content warning: discussion about (but not description of) child abuse, rape, pedophilia, sexual kinks/fetishes/tropes
Interestingly, I’m bouncing back and forth between two unrelated but tangential discussions, one on Medium about “virtuous pedophiles” and the other on tumblr about fanfiction featuring “disturbing” themes of rape, abuse, and–yes–sexually active characters who are minors*.
On Medium, everyone is rightly horrified to learn of a so-called “virtuous pedophile” movement of people who claim pedophilia is a sexual orientation (it is not) and who claim to be virtuous because they don’t actively go out and molest children (thanks? wtf). They do admit to fantasizing about it and writing about it. I’m horrified as well that people with a disorder that is potentially so vile and heinously abusive would co-opt social justice techniques to try and gain cultural acceptance. Furthermore, some of these people have taken to harassing and trolling anyone who disagrees/argues with them (“virtuous” does not mean what they think it means, clearly). The whole thing is just awful.
On tumblr, a bunch of mostly younger (teens? twenty-somethings? not sure) fans have decided that anyone writing fanfiction stories featuring the sexualization of rape, BDSM, abuse, and (here’s the overlap) characters who are minors* in canon are horrible, awful people who just need to STOP with the terrible, already. They consider the free, fan-run story archive AO3 as complicit in rape culture as a certain male presidential nominee because its TOS allows such stories to be posted there.
The overlap here goes beyond subject matter to freedom of speech, which I mean in the more abstract sense than the legal meaning it has in the USA.
Or maybe just freedom, overall. Should someone who admits to having pedophilic disorder (to get technical about it) be allowed to remain free? Should they be allowed to post on social media sites like Medium or tumblr or facebook? Should they be allowed to write erotic stories about their fantasies?
This hits close to home because in fanfiction culture, the right to write anything you want, no matter how horrifying it may be to someone else, is sacred. We’ve faced this issue down in the past regarding tropes like “magical healing cock helping someone overcome trauma”, and also the many (many) stories that eroticize violent rape. It’s cropped up in discussions of white writers writing minority characters, of abled people writing characters who have mental illness or a chronic health issues. And now, the discussion is back again, this time focusing on writers posting stories featuring any kind of physical or mental abuse, or characters who are minors* in canon.
It’s a natural lock for these fans to focus on stories featuring minor characters. For example, one of the biggest blockbuster Western fandoms is Teen Wolf, and the most popular pairing in it is Sterek — Stiles Stilinski/Derek Hale. In the show, Stiles is introduced in the pilot at 15, mayyyybe 16 years old, and Derek as in his early twenties (no one is sure of the age difference, it seems to change every season). The show is set in California, where the age of consent is a high-test 18 years old. The very ‘ship itself is child porn.
Except NOT, because these are fictional characters.
And that is where everything comes crashing down together. Everyone agrees that real child porn is terrible. As everyone should. But what about fictional stories?
I think most people would agree they are also awful.
…until someone mentions Nabokov’s Lolita.
…or the fact that the third most popular Sterek Teen Wolf fic on AO3 features a 15 year old Stiles being forced into a “marriage” with 20-something year old Derek.
~quandaries~ abound!!!!
See, the “problem” with freedom of individual speech is that setting ANY limit to it nullifies it as a concept. The author isn’t allowed write the book Lolita? Then you are not allowing writers the freedom to write. And how far a step is that from not allowing people to analyze and critique Lolita? It’s a greatly admired modern classic, for all that it is a horrific tale of kidnapping told from a pedophile’s point of view. If a reviewer admits they think it is a literary masterpiece, should they also be banned?
Once the idea that something is “too dangerous to write about” takes hold, the principle that writers have the right to write freely about anything is null and void. Creative freedom becomes a mockery.
No, actual child porn isn’t covered by that statement, because it de facto involves child abuse and rape of real human beings. So, no. That’s not about creative freedom. The difference is that one is an action that harms living, breathing people; the other involves a statement of opinion OR fictional characters. Opinions are not people, and fictional characters do not exist. They are not subject to any laws except those the writer of the story decided exist.
Fanfiction communities have a long history of butting up against these issues. A recent post on tumblr goes into this a bit, talking about the history of oppression and outright attacks fanfic writers and communities have experienced over the years because “someone somewhere thinks it’s nasty” — “it” being everything from stories featuring extreme kinks and fetishes to the simple fact that fanfiction exists at all.
The infamous LJ Strikethrough of ’07 deleted any accounts that were reported to host materials featuring child porn. I’m sure a few of the deleted accounts were exactly as described, but the Strikethrough is famous because it not only deleted those accounts, but hundreds if not thousands of fanfiction accounts AND, get this: COMMUNITIES FOR CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORS. Because hey, shocker: a community set up for abuse survivors to talk about their experiences might, you know, include descriptions of those experiences.
So yeah. That happened. Not the first time something like that went down, just perhaps the most well-known.
What those of us who are part of the fanfic community have discovered is that allowing ANY entity to make censorship decisions is always, always a catastrophe.
To be fair, much of the impulse to censor arises from the fact that people simply do not want bad things to exist. The idea of banning self-proclaimed pedophiles from an online forum and the idea of censoring erotic stories featuring characters who are minors are linked by the drive to protect people.
It’s understandable, a noble impulse even. The people making these arguments genuinely want to prevent people from being harmed, either by the fact that the violence is being glamorized in a way that encourages perpetrators, or because exposure to those written words will be upsetting to abuse survivors.** These are all opinions coming from a place of good intentions.
But good intentions are for shit if they are used to mute creative voices.
Sure, some voices are, indeed, problematic — racist, sexist, violent***, pedophilic. On the other hand, some people write about those very topics from a place of enlightenment and insight. Upsetting, even traumatic, stories will always be valued by someone, somewhere. Sometimes the value was derived from the act of creating the story. Yes, such stories can adored by some people for questionable, if not disturbing reasons, but for others they serve as catharsis. There exist women write rape porn as a way to process their own experiences, while some read it for the same reason, and others enjoy it because it’s a fetish.
At what point is the setting between “harmful” and “helpful” in such a case? Do writers need to “provide their papers” proving they are above reproach? Do readers need to supply proof that they are/are not survivors of trauma in order to read certain stories?
Where do the gate keepers put the line, once that line has been drawn? Who are the gate keepers? Why them? Do you trust them? Why should I trust them? Why should I trust you?
Hating what someone writes is not a valid reason for silencing them. Ever.
~
* “characters who are minors” – I’m specifically using this phrase because these are fictional characters. They are not minors, because minors are real people who are under the age of consent. If you don’t think there is a difference, then I expect you didn’t like this essay anyway.
** As a side note, this is one reason I support “content warnings” so much. Readers need the right to choose what material they interact with, and writers need the right to create stories about any topic they want. Again, an issue hashed out successfully by fanfiction culture years ago. I do wish the RL world would catch up.
*** I mean, if it were up to me, American Psycho would never have been published and certainly wouldn’t have been made into a damn movie. I have close friends who are fans of both the book and the movie; I don’t think they would be close friends if I had the power to simply delete from existence these creative works they find value in. But still. Ugh. I hate that fucking violent and irredeemable book.
