i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there – of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space – often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just – it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr – I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing – and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups – and their main support network – when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
I feel so old now. I’ve been through Dreamwidth but never made many friends there, and Livejournal for ten years until the strikethrough fiasco. I remember having posts about news stories I had linked deleted because they were about rape cases for example.
Before that there were newsgroups where a mod might just decide to block you or delete the whole newsgroup at any time without warning and you lost your community. There were years of Geocities and other host sites run by individual fans disappearing- because a parent was threatening to sue a fan writer because a minor had lied to access adult writing, or cease and desist letters from publishing companies that scared writers into removing works.
Just, you don’t have to like fanfiction or fanart. You can believe slash is homophobic or underage fic is pedophilia. You can be disgusted by vore or think 50 shades of gray fanfiction shouldn’t exist since it is fanfiction of a crappy Twilight fanfiction.
But once you start policing what is and isn’t acceptable? It starts to snowball and someone else might believe what you believe is wrong, isn’t conservative enough, and soon even fan works you like will be censored.
Ask some oldtimers from fandoms ten or twenty years ago and you’ll realize how you might be turning back the clock and how hard it was to stay connected with your favorite writers and artists…
P.S. Any old fogeys who used to be in “The Sentinel” fandom with me? Ooh, or “Forever Knight” 😛 Lucasfilm was always threatening “The Phantom Menace” fanfiction writers and you didn’t dare write anything using Anne Rice’s books. Ah, the good old days…
When people think of China, they all assume that everyone in China is Chinese, speaks Chinese, looks and live like this:
Now let’s look at the Ethnic Make-Up of China!
Look how many Han Chinese there are? But first things first! All the Han Chinese do not speak the same language! Chinese is probably as useful as saying the “Europeans”.
Let’s pretend that Europe is combined into a single country! But with London as the Capital City, and everyone is officially, “European” and they all speak “European”, with European English as the official language of Europe! The French, German, Spanish and Russians? They are their own entire language, culture and ethnicity.
Same goes with China. China is much larger than Europe, speaking different languages, eating different foods, practicing different religions, wearing different clothing. Beijing is the capital, with Mandarin Chinese as the official language of the entire country. However, Chinese languages are considered “Dialects”, but not their own distinct language, culture or ethnicity.
Now let’s look at the Han Chinese languages:
Mandarin Chinese not only has it’s “Northern, Eastern, Southwestern” dialects, but they even break up into more different dialects and accents from different region, city and province. There’s a difference between London accent, Welsh accent, Scottish and Irish accents. To simplify it, the government simply grouped everyone together.
Southern Chinese languages cannot mutually understand with any other Chinese. That’s like an Englishman trying to communicate with a German, a Dutch, or a Danish. They all belong from the same language group, but they cannot understand one another mutually.
But what about the other Non-Han Chinese?
See where Han is at? (Look where Beijing would be!) That is the original homeland of all Han Chinese people.
There are officially 56 Ethnic Groups in China, but there are hundreds and even more that are unofficial and undocumented. It’s the Chinese government way of saying, “Meh. Saffron, Violet and Pink are the same thing. Let’s just call it “Red”.
But how did Han Chinese became the major language and ethnic group of China?
Through conquest! Very much like how the Romans of today Italy killed, pillaged, raped and took over the Gauls of France, the Germania of Central Europe and the Britannia’s of the British Isles, and turned them “Roman citizens” through colonization and expansion!
But what makes China a unique case, is that the surviving natives of the Northern Han conquest, is that they still retain much of their native cultures. They survived, because most of the ethnic groups lived up in the mountains, where the ancient Han Chinese were too lazy to bring their armies up mountains:
Those who were colonized and assimilated into Chinese culture?
The Vietnamese were colonized by the Chinese more than three times.
Korea was colonized/tributing state for the longest time ever.
And Southern China! They would be influenced and assimilated strongest to Northern Chinese culture and language!
But why is everyone considered Chinese?
Same bullshit as your government saying that you’re an American, Canadian, British, Australian, etc. etc. citizen. It’s like a rich White straight male, taking control of the government and dictating how you live, under his life style. The Han Chinese says that everyone in China is all Chinese.
And mostly the blatent ignorance and education on the diversity of China.
Chinese Dialects?
It’s another bullshit ideology.
Is French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese a dialect of Europe? No. They are their own distinct languages. They may come from the same Roman history, the same Romance language family, but they are their own language. Teochow, Hakka, Minnan, Cantonese, Mandarin, etc. etc. are their own distinct language and ethnicity.
Unified China?
To unify Germany, Hitler said that the German Race was the greatest race! Germans from all over Europe, the German Swiss, the Austrian Germans, etc. etc. united as a single “Race” and rose to power.
To unify China, Northern Chinese Emperors said that they were the greatest race! And attempted to conquer everyone else, killing anyone who wasn’t “Chinese”. This was done for more than 3,000 years, resulting in many extinct native cultures and ethnicities in China, and resulting many cultures (like Korea, Vietnam and even Taiwan) to assimilate into Northern Han Chinese culture.
Conclusion:
Not everyone in China are Mandarin Han Chinese, the major ethnic and language speaking group of China. Three different dialects of Mandarin and 6 different languages of Southern Chinese (Hakka, Min, Wu, etc.).
There is an official recognized 56 ethnic groups, but hundreds that are unrecognized. Such as Tibetans, Miao, Manchu and even Koreans and Mongolians!
China is very diverse in language, culture, religion and ethnicity. Not everyone is ethnically Chinese, nor speak Mandarin Chinese.
Good post. This gives a much more diverse view of China, and the thing is the view outsiders often have of China is that of Han Chinese ethnic group.
Just some things I would like to add on/correct:
1. The term “Chinese” and name “China” is of Iranian origin -the Farsi word “Chin”,and that was the term that got passed to the Western world, just as for Iran itself, “Persia” came from the Greek name for Iran.
The local name for China basically means “Middle Kingdom” and is pronounced “zhong guo” in the Mandarin dialect. “Han” became a term to refer to our ethnic group after the Han dynasty. We are also called “hua ren” because the ancestral groups of people that would band together and identify as “Han Chinese” are called the Huaxia tribes. In English usage, many people just say “Chinese” not Han Chinese (even myself, admittedly). “Chinese” is also a nationality today and in Mandarin term used is “zhong guo ren” and generally I understand this applies to anyone with citizenship in the People’s Republic of China even if they are not Han.
The conflation of the Han people and our culture with “Chinese” as a whole is an intersection of several issues. Firstly, the imperialism and domination of our ethnic group as the post pointed out- which has led to Han culture becoming synonymous with the entirety of China and that’s why the other ethnic groups get erased. Think of this as similar to how “Englishness” is often conflated with “Britishness”, when the UK is also made up of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Further, the Chinese government today has very often tried to further Sinicise other non-Han ethnic groups. The English usage of “Chinese” also doesn’t always capture all the nuances. The fact that Han Chinese are such a dominant majority of the population further feeds this perception.
There is nothing inherently wrong with using the term “Chinese” but the problem with this is that elements of Han culture are far more explicitly treated as being the totality of the culture of modern China.
2. The thing about the non-Han ethnic groups mostly living in the mountainous regions where the imperial army didn’t bother conquering- I’d say that’s not an entirely accurate characterisation.
There were a lot of other indigenous ethnic groups in the plains and low lying areas who got massacred or forcefully absorbed too. For example, Austronesian-speaking peoples lived in much of the territory that is now modern China. Malays in Southeast Asia are an example of an Austronesian people. A lot of them got assimilated or probably suffered genocide so nothing remains of their history today. Another people assimilated are what we know as the Baiyue tribes, which is a loose term used by the ancient Han to denote several tribes they portrayed as “savages” and “barbarians”. Many non-Han people still survive today as China’s ethnic minorities but a lot more did get completely erased.
Another interesting (and slightly disturbing fact) is that the DNA within Han Chinese shows a lot more variation in the maternal line than the paternal line. Maternal DNA is passed from mother to child, so that implies a lot Han Chinese men fathered children with local women. Were they there as peaceful migrants? Or soldiers who raped or forced local women into marriages? Imo, it’s likely the second scenario was not uncommon even if the first scenario was the case in some instances. This is when you take into consideration how the Han ethnic group and various Chinese emperors had a very strong notion that our culture and civilisation was superior. Ergo, Sinicisation of diverse ethnic groups in a manner not dissimilar to how European colonialism forced its traditions on and erased local cultures in the Americas.
One of the obstacles all these abolitionists had to overcome was the
influence of Nelson, who was what you would now call, without
hesitation, a white supremacist. While many around him were denouncing
slavery, Nelson was vigorously defending it. Britain’s best known naval
hero – so idealised that after his death in 1805 he was compared to no
less than “the God who made him” – used his seat in the House of Lords
and his position of huge influence to perpetuate the tyranny, serial
rape and exploitation organised by West Indian planters, some of whom he
counted among his closest friends.
The reaction in Britain has been, as in the rest of the world, almost entirely condemnatory of neo-Nazis in the US and of its president for failing to denounce them. But when it comes to our own statues, things get a little awkward. The colonial and pro-slavery titans of British history are still memorialised: despite student protests, Oxford University’s statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes has not been taken down; and Bristol still celebrates its notorious slaver Edward Colston. When I tweeted this weekend that it’s time we in Britain look again at our own landscape, the reaction was hostile.
With all the heat Anita Sarkeesian gets for her Tropes series, you’d think it was a new topic, but Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert had a discussion on a similar theme when they were talking about the influx of slasher movies on their show in 1980.
Because you can not rewrite our history, because we remember everything
ok but i read the article and some of the others and how did they not know about the room before they built a bathroom in it?? LIke hmmm a dark and damp room with a stove but no windows? That happens to be atatched to good ol’ Tommy J’s? SEEMS LIKE A GREAT PLACE TO PUT A BATHROOM
Omg this kid doesn’t deserve 20 years in prison for protecting his own mother! This is fucking ridiculous. It was definitely a defense. He’s 13 years now, just imagine how traumatized he must be after watching his mother getting sexually abused and brutally beaten by a stranger? I am sure, if the boy was white American he would be carried carefully out of the house and would be given probation. That’s how white privilege works all around the world.
yall really gotta stop believin every story you hear on tumblr. jesus christ.
first, i tried to find the story, the top result being this change.org petition followed by a bunch of stories that were completely unrelated.
well that didnt work, let’s be a little more specific…
…
the one result that was relevant came from a site called wnews.world whose front page looks like a goddamn tabloid had sex with a hipster minimalist web designer.
you can find a link to the related story here, though i recommend against clicking and giving them any kind of attention. CW: death.
finally, i attempted a reverse image search, which didn’t provide anything more helpful beyond twitter accounts retweeting this same exact thing you fuckers fell for.
but i did find another article, which tells a different story.
huh that picture looks familiar….
but wait, what’s this?
a picture of the same kid at a different angle?
and one of him with his mom, also at a different angle?
please stop blindly believing everything you see on the internet. i do it too sometimes and i need a slap in the face when i do. i hope you take this as your slap in the face.
i have nothing but love for you and only want you to be aware about the things you believe in. false stories like this spread like wildfire because they were created just to be shared as many times as possible to make money for the organizations that create them.
this confirms that if mike pence was a millennial he’d have an anti-sjw blog with hot takes on steven universe
Is this real?
There’s so many things wrong with this, including the fact that Mulan is based on a true story, the fact that his solution for men raping women is to punish women by keeping them out of the military, the fact that he then reduces rape to men not being able to help themselves whenever they’re made to be around women a lot….
I fucking hate this man.
THINGS WILL GET INTERESTING?!
What a piece of garbage
So, I was going to respond to this with a sarcastic remark about how Tumblr will believe just about anything, no matter how outlandish, but then I googled this for proof that it was from a satire site and….it isn’t
It is real. Mike Pence actually wrote this in 1999.
we are the problem. all of the problems. and not just some of us – all of us. we are bullies, rapists, murderers and we live off the sweat and pain of anyone we can. you may not have raped or stolen land but you sure as hell dine off the privilege of being a member of the rape and murder class.
and the biggest problem are those of us who say nothing. we are the grease for the machine. we are cowards because we don’t want the brutality of other men to be focused on us. we are taught as children to play along with the rape and murder class rules or be punished.
so we keep our mouths shut when we should protest. we laugh at sexist jokes. or racist jokes. or we just slink away and say “I’m not like that”.
well guess what assholes – we are like that.
all of us.
so, if you’re not throwing yourself and every other man you see under the bus – you’re just another chickenshit rapist happy to skate by while others do the raping and live the fat life that buys you.
we don’t know 10% of how shitty it is to have to listen to the crap that comes out of our mouths every day. street or office harassment, stupid jokes at the dinner table, loss of money or healthcare or whatever simple autonomy we enjoy being denied to women, queers and people with less money or darker skin.
at every injustice of bloodshed and starvation, there is a man causing pain to someone else.
it’s a man’s world alright – and all this shit is man’s fault.
silence is consent motherfuckers. this shit doesn’t end so long as you stay quiet (and saying “I’m not like that” or “men get hurt too”…by men, btw – doesn’t count.)
speak up cowards. act up. yeah, and your life will be harder. you will lose shit. but that’s shit you stole – it ain’t yours. so buck up and make the term “act like a man” mean something other than rape or murder or violence.
Men –
As a woman, I am begging you not to engage in such embarrassing self-flaggelation. You aren’t oppressive for existing. It’s your actions that matter. Oppressive men are the problem. Men as a whole are not. By all means, acknowledge and speak out against oppression and misogyny, but don’t throw yourselves under the bus like this. It’s more counterproductive than anything. In fact, it makes me wonder how sincere you truly are when you make posts like this.
Every time I see/hear a guy talk like this, I wonder to what extent he’s trying to use feminist rhetoric to either get laid or to be the gay guy with the most hags. It’s suspicious af to me.
I have absolutely no idea whether or not this is a troll.
That said, in my LJ days there was a guy who had a blog and talked like this.
He was caught filming himself touching an unconscious woman’s breasts.
I do not trust people who talk like this at all.
*This* is what I mean by toxic masculinity.
Male identity that has misogyny and rape and abuse of power built into what it means to be a man.
That is not inevitable. Not all men are like that. You don’t have to be like that to be a man or to be masculine.
But a hell of a lot of ideologies seem to say that you do.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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