What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

fozmeadows:

ISTG if I see one more fandom post on this hellsite aggressively misidentify something as paedophilia I’m going to flip every goddamn table.

Consider my metaphoric table well and truly flipped.

As of right now, I’ve officially reached my limit for things being called paedophilia that are not, in fact, paedophilic. Specifically: I am sick of seeing fictional relationships where one party is in their late teens and the other their twenties being called paedophilic by default, as though it’s impossible for such a pairing to be anything else. I am likewise sick of seeing anyone who enjoys, creates or otherwise participates in such narratives being called a paedophile apologist or sympathiser. I understand that any conversation about what is or is not paedophilia is going to be inherently uncomfortable for a lot of people, and that’s as it bloody well should be, given the subject matter. But it’s precisely because both the crime and the accusation are so very, very serious that the topic needs to be clearly discussed.

Let’s get the definition clear at the outset. Paedophilia is, very specifically, a sexual attraction to pubescent or prepubescent bodies, coupled with the abuse and manipulation – whether physical, sexual or emotional – of a person too young or too immature to properly give consent or understand what’s happening to them, such that the predator either loses interest when their victim reaches an increased level of physical and/or emotional maturity, or goes to extraordinary lengths to keep the victim vulnerable, dependent, frightened and controlled. As such, paedophilia is always child abuse. It is always rape or sexual assault. It involves abuse of power, abuse of trust, and an age difference between the parties, and is invariably something the abuser endeavours to keep secret.

Given these facts, it makes absolute sense that many people have a strong aversion to any relationship, whether real or fictional, in which one or more of the following things occur:

·         a power imbalance between the parties, such as between a mentor and student;

·         a contextual gulf of experience, such as a sexually confident and experienced person dating a shy virgin;

·         an abuse of trust, such as one party deliberately withholding information that would cause their partner to make different choices;

·         a demand of secrecy, such as one party insisting the relationship not be made public;

·         an age gap, such as a teenager dating a twentysomething.

Nobody is obliged to enjoy stories which feature these elements, nor does that lack of enjoyment require justification. But by the same token, a person who enjoys stories which feature one, some or all these elements does not need to justify themselves, either. Because while fiction is undeniably powerful and meaningful – and while the proliferation of stereotypes and toxic tropes can cause harm at both the individual and collective levels – it’s equally true that enjoying or exploring something in fiction is not the same as condoning it in real life. Depiction is not synonymous with endorsement, and at the end of the day, the things that happen in fiction do not happen to real human people, even though reading about them can still impact the real human audience. Negotiating this fact is inherently difficult, as I’ve had occasion to say before, but while it can be tempting to deal in binary absolutes, the sheer complexity of the human condition will inevitably render that process flawed.

And thus the problem of unilaterally declaring teenage/twentysomething relationships to all be paedophilia: it simply isn’t accurate. Does my definition of paedophilia potentially encompass many such relationships? Yes, it does. But does it automatically encompass every such relationship? No, it doesn’t. Nor does such a relationship have to be pure and perfect in every way in order to avoid being paedophilic, because – to put it bluntly – being an asshole is not the same as being a paedophile. Having a specific, predatory attraction to malleable, vulnerable, immature youth is one thing; simply being a shitty partner for different reasons is quite another, even in contexts where a gap of age or experience might make the problem worse. Are we still right to criticise those relationships, especially if we feel they’re being wrongly held up as examples of healthy romantic practice? Absolutely! But in this respect, your choice of terminology is really fucking important. Simply labelling anything that squicks you out with an age gap as paedophilia might be expedient, but that doesn’t make it right.

More and more often in fandom, I’m encountering variants of the following argument: that, because twentysomethings are at a different developmental stage of their lives to teenagers, it’s completely implausible that any twentysomething could like, relate to, connect with, or otherwise be interested in a teen unless their motives were fundamentally predatory. And look: I understand the place of worry this view is coming from. Predatory adults exist, and the consequences of that fact are real. Every time we hear about a teacher seducing a student, a teenage girl falling pregnant to a much older man, a chickenhawk preying on baby gays at Pride or some creepy religious denomination pushing for teen girls to remain ignorant of their bodies while submissively marrying older, more ‘worldly’ men (to take just a few examples), we’re reminded anew of how truly shitty people can be. In the real world, there’s a lot of pernicious bullshit associated with the sexualisation of teenagers, and we need to acknowledge that.

But fiction, by its very nature, exists to poke at the what-ifs and grey areas of human life: to make us confront the complexities of the individuals who make up the collective whole. And while there’s a great deal of value in discussing the symbiotic relationship between the real and the fictional, including the ability of one to both influence and be influenced by the other, this discourse is not helped by making sweeping, fearful generalisations that conflate the narrative with the actual.

Here’s something I know for a fact: the relationship I had at the start of university – which began when I was a hair shy of eighteen, with a guy who was six years older – was emphatically not paedophilic. We dated for the better part of two years, and he was a douche: he was even, at times, a dick about the age difference. The relationship worked in some ways and was a failure in many others, which is why it ultimately ended. But even though it involved a whole lot of fuckery – and even though there was an age gap, which was at times salient to the fuckery – it was not paedophilia, because paedophile is a word we reserve for a very specific type of person, one who has committed a very specific type of predatory sex crime against a very specific type of victim, and it does not fit even the outset of that relationship. Paedophile is not a handy synonym for older asshole boyfriend, and while any accurate Venn diagram of the matter would certainly include a field of overlap between the two categories, that they are still two categories should not be in question.      

Another personal example: during the period when I dated the six-years-older douche, I also got to know his best friend and housemate, a man who is ten years my senior. By the time the douche and I broke up, the friend and I had grown really close; so much so that, within a month, we started dating. I was nineteen at the start of that relationship; my partner was twenty-nine. We’ve been together now for the better part of thirteen years and married for a decade; we also have a five-year-old son. And every time I see a post that snarkily posits the impossibility of someone in their twenties being able to find any platonic value or interest in the life of an older teenager because age difference and life stages, such that any romantic/sexual interest would have to be disconnected from their personhood and therefore inherently predatory – every time I see posts where people think it’s Super Weird And Creepy for adults to participate in the fandoms they helped build because being older than twenty means you should get off the internet and take up pottery – I want to flip every goddamn table in existence, because that’s not how humans work.

The fact that we currently live in a highly age-segregated society – the fact that our secondary school systems are overwhelmingly based on enforcing this weird, rigid grade hierarchy that’s arbitrarily tied to age instead of ability or interest – is hugely anomalous to how we are as a species. For most of human history, teenagers, and especially older teenagers, have been seamlessly involved in the adult world, not because we’ve hitherto failed to recognise the fact that All Teenagers Are Children Who Need To Be Segregated From Adults, but because it’s a demonstrable fact that being a teenager means transitioning to adulthood, and that transition is a whole lot easier if, instead of roping someone off from every adult thing until after an arbitrary date and then throwing them in the deep end, you instead let them level up in stages, in awareness of the fact that different people learn and progress in different arenas at different rates, and always have done, and always will do.

That we currently have a culture designed to operate in opposition to this principle does nobody any favours – though it does, perhaps, explain why so many people who’ve internalised the age segregation social schematic as Normal might struggle to understand how or why people of different ages could randomly meet in the first place, let alone find common ground. If you’re brought up to socialise only within your own age bracket at school; if you lack an extended family or social group where people of different ages regularly mingle; if it never really occurs to you to socialise with someone older or younger until the opportunity of doing so in a potentially romantic context is thrust upon you, and where your only real exposure to the idea of dating up or down in age involves warnings about why it’s a bad idea – then yeah, of course that’s going to seem like a shady concept in fiction. But especially when a story is set somewhere beyond your immediate frame of reference, regardless of whether that setting is real or imaginary, your expectations aren’t always going to map to what happens on page, which is kind of why we tell stories in the first place: to see things differently.      

Look: I know that the prospect of assessing maturity on a contextual, case-by-case basis is discomforting for a lot of people, because it means acknowledging the presence of subjective judgement in issues we’d prefer be black and white. And I definitely know – from personal experience, even! – that the world is full of awful, predatory adults who look on teenagers as easy targets. But you cannot act as though every teenager in the world is so young and naïve and vulnerable, every adult so jaded and gross and manipulative, that there’s no reason for one to enjoy the other’s company, whether platonically or romantically, that isn’t inherently suspect, and especially not in fiction.

Words have meanings, and those meanings have power. By all means, keep your objections to particular fictional relationships, but if you’re going to go on the offensive, get your goddamn terminology right, because it matters.

HERE ENDETH THE RANT.  

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