[ SECRET POST #5791 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5791 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 49 secrets from Secret Submission Post #829.
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.

Comments

[fscom]

01. https://i.imgur.com/XpkpJax.png

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I learned a lot about my sexuality from fandom space discussions. I feel sad that teenagers don't have the same safe spaces like that anymore too.

I appreciate having a locked 18+ fandom discord to chat on, but idk about age-gating in general. I have mixed feelings, I suppose. I had LJ fandom friends in their mid teens when I was in my 30s, and it never used to be a problem, but the internet's a very different place now.

Also any time you mark an online space out as for people under 18, it risks attracting predators.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure if I agree with the thesis here that fandom was once a safe space for teenagers to learn about their sexuality and is now a significantly less safe space for teenagers to learn about their sexuality

Not sure I agree with either part of it, to be honest; it seems to me that it wasn't necessarily safe in the first place, and it seems to me that a teenager who wanted to learn about their sexuality through fanfic would still be able to do so if they wanted to

IDK

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's less 'safe space' as in "it was safe for teens to learn sex through porn online" and more "it was considered a relatively normal thing to discover and explore one's sexuality in one's teenage years through online exposure, if one wished, rather than being shamed to within an inch of one's life for daring to have One (1) Sexual Thought before the age of 21".

[(Anonymous)]

Sure! But that's a teen-side problem, not a fandom-side problem

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed on both points. I especially miss those "I am over 18" buttons. Let teens lie about their age all they want, if they're that determined to see the dirty stuff, but I really think those things made it much more clear whose fault it was if/when they got squicked.

[(Anonymous)]

So true. I miss them, if only because I clicked them when I shouldn't have, and ever since I can it seems like they disappeared.

[(Anonymous)]

Click on an M or E-rated fic on AO3 while being logged out?

[philstar22]

Yup. Considering I grew up with conservative parents in a fundamentalist community, everything I learned about sex I learned online, mostly from fandom and fanfic with a little porn thrown in there.

I did eventually get a sex talk with my parents, but that was senior year of high school and they didn't say anything I didn't already know.

[(Anonymous)]

I learned a lot from kink memes. Man, I miss kink memes.

[kallanda_lee]

I agree. But I also have to say: there were just less of us online. Now, every teen is online all the time. They bump into more (unwanted) sexual content, while back then you sort of had to go out and look for it. So I get that attitudes changes with that. I think fandom spaces in general were safer for that because they were more overseeable, and you had to put in some effort to get there. And much older people were even less likely to find it.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, I think it's about the changing face of the internet. Smaller communities were easier to oversee and moderate, and build real trust.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm still not sure that fandom spaces were actually that much safer! It's not like there weren't fandom cults and I'm sure there were plenty of abusers as well.

[(Anonymous)]

+100

The things that I think did make kids safer was that it was less common for them to put a lot of personal information online, and those that did find their way into adult spaces had to do a good job of pretending to be adults, which included not acting like an immature teenager..

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, they were. The abusers were fewer because there were less people as a whole, so it was easier to single them out when caught. Nowadays it's just so... widespread.

[(Anonymous)]

Not sure how old you are, but when I was a teenager online fandom was full of middle-aged people. Like, all the BNFs and most of the authors were in their 30s at least. It's just that almost everyone was at least pretending to be an adult so finding out that someone actually was one wasn't the immediate cause for alarm that it seems to be today. That said, the internet was about as safe as you made it. If you were canny, you didn't hand out your personal information to everyone who asked for it and you stayed in the group chats. If you were too trusting, you were likely to get in trouble.

[(Anonymous)]

while back then you sort of had to go out and look for it

You really didn't, though. Like, I was looking for Disney Princess art way back in the day and LET ME TELL YOU how much porn I found just out there in the open.

[(Anonymous)]

On the flip side, the dangers of the Internet are much more well-advertised by now. Parents of teens today have no excuse for not at least talking to their kids about staying safe online.

[(Anonymous)]

When I think back on my childhood growing up in the wild west internet I remember going through embarassing stuff, like reading "erect penis" or "masturbation" online and asking my parents what that was (man... the joys of being neurodivergent - no but the contexts were a little worse than this, no, not fanfic) things like that. And I was exposed to stuff like cybersex as well, and I would ask my parents things like "why did that guy ask my panties' color? what's the fun in that?". Thankfully my parents were comparatively okay with sexual content (if only because I cried too much whenever I was scolded for something I didn't get) but yeahhhh .........

However I do feel like it wasn't as bad as it is now. Back then you had to dig the porn content. It didn't load quickly, after all. There was no... what's the name of that youtube-like website for porn anyway? Whatever. For text, you had to click "I am over 18 and I consent". Neopets? It's full of censorship and you're not posting if you're under 13, kiddo. And I recall lots of anime websites had "anti-hentai" buttons (!). It wasn't impossible to find porn but you had to go after it I feel. Nowadays... sometimes I will be reading a vanilla manga and end up facing the weirdest porn ad in mangafox or what have you. It *feels* different. People share nudes too easily, and people spread nudes as a way to harm others too easily as well. (ahh normie stuff.) For chronological reasons there are more creepy geezers who are internet-literate. And so on. And so forth.

It does seem to be less safe for me nowadays, if only because I as an adult sometimes try to avoid the porn content but fail miserably. It's been too... normalized? This idea that the internet is not educational, rather it is for porn (really, it isn't. The internet is a great tool, actually. Geez) .

[(Anonymous)]

(Same anon) there is something else I just remembered, which is ironic, but true. Back in the wild west internet homophobia was still rampant, so kids weren't likely to expose their sexual preferences or maybe on their friends-locked journal if anything. It's less commonplace nowadays but I think maybe 7-or-so years ago, everyone had their sexuality on their profile (like everyone has pronouns now). Even as an adult that made me really uncomfortable, as 1) doesn't that make things easier for sexual predators? 2) and shouldn't we... give kids time to grow up and develop instead of pushing them to make such "choices" (identity-wise, exposure-wise) at an early age? While of course it is great that homophobia isn't as rampant anymore, this outcome was bad. Thankfully things seem to have changed since.

But yeah. Ironically, it does seem to me like it was better to grow up in the wild west internet than in today's internet at least when it comes to sexual discoveries.

[(Anonymous)]

Tangentially related to this, I miss when websites would 'hide' their 18+ content on a secret page and you basically had to solve a mini puzzle (or be html-savvy, or sometimes both) to get access to it. There was something charming about having to work a little for your wank material.

[(Anonymous)]

People who say "fandom has never been safe for that" or "fandom has always been bad" are like people who respond to "It's hot in this house right now" with "It's always been hot" and then you see the conversation is happening while the house is on fire.

[(Anonymous)]

But the secret is specifically about how the house is hotter now than it used to be

[(Anonymous)]

I know people say that the internet has always been bad - but no way in hell would teen me had survived this era of being in an online fandom. Teen me in the early 2000s had Deviantart before it went to shit (and being in fandom groups on DA with moderators kept fetish artists out so there was that space in addition to being shit at art while having the chance to improve), Livejournal had separate communities that you had to be apart of rather than the stepping-on-each-others toes that you get with fandom spaces on Tumblr where anyone can waltz in and intentionally take things out of context for the worse - and on top of that, although official queer media sucked or was rare to find, fandom had shown me spaces that not only gave me an abundance of queer shipping I got into, but there wasn't this obsession with what is and isn't canon and what made it worthy to ship if it was indeed canon or 'okayed' by the creators of said media.
Essentially I had spaces where I could get fully absorbed in my interests because it would be with other people in the same boat. Whereas now - you'll get total strangers who will go through your blog and then try and cancel you because 'five years ago you liked a Hamilton modern AU fic = EVIL!'

I was flawed and a teenager that had body issues which lead me to finding about alternative sub cultures like goth/emo through fandoms (from fanmixes to meeting other fans via DA and LJ) that let me be as messy with my own style.
I'm 100% certain if I was a teen now with the perfection of Tiktok and all the other social media's warped view on purity and morality - I would have crumbled like a fragile cracker under the pressure of it all within a year.

[scissorsevered]

As a teenager myself in this current era of fandom, its places like here where I actually feel safe to express my interests in fiction without fear of being harassed. When I was 14 fandom was really my only thing keeping me happy, and when the puritanism started becoming the new trend, I was constantly bullying myself for what i was interested in and thinking that it made me a terrible person.