fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5593 ]

[ SECRET POST #5593 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5593 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Malcolm in the Middle]

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[The Owl House]

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[Doctor Who (2005)]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #800.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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SA
I think a lot of people in this thread don't understand what it's like to live without internet. I didn't internet access until I was in the 9th grade. By then, the culture had already steeped in.

I'm from a small town in Oklahoma, reading books was all there was to do, if you didn't want to spend every evening a church, or making out in the middle of a cow field (or watching the aforementioned TV, of which there were about 10 channels b/c we were poor). Naturally all the fictional books at the local library were "appropriate". Books written by/for women were romance books, or The Babysitter's Club style, Little House on the Prairie, etc etc. I didn't have the historical context to understand Jane Austin for anything other than, "Mrs. Bennet was right, the girls had to be married to survive". Everything else was John Clancy or Stephen King or from the 1950s. Not exactly going to get a lot of feminism there. Thankfully my mom didn't care what I read, so long as I did, so I bought a lot of books with my allowance when we went into the city. Mostly sci-fi. Not a lot of female characters in there to be found then, unless they're there for the sexy. Once I got the internet, it was easier to find books with female characters that had no romance, but only in so far as those books existed, which was still very few.

To give you an idea of what it was like, one of the two girl friends I had was VERY embarrassed to buy an educational book on sex. Obvs, if someone from our small town saw her with it, she was obviously going to have sex before marriage (she was) and it would ruin her reputation. We were in high school and the only sex ed we had was "If you have it before marriage, you'll get an STD and die", and thankfully she knew there was more to it than that.

I was embarrassed to buy a romance book. It felt like after my years of fighting against the whole "god/family/babies" thing, I was giving in and declaring I was interested just like every other woman because that's what being a woman was. Really, I was just really curious to see if I needed a "jump start" or something. Maybe I would like it?

As I said above, I'm very science minded, so I had no problem being seen buying what basically amounted to a technical manual on sex. Everyone knew I was a geek. She had no issue buying a romance novel, because, duh of course women read romance novels? So we went to the store and bought each other the books and then swapped in the car like a drug deal. I spent most of the romance book critiquing the character development and got really bored of the repetitive sex scenes.

I know NOW, of course, that most of any genre is crap, and I've found romance novels I do like (mostly gay ones so I don't have the possibility of projecting myself in there). But at the time, it felt like more confirmation.

AYRT--I didn't have internet access until I was, idk, 12? And by internet access I mean AOL chat rooms so a lot of being propositioned by creeps; didn't really get access to the wider internet until a couple years into high school. And I didn't go looking for sex and sexuality related stuff because I wasn't interested, just musical theatre, fantasy art, and animals.

And some of the books I read as a teen had romance and/or kids as the endgame for the main characters, but they did other stuff (that I was interested in) along the way, like fight evil sorcerers and talk to animals, or ride dragons, or survive on their own in the wilderness, or foil political conspiracies, or go to space.

And while my hometown had a pretty comprehensive library system and didn't forbid kids from checking out adult books, plus a decent used bookstore, I had a friend who grew up literally in the backwoods, with no electricity, no phone, and an outhouse, and her closest tiny library (one room, in the town with a one screen movie theater and her high school, about 60 miles away iirc) had most of the same kids' (these days some would be classed as YA) books, by Tamora Pierce, Patricia Wrede, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula Le Guin, Pamela F. Service... plus lots of adult fantasy and sci-fi.

I spent summers visiting and always loaded up on books every time we drove through on the way there, because there wasn't even a church, just one paved road about ten miles from where my friend and her mom lived, with a post office and a payphone.

Admittedly my parents didn't care what I read, although they sometimes wish I read less.

I'm sorry you grew up so isolated from the info that would've helped you. I never thought I was "a man in the wrong body," I just thought I was a broken weirdo for not caring about sex and reading about romance like I read about someone surviving a shipwreck by rowing a driftwood raft with a plank and eating raw fish and rainwater--fun to read about, but you couldn't pay me to do it myself.

AYRT

Same. I was 14 when I got a computer/the internet, and there was no google. AskJeeves was brand new, and AOL was the common gateway to the internet. I got kicked off every time someone called the house. I didn't even use the internet as a resource for school because the search functions back then were such shit. Also, there wasn't a whole lot of stuff on the internet other than really crappy text websites (no dark mode, RIP my eyes) and chat boards.

I was mostly in AOL chatrooms about Star Trek.

We weren't QUITE backwoods, since we had a library and all, but the town was very 1950s. We had a main street (helpfully named Main Street), with a general store/post office/soda pull (yes, all one store). We would go visit my great grandmother in her house in Dewar, where my mom's mom grew up, and the bathroom was an outhouse. So we weren't far off.

I think because my mom (who was the first person in our family to go to college) emphasized learning since I was born, I never thought I was broken, as a person. I figured if something was wrong, it had to be physical, like diabetes or something. I always had the framework of "This is the way things are, so what does that mean?" Men are interested in intellectual pursuits, or physical pursuits. Women are interested in love and men. I'm not interested in love or men. I'm also not broken as a person, because this is just the way I am. Ergo...

It was also the time when the mainstream was learning about the existence of the whole queer spectrum. Gay men first, lesbians second (with a scoff that they probably didn't exist except as far as it was for men to watch), and then the trans. But the idea of trans at the time, in my tiny corner of the world, was that it was a sexual deviant trying to make their perversions acceptable. I saw lots of trans panic defense in the news, because everyone in my neck of the woods thought it was perverts trying to corrupt decent men and the men were only defending their honor.

I met my first trans person in college and realized very quickly that that was a load of bullshit. Learned a lot about gender identity and feminism and sexuality and it was life changing. I got my first actual comprehensive sex education in freshman orientation, because I chose the college that was the most liberal and not-south that I could find. The official unofficial motto is Communism, Atheism, Free Love.

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[ SECRET POST #5593 ]

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