Anonymous asked:
Thoughts on the wattpad Ao3 situation?
teaboot answered:
[Re: facing new censorship restrictions on Wattpad, Wattpad users are fleeing to AO3, where a portion of them appear to be trying to impose censorship restrictions]
As an abuse survivor whose primary connection to the world was the internet, I first learned that what I was experiencing was abuse by finding a fic I was reading had that tagged.
Then, experiencing a morbid mix of fascination and denial and desperation to contextualize my expriences, I then went through about a hundred different pics with that tag until I could say out loud to myself, “These behaviours are abusive. This is abuse. Thousands of other people have agreed it is not normal.”
Once I had it in me to suspect, and once I had the language I needed to pinpoint what was wrong, I was able to branch out. Differentiate between emotional abuse and teasing, psychological abuse and nomal behaviour. How my behaviour emulated these things, and why it was unhealthy, and what I should correct in myself to avoid becoming like the people who hurt me.
I wasn’t being sexually abused, but if I had been, I imagine this discovery process would have been exactly the same. Accidental, then purposeful, then comparing, researching, validating, and seeking help.
As an individual, there’s a lot of shit that icks me the fuck out, that I would find incredibly unpleasant and distressing to read. So I don’t read it. And, would you look at that, there’s a handy-dandy way for me to see up front which stories or poems or whatever include those things, and I don’t have to get blindsided.
People are going to write about whatever they want to write about whether you let them use a website to do it or not, and trying to stop them won’t stop them, it’ll just be harder to find. And for some of us, that messed up, awful, uncomfortable shit was very important to find.
There’s a lot more I can say about censorship. About the implications of coddling the public, stigmatizing real-world experiences, the foot in the door that allows us to spread from one little nasty thing we all agree is bad to everything else from gay sex to cross dressing to boys wearing pink, the obscene to the innocuous.
But.
If I may lower myself to entertain the argument that “Oh, but if you write about these awful things, you must have the heart of an abuser! You must have the heart of a murderer! You must have the heart of a rapist!”
Then I will ask the person who believes this to consider:
Would you rather have a monster who you can’t see, or hear, or sense, who is always there, always thinking its monstrous thoughts, making its monstrous plans, out of sight and hidden away until you happen to stumble across it unexpected in the dark?
Or would you rather it stay outside, in a clearly marked enclosure reading “MONSTER! DO NOT ENTER! MONSTER INSIDE!” where you can see it and avoid it, knowing exactly where it is?
Just, you know. My fucked up freak opinion
