What do we lose when we condemn the existence of fanworks that include unhealthy, traumatic, violent, or otherwise difficult material?
I grew up celebrating the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week every year, and it has profoundly impacted my views on censorship. While progressive fan communities are generally against banning commercially published literature, sometimes well-meaning fans condemn the existence of fanworks that portray unhealthy, traumatic, or violent material in the interest of protecting people from it. I wanted draw a connection between the kind of censorship that those fans suggest and the kind applied to frequently banned works of commercial literature that we consider politically and artistically vital. What are we losing when we condemn fic that deals with difficult material?
When fanworks are racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc., we should certainly critique them! That’s not in question here. What I wanted to highlight with this post is what we lose if we attempt to enact a general ban on, or refuse to ever engage with, any fanworks that portray less than perfectly “good” behaviors and experiences.
It would be impossible to talk about this without offering endless thanks to @transformativeworks and their maintenance of Archive of Our Own, whose tagging system works to ensure that readers can navigate difficult material as safely as possible. <3 <3 <3
not only were these books banned by ppl in power (schools, churches) and therefore not comparable to some teenager “anti” on the internet who doesn’t like ur lil fanfic
also these books all dont romanticize ‘difficult topics’ like the fanfics we object to do (those being the pedo and incest ones). dont pretend that thats the same thing, and if you are gonna, slap Lolita up there instead of like, yknow actually intelligently written books that can handle shit maturely
only on tumblr dot com will you find takes This far removed from reality
P.S. PEOPLE OF COLOR AND QUEER PEOPLE WHO CRITICIZE THE PLATFORMING OF CERTAIN TYPES OF FICTION AND THE WAY AO3 HANDLES THEM ARE NOT FUCKING ANTIS YOU INCREDIBLE FUCKING ASSHOLES.
Holy shit I think I found an even worse take than OPs in the notes. Imagine having the fucking unmitigated GALL, to speak over black women and our objections to some of AO3s priorities by trying to use Octavia Butler as a weapon to silence us. It’s deeply obvious you know nothing about Butler and her work even if you claim to have read it, you utterly failed to understand it.
Butler wasn’t playing devil’s advocate, she wasn’t writing treatises on moral relativism, her writing spoke to the incredibly difficult choices that marginalized people (particularly black people and black women especially) have been forced to make for centuries to survive the horrors that the white supremacist establishment forces on us. It spoke against human hierarchies that lead to our own destruction and the use of “taboo” subjects is used to AGAIN illustrate centuries of abuse and the heroic nature of survival.
You are so completely wrong about everything you said, and so racist in your framing that it’s quite literally painful to me to read your bullshit. How dare you try to twist her work and message and use it against us.
In short, fuck you @lierdumoa, keep Octavia Butler’s name out your mouth.
I am queer and Black and Asian. You are literally accusing me of speaking over myself. You are accusing me of stealing the mic from myself. You are accusing me of silencing myself. Octavia Butler wrote books about mixed race children grappling with their flawed heritage. That’s why I got into her books in the first place. Because my Black Trinidadian great grandmother worked on a sugar plantation and bore 17 of her slaver’s children. Because my Asian grandfather was a refugee of the Hakka diaspora. Because I’m queer and the first book I ever read that had anything resembling a queer character was Butler’s Imago – a storyabout a
nonbinary
human/alien hybrid (who used biochemical coersion to form a soulmate bond with a pair of twins that ze then had 4 full pages of fuck-or-die incest sex with, but I digress).
The irony I was actually talking about white anti’s who exploit the marginalization of POC to justify censorship. But you automatically assumed I was white, and that I was criticizing the actions of POC, I guess because I used the term “moral relativism” and you had a kneejerk reaction to the term.
Which I can empathize with, because I myself have had that term mansplained to me by racist white men.
But it doesn’t mean what racist white men think it means, and I don’t use it the way racist white men use it.
The irony is that I actually agree with your interpretation of Butler’s work.
I was, in fact, trying to point out that your interpretation, which I agree with, is in itself, a morally relativistic interpretation.
You recognize that the behavior Butler’s characters exhibit cannot be measured out of context according to an oversimplistic ethical metric that attempts to shove all behavior into a neat binary of “people who [insert action] are bad and people who don’t [insert action] are good.” I agree!
You recognize that the behavior of Butler’s characters, and also of marginalized people is dependent on too many outside factors – the long term effects of generational abuse, the coercive environment in which those behaviors take place, the power structures at play, etc.
You see the term moral relativism, and maybe your only experience with that term is having it mansplained to you racist white guys, so you have a kneejerk reaction to automatically dismiss anyone who says it.
But when I use the term moral relativism, I actually mean it in the sense of how you interpreted Octavia Butler’s work – as a way of recognizing how environment, class structure, history, generational abuse, etc. serve as coercive factors.
It really is exhausting being on tumblr.
I am a person of color, I am queer, I am multiracial, I have a vagina, I have ADHD, and I have been criticizing racism and biphobia and homophobia for the past 20 years, all while working to unlearn my own internalized shit and figure out my own queer identity, and I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO SUBMIT A 27 GB DATABANK OF MY COMPLETE PERSONAL ANALYTICS COLLECTED BY GOOGLE AND SOLD TO CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA every time I express half an opinion at 3am when I’m exhausted from my 3 part time jobs, one of which involves taking my clothes off for rich middle aged white people, just so reactive tumblr bloggers stop calling me a Klansman (truly ironic considering I’ve written enough “Joss Whedon is a confederate racist” diatribes to publish at least a novella)
Now I’m just oversharing.
Where was I?
And when I defend AO3, I defend it not because I am a race traitor, or a wannabe fascist, but rather because I am a pragmatist, and I recognize that many of tumblr’s ideas for protecting women and poc have already been attempted and have backfired spectacularly in ways that actually harmed queer women of color – the very groups these policies were proposed to protect – the most, and particularly because I hate seeing white people use MY OWN PERSONAL identity, to justify censorship, only to have MY OWN PEOPLE accuse me of SILENCING MYSELF, AGAIN, LIKE THIS IS THE 12TH FUCKING TIME I’VE HAD THIS EXACT CONVERSATION.
It’s your own internalized racism leading you to assume your own people are a monolith and anyone who doesn’t express opinions in the exact same verbiage you do must be white.
I have a lot of thoughts about both your original post and your response, which I don’t have the energy to write coherantly after 3 days of attending a conference on domestic violence, child sexual assault and commercial exploitation, and rape, (since we’re oversharing) but have you considered the fact that I’m not speaking from a place of internalized racism (which I’ve had a loooooong time to grapple with) but that your own defense of AO3 in relation to this person’s half baked comparison to works usually by marginalized voices aligns with the posts commonly made by racists exactly to shout down the voices of women of color and THAT’S why you keep having to have this conversation over and over and over again?
I certainly don’t think MY people (or any other PoC) are a monolith, but I certainly do think fandom racism has a script that you’re following pretty damn closely.
Bold of you to make fun of them for over sharing when your (incorrect) assumptions about their race is what spurred it. If you don’t want people to over share about their race and family history maybe don’t make assumptions about it just because they disagree with you?
since the enforcement of social hierarchies can’t allow the upper half of the binary to truly desert its post, lest the whole binary crumble, it often creates a debased subclass that can be used to punish or further discriminate within the privileged class. in the american racial hierarchy, this is White Trash, the poor rural whites who do not have the prestige of landowners, but can at least be comforted by the fact there exists a class even below them, to which their disdain can be channeled. but in the gender hierarchy, there is the debased man instead: the wimp or sissy.
and our social anxieties often find their expression in eroticization: the sexual threat of the racial other in racialized cuckolding porn; the sexual threat of cheating in cuckolding porn more generally (as opposed to “hotwifing,” which is just the thrill of being slutty while married, and is less bound up with humiliation), so it’s no surprise that there is an extremely rich variety of porn on the theme of “debased manhood.” small penis humiliation, aspects of cuckolding porn again (cuckolding porn is invariably a rich text!), but also of course sissy porn. the emergence of ‘sissy’ as a sexual role or category is both an expression of cultural anxieties and a relief from gender conformity, and also a way to draw the sting out of a feared humiliation by eroticizing it. i think it fits within the theory i’ve described that there’s not really a “debased woman” role that has the same overloaded semantics of humiliation and failure to embody the role and being forcibly relegated to the category by external forces. women can of course be charged by society with performing femininity badly, but it’s not shameful to be a tomboy in the same way it is to be a sissy, and “forced tomboyification” isn’t really a porn category in the same way
but what does seem to exist is a trans male counterpart to anxieties of being relegated to a debased masculine category–there is a subgenre of porn on AO3 that’s sort of classic feminization porn where the subject of the feminization is a trans man. i don’t know what exactly about this formula the authors find erotic, and i don’t know how the authors identify really, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this really was the trans male equivalent of the trans women who eroticize their anxieties about their gender identity into feminization porn, because since the social hierarchy that gets inculcated into us isn’t symmetric (“man” and “woman” are not equal categories), it makes sense that the eroticization of anxieties around gender performance isn’t symmetric either: it’s not humiliating to be masculinized in the same way it is to be feminized.
i’d be interested in hearing from trans men or trans mascs with gender related kinks, though, bc this is a perspective that’s still pretty obscure to me. and it is entirely possible there is a rich vein of oops-i-have-to-pretend-to-be-a-guy-and-somehow-this-is-very-embarrassing porn out there that i just don’t know about
I do not mean just cis men’s anxieties, no. if you take someone (even someone who knows themselves not to be a man from a pretty young age), put them in a certain kind of environment with fairly narrow expectations for what kind of gender role they’re allowed to perform, and give them a lot of anxieties about what happens to them if they fail to perform that role correctly, well, once puberty hits you’re going to get a nontrivial portion of that population with some pretty specific kinks and fantasies involving ways of expressing their sexuality that both relieve them of the burden of shame that might otherwise fall on them, and sublimate that shame into erotic tension. and their sexuality might be, at bottom (no pun intended) actually pretty typical for women’s sexuality! but the erotic fantasies of the human animal are an incredibly elaborate castle of which our fundamental sexual urges are only the foundation.
i can’t speak for all trans women and wouldn’t try, but from what i can tell from reading about various trans women’s experiences, quite a lot of trans women come to realize their gender identity because what they thought was a narrowly-focused kink (crossdressing or sissy porn or forced feminization) was simply one manifestation of a deeper discontinuity between their gender identity and the gender role they felt obligated to perform. it’s not that the kink came first in a causal sense–rather, sex is one of the areas in our life where some degree of very gendered self-expression is virtually impossible to avoid, and it is very hard to lie to yourself about what turns you on.
also “male gaze” is a term from film and other visual arts that isn’t a drop-in replacement for “male perspective/preference,” and it bugs me when people use it that way
in fact, the way a lot of forced feminization porn mirrors classic tropes of porn for women is super instructive! as the sexual subject who is supposed to be without desire, women’s sexual fantasies often seem to include a component of subjection to a stronger, dominant force–the literal trope namer of the so-called ‘bodice ripper.’ the protagonists of these stories clearly have desires, as do the readers, but they don’t have to act to have these desires fulfilled; and this also plays off the tension of anxieties around sexual assault or domination by men.
as the name suggests, forced feminization hits a lot of these same markers! obviously there are key differences–there must be, because people taught since birth that they ought to perform masculinity, who are uncomfortable with that performance, and are also uncomfortable in fundamental ways with the social role they are told necessarily attaches to their bodies and appearance as they currently are are going to have fantasies that differ in a lot of specifics–but the erotic structure is often strikingly similar.
I am not sure about a lot of the theorizing going on here but there is one thing I feel confident about predicting even just on the basis of non-sexual examples I have seen:
Forced feminization for cis women alone already seems to be a lot more common than any kind of forced masculinization/tomboyification.
I have also sometimes seen a sort of annoying gender essentialist thing going on where a character (usually a woman) established as being GNC is later shown as actually wanting to be more gender-conforming deep down and being prevented from it by social pressures to be strong and cool.
It is one thing if the character just has a couple of such interests and the whole thing was framed as just being embarrassingly out of character for them. A lot of people realistically have at least some interests that are not “appropriate” for their gender after all.
But often this instead takes the framing of “all women are like this inside when they are being honest with themselves and not forcing themselves to play a role”.
I kind of like the forcedfem/gender existentialist stuff you’re talking about about. You’re particular example would annoy me too though because all I can think is “In what place is that the dominating social pressure for women’s behavior lmao”
I don’t care about the embarrassment, just the fact that it’s forced. I’m afab with lots of trans gender feelings but I also (in theory) derive some joy from some of whats socially expected of me (romantically specially). That type of porn is just like, a release valve of “Ah, wouldn’t everything be easier for me if acting that way was some true and strong biological desire?”
Kind of the joy of not having to deal with hard decisions?
βObesity is defined as having a BMI at or above the 95th percentile, and severe obesity is defined by a BMI at or above 120 percent of the 95th percentile for age and sex.β
A 3-year-old who weighs 18.2 lbs (8.25 kg) is considered βobese.β (Nobody is recommending drugs or surgery for kids that small. But the charts cover those ages because the obsession with Correct Weight begins at birth.)
It was kind of a joke between me and a friend (“you wouldn’t judge someone for having gone rock climbing with a bunch of different people”) but honestly the more I thought about it the more I bought into it unironically because:
It is a physical activity done with one or more partners
You should only go rock climbing with people you trust not to let you fall
You should not go rock climbing with someone who is drunk or currently incapable of rational decision-making
Some people get super super super into rock climbing and do not shut up about all the places they have climbed and how many are left on their bucket list and these people are usually men between the ages of 20 and 35 and like it’s fine dude I’m glad you’re happy but I don’t know what most of those mountains even are
While many consider it a fun activity, pressuring someone into climbing when they don’t want to (or ignoring their feelings and just dangling them off a cliff,) could cause both psychological and physical trauma
There is no moral value to it whatsoever. Who you have gone rock climbing with (or whether you have rock climbed at all) has no bearing on who you are as a person. Imagine telling someone “it’s not that heights make you nauseous, it’s just that you haven’t found the right person to belay you!” or “you need to save your first time rock climbing for someone special.” That would be absurd.
historically I have not asked myself “will this aggravate my hip flexer injury” before participating when perhaps I should have 😔
”walkable cities is ableist” has to be a psy-op. you can’t be this bad at understanding what the term means.
I feel like this is similar to the argument i’ve seen “working class is an ableist term because not everyone can work” where people just see one word (walkable, working) and make incorrect assumptions based on that alone without further research. In reality “walkable” doesn’t refer to “having to walk on two feet” but general mobility outside cars.
We all know walkable cities are designed exclusively with people who can run a 5min mile in mind and working-class only refers to people who swing a sledgehammer for a minimum of 9hrs a day for work
It’s not a psy-op. It’s pretty easy just to listen to disabled people who are saying, “Walkable cities are great and important, just keep in mind that some people do need cars. There are medical needs that are of a complexity and severity that they can’t be solved by “mobility aid” or “wheelchair.” They can’t be summed up by “can’t walk.” These disabilities do in fact exist and cars are currently exceptionally well-suited to transporting people with some types of severe disabilities.”
That’s it.
The problem is, while some walkable cities advocates bear that in mind, a lot don’t. When you ask them how they’re going to handle people who are disabled in ways that mean “mobility aid” and “wheelchair” are useless to them, but “car” isn’t, some walkability advocates either ignore you or insist that such people don’t exist, that everyone can at least use a motorized wheelchair. So therefore, it’s fine that their designs include whole swathes of the city where the closest you can park to a home or business is a block away (because half the streets don’t allow cars, only pedestrians/bicyclists/people on scooters/etc).
Just because you can’t park a car on your street doesn’t mean you can’t use a vehicle. A family member of mine gets incredibly cheap rides from the city that drop her off right in front of her house! And she prefers it because it’s cheaper than using her car. This is some pretty limited thinking. A city that puts in the work to be walkable is so much more likely to put in the work in other places to help people.
you need to get it out of your mind that psychosomatic illness is just “making up symptoms” when it’s actually much more like your body is being actively poisoned by chemicals released from your brain
if you’re so stressed that you’re puking your guts up every morning, are unable to eat or keep anything down, you can’t look at light without feeling infinitely worse and feel exhausted and in pain all the time (or whatever your particular stress induced symptom set is) you’re not just feeling like that because you’ve willed it into being. your body is begging for relief from the constant barrage of stress hormones and it requires the fundamental source of stress to go away, not just distracting yourself from the symptoms
just because the root is psychological doesn’t mean the result isn’t an entirely physical process.
Your brain is a body part, and brain malfunction is whole-body problem
I learnt something today that I think is just beautiful.
My grandmother was a very sick woman and pretty much housebound for the last of her life. She derived great pleasure from watching her neighbour’s backyard chickens. She adored these chickens. Every time I called, she had new chicken drama to tell me—think Linda Belcher and the raccoons.
It turns out that at some point, their neighbour was no longer able to have chickens because due to a disability he could no longer afford to keep them. My grandfather, upon learning this, immediately used his spending money to keep the neighbour in both chickens and chicken feed so that my grandmother would have chickens to watch since my grandfather didn’t have time to keep chickens at their home.
He did this for ten years, guys. TEN YEARS he secretly funded his neighbour’s backyard chickens so that my grandmother would have chickens to watch every day until the day she died.
I’m not sure if dubs are truly cringe (some of them are ngl) or if people realize that the dialogue was always a little cheesy in their native language and react.
Yes, that’s definitely also a factor. It’s a lot easier to watch over-acted media for children if I have a gap in understanding and am not forced to confront just how over-acted it is.
Tumblr Blaze sounds amazing, but can we go a step further? Can i sponsor other people’s posts? Can i go dig in someone 3am trash and put it on blast?
Proof likes do nothing on this site.
Likes do not do “nothing” on this site. Tumblr likes actually have SEVERAL functions.
FUNCTION 1: Tumblr likes can be BOOKMARKS. Tumblr keeps a record of the posts you like. Many people therefore use likes to keep track of posts they plan to reply to later with a comment or meme, or e-mail to an off-tumblr friend, or cite in an academic essay, etc.
FUNCTION 2: Tumblr likes can be READ RECEIPTS DIRECTED AT A REBLOGGER, RATHER THAN THE OP. You can like a post your mutual reblogged to let your mutual know that you saw the joke and/or personal anecdote they put in tags.
FUNCTION 3: Tumblr likes can be PARTICIPATION TROPHIES. Sometimes the only reason you got a like was because someone decided to be nice to you out of pity. They didn’t actually like your work, but thought you could use the encouragement.
FUNCTION 4: Tumblr likes can indicate AGREEMENT WITH PART, BUT NOT ALL OF A POST. You see an awful post. Your bestie wrote an awesome rebuttal in a reblog. You don’t want to give the OP’s awful take more attention than it deserves, but you want your bestie to know that you agree with their awesome rebuttal, so you like your bestie’s reblog without reblogging the post yourself.
.
It’s not that tumblr likes “do nothing” or “don’t work properly.” They do plenty! They work fine!
It’s just that what tumblr likes do is different from what twitter/instagram likes do. They have a different job. Their primary purpose is not to provide publicity, but rather to facilitate direct, private communication.
.
TLDR: Stop calling things useless just because you can’t profit off of them.
I come to this website to share thoughts and ideas and observations with fellow community members. I come to tumblr to inspire and to be inspired. To interact.
I personally don’t care how many reblogs my original posts get, or what the like-to-reblog ratios are on those posts, regardless of the amount of time and energy I put into making that gifset or writing that analytical essay, because I do not view my posts as products, and I do not view the people who reblog my posts as customers.
I fundamentally do not view Tumblr as a marketplace, and I try to surround myself with mutuals who feel the same.
