an increasingly irksome scenario
an underage person on tumblr, emphatically: IT’S BAD AND WRONG FOR ADULTS TO WRITE SEXUAL CONTENT ABOUT TEENAGERS OR STORIES WHERE DARK THINGS HAPPEN IN ROMANTIC/SEXUAL CONTEXTS OR FICS WHERE THE CHARACTERS ARE ENEMIES IN CANON BECAUSE THINK OF THE CHILDREN, IF YOU DO YOU’RE A PAEDOPHILE WHO CONDONES ABUSE
me, in an imploring whisper: you are literally underage. if all adults were fully committed to the same reductive, simplistic morality you’re using to demonise narrative concepts outside your current emotional framework, you would be banned from this conversation entirely, because you are underage. the idea that only those aged between 14-17 can write romantic or sexual content about characters in that age bracket (because it would be Wrong and paedophilic for anyone older to do so) means you’re effectively arguing that teens aren’t old enough to have any true sexual agency. as you’ve likewise decided that writing about a sexual act is morally equivalent to committing that act, by your own logic, you aren’t old enough or adult enough or sexually mature enough to be writing about sexual anything in the first place - in which case, nobody should be allowed to write such stories. I absolutely want you to be able to set boundaries around your sexual experiences and to engage safely with your developing sexual identity on your own terms while still remaining informed, but you also need to acknowledge that sexual development is part of becoming an adult, not an exciting new facet of childhood; and as such, venturing publicly into this arena via fandom, ficwriting or other narrative/public avenues means you are going to encounter adults. if you are not ready to take this step, that’s fine! go always at your own pace! but please, for the sake of everyone, learn to tell the difference between your immediate personal comfort levels with particular adult concepts and actual moral or criminal transgressions made by adults. your discomfort with a particular concept is valid without the concept itself being Wrong.consider the following: If a teenager is telling you that the preoccupation that some adults seem to have with writing/consuming content that that either romanticizes abuse or graphically depicts underage characters having sex is making them uncomfortable and could harmful to others maybe you should spend some time actually thinking about Why That Is
Instead of making the assumption that anyone under 18 is just too stupid and naive to understand what they’re talking about
If a minor tells you that you’re making them uncomfortable you Need to reflect on that and examine your actions/behaviors and any possible harmful consequences you might not have been previously aware off, instead of dismissing them outright and Mocking Them.
an honestly, if someone calls you a pedophile maybe its because you’re acting like one
sincerely, a fucking adult
Nowhere have I said that people under eighteen are stupid and naive. What frustrates me is when underage teens enter adult spaces - like, for instance, AO3 and most of fandom - and complain that those spaces are making them uncomfortable just by dint of existing. Fics that contain graphic sex of any kind are marked as explicit for a reason; if an underage reader is going to ignore the TOS and the tags and proceed regardless, then they are accepting responsibility for curating their own experience, and that is not the fault of whichever content they encounter. To then argue that the content shouldn’t have existed in the first place because they weren’t ready to see it is a means of trying to retroactively shift that accepted responsibility back to another person, but linear time doesn’t work like that. A teenager making a mistake is a normal part of human development; arguing that the mistake must really be someone else’s fault because the teenager doesn’t like the consequences - that, I would argue, is what it means to treat teenagers as stupid and naive.
If an adult is told that the way they’re interacting with an actual minor is making that minor uncomfortable? Fuck yeah, the adult should listen! But this is manifestly not the same as a minor wandering into an adult space, looking at things marked ADULT and then telling the creator, “Hey, this makes me uncomfortable and if you don’t stop you’re a paedophile.”
The “preoccupation” that some adults - or some teens, even! - have with writing about abusive relationships or underage sex is, quite often, a means of processing their own traumas. I know people who’ve written their own past abuse of all sorts into fics, or who, in writing about bad or questionable or maybe just sexual things happening to teenagers, are speaking to or thinking of their own past selves. There’s unpleasant shit I experienced as a teen, or which my friends experienced at the same age, that’s had me look for catharsis both in writing and reading fic - and in novels too, for that matter. So when, as an adult, I make the decision to ignore the tags or take a risk and click through to a fictional story that ends up containing something I find awful or upsetting and which I personally would never, ever have written, I accept that there’s a difference between “I don’t like this” and “this shouldn’t ever have existed.”
The relationship between a creator’s work and their beliefs IRL is complex at the best of times. I could write an entire set of essays about the difference between fanfic and original fiction; how our default political/cultural assumptions invariably influence our writing even in fandom; how the tagging system unique to fanfic requires a writer to pass judgement on the relationships they write in a way that other mediums do not and, as a result, allows the reader to trust that the writer is portraying (for instance) an abusive relationship, not because they don’t know what abuse looks like, but precisely because they do; how fantasising about something in fiction is more often done because we don’t want to do it in real life; on and on and on. In fact, I’ve written a lot about this stuff elsewhere, because it’s important and meaty and interesting. Which is why I’m so goddamn tired of seeing tumblr discourse ignore all the context and history and nuance because a fifteen-year-old was upset by some Sheith fanart and therefore the 40k people who clicked like on that post are paedophiles.
Also, if we could stop tossing around the word “paedophile” as though it’s in any way a synonym for “person who wrote/drew a squicky thing about teenagers that I didn’t like,” that would be just peachy.
Sincerely, a queer parent who is Fed Up
(via monotropauniflora)
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