a lot of young people say that fanfic made them think abuse was okay, and I think it’s disingenuous to say they’re all lying. but why is this suddenly a problem? this is my theory as to why it’s no longer an understood thing that fandom is about fiction & fantasy.
I’m not sure this is a tumblr thing though. I remember the same stuff on lj, just not as intensely rabid. I almost lost a real life friend because I said on lj I thought a particular shota manga was disturbing but artistic.
Not long ago, when I first learned about consent, I was angry at erotica writers, both amateur and published, because the fact that a character’s refusal to engage in a sexual situation was ignored more often than not, caused me to think that a “no” is meaningless, but after more thought I realized that it was likely because a) I am autistic, thus prone to interpreting things too literally, b)I never had any consent education (my sex ed was limited to how genitals look, how gamets are produced, how pregnancy proceeds, and what changes to expect from puberty – the teacher said at one point that the difference between love and friendship is that love is m/f and friendship is same sex), c) my lack of consent is routinely ignored in everyday situations. Anyways, I am glad I have not had sex until the situation clarified, I could have hurt my partner.
Tumblr is a kind of single very large room, with a lot of different people trying to do different things all at once. So you have a fashion show going on over there, a bunch of different political discussions going on in different areas that sometimes intentionally interact with each other because disagreement and arguing can be fun, and there’s a bunch of artists and writers and photographers and people who are here for some Aesthetic, and sometimes particular aesthetics are associated with particular politics (women in wheat fields and nice farm house/cabin decor pics are kinda randomly associated with a particular ideology cluster, but artistic photos of study spaces or antique guns are somewhat more obviously associated with particular kinds of people, and the aesthetic-ideology pairs aren’t 1:1). And of course you have the people who are here to engage in sexually related pursuits, and the generally inexpert advertisers and retailers, stumbling through crowds and mostly annoying people.
And, there’s a reason why “open concept offices” are so hated: it’s very hard to not be disturbed by whatever those people over there are up to sometimes if you are all in one room, or to not get yelled at because you got a bit loud and rambunctious and started playing tag and somebody crashed into somebody else.
A social media space without the ability to create boundaries, without the ability to make separate subspaces for specific groups, a social media space where it’s effectively 100% certain that you will see samples of ANY type of content that is on the site at all, especially the porn bots, and it’s 100% certain that it will become unreasonably full of conflict and hostility. Because as big as the space is, it’s mechanically impossible for anybody to get away from anybody else, so social norms of being extremely verbally hostile form. Because it’s impossible to keep away from bullies without leaving altogether, bullying becomes endemic.
The thing on LJ is that it had groups, it had LOTS of ways to excluded people, to restrict access to only the people who had context. I read lots and lots of filthy fanfiction there, and it was very frequently inside communities that you had to be admitted to.
I-want-my-IWTV 