Oh, nonnie, you’re barking up the wrong tree here.
First of all, most fanfiction comes with an appropriate age rating, and if there are fourteen year olds visiting a fanfiction archive like AO3 – which, by the way, comes with a general disclaimer in the TOS that informs reader that they are likely to encounter upsetting, offensive, or morally questionable content – or if there are fourteen year olds on tumblr, which is an unmoderated, semi-private blogging platform – it’s not my responsibility to “keep them safe” from anything that isn’t age-appropriate.
Second, I’m really very sorry that you didn’t read my post earlier, so it would have given you a bit of perspective, and made you realize that it’s perfectly okay to read all kinds of fucked-up fiction, as long as you are mature enough and capable of discerning between fiction and reality. And usually, even fourteen year olds are old enough to make that distinction. Or if they aren’t, it’s their parents’ responsibility to make sure they don’t encounter content that isn’t suited for them.
But seriously, nonnie, do you have any idea what kind of stuff I read when I was fourteen years old? Stuff that I could get in every book shop, unsupervised, uncensored, and without content warnings attached to it? Do you realize that published books come without any kind of age restriction? I’m inclined to laugh at you. I was a fourteen year old myself, and back then, no one even tried to put restrictions on me and my reading preferences. Goodness, our house was full of books of every genre and flavor, and no one bothered to even look at what kind of stuff I pulled from the shelf.
But, hey, if you want to start banning fiction, how about you start with the things that have a much bigger audience than niche fanfiction which is posted in fannish spaces like tumblr or at the AO3 (which, by the way, was made with the explicit purpose of hosting all kinds of fanfiction, especially the stuff that was banned elesewhere)?
If you are really so concerned about the influence that fiction has on younger people, I’d start here. That’s a literary classic romanticizing rape and incest among other disgusting things. Also this one, it’s full of violence, propagates rape culture and really toxic masculinity!
And let’s not even talk about contemporary novels! From Nabokov’s Lolita to Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire to Effinger’s Marîd Audran series, published fiction is full of problematic stuff, and it’s all easily available for young people!! Shouldn’t you make it your quest to go out there and prevent that from happening?
But not, instead you’re in my askbox, wasting your time.
[…] or you just lie to yourself to feel better about readng about gross things yourself?
Oh, nonnie, I’m sorry, but this is pitiful. You’re talking to an adult, a sane, mentally stable and self-assured person, and your moral condemnation is pretty much meaningless to me. I’m not in any danger of conflating fiction and reality, and my conscience is perfectly clear when it comes to my support of fannish creativity and freedom or expression. 🙂
I for one am glad that I wasn’t exposed to much hand-wringing about fiction giving teens bad ideas when I was younger. I can only imagine, for example, what kind of confusion this constant refrain of “if you enjoy it in fiction you must also want it in real life, don’t kid yourself” would have caused. Or the negativity and suspicion towards kinks and sexuality. The pressure to only like things that are “pure and good”.
And yeah. I think I had read most of what Stephen King wrote by the time I was 14. Then I read every Anne Rice novel I could get my hands on. My parents knew and I’m thankful that they gave me this freedom. While I (like everyone else, I suspect) had and have my childhood issues to work through, none of them stem from the fiction I read.
my family has had dark comedy graphic novels about death, violence, sex and drugs in the bathroom since I was like 9
and I know it would have fucked me up so badly if I as a young 12-14yr old had been told that I supported the weird shit I read in real life and that I was disgusting and dangerous.
I was told by my authoritarian father that I shouldn’t read books with sex in them but he never actually screened the books I read.
I experienced queer people like myself through books far before I experienced them in real life. I experienced horrible things in the books I read, murder, necromancy, the desecration of corpses, people literally being pulled apart, etc.
But the most freeing thing about books for me was this:
I could always put it down.
There was one book with very intense description of children who were reanimated as skeletons that would roam this area and cry and that freaked me out so much that I stopped reading the book. And just like that poof! I didn’t have to imagine it anymore!
Another book had a graphic scene of a guy jerking off. (one of the hannibal books as I recall) I was grossed out by it and just sorta never picked the book back up. Years later I’ve watched all the Hannibal films and enjoyed their fucked up story but like, the book was still too much? It’s interesting how the brain works in that regard. We imagine things very vividly.
One of my favorite book series to this day has the forced pregnancy of like 12-14 year olds as part of the plot. It’s clear this isn’t okay and it’s pretty horrifying in the story. It was also required reading in school.
Did you know that a lot of required reading in school has problematic things in it?
The Jungle, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, The Giver, The Diary of Anne Frank, just to name a few.
If we shelter people from the worst of the world they don’t have context for the best of the world. And sometimes people can appreciate those dark stories because they see something of themselves in them.
The Giver meant a lot to me because I also very like I was in a position where I was very controlled and incapable of doing things. I felt like I saw the world differently from those around me. (And I did, my household was pretty conservative and old fashioned)
I think the important thing that people are forgetting is “You can always put it down” that also applies to the internet! You can always blacklist the tag, unfollow people that reblog it, etc. You can always put it down and walk away and go pick up a story you enjoy better to entertain yourself.
That’s the most powerful thing about media, honestly. We have a choice to partake.
I read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings at the age of 15. It’s the first book I remember reading out of my high school’s library when I was a freshman. If you’ve never read it, there’s some very frank descriptions of very bad things in that book, including child rape. I could’ve put it down, though I chose not to. I did tell the librarian I thought it was inappropriate but again, I was 15 and very sheltered. Although not about sex, weirdly, I knew what sex was…
But anyway, it didn’t scar me for life or anything, and I guess you could say it did cause me to do some critical thinking. And it made me talk to a stranger, which considering how bad my social anxiety was back then is honestly a miracle. I spent more time in the library than I did at lunch, until they told me I couldn’t do that anymore.
I read all kinds of stuff as a child and a young teen. I read Magic Johnson’s autobiography which talks about sex and HIV. I read God, Can You Hear Me? which has underage masturbation in it. I also read a lot of romance novels in my grandma’s basement bathroom…
People want to act like fanfiction is the only place where this stuff exists but it’s NOT, it’s out there in popular, famous books.
[Bold above mine] No. People want to be anonymous bullies on the internet. Concern trolling is just that, trolling. Normally the appropriate response to trolling is to ignore it, however these posts are important reassurances to young people that that can (and should) read (and write) whatever they want to.
I read Stranger in a Strange Land the week I turned 16. I got it from the school library. It taught me the word bisexuality, which I hadn’t known I was looking for. It also had cannibalism and Heinlein’s very fucked up ideas about gender roles.
My uncle told me The Hobbit when I was four years old. It has a lot of violence and ends in the death of several main characters. It also established my lifelong love of reading and of SF&F. Seriously, I buckled down to learn how to read after that because he admitted he left out a few bits, and my four-year-old self could not stand to miss a moment of that story.
We are not meant to take works of fiction literally or as direct blueprints for our lives, and I knew that at four years old. Yes, there is some problematic as heck stuff in fiction – basically all fiction has something problematic in it – but we work through that best as cultures and communities by talking about it, not by banning it or shaming people into not admitting they’ve read it.
Because there is some problematic as heck stuff in our lives, in our world, and in our cultures, and art is how we process that stuff. Sanitize art and you take away its power to address our very real issues. Censor art – force it to conform – and you create underground resistance. Seriously, there is an illegal trade in kpop mp3s in North Korea, primarily among students. They can literally be jailed for having these songs, and they still fileshare.
Harry Potter is one of the most banned books in the world. Omg witchcraft, you know. One person’s completely unacceptable work of fiction is another person’s favorite. Nobody is the arbiter of what’s acceptable because no one knows what other people need to process. Learn to arbitrate for yourself and don’t let anyone else tell you what art is useful and what art is garbage. You decide, and then you let others decide for themselves, too.
You don’t have to be 18 to make choices and judgments for yourself; neither should you go around declaring to everyone else that some random fic you found on the internet is the end of civilization as we know it and the author should be destroyed. That kind of behavior just proves you’re not ready to take responsibility for your own choices and want to push that responsibility on others. You cannot do that and have anyone older than you take you seriously. Grow up. (No really, this is part of growing up.)
If you don’t like what someone else wrote, write your counter-argument as a fic. I’m not kidding. Many, many famous authors have done this. Art is a conversation. Join the conversation, instead of trying to scare other people out of it.
Oh, and also? No one is morally pure, including you, including me. No one.
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