bemusedlybespectacled:

challahchic:

thebibliosphere:

crazy-pages:

thebibliosphere:

Because those are specifically what I’m talking about. The argument
isn’t about it catering to children, it’s about not catering to people
who consume that kind of content. Which there is thousands of, if you do
a quick search of any of the tags used to find shit of that like.

I’m saying that while I personally abhor such things on such a visceral
level to the point where even thinking about it in a fictional context is making me shake and want to throw up as I type this, that doesn’t give me the right to decide who to censor and who to not. Cause where do you then decide that censorship ends? Once you allow the one to be censored, it allows for the censorship of the personal as well which is exactly what happened before. And anyone naive enough to believe that it wouldn’t happen again is in for a very rude awakening. We’re already seeing it come into effect with Microsoft censoring what they deem to be “explicit content”, which includes a lot of things from explicit imagery, right down to swearing.

This is actually something that’s been hashed out in courts of law over and over and over until we have come up with the laws that we do have, which are very helpfully explained here and are well worth the time to read:

(http://www.lawyersandliquor.com/2018/04/fetish-friday-the-legality-of-fictional-minors-in-sexual-conduct/)

And it has already been decided that legally, fictional depictions of certain acts even between adults and minors, can only be judged on a case by case basis to determine whether something has artistic merit or if it can be deemed too obscene as to be harmful.

And people making reports to the FBI over this kind of thing, is going to obliterate fandom again, and all the safe spaces the generations even before mine worked so hard to build are going to go with it. Again.

Just because I’m anti-censorship and losing my fandom spaces, doesn’t mean I want those stories on there, it doesn’t even make me okay with them existing on a personal level because I am not.

But I am aware of the consequences of what will happen if we do allow for that kind of censorship, and it’s not as clean cut as a lot of people believe. In an ideal world, maybe it would be. But we’re not in that world.

Now if you’ll excuse me. I’m going to go throw up.

This is, to me, a pretty solid example of why sometimes learned history and empirical examples trump good intentions and feelings.

Because every part of me screams that of course banning luridly ephebophilic content on creative platforms is the right thing to do. (And pedophilic content too of course, but that’s actually pretty heavily policed already). Especially platforms that minors frequent, where minors regularly consume content labeled ‘not for minors’, and there’s no good way to keep them out of such content. And it’s not immediately obvious to me why this would be a difficult issue to selectively police. Arguments for why it’s a slippery slope tend to sound like apologist arguments to me, rather than legitimate difficulties. 

But you know what? I’m wrong. How I feel about this is demonstrably, historically wrong. Countries around the world have struggled, really fucking struggled, to decide how underage sexual acts should be legally handled in media and absolutely none of them have come up with an easy solution. The most common one is “the legal system will handle it on a case by case basis, when it’s clear there’s something to be looked at”. And I mean … damn. When that’s the best legal scholars can do you know it’s bad. I don’t even want to imagine what law school courses on this subject are like.

And in fanfiction specifically, there are horror stories of how this kind of policy was abused. How well-intentioned efforts had awful far-reaching consequences and how malicious actors abused the policing systems. The effects of this in the past unmade creative fandom on the internet and forced it to basically start from scratch so far as platforms went.  

I wish, I wish, that simple common sense policing policies for this stuff worked. And it feels to me like they should! That makes it really hard for me to let go of the idea that there should be some way to make it work. But all the world’s lawyers and all the world’s committees haven’t managed to do it, so I’ve just got to bite my tongue and admit I’m not that smart. I will not succeed where they failed. So for fandom, we’ve just got to let fandom be posted and hosted as is. 

Thank you, you just summed up exactly how I feel about all of this. And I’m so incredibly bitter that I’m having to be the one to make the “slippery slope” argument cause it just feels wrong. But this isn’t about my feelings. It’s about protecting ourselves against those who would silence us entirely, and if you think this whole thing is “just” about fanfiction, you are absolutely dreaming.

And as I’ve said during kink discussions— this slippery slope ends with the burden being predominantly taken by young women and queer folx who are just trying to explore their world. No one’s talking about MLP fandom or actual loli fans. This doesn’t hurt people with social capital to burn, like straight men sexualizing young girls. This is all within an community most specifically used by marginalized people. LGBTQ writers and people with trauma in particular bear the brunt of these attacks.

just as A Thing: this doesn’t just include fandom. 

Sex education is so shitty in the US because there is a strong, real fear that any frank discussion of sex or how to do it will entice children to be sexual before they are ready. The common idea is that sexual discussions should be between parents and children because only parents can appropriately gauge both what moral lessons they want to impart to their children and what information is appropriate for their own children to hear, even though parents don’t actually provide their kids with basic sexual instruction or do so in a patchy, gender-biased, and non-comprehensive way.

Anything non-cis and non-het is still thought of as inherently more sexual than anything heterosexual. This is the reasoning behind double standards regarding, for example, nonsexual public displays of affection between same-gender couples instead of different-gender couples. This is often linked to a “conversion” theory of queerness where impressionable children become queer from being exposed to it through interactions with other queer people and through the media. This is inexorably linked with pedophilia and the idea that queer people are all pedophiles who “make new ones” by molesting children. (This is further complicated by the fact that LGBTQ people, more often than straight people, are fine with and interested in relationships with 10+ year age gaps)

But of course you don’t mean sex education. But of course you don’t mean queer couples. But of course you’re fine with people who write stuff out of trauma, or are minors themselves, or are portraying it as a bad thing.

Fun fact: the law doesn’t give a shit about that. There is no “but only if it’s portrayed as bad” law. There’s no “but only if it’s a result of trauma” law. There’s no “it’s okay if you’re a minor yourself” law, as kids find out all the time. You can have your philosophical discussions about where to draw the line all you want, but you cannot then assume that the law has come to the same conclusion you have about it.