folks don't??? Is that condescending??? I don't have kids! Clearly!), but the US has a lot of hang-ups about sex. This goes double if you're not a cis hetero man. Your sexuality and expression of it is marginalized and mocked and suppressed.

Sharing the horny art publicly is also a hugely important part of fandom. Personal anecdote: when I was younger, I found Sandy/The Fannish Butterfly's (RIP) website with a huge, public list of recs for noncon fanfic. If this website hadn't been made and hadn't been public, I wouldn't have found out there were other people that shared this kink. I felt less alone and less like a freak. It meant a lot.

Expressing ourselves through art, finding friends through sharing it, finding other people who are turned on by what we're turned on by, is pretty vital for well-being and mental health.

Idea 2: Some ideas are so dangerous they should never be shared.

I agree! I'm Jewish.

Idea 2 is-- Hang on. So I'm a liberal. If you're reading this, you are probably somewhere on the liberal to hard left spectrum. Let's call us all "progressives" for now to forestall any fighting.

Idea 2 is here as kind of an umbrella covering a suite of three ideas, or principles, or points of consensus, that have become accepted mainstream thought among progressives in the online discussion spaces I'm a part of. Good people worked hard and thanklessly to push these ideas -- which are good and backed up by facts -- into the progressive mainstream. I am not here to shit on these ideas, all of which I agree with. I am not arguing for us to go back to the Before Times. The Before Times were bad.

1. Representation matters.
   
   This is just true, right? I'm too lazy to google a bunch of studies, but the social science is pretty clear on this point, is my understanding? Negative stereotypes of marginalized people in mass media -- big studio movies, popular tv shows, bestselling novels, pop music -- causes negative, real, concrete, material effects. It makes marginalized people exposed to the stereotypes feel bad about themselves. It convinces the folks higher on the food chain to create or continue policies that further oppress the marginalized. Meanwhile, positive representation has positive, concrete effects.
   
   Is fanfiction mass media? From the 1960s to the 2000s, I would say "no." From 2010 on... I think you could argue either way. There have been a few individual stories that have racked up around... a million readers? I think? Fifty Shades of Grey started as fanfic and became true mass media as a movie. That Dream SMP or whatever it's called fic broke AO3 when it updated? I think? Feel free to correct me?
   
   Can negative stereotypes in fanfic influence society? How do we measure that? I don't know. We do know the effects on our peers in fandom, because they've told us: it feels shitty. As a woman, it sucked to see female characters in the 1990s-2000s written as shrieking harpies just because she was an obstacle to the writer's preferred ship. Plenty of people of color in fandom have discussed how shitty it feels to see stereotypes replicated in fanfic.
   
   So just in terms of being good neighbors to one another, avoiding tired, harmful stereotypes in our writing and art makes sense. Everyone comes to fandom to relax and have fun, and you can't relax and have fun if you keep getting poked in the eye by that stuff.
   
   [eta: I should also add, I guess for? Disclosure??? That I was friends and friendly acquaintances with folks who, around 2002-3, pushed for more antiracism in our shared fandom. They mostly got pushback.]
   
   
2. Warn for sexual violence. Or: Some survivors don't want to see depictions of sexual violence in fiction for mental health reasons.
   
   Back in the mailing list days, fights about warnings didn't, if I recall correctly, really involve discussions of mental health at all. Side A wanted to be warned for things like rape or major character death, Side B wanted the freedom to surprise their readers by not putting a spoiler at the top of the fic (which is where warnings tended to go). There was no way to hide, obscure or cut a spoiler at that time. You had to do this, lol. I don't know if it was possible to do via HTML on personal websites at that time or not? Happy to be corrected.
   
   Anyway. During the LJ days (mid-2000s), a new dimension opened up in the warning fights, which was survivors arguing that getting surprised by a rape scene in fiction could trigger a PTSD flashback, forcing them to relive their own IRL past sexual assault. This changed a lot of minds on warnings, including mine. I'll come back to this later.
   
   
3. Deplatforming works.
   
   It's true. It does. It worked on Milo Y. It's worked so far on Tucker Carlson. I think it worked on KiwiFarms and Stormfront, I don't know, maybe they oozed back out of the dark web???
   
   This isn't, I don't think, a mainstream idea in non-Extremely-Online-America. But it's a tenet of faith in my circles. We've all heard the anecdote about the Nazi bar. I agree that there's no reason to try to debate Nazi shit in the "marketplace of ideas". Sunlight doesn't seem to disinfect this stuff but rather causes it to grow... that seems to be what recent and past history has revealed.

So let's mix these ingredients together. Some ideas hurt society, as well as individuals in our community. Some ideas even cause intense negative mental health episodes in some people in our community. And ideas that are really, really bad shouldn't be shared.

If you put all that together, I think it makes sense why tween and teen and twenty-something progressives see ideas they don't like and think those ideas shouldn't be shared in public.

And here in Progressive Land, we do a pretty good job of showing how little things become big things and putting things on a spectrum of badness, right? We talk about laundering. This "reasonable" seeming version of an idea is going to lead to what the speaker really believes, which is the nightmare version. This is often true! We can see how a seemingly small instance of bigotry can pave the way for worse bigotry. I can get eye-rolly about how many things get labeled "violence" that aren't actually two people hitting or stabbing each other, but it's not always people being overdramatic or dicks, there is a political reason for this: it reveals a web of harms, showing how all this stuff is connected. This can be valuable!

I can see the mindset that goes, "Okay. Nazis are racist. Nazi speakers get banned. I think this story is racist. This story hurts me, or could hurt someone I know. This story should get banned. This story eroticizes rape, and that upsets and could trigger some people, so that should get banned."

I can see how people get from A to B, if that is, in fact, what's happening. But it also really sucks! We're in a world where some She-Ra: Princesses of Power fanartist gets yelled at for drawing a sex slave AU, because... problematic??? I mean, I don't need to list examples, you all know it fuckin' sucks right now and has for, like, a decade. (The teen in my anecdote also, for instance, committed the crime of writing Aziraphale/Crowley mpreg. This is bad for. Reasons?)

What's interesting and what puzzles me, is that antis seem only concerned with the stuff covered under Idea 2, and do not care at all about Idea 1. Like, the idea that sexual expression, especially for marginalized genders, is good in and of itself.

There's also the tension between being good neighbors vs power and scale. This side of fandom is populated by marginalized genders and lots of queers. Do any of us have the power to "normalize" anything? When is something a problem vs when do we all need to touch grass? How do we balance sensitivity to our peers against the right to self-expression?

One example of balance is AO3's warning system. AO3's founders cared a LOT about Idea 1, but were sympathetic to Idea 2. You can warn for the most commonly triggering and upsetting story elements. Or you can mark your story as Choose Not To Warn. Works for me! But if you think an idea or kink or trope is so harmful it shouldn't ever be shared publicly, that compromise isn't going to work for you.

I realize this is just the Feminist Porn Wars of the 1980s all over again, but whatcha gonna do. I also realize I have not covered underage or RPF at all but man I'm just not equipped.

Is it inevitable that good ideas get mutated into flattened bullshit in order to bully people and win clout? (See: communism.) The next time we need to push important ideas into the bloodstream, is there a way to head this off? (Obviously antis are the least of the planet's concerns. I think this is applicable to IRL stuff, though.)

Can this all actually be laid at the feet of call-outs? Should call-outs be saved only for extreme bad actors: sexual predators, people who are physically violent? Should bad actions below that threshold merit them?

Is there anything we can actually do to make fandom less... like this? I've seen it said that in most fandoms, the adults are in secret locked down Discord servers now so that they don't have to deal with this shit, which means the first big, public servers that newbies find... are run by antis. That the anti mindset is the default now, because it's the first thing n00bs come across.

Will the younger folks grow out of it? What if they don't? Will that have effects IRL?

Fandom is for fun and relaxation. Most people my age have jobs, kids, maybe they're taking care of their parents or grandparents. I don't blame folks for just hunkering down and waiting this all out. But I wish there was something we could do to model less toxic behavior?

Also, fans always bullied and fought with each other. It's just 1) there are so many more people online now to join the dogpile and 2) when the bullying is given a veneer of progressivism, when these important concepts are just perverted like that... it's maddening, dude! It's way more upsetting than "you are interrogating this text from the wrong perspective."

Anyway. Please share your thoughts.

Comments

[nialla]

I haven't heard it referenced as "fight for resources" but that's definitely one way to see it. I definitely feel like there was a phase of "everything should be sanitized for me/the hypothetical children" before the censorship really devolved but even with that it could still boil down to the same thing. Some people want fandom to be content creators churning out their preferred content. Others just want to watch it all burn.

It seems newer fans (not necessarily physically younger) have no concept of lurking. They don't hang out, check the vibes, and see if a particular group is for them. They crash through the door, demanding everything suit their needs and wants. I think a bit of bleed from other media, such as Wattpad and TikTok, are also at play. They require a certain level of self censorship, so their users don't understand when that doesn't happen at AO3. Those "reasons" they use are just the latest weapons of wankery.

Is fanfiction mass media? Hmm. That's a tough question. My gut says yes, as it's (generally) using mass media to build something else. But technically no, at least not until 2010ish when it breached containment into the mainstream. The moment it did was when it seemed like the big push for sanitizing content happened.

Fandom in general and fanfic specifically paved the way for a lot of people to understand queerness. Even some who figured out they were queer, because without fandom, they didn't have the understanding and vocabulary to express themselves. Yet now there's wars over queer being a bad word, when every word for marginalized people had been a bad word at some point. We can't have an umbrella term that leaves no one out, because of the people who want to leave certain groups out. Same thing in fandom itself, where some want to leave "those people" out.

I've never had the time to figure out the Discord thing. I really miss the LiveJournal days of discussing fannish history and theory. I'm not a scholar, but I find it fascinating. I've been in online fandom for over 30 years no. I was there Gandalf, etc. I still hang out online with some folks I've known online for 20+ years. Am I isolating myself from new ideas and concepts? Probably. I'm also avoiding a lot of bullshit.

[yourlibrarian]

Your comment about them being given certain expectations from other platforms makes sense to me. If you're on a site that has no community formats and in which algorithms are there to funnel you content with no personal connections, it's less surprising that people don't know why they can't just be served what they want. So many reasons why the methods social media sites have used to grow and monetize themselves are terrible for society.

That said, certain behavior was there well before these platforms. I agree with the argument that it's a fight for resources, and it's not entirely untrue. Many creators might be interested in creating for a variety of ships and characters but often don't because they don't think they'll get a big enough response.

[nialla]

I think a lot of them are so used to being the product, they no longer realize (or care) that they are. Most sites have some sort of algorithm to direct you to content. They can't fathom on where you have to do a bit of work to find what you want.

Another issue is that lack of personal connection. While I've known a lot of folks online for 20+ years, it was mostly in forums, then LiveJournal, and now DW where the fandom community coalesced. While DW is alive for those who migrated from LJ, it's not nearly the focus that LJ once was.

There was everything from squee to heavy discussions, and it where where you learned how fandom in general, and the one you were specifically discussing, worked. Now they just dive in and expect it to do things the way they want instead of learning how things are done.

I think the new platforms just amplified existing behavior. This is old-fashioned Ship Wars that have added nukes to the arsenal. Do as they say, or they'll do their best to wipe you off the face of the internet.

[nostalgia]

I think at some point around 2010-2012(?) fans became aware that you can claim moral high ground against other fans and make them look bad even if the actual disagreement is about something relatively trivial like a pairing you don't like. The good thing about that era was fandom become more aware of Issues but the bad thing is that fandom is absolutely full of people who want to look better than Those Other Fans and who will make up an ethical argument to win. I think sometimes it's not deliberate as such, though? In that we now automatically start worrying about what's problematic and even the most vanilla pairing is immoral and dreadful once the fights start. I feel reactionary for saying it but I think some of it does come from us rewarding call-outs with positive attention and not being careful enough at the start about saying "no, this thing is not actually that bad, it's not ideal but it's not really harming anyone" and there was def a point where fandom got very into morally righteous dogpiling and that's part of the current problem.

But also I saw someone say that we oldies grew up with a 'wild west' internet where every click was risky and the only person who could be relied upon to keep us safe was ourselves, so we had to learn to not click on things when there were warnings - and warnings on fic AO3-style are more comprehensive than they've ever been and so to us this is a vast improvement and very socially-minded. BUT the youth of today (lol) grew up in walled-garden places like Facebook and the like, where if they saw something terrible that upset them it was because someone broke the rules, and so to them AO3 should have rules to completely ban content they don't like, and not just rely on them not clicking on it. IDK but it sounds plausible to me?

[krait]

I am very isolated (and grateful for it) in my Dreamwidth bubble, surrounded by fans who mostly grew up with "Don't Like? Don't Read!" and YKIOK as guiding principles; I virtually never encounter antis, aside from spotting anti-esque tags on AO3 fics or hearing friends complain about them in other spaces.

I'm a definite subscriber to the idea that what most antis want is control: of resources, but also more generally of other fen, too. (Being in charge, leading the mob is a heady feeling.) It often seems to be tied up with people taking personal disgust as a moral indicator: if I feel a visceral reaction to a ship, a kink, or a concept, it must be an objectively Bad Thing. Further: if it's a Bad Thing, then my desire not to feel bad isn't just a silly wish but a matter of moral principle. You're subjecting me to Bad Things by writing smut, which means you're actually harming me, not just making me feel a bit ugh. Now I'm justified in attacking you, because it's self-defence!

Of course, anybody over the age of 12 or so ought to be well aware that "I don't like it" is not the same as "it's an objectively bad thing." And it further breaks down because, for ~mysterious reasons~ (hint: it's misogyny) never addressed by these wankers, it's only women and minorities that they apply it to - I never see or hear about antis trying to harass and dogpile male fans or police fanfic posted on male-dominated sites. Funny how that works! If it was really a moral crusade that they believed in, wouldn't it apply to everybody, and most of all to those who have social power to oppose or support them? And yet, somehow, it's always women and minorities who are targeted for being insufficiently moral - because those are the people with the resources that antis want, and also the people who are (perceived as) easier to control.

[nonesensed]

I can't but agree with both the things brought up in the post itself and in the comments here above mine. I think it's a complex problem with many factors, but the current way the Internet has developed and the English speaking part of the Net's culture (in a very general sense, there are of course many local differences) has rushed towards more conservative "won't someone think of the children!"-pearl clutching has likely been gasoline on the fandomwank fire. There have always been in-fights and name-calling in fandom, but with how huge fandom has grown now that everyone is online, it's far easier for people to dogpile someone.

Plus, with many now young adults having grown up with a very handpicked, streamlined, algorithm ruled online experience, where everything Must Be Kid Friendly or your app is deleted from the app store, I don't think they've learned how they should react to things that, as nostalgia brought up, they're used to only seeing when someone's broken the terms of service for a site/app. When I was a kid, if I saw something scary and/or icky online, I hit the back-button. My experience with the generation younger than me is that they're taught to hit "report" instead (or even report things they simply don't like to get it off the internet - as is a popular way to get Youtube videos you don't like removed or at least demonetized for no good reason).

And that fight for resources does seem to be a big part of it. I've always come across people who're upset their favorite pairing/character/trope isn't as big as they want it to be in fandom, but it's (in my very anecdotal personal experience) become more and more of a thing in fandom to go "people aren't writing about/shipping X because they're all racists/sexists/etc" and/or "popular character/ship is Problematic and you shouldn't write it". It's a weird kind of negging, instead of posting about why you like the thing _you like_ - a method that usually gets you way more fanfic, meta and fanart about Your Thing than trying to guilt-trip people to change what they're already writing about to pivot to the thing that caters specifically to you.

It's definitely an overwhelming problem to even start to deal with. But I do believe it's possible to do something about it, even in small, "can't help them all but it'll matter to This One"-ways. Because kids these days are, in my personal experiences, rarely taught anything about online safety - or even how to use a computer. They are (as a generalization) expected to have just absorbed how everything works, because their parents (who are now my age) had to teach themselves about computers since _their parents_ didn't know anything about computers (again, generalization). We have a whole generation raised on algorithms who don't know how to save a document as a PDF and instead are photographing their laptop screens and sending blurry photos of their assignments to their teachers, and who've come to accept the censorship of platforms like TikTok as everyday and normal. Maybe getting as many of them as possible basic computer knowledge and Internet safety tip would calm things down, if just a little?

I'm glad we're finally getting larger fandom spaces to acknowledge there are problems with who is welcome and seen as 'default' in fandom. That's a silver lining to all this, I feel. But I also think it's rather telling that the fandom outrage dogpilings tend to happen over social media to Random Fanfic Writer #193, indie authors and web comic artists rather than those "protestors" going up to people in real life to tell them how sick they are for watching the incest-filled Game of Thrones. I'm sure some of the so called antis are genuinely upset abut the things they're angry about and are sending George R. R. Martin angry e-mails, buuuut far too many of them seem to only focus on random people on the Internet and not on the actual, huge, popular media sharing the same supposedly "unspeakable tropes" for me to believe they're actually outraged about the tropes themselves...

[nialla]

but it's (in my very anecdotal personal experience) become more and more of a thing in fandom to go "people aren't writing about/shipping X because they're all racists/sexists/etc" and/or "popular character/ship is Problematic and you shouldn't write it".

I recall seeing a lot of this circa 2011. Lots of claims that people weren't shipping a character because he was Hispanic. If they hadn't said it, I wouldn't have even thought about it, as he looked rather Generic White Boy to me.

I hadn't thought of this as negging, but that's a good term for it.

[nonesensed]

Oh yeah, it's definitely a technique that's been around here and there in fandom for ages. I've just seen a rise in its use in the last 2-3 years in the fandoms where I hang out.

Many fandom spaces have taken more serious steps to deal with outright cruelty based in racism/sexism/ableism/similar of late, which I think is great. Along with that, it seems some people have decided to more and more co-opt the "right language" to get away with being rude and entitled. Not to mention all the people who seem to think of fanworks only as "content", rather than stories and art made by people they could talk to and befriend.

[nialla]

I loathe the "content" aspect. Nowadays many of the users do not have much other connection with fandom. We used to talk in forums, LJ, etc., and while some of us are still there, the younger fans (not age, just relatively newness) don't interact that way much. Easy to forget fellow humans are creating those fanworks when it just shows up as content for the user, which also makes it easier to attack writers and artists with the "right language". They aren't people, they're content creators.

[nonesensed]

Hard same. Current fandom has been very influenced by how the Internet has shifted from individual websites to everything being hosted on a limited number of social media platforms - and those platforms in turn have done more and more to make themselves Content Streams. The social-media-ness of today's Internet makes it easy to stop thinking of artists and writers as "person who makes art" and trick your brain into seeing them as "content". Along with that, artists and writers are putting a lot of pressure on themselves to get a crazy high number of comments/likes/reblogs - I've seen people consider their fic or fanart a "flop" if it has less than 1000 likes and newer writers on AO3 changing their posting dated over and over and adding unrelated tags to their works to try and gain more of an audience (which usually backfires). Not to say that chasing a high number of comments or likes hasn't been a thing in fandom before, but I feel the bar for what counts as a "successful" fanwork is getting higher and higher by the minute.

Though I also think we're seeing a backlash to this development, what with platforms like Pillowfort being created and Dreamwidth around and kicking. So I live in hope that fandom will keep on keeping on in many forms and not fully shift to only "make more content/consume more content"-mode. Discord seems to be the new Yahoo-mailing-lists for fandom to flourish in (and as with Yahoo mailing lists, I feel very lost when trying to join in on one 😅)

[pauraque]

In an unrelated discussion I was having today, someone floated the idea that there may be a connection between the rise of antis and the increase in the visibility of fandom. During the height of the Caligula days (and I do love that description), it's not like mainstream media was reporting on what we were doing. Social media hadn't really taken off yet as a fandom venue, so fans didn't have the direct contact with canon creators that they do now. Most non-fans still barely even knew what fanfiction was, and most fans wanted to keep it that way. If canon creators knew about fandom, their comments on it were usually negative and contemptuous, or at least distancing.

Obviously, all those things have changed. There are a lot of fans who do not see any problem with directly interacting with canon writers/actors, and many canon writers/actors welcome that and actively encourage fanworks and freely acknowledge consuming them. In this environment, I can see how some fans might feel a need to "tidy up" fandom and make it look good for outsiders.