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wembleySo 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.
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.
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.
- 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.] - 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. - 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.
