Okay I’m gonna quote that crap so that people can see what’s going on:
if you agree that positive representation (for example, well written,
humanized gay characters) can normalize and help gay teenagers, then you
inherently have to also accept that negative representation (for
example, accepted and sympathetic pedophile characters) can normalize
pedophilia to people. this is the same vein of the same critical
thought. you can’t claim that representation matters if you also believe
that someone writing ‘non con’ adult / child porn is fine since its
fictional.
Oh that is some lovely reductive bullshit isn’t it? It sounds very catchy, but it is very reductive and doing the whole false equivalency thing. And we know it’s a false equivalency because the research and studies literally don’t bear out what they’re saying. Very catchy if you’re an anti I suppose (especially that whole positive/negative thing, see that lovely binary between pure and sinful happening? You may not recognise it for the Fundamentalist argument it is, but…it is very Fundamentalist, as old as the church really), but again, it’s designed to shut down conversation and discussion and not promote conversation and discussion. And that’s a big problem when it comes to fiction.
Like, fiction will, by its very nature, be problematic. All fiction. ALL fiction. Even the best fiction that helped someone and normalises say: queer teens, fat bodies, disability etc. will, in some way, be problematic. Even the greatest feminist work of fiction in the world, right now, no matter what it is, is not without its problematic elements.
The answer isn’t to eliminate all fiction ever, just because fiction can be problematic or have problematic elements. Just because it can do things like: normalise heteronormativity, or express taboos in ways that seem like it’s normalising that taboo.
It’s also way more complex than: ‘people writing underage stories about 15/40 yos normalises pedophilia.’ We know it doesn’t. Like, there has never been a single good study that has demonstrated or supported this. (Please see: Moral Combat? Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong by Patrick Markey and Christopher Ferguson – which also covers fiction, comics and other media too). Scientists with a lot of government and church money to try and prove this stuff is monstrous have never been able to accurately prove that: violence in video games causes violence in real life, representations of sexual violence in fiction causes sexual violence in real life, and so on. There’s just no ‘correlation equals causality’ happening.
Fiction influences us. Of course it does. But we get to be discerning re: how it influences us. We have brains, and are not just mindless fiction receptacles. That’s media studies 101, that’s the first thing you learn. That’s why companies who pay for advertising don’t always get rich, because as much as they wish it were true – humans are not mindless fiction receptacles. That’s why we get to actually talk and have discussions about things that are problematic in media to understand why we like them, what’s going on there, and what might be being expressed:
For example, rape fantasy among women is extremely common in misogynistic societies. That is obviously reflective of a greater societal issue, but on an individual level it’s often an expression of ways to get healthier control in an unhealthy, uncontrolled society. A lot of women enjoy rape fantasy because they get to control the fantasy. They get to express sexual control and also get to experience guilt-free sex, if someone ‘forces’ them in a fantasy, then they don’t have to associate any religious or societal shame in a society that represses and shames them simply for having the bodies they have.
That is obviously something we learned from talking about it, researching it and discussing it. We didn’t learn that by shaming women so profoundly and saying things like: ‘look you have to admit that if you care about women’s rights and read rape fics at the same time…there’s something going on there, you don’t get it both ways.’ Like, actually, you do? That’s kind of…how society works? It’s not a coincidence that the most oppressed people in society are most likely to write the most taboo content. Like, how does anyone think that is a coincidence? That say, on AO3, the majority of the people are non-male and non-straight, and need those taboos more than y’know…a very wholesome episode of whatever primetime TV show is being very acceptable by mainstream standards right now (idk, I don’t watch primetime TV anymore, lol).
If it was so simple was ‘I read a gay fic that made me feel better about being gay’ and ‘I read a fic about underage tropes and now I’m in jail for pedophilia,’ then like, maybe. But we KNOW it doesn’t work like that. To be accurate in their comparison, what this person would need to say, is something like this:
‘These fics have gay representation and it normalised gay people and therefore straight people and straight children will become gay and that’s why it’s bad.’
Like I’m sorry, but that is not how queer fic is working. It’s absolutely not how underage, incest and rape fic is working either. That is like, the kind of disgusting rhetoric we saw from queer hate groups and Fundamentalist Christian groups. And it is scaremongering. The post acts like they’re engaging critically with the concept, but they’re not.
Of course representation is important, but that doesn’t mean it’s free from being problematic. Look at Will & Grace! That show did immense and world-changing things for queer representation, it showed the first on-air kiss between two men on primetime TV – it was also viciously: lesbophobic, transphobic, fatphobic and gender essentialist, and also – at times – deeply misogynistic. And ironically, laughably, fics with rape / noncon / incest can be great for representation! Lol. It’s not like, ‘here is the first and here is the second and never the twain shall meet.’
But you have to think in that super rigid binary if you’re an anti, because one has to be good, and one has to be evil. The words are right there in their post for you to see exactly how much of a fixed binary they need in the world – positive representation, negative representation, and no acknowledgement that all representation is problematic anyway.
Let’s also talk about normalisation, because it doesn’t always do the things antis think it does. Normalisation can mean good things for representation. But it can also help maintain cultural taboos. When we normalise the discussion of STIs, that doesn’t mean we’re more likely to go out and get STIs. It actually means we’re more likely to protect ourselves against STIs and have more informed sex.
The act of writing underage and having to tag that with a huge bold warning on AO3 actually helps constantly and consciously/unconsciously maintain the distinction that this is a huge societal No No on par with graphic depictions of violence and rape/non-con. (And the people writing underage don’t want that warning to go away, they understand why that needs to exist). Just by the virtue of that tag existing, we maintain the cultural taboo and understanding that this is not an okay thing to accept in real life, and we don’t positively associate with real life pedophilia. If anything, you are more likely to find folks who have been sexually assaulted, abused as children, people who are trying to heal, people who are trying to understand what happened to them, and folks who very clearly understand the difference between fiction and reality.
Normalisation is not a simple term. It’s a sociological/anthropological/psychological term with a lot of varied approaches that doesn’t just mean ‘seeing this all the time makes this thing okay.’ We know it’s not that simple. We know that sex education doesn’t make us more likely to go out there and get pregnant or get STIs – even though that’s what Fundamentalists, Christian right wing groups (and probably antis in about ten years) would want you to think. It actually makes you hugely, radically less likely to go and do both of those things. It is when sex education isn’t normalised that you get a massive problem.
Representation is complex. It’s obviously complex. It would be lovely to reduce it to a nice simple paragraph of ‘if you’re on this side you’re virtuous and if you’re on this side you’re a sinful person normalising pedophilia.’ But the research, academia, the studies, the real life lived experience of people just doesn’t bear that out. It’s so much more complex than that. And as we see with the prevalence of rape fantasy in women in misogynistic societies, something likely very psychologically complex is going on in the case of people attracted to things like underage / incest / noncon and other societally agreed upon taboos.
If you want to read further about this subject in an engaged way (because even my response isn’t as long as I wanted it to be, because you could be here for years talking about this stuff, and people are spending years researching this stuff), I highly suggest you also look into:
Transcending Taboos: A Moral and Psychological Examination of Cyberspace by Garry Young and Monica Whitty and;
Sex, Literature and Censorship by Jonathan Dollimore
as well as the book recommended above.
When the “normal” thing to do in fanfic communities was put tags on fic “warning” for homosexual relationships, but not to bother warning about noncon, we actually got a lot more “rape = love” and really squicky shit that no one was acknowledging was even weird, let alone problematic, while at the same time we had flame wars over whether or not it was okay to write slash fic. At all.
Today we’ve “normalized” homosexual relationships so that no one warns about them (advertises them, maybe, but not warnings), and we’ve “normalized” content warnings for non-con so people understand that “this is rapey” is a thing worth warning about. And I’m seeing a much lower proportion of fic where rapeyness isn’t acknowledged as bad.
“It’s okay to write about this bad thing but put a content warning on it” sends the message that the thing is bad. It doesn’t make it seem acceptable. When you “warn” for things that aren’t objectively bad, but are seen so in some people’s morality (like homosexuality), you send the message that those things are bad and people need to be kept safe from them through warnings they have to consent to. It was the changing attitudes toward homosexuality in society, not anything caused by fanfic, that led us to give up warning about gayness in fic.
Warning that a story contains noncon or underage reinforces that these things are problematic and not everyone wants to see them. It doesn’t make them seem more acceptable.
Antis are wrong about this (and about pretty much everything else.) Like all purity movements, they fail to understand that refusing to allow dark things to be shown in fiction just leaves those things in darkness, where they do even more harm than they already do.
chihiro never forgets her time spent in the spirit world,
because that’s no fun for anyone. she never forgets her friends, how could she?
she holds them all close to her heart, which is where they belong, especially
her beautiful white dragon.
hake is hers as
far as she’s concerned, but she’s his too, so it’s all nice fair. of course,
haku thinks that she doesn’t know he exists, but that’s okay. she’ll go find
him again one day.
because chihiro plans to return to the spirit world. but she
knows the time isn’t right, that if she just goes darting through every place
where the boundary between their worlds runs thin, then nothing will change. as
is, she’s just a little girl, just a helpless little girl who will get lost and
killed in the world of her friends, of her dragon. so she doesn’t go back.
she could. now
that she knows what to look for, she sees entrances to the spirit world
everywhere. they’re rarely in the exact same place twice but she knows what to
look for, how to find them if she wants to, how to get back to rin and kamaji
and zeniba. but she’s not ready yet.
she needs to get stronger.
her family’s not religious, so they’re surprised when she
asks to go visit shrines, but maybe it’s for the history or the culture, or,
they don’t know, the architecture. it’s a simple thing, and so they go.
chihiro keeps her eyes peeled, because she’s looking for something
in particular.
she’s looking for a shrine with a lot of spirits living in
it.
oh, because that’s another thing she can do now.
she can see spirits.
not ghosts, not
the echoes of the dead. but spirits, nature spirits mostly, but tricksters and
guardians, and all sorts, really. so they visit shrine after shrine, and there
are sprits there, of course, but never enough, none of them are there for anything
but the offerings, and that’s not what chihiro is looking for.
it takes months, and she’s already started school, settling
into it easier than she knew she could. after her adventures in the spirit world,
human children are nothing. but one day she visits a shrine, and she knows it’s
the one. it’s small, nothing impressive, all the way at the top of a long hill.
but she knows she’s found what she’s looking for. someone
who can help her.
there’s an old priestess taking care of it all on her own,
and all around her dart spirits, some lingering, some running by and doing
nothing more than patting her on the shoulder or back, but all of them
acknowledging her in some way. she takes one look at chihiro and says, “looking
for an apprenticeship, then?”
her parents start to say no, but she interrupts them, says, “yes,
i am,” and her parents don’t understand, but they have no reason to deny her,
so they don’t.
“it’s been a while since i’ve seen someone else who was
spirit touched,” she says the first day that chihiro returns, this time on her
own.
“what happened to you?” she asks, and knows the old
priestess will understand. those with the ability to interact with the spirit
world aren’t born. they’re made.
“a spirit saved my life as a child,” she answers. “you?”
she grins. “a river spirit saved me. once when i was
younger, and then again just a few months ago. i’m going to back to him.”
“returning willingly to the spirit world is foolish, and
dangerous,” she says, but there’s something like approval in her eyes.
“yes,” she says, “teach me how to survive it.”
so the priestess does. chihiro becomes known to the local
spirits, helping them however she can just like the old woman. plenty of
guardian spirits offer to attach themselves to her, to mark her as under their
protection, but she always refuses. there’s only one spirit who’s mark she’s
willing to carry.
years pass, and chihiro grows, from a girl to a young woman.
she grows up strong, and beautiful, and thanks to her years under the
priestess, she grows up powerful. she learns how to shoot arrows that cut
spirits and to write spells on rice paper, she learns every inch of the forests
around her home and the spirits that dwell there, and on the day she graduates
high school she moves into the temple.
but she’s not planning to stay.
“i hope he’s worth it,” the priestess tells her.
chihiro grins, sharp and eager, and says, “i guess i’m going
to find out.”
she walks into the woods and slips through one of the places
where the border is too thin, and enters the spirit world once more. she has
her bow and her ink, and this time she’s not going to be easy prey, she’s not
going to be someone that has to be saved or coddled.
she’s come here for her dragon, and she won’t let anything
get in her way. it’s haku, and haku alone, who will be able to turn her away.
if he rejects her, she’ll leave. but for no other reason.
it takes her a long time to get to the bathhouse, to fight
and bargain her way there, because before it was an obstacle, so it came to her
easily, but now it’s a goal, so this world holds it back from her. but she won’t
let it stay out of her grasp forever. when she arrives she’s filthy and tired
and half her arrows are missing, her clothes are different, and she’s older. by
how much she doesn’t know, because time isn’t the same in here, but she’s not
the same girl who entered.
the whole realm is talking of her, of the human who walks
among them and won’t be chased away, of the girl who marched across the endless
marshes until she reached the end, something few ever manage, and then just
kept going. who aids those in need and destroys those who stand in her way.
when she walks through the bathhouse doors, haku is there.
“it’s you,” he says, eyes wide, and he looks older too, like
breaking free of yubaba’s curse finally allowed him to grow up. “i didn’t think
it could be. i didn’t think it was possible.”
she marches forward, grinning, and grips the front of his snow
white shirt with her muddy hands. “anything is possible. you taught me that.”
she kisses him, exhausted and filthy and feeling more alive
than she ever has. she kisses him like it’s the last thing she’ll ever do, because
it just might be, because if she angers him, then he could easily kill her.
he doesn’t kill her.
he kisses her back.
chihiro gets exactly what she wanted – her friends, a place
in the spirit world, and a reputation as someone who’s dangerous, even as a
human.
and her dragon husband, of course. she gets that too.
People who want to shut down Ao3 are the antivaxers of fandom tbh
Ao3 & OTW: is the crowning achievement of fandom, protects all fans’ right to create content, maintains a safe and stable archive to host that content without profiteering or interference from corporate interests
Someone too young to remember the dark days of C&D letters and arbitrary deletion: but even though I have no data to support my position I just KNOW it’s harming children!!!
screaming into the void since '89 