[ SECRET POST #2195 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2195 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 076 secrets from Secret Submission Post #314.
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

[aquila_black]

This is an excellent question that I've never gotten a straight answer to.

I'm guessing the reason I haven't heard from any paranoid fan, anywhere, about some far-flung, notorious case where someone was handed their head on a platter is because it has never happened. But fandom does have an exaggerated fondness for hand-wringing, sometimes.

[thene]

Yeah - we have all kinds of stories about complaints from parents, pressure to delete stuff, DMCA takedowns, etc, but only could bes about actual sex offence investigations. I don't blame anyone for avoiding RPing smut with minors, though! I would not do it myself, not just for legal reasons but for moral ones. It's still a very tiny niche aspect of the whole discussion about minors and fanporn, though, and I don't like seeing it dominate that discussion.

unpopular opinion: What really gets me is that there's a collective 'yeah, we know, shrug' about underage boys having free access to pornographic videos online. Text and illustration is not video - it's just not even kind of in the same ballpark, and text especially gives a kid no more than their imagination is capable of conjuring (I remember this from my own earliest porn-reading experiences). I'm going to assume that this hand-wringing at least has a sexist dimension, albeit unintentional. There's this whole culture out there on the other side of the line in which men are used to inducting younger men into the sexual mores of pornography and stripping, and women are still freaked out by much tamer equivalents.

[aquila_black]

This happens a lot. A few worst case scenarios and eyebrow-raising things that one might do dominate the whole discussion. And dammit, other stuff needs to be said.

That's another excellent point. The absolute indifference to "boys have access to porn!" betrays a) a gender bias regarding these children that might be exposed to erotica, and b) a slightly more hidden heterosexual (and vanilla) bias. That is, the media gets to proselytize about straight, non-kinky relationships everywhere, but god forbid little girls discover slash.

[thene]

(Btw there has been an obscenity court in the UK case involving fanfic - a violent RPF rape fanfic, ie. about the most heinous thing describable as fandom - and the case was abandoned, partly because the defence were able to prove that the odds of random kids finding the fic and reading it were amazingly low. Here is a pretty thorough article about this and other attempts to prosecute people for obscene text in the UK (tw: contains a detailed summary of a fic that involves noncon and sexualised gore), the takeaway being that it is no longer possible to convict someone for obscene writing in the UK, period. Key quote: "Obscene printed material is a contradiction in terms.")

[aquila_black]

Interesting. I had not seen that. It's a pretty ringing victory for fanfic, because that's about as fringe as it gets - RPF, rape, extreme violence, and written by a man, to boot.

It helps that he wrote in a large fandom, where they could argue that you'd have to look for some of the themes in his fic to have any chance of finding it. Fandom needs to challenge this idea that things the public at large is uncomfortable with should be well hidden from kids, at best, and preferably not written at all. If we're serious about giving people the option of coming out as fans, that's a trend we have to challenge. (Right along with the idea that workplaces have a right to tell you what to do with your free time, etc.)

"The only material that should be banned is that whose making can be proved to have involved the commission of illegal acts, such as non-consensual sex." This is the standard I want applied to all porn - one that penalizes only demonstrable harm.

Most of the "pornography is hurting women" arguments are unintentionally sexist. They're geared towards a presupposition that all available porn is made by and for men, and is about ravishing women. That is becoming less and less true by the day, and the establishment is still kicking and screaming over it. But I think that's the direction that true emancipation is going to come from.

I'll say something else. I lived in Saudi Arabia for a number of years. I'm not an authority on anything except my own experience, but that was fascinating. Censorship of imagery was very, very strict. You would not see a woman's body from the face down or with their hair uncovered anywhere - not on billboards, not on television, nothing. And when people went out, they covered from head to foot, leaving only their faces visible. (Really conservative women covered everything but their eyes.) Some of the Western women bitched about this a lot. But you know who complained even more bitterly? The guys. Not kidding: they felt a stiffed and deprived because they couldn't ogle women. And sexual harassment was completely unheard of. They'd kick you out of the country for that. It was ... a huge, welcome change, as the teenage girl that I was, not to have to put up with the persistent attention of full grown men. And it was tremendously freeing not to have to deal with women's mostly-naked, emaciated bodies selling products everywhere. I get really impatient with arguments about what's good for young people because a) no one ever listens to what young people actually want and b) if it inconveniences the bottom line or the adult world, well, screw that. Let's be honest here. Most of the morality laws exist to oppress minorities and/or fuel pointless arguments. They do not, in practice, make it any easier to grow up female.