The problem of antis

[enemyofperfect]

It's not that I think it's okay to attack people for their ships or their fictional kinks. It's just that I feel like it isn't great to yell at unhappy teenagers either.

Let me back up a little.

So, there's a post that's going around on tumblr. Mostly by this point it's a resounding defense of the AO3 as a remarkable project operating on a shoestring budget, but it started out with a 15 year old complaining that the Archive has exceeded its latest fundraising goal, while at the same time being a website that lets you post porn about characters who are under 16. Unsurprisingly, this led to a lot of shouting.

What gets me is that this kind of happens all the time. Not this exact situation, obviously, but there are so many tumblr fights along these lines that both sides seem to view as generational: there's the damn kids (who run from their mid-teens to just over twenty, as far as I can tell) arguing that some things are too awful to write about, and then there's the evil corrupting ancient adults, meaning the rest of us, who find that idea variously laughable, offensive, and/or dangerous. That's how the battle lines are drawn.

And I feel like I understand why the children's crusade contingent sometimes behaves badly, because I too was once a young person with more moral fervor than common sense, but what I can't wrap my head around is why so many people in their thirties and above seem to think it's okay to respond with mockery and personal attacks.

Sometimes the justification is that the teenagers shouldn't be vocally wrong in public if they aren't ready for the kind of heat that brings. But what the heck? Since when is fandom a pro-victim blaming space? What is or is not prudent for an emotionally vulnerable teenager to do has nothing to do the question of what's ethical for grown adults to do in response.

And these teenagers are emotionally vulnerable, or at least many of them openly identify themselves as such... which I guess could be dismissed as a rhetorical ploy, but I'm not really in favor of deciding people must be lying about their mental health just because I disagree with them.

I don't know. I'm wringing my hands on DW instead of wading into it on tumblr because I have no idea what an actually constructive response to any of this would look like.

I'm solidly in the evil corrupting adult camp -- I've written noncon, and I believe passionately that it's important to be able to explore through fiction things that frighten or harm us or that can't be safely explored in other ways -- but I feel for these kids. They're young and full of ideas and they're probably a little bit terrified, don't you think? If white Christian middle-aged men were stirring up a moral panic about the depravity of fandom, that would be one thing, but half the time, these are literal minor children grappling with the social norms of the online culture they're still in the process of growing up in.

I get that existing in fandom isn't volunteering to be someone's surrogate mom. I get that a lot of fans have reason to put up hackles in response to being told to self-censor or play nice. I just wish that, for as much as we repeat the words "don't like, don't read", we could extend that same courtesy when the temptation arises to be cruel to a bunch of teens who are still figuring out what to believe.

(I wish I knew a way for those kids to feel safe.)

Comments

[violsva]

I feel like tumblr amplifies everything, by feeling like a private space while in fact being a very public one. People are simultaneously talking to some combination of themselves, just their followers, the original poster, everyone who checks the tags they used, and the entire internet, and may not be aware of half of those.

And possibly there really aren't enough warnings. Tumblr doesn't let you make a post unrebloggable; AO3 has a standard warning page for all Mature and Explicit works but lets you turn off seeing it no matter how old you are. We have an infrastructure, now, which gives people in fandom access to an enormous amount of information, including information the creator may have specifically wanted to limit access to.

It's much better for readers than fic being hidden in locked journals, but it means you can't hide your ranting in locked journals either. (I mean, you can. I do. But you can't do that and also have your tumblr friends see it and commiserate.)

The public/private divide in fandom is a lot less solid than it could be.

And while the children are in online culture now, that's not necessarily where they've been growing up before then. There is a lot of culture shock in going directly from a perhaps very sheltered upbringing to fandom. And there isn't any easing in to it; as soon as you find AO3 you have access to all of AO3. They're not just grappling with the social norms of online culture; they're also grappling with the social norms of offline culture.

And frequently that is conservative Christian American offline culture. Which I suspect is a terrifying place to grow up in already. So they don't have any kind of offline support to go to that won't tell them that everything they're looking at is evil.

I don't know either. Given the set up we have, ideally the adults in fandom would either step away from teenagers or not mock them. But we do have this set up that assumes everyone is an adult, even people who don't know yet what being an adult means for them.

[enemyofperfect]

This is such a good and thoughtful comment, this is the best thing that could have come of my flailing post.

I'm especially struck by your point that offline culture is also a part of what these kids are dealing with, which is absolutely true and undoubtedly a large part of what's so frightening, and which also reminds me of a post I saw a while back about moralities that equate disgust with morality and think that merely being exposed to a thing is enough to seduce someone to it. When I became an atheist, for a while I believed as passionately as my Christian mother that everyone ought to believe what I did; I shouldn't be surprised if other teens carry over other parts of the morality they may have been taught, like the belief that dangerous concepts are inherently corrupting and can't be safely explored.

I do wonder if there are better structures we could put into place, too -- not that I want censorship, but when young people say that the current systems have hurt them, I feel like we have to at least listen. The recent update to make it easier to exclude unwanted content from AO3 searches is one good step, at least. I don't know what else might help.

And of course you're right about the public/private distinction, or rather the lack of one, as well. After years on tumblr, I still don't feel like I know how to navigate discussions on that site, but maybe no one really does -- posts can explode so far outside their original context that it's impossible to really predict what responses you might end up getting. Which is presumably all the more unsettling when the topic is as fraught as this.

I still don't have any good answers here, but I also feel like you've enhanced the quality of my confusion, which I appreciate.

[violsva]

And your post has a level of empathy that I would like to see a lot more of in online discussions!

I saw a post, which I now can't find, that was someone (probably someone on the damn kids side, though I didn't go up to check) saying "Of course you can apply morality to shipping, you should apply morality to everything" .. but the person who had reblogged it pointed out, the problem here is that everyone involved is actually applying their morality to shipping, it's just that they have different ideas of what is the moral priority here. Which of course is why it gets so heated on the adult side too, because they (we) feel this is a moral issue and that we are protecting our values, those being freedom of expression and diversity (? I'm not sure diversity is what I mean here. Tolerance. Openness. Lack-of-kink-shaming. Minding one's own business).

I hope AO3's new filters will help, at least to let people feel like they have some kind of power over what they see. Although it does kind of surprise me, that this is flaring up right after AO3 has implemented a major change that really does make it easier to avoid content you don't want to see.

[enemyofperfect]

I guess there's been plenty of time for people to get entrenched in the idea that some things shouldn't be available at all. Maybe having to specify what they don't want to see feels like being put into a marked category? I wonder if some sort of built in "safe search" option would feel less alienating -- to some, while inevitably feeling more so to others.

Because you're absolutely right that this is about morality on both sides, if only the moral right to be left alone as long as you aren't hurting anyone, for those of us who feel that we aren't hurting anyone. Except then I wonder if maybe I could be, accidentally, in some way that I might be able to address, but it's hard to get a clearer sense of things when the conversation is simultaneously so diffuse and so absolute.

(To be clear, none of the controversy has made me think that I shouldn't write what I want to write -- but if more detailed author's notes could provide helpful context for more troubling subject matter, say, then I would very much want to provide them, just like I try to provide accurate warnings.)

[silveradept]

I think that when you talk about creation and the anti crowd, you've hit on an important distinction, of knowing what's going on before (or realizing it as you go along) and then deciding what to do with that information and what conversations you think are best warranted. The antis seem to hold the position that there are things that, through their mere existence, are beyond the pale. As a Fandom Old (if not a Great Old One at this point), I think they're right, but they're misaimed, if that makes sense. And it might be that, as you point out in the other piece, they've grown up on a Web with less privacy and pseudonymity, and a lot more performativity than those of us on the older side. People in a panopticon behave differently than those who believe they have (and should have) at least some measure of privacy. So it might very well be that since they're always in a performance space, even the possibility of something existing out there somewhere becomes a problem because if they're not being performative enough, then it gets turned on them, and that's not good for anyone.

I'm not sure how, with the way that most social media spaces are still very public even in their more private modes, that we can give them space to have a conversation in something resembling actual privacy where they can work through what they want, and learn how to read the tags and the art of lurking (and possibly of spinning up a completely new pseud to explore those places). I think what would help them feel safe is if they could do the separation that seems natural to older fen, so they could be in a place where they could talk with each other and with supportive older folks who, even if they don't understand, have experience they can offer that might be relevant, when it's wanted. And possibly make a few mistakes and not have it get put on blast.

They essentially need the equivalent of a public library to hang out it and be themselves where there are grownups that keep an eye out for them, point them in the direction of where the resources are, and tell them when they're over the line for behavior, but otherwise just let them become the people they want to be with each other.

But that sort of thing doesn't make the advertisers money, so barring a mass migration to platforms and instances that give advertisers the middle finger, I'm not sure what can be done about it. Especially with the people who are getting really good at hiding themselves in plain sight.

[enemyofperfect]

This is such an amazing and thoughtful comment. I especially like your observation that a complete lack of any expectation of privacy might affect baseline expectations about how this kind of thing should or even can go. And you offer some possibilities that I find genuinely heartening: maybe new and safely compartmentalized pseuds could offer some people currently in the anti camp a chance to explore other mores and figure out where they feel most comfortable making their online home.

And of course you're horribly right about the question of what gets that ad money. I really don't feel like the answer can be complete age segregation: I've always learned a lot talking to people who are older than me, and increasingly I'm learning from people who are younger than me, too! But I guess the line of having some connection with older adults, while still having a chance to mess around and be a kid, is harder to walk when you're on a platform that's optimized for things to generate as much controversy as possible. As valuable as the internet has been to me and still is, I don't envy people coming of age on right it now.

[silveradept]

I thunk the oldest Millennials are the last group of people who got online when it was possible to be forgotten and to start again in a new space without too much effort. Being able to try something out and discard it if it doesn't work is an important part of gathering maturity online and off-line, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to do that in both spheres.

I don't believe age segregation is the solution, but I do think there has to be a way for them to build a space that is theirs and curate who gets invited inside, so they can really call it their space.

[enemyofperfect]

Being able to try something out and discard it if it doesn't work is an important part of gathering maturity online and off-line, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to do that in both spheres.

Yes. Even as toxic as it can get, that's one way tumblr has always seemed more welcoming to me than, say, Facebook.

I do think there has to be a way for them to build a space that is theirs and curate who gets invited inside, so they can really call it their space.

And yes to this too! That's so key to a sense of safety, to have some degree of control over what kind of audience you're likely to get. And of course that's also vanishingly rare at this point. It's a difficult situation.

[silveradept]

With the tendency for places to demand or insinuate Real Name policies, they say that there only one person that matters and that person is the one who should be protected everywhere, which is nonsense. That tumblr offers pseuds at all makes them more welcoming than Zuckerberg's Folly, but the way it's set up doesn't really do well with interaction that isn't public. And as much we would love for young people to choose more privacy-centered items, it's not like Dreamwidth has deep pockets so as to host multimedia content on the site itself.

[enemyofperfect]

Yes to all of this, unfortunately.