I came across this article in the wall street journal and thought it might be helpful for some of my fellow spoonies
This post really hits home for me just how many of the things old people do is just disability accommodation
Kids these days are all "wow I can't believe I still like this ship 3 months after the canon ended!" bestie I have ships that started when I was still using dial-up internet
god keep ur fucking kink meme shit out of ao3 tag y'all make this fandom even more insufferable than it already is and thats saying something!!! The kind of shit y'all post require a fucking trigger warning it doesnt belong in a safe space
Hello! I see there’s been some confusion! Allow me to clear something up: AO3 is not a safe space.
Let me repeat that. Archive Of Our Own is not a safe space, not in the way you mean it.
From the AO3 Terms of Service:
Why does the Archive have a goal of maximum inclusiveness?
There are a number of wonderful specialized archives. Our aim with this Archive is to provide a place to preserve as many fanworks as possible. At the same time, the Archive software can be used by anyone to create their own archives, including archives limited to particular topics, fandoms, or ratings.
What kind of content do you allow?
We will not remove content from the Archive because it contains explicit material, as long as it doesn’t violate any other part of the content policy (e.g., the harassment policy).
One basic consequence is that users are responsible for reading and heeding the warnings provided by the creator. Risk-averse users should keep in mind that not all content will carry full warnings. If you want to know more, you may also wish to consult the bookmarks that people other than the creator have used to categorize the fanwork.
Some creators do not want to put specific ratings or warnings on their works. Our policy aims to enable creators to choose appropriate labels or to opt not to use ratings and warnings, with the understanding that some users will avoid unrated or unwarned content.
The ratings/warnings policy is really minimal. Why is this?
We believe that appropriate ratings and warnings are often in the eye of the beholder. Users who feel that a fanwork lacks an appropriate rating/warning are encouraged to try to resolve the issue with the creator. Users may also add tags of their own to on-site bookmarks of a fanwork, which other users can consult for more information. When those tags are present, you can click on the “Bookmarks” link at the top of the work to see them.
The stated desires/goals when AO3 was conceived and initially developed can be found here, on a livejournal post from @astolat (founder of VidCon, Yuletide, and AO3, and all around fannish legend). In short, the goal was “allowing ANYTHING – het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult.”
And that, in fact, is precisely what AO3 hosts. You see, AO3 is a safe space for fanfiction. It’s a safe space for people to explore all kinds of fannish content without fear of banning, deletion, or legal reprisal. It was founded, designed, and developed to be a safe space for fandom and fannish works.
There also seems to be some confusion about the nature of safe spaces vs. trigger warnings. A fannish work that merits a trigger warning isn’t something that doesn’t belong in a safe space. The trigger warning is what MAKES something a safe space despite the presence of fannish works that merit warnings.
Something else to consider: there are many other things that include het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, and highly adult material, in addition to incest, pedophilia, infanticide, necrophilia, rape, bestiality, sadism and violence, adultery, and all manner of other things.
So holding individual women (because that’s what fandom primarily is, women exploring their sexuality in a safe forum filled with other women doing the same) accountable for their fictional exploration of things that a) exist in real life in genuinely damaging forms, b) have significant impact on women themselves, thus leading in some part to the urge to explore those things safely, and c) have existing in movies, television, popular culture, the Bible, and in all of literature since literature began? Well, that’s just an extension of the same culture that polices women’s sexuality in the first place and drives them to find safe ways to explore it.
Ding ding ding we have a winner 🙌🏼
AO3 was pretty much meant to be a safe space … FOR WRITERS.
FOR WRITERS TO POST PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING AS LONG AS IT IS ADEQUATELY WARNED FOR AND MEETS THEIR CLEARLY POSTED CRITERIA.
IT LITERALLY EXISTS TO PROTECT FANWORKS FROM BEING CENSORED, THREATENED BY LAWYERS, OR TAKEN DOWN OR ALTERED AGAINST THE WRITER’S WILL. THIS APPLIES TO ALL WORKS THAT MEET ITS TOS. ALL OF THEM. YES, INCLUDING AND ESPECIALLY THAT REALLY ICKY ONE.
THAT IS LITERALLY ITS PURPOSE FROM THE VERY BEGINNING. IT WILL NOT CHANGE ITS PURPOSE AND SUDDENLY DECIDE SOME KINDS OF CENSORSHIP ARE OKAY NOW BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE YELL.
If this makes anyone personally uncomfortable, there’s a very easy way to avoid that. Just don’t use AO3. Problem solved.
I guess I should be glad that we have built a world where young fans can be so deeply ignorant of fannish history that they think that the mechanism of repression they’re invoking wasn’t originally built and used to silence them, and so easily could be again. Their assumption is that they are entitled to have fandom feel comfortable and safe for them; it literally does not occur to them that within their own short lifespans you had to have separate and sometimes secret lists and archives for slash because “nobody wants to see that” and “it’s gross/against God’s will” and “what if the children see it!!!” (I remember a man knitter having to quit the freaking knitlist because he took such shit just for referring to his partner as “DH/DB” (dear husband/boyfriend) the way the women knitters did theirs.) And even within the slash community…the very first Smallville slash mailing list tried to ban strong language and graphic content. A rebel splinter had to break off and found ClarkLex to publish all kinds of stories. That was only in 2001!
I know it’s a good thing that we’re now in a world where indignant young people have no idea how vulnerable they historically have been and still are in this particular context. The time before: that was worse, for many people. But it’s still very tiring to see.
Please, indignant young people, do start up your own archives where the Problematic Content is banned. You’ll be setting each other on fire within the year over just where the line is to be drawn. And advancing your actual cause not at all.
AO3 is big and easy to use and I have seen some fucked up shit there.
Fandom is becoming mainstream. We need to reconsider if “because you CAN write it, no other reason necessary” is a good philosophy these days. It may be that AO3 needs to reconsider its philosophy and possibly change.
Excuse me? What’s wrong with writing something “because I can”? What other philosophy do you want us to adopt?
Let’s see if this fits mainstream criteria of normalcy, of “good” and “moral”?
And the answer to that is: NO. A huge big NO. This is why AO3 was created after LJ strikethrough in 2007 - because we wanted a space where it didn’t matter how weird or kinky or fucked up a story is. Where it didn’t matter that it’s not mainstream. Where we wouldn’t be judged, nobody could delete our stuff and nobody could try holding us legally accountable simply for writing something that’s not to their tastes (as long as there is no actually illegal material).
It may be that AO3 needs to reconsider its philosophy and possibly change.
Why would they “need” to do that? For what reason? AO3 is precisely what we need - apparently now not only to ward off attacks from outside fandom as it used to be, but from inside fandom as well.
“It may be that AO3 needs to reconsider its philosophy and possibly change.”
NO. Ao3 doesn’t *need* to do a damn thing.
If you (and plenty of other people, evidently) think that fandom needs a more mainstream, sanitized space/archive go ahead and make it happen, the source codes are out there (and good luck deciding about how clean is clean enough).
I have seen this exact response given over and over again -make your own space, go on and do it yourselves- and it’s always ignored or treated like a dismissal.
It’s NOT a dismissal, this is how everything in fandom gets created. This is how ao3 was created: a bunch of people wanted it enough to make it happen. We donated money, time and workto make it happen. And the folks at ao3 did such a good job that the result is now the biggest and most well known fandom archive.
But it was born from a bunch of people who wanted to give fanfics a safe space and were willing to work for it.
Every time I see people huffing and ignoring the perfectly logical suggestion to “get together and create the fandom space that you want” I can’t help but think that they just don’t care enough about their ideas to be willing to put in the work (and if so, why should we care enough to do their work for them?) or worse, are just in it for the joy of policing and shaming others
THIS.
We didn’t like how it was done elsewhere, so we built AO3. You don’t like how AO3 does it? WELL GO BUILD YOUR OWN SPACE INSTEAD OF DEMANDIG AO3 TO DO AS YOU PLEASE! DAMN IT!
This entitlement is so disgusting.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
As we say in Danish, “if you don’t like the smell of the bakery, you can eat somewhere else.”
school (esp school as a child) shouldn't be the only place you acquire information about the world. implying that if information wasn't already in your head by age 18, you have no option to find out more is just... so disingenuous and disconnected from reality.
social media should also not be your only non-school source of info about the world. you have so many options!!
there are nonfiction books written by experts! and if reading with your eyes is hard there are so many audiobooks! there are courses you can audit or listen to/watch recordings of if you want to practice new skills or see them demonstrated!
there are short form articles meant both for laypeople and experts! a LOT of nonfiction informational books are DESIGNED to be extremely digestible to someone with no prior knowledge!
people make reading lists, curricula & syllabi to help YOU. whatever you want to learn about, odds are somebody somewhere has made a list that might be useful to get started!
like your options truly are not just "happen to run into this info accidentally" and "never learn it".
sincerely though for most things (be careful w politics/economics lol) even wikipedia can teach you a lot. like you aren't doomed never to know stuff just bc you didn't learn it while a literal child. you might find that your adult brain actually picks certain things up easier than when you were little!
like yes schools need to be better but like. you aren't 10 anymore. you have more options now! the world is so big and you have time to learn slowly!
so if it takes you longer to learn certain kinds of information, that doesn't mean it's impossible! like I find geography extremely difficult bc i'm so nonvisual but I still make progress on understanding it year by year, and searching in the moment, when i'm not sure if i remember correctly, reinforces that knowledge, so I'm definitely much better-informed than I was half a lifetime ago in my mostly forgotten childhood class.
ultimately you are the one who makes the final decision about what you will or will not prioritize in your life. Be honest w yourself about what your barriers to knowledge are RIGHT NOW as an adult person, instead of assuming bc you had barriers as a kid they're still identical now & also insurmountable.
The barriers between you & knowledge as an adult are probably more permeable than you might assume!! You have so many options!! But apathy is the first barrier, and it's one only you can address for yourself.
“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot
“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.
"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult
Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.
There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.
I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.
Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."
Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.
Thank you for this addition!
I did a report on book banning once.
Actually, I did reports on book banning three separate times with three separate teachers, with three separate sets of parameters so I was able to write about the same topic in different ways, but this is specifically about the report I did in university. The actual specs for the report included that we were supposed to complete some kind of study or poll (this was not a science class). I put the questions out on a couple of forums I belonged to at the time and asked a few IRL friends as well. A lot of the questions were standard for this sort of thing, I think - were you ever assigned to read a banned book, did you ever read banned books on your own, did you read/were you assigned them BECAUSE they were banned or did you find out about them being banned later, what's your opinion on banning books, etc.
But there was one question I asked that ended up reshaping the entire thrust of my presentation: "Are there any books that you think SHOULD be banned, and if so, why?"
Here's the thing. Most of the forums I was posting on were fan spaces for a book series that, at the time, was one of the most banned/challenged books out there. It's a fandom that I have since entirely distanced myself from, that I one hundred percent do not recommend to anyone, that I will actively attempt to dissuade people from reading or talking about, and that I would like to not be popular anymore. I'm sure most of you reading this can guess which one I'm talking about (I won't name it or go into specifics because I don't want to trip any filters unnecessarily). But it was KNOWN that these books were banned in a lot of places. A lot of people wore the "I read banned books" badge with pride. I fully expected that the answer to that question would be a resounding "no" from the forums, and that I'd maybe get a few affirmative answers from one of the other spaces.
I was shocked. Not only did a lot of people come back with either "not exactly but I think we should keep [author] or [book] out of the hands of children" or "yes, [book]/anything by [author] should be banned because XYZPDQ", but not a single person who responded gave me the same answer. The only one I remember - keep in mind it's been almost twenty years - was that one person specifically said The Bone Collector, and for the "why do you think it should be banned" question, they only said, "No. I'm not explaining it. It's too horrible to even think about. Just believe me when I say nobody should ever be allowed to read this book."
I highlighted that last comment in my presentation, along with several other of my "favorite" official reasons for banning books - the Alabama school board that banned The Diary of Anne Frank in 1984 because it was "a real downer", the district that removed A Raisin in the Sun because it was "pornographic", the library that took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out of circulation because it "might be hurtful to children without parents", and things of that nature - and pointed out that all of these were the same thing. This was somebody saying "I don't like this, therefore nobody should read it, and I shouldn't have to explain why." I also pointed out that if you can't give a good reason, the whole thing falls apart, and then I quoted "Smut" by Tom Lehrer:
All books can be indecent books,
Though recent books are bolder,
For filth, I'm glad to say,
Is in the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
I can tell you things about Peter Pan
And the Wizard of Oz - THERE'S a dirty old man...
Go back to that paragraph I mentioned earlier, about those books that I no longer recommend to anyone. Notice how I phrased that. I don't recommend them. I will tell you all the reasons why I don't think you should buy them. I will tell you all the problems with the author, with the franchise, with the writing. I wish they were out of print, I wish they were deeply unpopular, I wish nobody would ever read them again.
But I still won't advocate for banning them.
It's so easy to twist a justification. Look at what I quoted up there! A Raisin in the Sun was banned for being "pornographic". One of the websites I used as a source responded to that accusation with "Did they read the same play I did?" At the time, I thought the comment was funny. Now, twenty years later, I realize: It was a buzzword. It was a convenient label. At the time of the challenge, just saying "it's pornographic" was enough. Obviously you're not some kind of sicko who wants to hear about all the pornographic details, are you? Freak! That's pornography! And they're teaching it in schools! We should get rid of it!
A Raisin in the Sun, for anyone who didn't study it at any point or read it (or watch the movie, which was very good), is a play/movie about a black family in Chicago in the 1960s. The family matriarch has been in domestic service for years, but she's just received a very large insurance payment from her husband's death and is retiring. Wanting to give her family, especially her young grandson, a better life, she goes out and buys a house...in an otherwise exclusively white neighborhood. The head of the homeowner's association (essentially) comes to visit them and offers to pay them a substantial amount of money to not move into the neighborhood, because segregation isn't officially a thing and they can't legally stop them from moving in, but they don't want them there. There's a lot more that goes on in the play, and I highly recommend you go and read it, but the point is that there is nothing sexual or titillating in the entire thing. The closest we get is a scene where the daughter (Beneatha, a college student) is gifted a traditional African dress from her boyfriend, who's Nigerian, and he shows her how to put it on over the clothes she's already wearing, and maybe the scene where the daughter-in-law (Ruth, a laundress) accidentally reveals that, having found out she's pregnant, she's planning to have an abortion rather than bring another child into the world/have another mouth to feed.
It's not pornographic. But someone didn't want it taught in schools, so they called it that to get it banned.
It's so easy to twist labels. If you, a liberal, agree that books with X trait are okay to ban, the people who don't want books to exist will find a way to say they have X trait, and then what are you going to do, admit that you like that sort of thing? Sicko! Freak! Pervert!
You don't have to like the book, or the author, or the topic. But if you're advocating for banning them entirely, you're functionally a conservative.
People have called The Diary of Anne Frank child porn (which is now more properly called CSAM - child sexual assault material) because in the book Anne discusses her own sexuality and masturbation habits in a very direct and relatively detailed way. And since she was 14 and thus a child (except 14 year olds are not children, they're adolescents) this constituted disgusting vile child porn.
Which is ridiculous any way you look at it, but that's the justification many people have used to get that book banned. We can't let people know that minors have any kind of sexual awareness or feelings, now, can we?
A friend has once again brought it to my attention that it is unusual to have an intact chronological memory of life prior to age 12 and you know what’s weird to ME is that the rest of yall forgot how to sing the clean-up song
Other shit:
Yes I’ve talked about this before and yes I’m going to talk about it again because every single person on earth should be fully and viscerally aware that being a kid feels like every description I’ve ever read of recovering from a stroke and we all grow up and forget and talk about childhood like it was magic.
Yeah some of it was fun and all but don’t you remember FALLING DOWN CONSTANTLY? You don’t remember needing help putting a shirt on cause you got your arm stuck and couldn’t get out and panicked so bad you started crying? You DON’T remember being just CONSTANTLY STICKY? Ohhh my good, pissing yourself. Pissing yourself was the worst. Christ alive, and being put in the playpen with a weird kid
Why were you falling into the toilet?
I WAS LIKE TWO FEET TALL
what's weird about my brain is that i have extremely bad *voluntary* recall but if someone else can prompt me, it turns out that more often than not, the memories are still on file
i would like to also add:
-being a nervous kid means living in silent hill permanently forever. there are monsters. they WILL get you. you can't predict when. no one thinks this is noteworthy.
-some foods make you sick. somehow this doesn't mean you can just not eat them. being sick is really inconsiderate of you, too.
-sticky crumbs are the worst.
-kids cooler than you hate you. kids weirder than you are even more unpredictably violent.
-no one understands your creative vision. 'house' would be so much better with a dragon. why does this require extensive debate.
-the assholes who never put the play dough caps back on the tubs should get their hands unscrewed.
-that one girl who can't tell a story but cries if you interrupt whatever boring thing she was failing to say
-boys are allowed to kill any creature they want in front of you specifically to hurt your feelings and you're the bad guy when you bite them???
-rose petals should taste good but don't. WHY.
-that one church lady who thinks screaming in a shrill and pathetic way at the rude boys is going to work THIS time. what the fuck is wrong with her
-snail slime washes off but slug slime is forever. i still don't understand this one.
-if there are millions of grownups in the world why can't they replace the one currently fucking up being in charge of you and the six boys who like to to torture you. like there's lots more teachers. can't you get one who is trained in not letting kids get tortured? no one in the room has been sneaky about the torture thing. come on.
-clay soil should taste good. look at it. deeply unfair that it doesn't.
-you will never regret putting a small smooth rock in your mouth.
-you chewed too much string and are having an unprecedented bathroom situation.
-why does your friend's mom smell so bad? bad-smelling moms seems like it should be against the rules.
-why does your other friend's mom smell so good? can you get your mom to smell like this?
-extremely specific pretend game scenarios you revisit over and over until your friends are exasperated and ten years later you go OH SHIT as you understand some very embarrassing things about yourself.
-rolling down a grassy hill was such a fantastic combination of chaos and freedom and safety. it's still fun as a grownup but my joints don't agree.
-the utter devastation of squishing a bug you were trying to save. you go from disney princess to warcrimes mcbloodhands in one irreversible second.
-sometimes the free lollipop is just kinda mid. and they don't give you another one to make up for it. and you can't even get THAT mad because mid is still better than nothing.
-mom tells you to clean your toys up but you only have one basket for your stuffed animals, who are currently having a civil war. not good.
-being small enough to climb into a box full of packing peanuts. incredibly good noise. incredibly good texture.
-do you also remember unspooling a tape measure allll the way out, confirming to everyone that the metal end bit COULD rip your eye out, then dropping the tape measure and running out of range before the tape respooled?
-pissing your pants sucks so bad. it stings. and it seems to take so much longer to dry than a water spill does
-you're still a person, every year of your life. everyone says you'll be different when you grow up. and every grownup is so strange, so distant, so unsympathetic and illogical and dismissive and alien. you wonder what could ever make you that different. you wonder why no one can explain.
The “extremely specific pretend game scenarios” turned out to be an early sign that one of my BFFs was a lesbian, but since I myself am straight, I didn’t understand why she was so much more into Princess Leia than I was (my bae was Han Solo) until much later. 😂
If I may:
The thing I remember the most is being told I was 'dramatic' about things that would later be classified as Symptoms of Disorders and Diseases that I had my whole life, and some of them were things that the adults in my life knew that I had. Yes, the sun really does hurt my eyes so bad I want to throw up, actually. Yes, it really did take 4 months for the tendons in my foot to heal and no I was not just trying to get out class early. Yes, it really does make me feel very sick when I am forced to eat things with aspartame in it.
i think as adults it’s our responsibility to be nice to kids and treat them with the respect we wish we got at that age and im not kidding or exaggerating in the least
an imperfect ally is better than a perfect bystander
the old boomer who "doesn't get the gays" but still votes blue every election is still a better ally to you than every well-spoken, woke millennial who says all the right shit but didn't vote because they "didn't like either option"
the lady who voted for trump but has changed her mind since and is calling her senator every day is a better ally to you than anyone very politely apologizing for how awful things are and not doing anything to actually help
I think fandom will be immensely improved once people manage to internalize that 1) racism and misogyny in fics and in fandom culture are not necessary evils to sustain a thriving fandom ecosystem and 2) if your thriving fandom megalopolis has racism and misogyny as load bearing walls then it deserves to be destroyed.
I love when you see stray cats experience joy and comfort the likes of which they've never even dreamed and they literally don't know how to respond to it yet. it's like they're just mashing every response button wildly, trying to figure out how to express this overwhelming feeling: PURR? KNEAD? BITE? SCRATCH? WRITHE? SNARL? MEOW? RUB?? ???
wouldn't it be awesome if you stopped using fatness as a visual shorthand for ineptitude/cruelty/greed/selfishness today
It's the internet's millennial mom back here again with an extremely unpopular opinion that I need you all to internalize:
There are no food rules, ESPECIALLY when you're just feeding yourself.
The internet (and specifically TikTok, Pinterest, etc) has become obsessed with beautifully plated meals that follow certain conventions. It's all bullshit.
Crack your pasta in half before you put in the pot. Put BBQ sauce on your salad. Do whatever the hell you need to do to get nutrients into your body. The only rule is you need to eat.
From capitalstitchco on Threads
A brief moment of rationality from the bird place.
your life should not be a museum
Also the theoretical archaeology or decorative arts museum centuries from now wants to study objects as they were USED. The wear and tear is important information about those objects, society, and the people who owned them!!!! We'd want that context ANYWAYS.
