fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6365 ]

[ SECRET POST #6365 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6365 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 36 secrets from Secret Submission Post #910.
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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DA

Women talking about sex in slash fandoms would be very solicited and appropriate comments, though, in most places. Unsolicited would be like, you draw a nonsexual fanart and someone DMs you their rape fantasy because "isn't the character so hot and don't we all want this XD >w<"

No. No we don't wtf and even if we did why would you open a convo like that?

Subthread OP. I guess I just don't see how that would be different from any number of other ways of failing to read the room or being obnoxious in someone's DMs that wouldn't and shouldn't be described as violations of consent. For example, I post a fantasy adventure story and someone sends me their detailed D&D campaign idea I have no interest in? I post a fanart I drew and someone gives me a three-paragraph description of their OC they would also like me to draw? These are obnoxious behaviors that someone shouldn't engage in but to describe what is essentially annoying speech or spam as a violation of consent is really over the top to me.

Like, yes, in some sense, it is possible to see it as a nonconsensual interaction, but then by labeling it that way, a lot of other parts of life become nonconsensual interactions. A stranger coming up to you on the street to strike up a conversation is a nonconsensual interaction; a protestor yelling an opinion you viscerally disagree with within earshot is a nonconsensual interaction; someone walking around with an obscene t-shirt is a nonconsensual interaction, etc.

I'm very wary of the mentality that criticizes speech (especially sexual speech) along the lines of consent, especially since it often gets into "think of the children!" territory.

This is not to say that I disagree that a lot of sexual speech online can be unpleasant, obnoxious, and unsolicited/unwelcome! It is! And I definitely think certain forms of speech can violate consent, like when a person is unable to use a site without being spammed with sexual messages, or when there is no block feature or someone keeps on evading the block feature. Even then, I'm not sure consent is the right framework to use to analyze what has gone wrong in those scenarios. But I do think those issues are severe enough to become a consent issue. But to use a consent framework on individual acts of speech feels really dicey to me.

...are you implying that there is no difference between being sent someone's dick pic and being sent a picture of a politician you don't like that you didn't ask for? And that those are the same thing and should be judged the same way?

It explicitly involves consent because it's directly, overtly, graphically sexual in nature, that's the whole point.

I am a bit confused by this response because... kind of yes, but I am saying this is a consequence of framing the badness of talking about sex in public as a "consent issue" rather than some other kind of issue (an issue along some axis that isn't consent). The idea of consent isn't one that only applies to sex, in my opinion... It applies to any activity that involves more than one person.

If you think being sent a dick pic and being sent a picture of a politician who you hate and have shown no interest in are very different offenses, it is my opinion that the difference between them can't be captured by the notion of "consent" and it would be very bad to try to do so.

I'm not sure where we're disagreeing here, but my guess is that you think issues of consent only arise/apply to sexual situations (either physical or written/verbal), whereas I think consent is an extremely broad concept relevant in basically every interaction between two or more people, which makes it a particularly bad choice for analysis here when talking about the wrongs of talking about kink on the internet.

I think you're making this out to be more complicated than it has to be. The consent being discussed at hand is sexual consent.

> DMed a dick pic
> did not consent to this
> this is, in fact, violating someones sexual consent by involving them unwillingly in your sexual acts/gratification, albeit indirectly as a viewer

> DMed a rape fantasy
> did not consent to this
> this is, in fact, violating someones sexual consent by involving them unwillingly in your sexual acts/gratification, albeit indirectly as a viewer

> flashed someones IRL penis in the street
> did not consent to this
> this is, in fact, violating someones sexual consent by involving them unwillingly in your sexual acts/gratification, albeit indirectly as a viewer

If we agree about that, the rest is irrelevant.

SA

Please don't go into kink discussions about consent and start talking about how everyone there has to specify "sexual" consent because "just consent" is so broad that it could be applied to grocery store interactions and it's so hard to tell what they mean.

Context clues!

DA

I think you're on the right track about this, while the people who only want consent to mean "their right to complain about seeing or hearing about sex" are wrong.

"I'm pissed because you sent me a picture of a naked body" is not a different and more special sort of being offended than "I'm pissed because you put religious propaganda in my ebay order."

I take sexual consent violations that make anyone do the calculus of "is this person threatening me?" and "can this person try to force me into sex?" much more seriously. And I think that's needed: I've seen what's left of blogs where women have stopped posting their thoughts and feelings specifically because strangers' threats of torture, murder, and rape intimidated them, and the police and the legal system often won't do a damn thing. If we want threatening a private individual with death, dismemberment, and sexual abuse to be a punishable offense in the future, there needs to be a distinction drawn between that and the comparatively harmless, "didn't want to know you felt that way" sex talk that's currently included in the Tumblr definition of a "consent violation."

I... don't think you're gonna get much agreement with that stance. Even legally, intent for that kind of thing matters, and when people are sending you dick pics and rape fantasies they outright mean for you to read and react and engage with them in a sexual way, unlike with all sorts of nonsexual unwanted spam like calls about your car's extended warranty.

Perhaps a better way to explain this to you is: why is sexual harassment different from regular harassment?

Or do you think both are, or should be the same, too?

Other interactions only become nonconsensual in this framework if you see no difference between sex and other types of interactions. But sex is different. Being exposed to sex or being forced to have sex that you don't want has a totally different emotional and psychological effect than being exposed to disagreement or being forced into a conversation.

Sex is how we reproduce, and when we have it, our bodies flood with chemicals meant to create a bond between us and the other person. This means that there's an intensity to it, and a risk involved with it (pregnancy -- which, apart from involving the creation of a child, can physically harm or even kill the mother), that simply isn't present in other social actions. For this reason, we treat it with a greater weight, and have rules around it that we don't apply to other situations.

See my reply above -- sex and non-sex interactions may be very different in nature; I do not think consent is the right framework to capture those differences. Consent is a very broad concept that applies in many more situations than kink or sex or whatever, so I find it especially inappropriate to use when trying to discuss why sex is especially bad to talk about on the internet.

Also, I thought we were talking about, like, people being kinky/horny on main online, so I have no idea what the relevance of bonding chemicals or pregnancy risk is to the conversation here. My guess is that you're saying because sex is a high-stakes activity in real life, as a policy we should take more care in how we talk about it online? For example, because suicide is a high-stakes activity, people should be careful about how they voice suicidal ideation or jokes in public? Is that the point you're making here? I don't disagree although I would definitely want more detail on what you think are the implications of the high-stakes aspects of sex on how people should or shouldn't talk about it online.

DA

Sex may be different for you, but I'm also female, and (especially online) conversations that involve sex do not mean any of that to me. You're mixing tangible risks that cannot happen here - like pregnancy - with risks that I think people absolutely bear the responsibility for managing themselves. Whether I bond with another person does not depend on whether they say sexual things to me. It doesn't even depend on whether we've had sex: I don't define my sense of self-worth or my opinion of anyone else by that. I take care of myself sexually and own the fact that I have a sex drive, instead of blaming strangers for being turned on.

It would be just as disrespectful to insist that no one say negative things within earshot of me and accuse them of spoiling my day if they ignore this demand as it is to tell other people to stop talking about sex where "someone who doesn't want to know that" could hear them.

Do you think it's appropriate to talk about explicit sex in front of children?

AYRT

I don't understand your question. Are you changing the subject, or ... ?

Well, if hearing about explicit sex is no different from hearing something with which you disagree, then you must think it's perfectly fine to discuss explicit sex in front of children, since it's certainly fine (and even beneficial) for children to hear things with which they don't agree.

So, do you think it's okay to talk about explicit sex in front of children?

You make an interesting argument. It took me a while to put words to what I want to say about this.

I don't think the standard for all human behavior should be "would other people approve of your doing this in front of a (young) child?" Not online, and not offline. I consider eating animals morally acceptable, but I wouldn't clean a fish in front of most American children. I know plenty of kids from other countries who not only would not bat an eye, they've done it themselves. So, is this "automatically offensive and traumatic to children," or not? And even if you think it is, do you think it must be hidden away and never written down, because otherwise *some child might learn of it?* Or is that kind of conviction reserved for only sex, to you?

I also consider abortion and surgery morally acceptable, but I'm not planning to make children watch either. On the other hand, if you happened to be the sort of kiddo who looks up surgery videos online ... I would not hold random people responsible for hiding the videos or stopping you.

My parents are atheists. My best friend's parents were Jewish. Sex was never a secret in either of our families. Growing up in a US city with a horrifically high rate of child sexual abuse, I credit this with being able to tell if I was in a sketchy situation while I could still get myself out of it. But like a lot of kids, I went into spaces online that were discussing sex in an explicit way, and added to my knowledge by lurking. My best friend and I would entertain each other with the wild stuff we found. It humanized adults in our eyes a lot, and comforted us with the awareness that "old" people still play and daydream and pretend and care a lot. If there was some terrible effect to any of that exploration, I've yet to discover it. And I haven't been a kid in quite a while. So, honestly, no. When I compare my experiences with people whose parents did try to keep it a secret until they were older, and then grudgingly and uncomfortably doled some minimal information out, I think enforced sexual ignorance makes it harder, lonelier, and scarier to grow up.

That said, one thing I appreciated about the internet is that I was mostly in control of what I learned. No one was purposely having explicit conversations in front of me, and I would have immediately wondered what their motivations were, if they had. So I think "either adults should stage graphic sex talks in front of child audiences OR decency requires that all discussion of sex be hidden away" is a false choice, and ignoring a lot of possibilities that are better than either of those.

AYRT

I see the distinction you're drawing, but the OP didn't make any distinction at all. They griped about being disgusted by hearing people's submissive sexual fantasies in fandom and hoped they would be stigmatized the way they're claiming dominant sexual fantasies already are. Like, "hey guys, can we also shame people for the flip side of BDSM thirst? The "S" side? It's also kinky! And equally gross to me!"

The situation you're describing, while it might be unsolicited, has never made me uncomfortable in fandom. I'm for it. I draw non-sexual pictures, and also write dark erotica, and I have *repeatedly* had to reassure commenters that I am not going to go off on them for finding the latter (or really, anything they want) hot. Because they've interacted with people in fandom who throw big tantrums about readers having feelings about blatantly sexual stories "without condemning the rapist" or for not having whichever response the person pushing an agenda thinks would be more virtuous or appropriate than being turned on. And that seems a lot more unreasonable to me than someone free-associating a picture I made that has no sex in it with sex and telling me about it.

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[ SECRET POST #6365 ]

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