Anonymous asked: yes okay technically a adult fucking a 15 yr old ain't pedeophilia, it's hebephilia or whatever. but...why on earth should people be given a free pass to write fanfic, draw fanart, etc about a pairing like that?
Because it hurts no one. Because the characters aren’t real, and reading about something or drawing something fictional isn’t the same as condoning it IRL. Because teenagers experience attraction to and affection for older characters, too, and like to imagine scenarios where a character their age could be appealing to that person. Because all adults were teenagers once, and many have feelings and memories about that time in their lives, whether positive or traumatic or both, that they like to explore through fictional teenage avatars.
Because fiction doesn’t have to be wholly morally pure in content to have value or to have the right to exist. Because this conversation isn’t just about instances where the characters have sex, explicitly or otherwise, but about whether particular pairings should be “allowed”. Because if you set a rule in stone that says “no story can depict romance or sexual contact of any kind between persons under eighteen and those over twenty,” then not only do you make it impossible to tell stories that condemn rape and abuse within those parameters, or which feature frank discussions about how those sorts of relationships can occur or be dealt with in real life, or which detail actual real-world or historical events, but you also make it so that a staggering percentage of the existing literary canon is, by this definition, morally unacceptable.
An example: Lydia Bennet is fifteen at the start of Pride and Prejudice, a novel whose climax sees her married off to George Wickham, a man in his mid to late twenties. Lydia, by all accounts, is happy with this turn of events, and while we as readers have every right to criticise this aspect of the novel, even while taking the period of its creation into account, the idea that nobody can enjoy the book or argue in favour of the outcome is absurd.
Right now, I’m seeing a lot of people up in arms about Call Me By Your Name because it features a sexual relationship between a 17 year old and a 24 year old. It’s a film I haven’t seen and have no intention of seeing, and the extent of my knowledge of it is restricted to a Wikipedia summary of the book from which it’s adapted and gifsets of the film. The only dog I have in this fight is one of accurate terminology. Nobody is required to like the movie or the relationship it features. Critics are completely within their rights to write as much furious meta as they wish about how the relationship between Elio and Oliver is predatory, unhealthy, wrong, skeezy, gross and full of negative stereotypes, but calling it paedophilia is categorically wrong, because paedophile is a word with a really specific meaning - and a set diagnostic criteria, even! - which does not apply in this context.
I say again: a relationship can be predatory without being paedophilic. But right now, a frightening number of people are using the two terms interchangeably, either unaware or uncaring of the fact that, while all paedophiles are predators, not all predators are paedophiles. I get how the slip has happened: especially when you’re talking about fictional teens in fictional relationships, it’s easy to handwave the distinction as unimportant. But when it comes to fictional narratives - and I’m emphasising that word here, fictional - half the point of engaging in fandom or literary criticism is making a personal judgement about the story and its meaning.
But unlike with paedophilia, there is no DSM for what predatory behaviour is or means in a universal sense: it’s a description, not a specific medical terminology. Which means that, if you use textual evidence to aruge that a given relationship is predatory, other critics get to use their own textual interpretation to disagree, because the applicability of the term, as well as what it might mean in any given narrative context, is fundamentally up for debate. The same is not true of paedophilia: because it has such a specific, clear and detailed application, the only time you can really argue about whether or not it’s present in a story is if you, the reader/viewer, aren’t given sufficient fictional information to make a judgement.
Which is, I suspect, precisely why so many people have taken to using paedophile instead of predator when it comes to ships or narratives they strongly dislike.Putting your hypothetical interlocutor in a position where they have to argue against such a serious, declaratory statement as “this movie is about paedophilia and liking it is Bad” in order to debate you, even if you’re demonstrably wrong, is like setting a powder-keg in the middle of a room and daring someone to light it up. It’s exactly the sort of argument you don’t want to have in a threaded medium where it’s easy to get dogpiled by strangers, and especially not in a context where the continual shorthanding of predatory/unhealthy into paedophilic has quickly come to mean, in some circles, “any teen/twentysomething ship I don’t like is now paedophilic and saying otherwise will see your inbox flooded with hate.”
I feel like I already said all this at length in my original post, but basically it boils down to this: while fiction has a clear relationship with the real world, it is still ultimately fictional. Just as enjoying books about serial killers does not make you a serial killer apologist, drawing fanart or writing fanfic featuring age gap romances does not make you a paedophile. Nobody is obliged to share your taste in fiction, and it’s fine to offer criticism of tropes and stories you don’t like, but when you start tossing around one of the most shocking, powerful, serious accusations in any human culture and applying it to actual real people because of fictional pairings that don’t even meet the criteria in the first place, then yeah: I’m gonna take issue with it.
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