I feel like there’s sometimes a kind of punitive edge in the “oh well then, minors don’t interact” culture on this site, and I am bone-deep certain that the people most completely screwed over by this whole war are the minors who do want and need to interact with fandom as it was, to explore their sexuality online in fiction and make test-runs of their passions with little consequence.
I mean, I’ve been interacting with fandom since I was thirteen, despite all the warnings and disclaimers and whatnot? I’d just lie about my age, when I had to, and I found creative ways to get around restrictions when just saying ‘oh, yeah, I’m totally 18’ wasn’t good enough. I have absolutely no doubt that kids can and will still do that, and I honestly don’t see the harm in it?
I mean, to the extent that it is that kind of thing, it’s not that bad.
It’s the on-Tumblr-steroids version that bugs me. The performative “ew minors get out” posts, the BYF pages with downright threatening stuff like “if I discover you’re a minor following me I’ll block you and report you to Tumblr”, or where it’s peppered with vehement dehumanizing language about kids and how a minor can’t possibly understand sexuality or be enough of a person to communicate with an adult on an equal playing field. That’s the harmful stuff.
I didn’t mind having to conceal my age to get into spaces when I was a teenybopper and the internet went fffffffsssshhhh rrrrrEEEEEEEE te-boom-de-boom and tied up your phone line. Well, OK, I minded, it was an irritating microaggression, but I felt like I could usually get to know people and then divulge a little more info about myself as part of starting an actual friendship, and it wasn’t a solid barrier to that. The messages weren’t personal.
It seems like one of the end goals of purity politics is to isolate minors from adults outside of their immediate families (which is ultimately extremely dangerous especially to kids who are LGBTQ+ or neurodivergent and have unsupportive families) and that the vicious kinds of “adults only” messages are a tertiary consequence of anti culture, but they’re often nonetheless spread by people who are trying to resist that culture, and who aren’t conscious of the collateral damage.
True. I don’t write about fandom and shipping policing on Tumblr much but I often find this so so harmful. Both the “all ships should be healthy” and the “all ships can be filthy but only if there are no minors” attitude.
Like, from my own experience from when I was a minor writing porn in a slash community that was pretty open about age, almost everyone producing the most extreme fiction was in my age group. The rape fics? incest fics? the teen AUs? The real person fics? the kinky as hell without consent stuff? All these things were super popular among minors annd young adults with no sexual experience at all.
At least that was my experience in the fic communities where I was active, which were great and welcomes this kind of thing.
In many ways, I felt like the ‘wrong’ fics served as a testing ground to see what our minds were capable of and where they would go ‘nope’. The more truly over-the-top this-is-evil a fic setting was, the more likely it was to be written by a minor doing a test drive on their brain. And that makes perfect sense to me because minors are figuring themselves out, trying to make sense of a world full of options and full of stigma and when you have no idea how you relate to sex yet it makes total sense to use fiction as an ‘anything goes’ sort of field where you can test run your sexuality on tons of different scenarios.
For a while now my main attitude about shipping communities on Tumblr has been “whatever, if I was a minor who wanted to ship stuff today I definitely wouldn’t do it here. There are probably still forums out there without all this stuff” but that attitude is wrong. It shouldn’t be so hard for minors to mess around with their sexual fantasies in writing.
QueerAnarchism 