Whenever people go on about how AO3 doesn’t deserve donations because they host “ch*ld p*rn”, i*ncest, etc. and basically everything else they don’t like, I can’t help but to be like 

Low key FFN has the same shit… You can’t just write MA or explicit stories. FFN doesn’t ban specific ships (since that’s basically the basis of calling it in*est or C* or p*do) or shows just like AO3 doesn’t ban specific ships or shows.

On FFN you just can’t write MA stories. However, similarities tend to end there.

AO3 allows you to actually have content filters. On FFN, you just have to rely on the author putting it in the summary. 

AO3 also actively fights to help keep fanfiction and fanworks free. Anyone who complains about this obviously hasn’t had to survive when FFN purged a crap ton of fanfictions because of authors like Anne Rice who basically want No Fandoms. 

Ofc a lot of people say that AO3 is a “haven” for basically all the bad shit because AO3 doesn't actively disallow or ban it. If you haven’t noticed, trying to say “this is allowed but this isn’t” when it comes to fanworks often leads to a clusterfuck of nuance, loopholes, and contradictions. There are far too many uploads happening and users to be able to filter out each individual chapter and story submitted in a timely manner. 

And a lot of the “bad” tags on AO3, aren’t even smut (or lemons as older fandom people tend to call them) or romanticizing it… They’re tagged because they depict it so people can avoid it regardless of whether or not it is treated as something that is absolutely terrible and the worst thing you can do to someone. Hell, on AO3, people tend to over tag just so everyone has the best chance possible to avoid any content they don’t like. 

A lot of the “P*do” and r*pe stuff on AO3 is from survivors who wrote explicit stories about a character overcoming the abuse and don’t romanticize or justify it. The other “p*do” shit people say is hosted on AO3 is just ships they don’t like with an incredibly small percentage of it being actual lemons.  

The reason why people migrated from FFN to AO3 isn’t that they just wanted a place to freely post their lemons. They wanted a place where they didn’t have to worry about being censored. It’s why the MA tag is so important and why many people left FFN. 

The MA tag isn’t just lemons. It’s anything that is inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. Sometimes fandom writers want to create or enjoy something that is purely adult in nature. Adult in nature =/= lemons. Adult in nature is anything that is explicit, I.e in detail and without any room for confusion or implications. 

AO3 also has a better filtering system where you can search for things based on archive tags like F/F, Multi, etc. And yeah, even though AO3 lacks some features that should be innate-like a permanent exclude/blacklist, they aren’t shy about letting people know about 3rd party applications like AO3 Savior if it is a feature that they need. 

It sucks there aren’t certain features, but I’d rather have a feature that isn’t there and that I have to use a third party app to have the feature than to have a feature that doesn’t work and breaks the site. looking at you Tumblr. 

However, even though their filtering system isn’t permanent, it’s far better than FFN as it allows you to exclude just about anything you can include, whereas FFN only allows you to exclude certain characters and a genre.

People are mad or saying AO3 doesn’t deserve donations, support, etc. for basically hosting content they don’t like while FFN is basically the same way… only without the MA tag and with far more restrictions on the actual content you can post minus ships and fandoms. The MA tag or ability to have one is incredibly important to fandoms because it gives adult content creators a space or a way of creating adult material and adult material isn’t always lemons and lewds. 

Sometimes adult content is serious, direct, and in-depth depictions of domestic abuse and violence. Sometimes adult content is direct and deliberate depictions of r*pe and unhealthy s*x and relationships. Sometimes adult content is dealing with adult fears such as job loss, homelessness, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. in a way that isn’t suitable for minors. It isn’t exclusively about ships and shit you don’t like. Don’t like it? It’s almost obnoxiously easy to exclude them from the search on AO3.

If you hate AO3 for hosting “p*dophilia”, r*ape and/non-con, etc, you obviously haven’t been able to live through the fall of Livejournal, FFN, the cease and desist and authors like Anne Rice who come after fandom creators looking to sue them, etc. when 90% of the criticism of AO3 boils down to the site owners not removing ships, fandoms, etc. that people don’t like. They haven’t had to deal with walking on eggshells that someone will report two characters kissing as inappropriate for children and site holders deciding to remove it. 

Because the issue with saying “they should remove r*pe fics” is that not everything is a f*tish lemon. 

If I write a story that involves graphic depictions of r*pe and sexual violence, guess where it falls? Yup, a r*pe fic even though it isn’t a f*tish r*pe fic. Guess what gets removed if AO3 decides to give in and remove anything related to? Yup a non f*tish r*pe fic that doesn’t romanticize or justify r*pe. 

Not everything with an underage, r*pe/non-con, etc. tag is something that is romanticized ship stuff. Some people tag depictions of it so people can avoid it. Why? Because if someone is triggered by r*pe, it does not matter whether the depiction is implied, direct, romanticized, realistic, or depicted negatively, etc. they are still triggered by it. 

Same goes for anything else people are squick towards or triggered by. When you go on crusades about how they need to remove bad and problematic fiction, you basically shoot anyone who wants to make a realistic, dark and in-depth story in the head just to get rid of a bit of f*tish or ship crap because they feel like they shouldn’t have to blocklist or avoid certain tags, content warnings, etc. 

They want a place free of any gross, bad, etc. ships and people and a place that is 100% Fandom Pure despite the fact that no such place exists because believe it or not, there is always something someone thinks is bad, gross, etc. and they’re gunna be crying when their “precious pure ships uwu” get the ban hammer should a site ever come into existence because people found a problem with it or when they can’t write certain AUs or content because someone may find it problematic to even so much as mention that it exists. 

There is a reason why many experience fandom creators don’t flock towards sites that are like that… because they know at any point they could be the ones getting the ax and why they tend to flock towards sites that allow anything to be posted or hosted provided that it isn’t illegal in the state/country/province/etc. that the site itself is hosted in.

Also… FYI… on FFN you can host the same things… you can only just imply that it happened and you aren’t allowed to basically make it MA… which is arguably more dangerous towards people as opposed to being able to protect them. And without the content warnings of AO3, survivors and people with certain triggers or grossed out by certain content are in far more danger because of the fact that not allowing those content tags to exist doesn’t stop people from making it… It just only leaves people to imply that it happened and people often won’t put it in the tags or summary that it contains something violent or graphic because they risk getting removed despite the fact that the M rating exists on FFN. 

Idk about y’all, but I’d much rather be on a site that hosts fictional shit that I don’t like and I can avoid and blacklist it as opposed to being on a site that I have to walk on eggshells wondering whether or not I can appropriately tag something so people can avoid it while also not putting myself in danger. 

and before you say “Well if it is potentially triggering, just don’t post it”

Anything can be potentially triggering to anyone. Self harm, depression, mental illness, homophobia, racism, etc. and when you fall into the whole “If it’s possibly triggering, don’t post it” you basically are saying “Don’t create anything other than a coffee shop AU”

whenever we have these conversations I think it’s critical we talk about actual numbers that something is “full of”. If you were to combine all Incest, rape (dubcon AND noncon), and pedophilia fics together, that number would make up less than 1-3% of the entirety of AO3′s catalog. It’s really less than 1% but I’m being super generous and saying that it’s possible up to two-thirds of fics aren’t tagged (which I straight up don’t believe). 

It’s ridiculous to me that 3% of a catalog is enough in some people’s minds to condemn an entire website. 

From Kasia Babis.

This is important to grasp.

My fellow American followers, read this! This is what created the economic prosperity for our parents’ generation!

Thinking critically about information - Just Do It!

From the Global Digital Citizen Foundation.

Homophobia and racism in Wattpad Forums

This is a private message I received on Wattpad about two hours ago. The moderator who runs the “story services” forum took the time out of her day to tell me to stop using the flagging system is the same moderator who thinks discriminating against LGBT and POC books is simply a “preference.”

Wattpad TOLERATES BIGOTRY IN ITS FORUMS and has done so for YEARS without any progress, despite the fact that discrimination and hate speech are technically against the community guidelines.

These are screenshots from the three threads I flagged:

1) homophobia

2) homphobia and racism

3) homophobia

Wattpad claims that it promotes a safe and welcoming environment for all of its writers, yet it continues to throw its LGBT and POC authors under the bus. 

If you’re a wattpad user, consider 1) flagging posts in the “story services” forum if theyre discriminating against minorities, 2) contact the moderators (”community ambassadors”) in charge of these forums via private message, and 3) participate in or make threads in the “wattpad feedback” forums regarding this issue. I have a thread open here but I’m sure it will be closed soon because these moderators have a history of targetting users that show discontent with their moderation.

If you’re not a wattpad user, consider reblogging this post or showing it to your Wattpad friends. 

Please consider spreading this info folks, I know Wattpad is still very popular but this deserves more attention.

That looks like the people just don't want to read slash, they're not saying it's bad or anything. While some of those people probably are homophobic, the posts themselves aren't. Flagging them is, in fact, wasting the mods' time. You should ask those people why they don't want to read LGBT content, and then if they say something actually homophobic—not just "I don't want to read it" or "I'm just really into het ships atm"—flag that.

Also, it sounds ridiculous to say "discriminate against books." This isn't even a publishing house where that would start to be an issue and affect real people. It's a fic site. Wait till the people do something actually bad, and don't waste the mods' time until then.

so… now that I got into ace discourse territorry, might as well take the plunge: I have a suspicion that a lot of exclusionists are cishet. Like, waaay more than I initially thought.

Many of them sound like: 1. They have an idealized notion of oppression that they see more as social capital than anything else.  It reminds me of how emo kids were always accusing each other of being posers due to their own feelings of inadequacy. As if they’re insecure about not being ‘oppressed enough’ and project that onto this group of people. 2. They have no idea of what not being cishet in society is actually like. Seriously. Their whole perspective is so normative it’s hard to believe they truly understand and empathize with the experience of being ostracized by society. ex: the whole ‘you don’t need labels’ argument only makes sense from the perspective of someone who doesn’t have to worry about their identity being accepted. ex2: ‘you don’t have to talk about it’/ ‘nobody cares about your sexuality’. as if everybody isn’t just going to assume you’re straight or you should consider that assumption a privilege or if you were True Lgbt TM nobody would make that assumption in the first place. ex3: their fixation on calling aces cishet as if they’re all lying or they’re mistaken about their identity is as normative as it gets. that’s the logic that is at the root of horrible things like conversion therapy or corrective rape: ‘it’s impossible for you to be different, you claiming to be different bothers me so much I need to make you realize you’re not’.

I’m not saying these people are the majority of exclusionists or anything like that, I honestly can’t tell how many of them would fit this description. Of course I can’t know for sure what is going through people’s heads, they could have a lot of different reasons I haven’t considered. I’m just saying: if a lot of cis straight bigots who just want to shit on people for being ‘cringey’ (i.e. deviant) are using social justice language and oppression olympics to disguise it as ‘discourse’ I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

#it’s so obvious they named it based on how we inconvenience them rather than what it actually does to us

There it the fuck is.

autogynephilia is a weird concept because like…quite a few nondysphoric cis women have it. some nonbinary people have it. it’s the clinical term for liking your own damn body. yet when trans women dare to like their own bodies, it’s an attack on cis womanhood and something to be demonized and medicalised. gotta love transmisogyny huh

Just FYI, people have actually studied this professionally. By using the commonly accepted criteria for evaluating autogynephilia, one study found that 93% of cis women could be classified as autogynephiles. (source)

They created a survey scale called the Autogynephile Scale for Women, built from the questions used to study it in trans women. Using the common definition of autogynephilia, 93% of the respondents fit the diagnosis. Using a much more restrictive requirement of frequent arousal from multiple items on the scale, they still got back a 23% match rate.

So yeah.

It’s really important for us to talk about how autogynephilia isn’t actually a thing in its own right. It’s just someone inventing a word to talk about female sexuality in a way that shames and others trans women.

In particular the cishet man who wrote the book which put this theory forward (Ray Blanchard) is firstly a fucking sensationalist hack and secondly explicitly used it to attack trans lesbians while fetishizing (but still misgendering) straight trans women.

And like, wow a cishet man who makes money off antagonizing trans people and lesbians. What a surprise.

Hey, human rights activists, looking for something to rage about?

Because Betsy devos is trying to kill the Special Olympics!

She’s also proposing taking:

- 51 million dollars from programs to help autistic people

- 7.5 million from the institute of the blind

- 5 million from resources to get books for blind children

Betsy devos is a cartoonishly awful monster of a person and it’s clear that she is out to get the disabled community. Don’t leave us out of your activism. Don’t leave us to fight this on our own.

And for the love of god vote Democrat in 2020

Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

unfriendly reminder that dehumanizing people - even the worst people - is a shitty tactic and you should employ it basically never. 

look I’m too tired to explain this properly but when you erase the humanity of the scummiest people on the planet you erase the fact that the all those shitty, shitty things were done by a person. a real human chose to do those things. you erase humanity’s capacity for evil. you misrepresent reality. that’s…really not good. at all. and in addition to that dehumanization as a tactic has always been used against marginalized people - to harm and kill us in vast numbers - and turning it against bad people is also just pushing the idea that it’s an okay rhetorical tool to use, and that will always end up harming marginalized groups

Saying, “those people aren’t human; they’re monsters,” both avoids placing blame for how they got that way, and abdicates responsibility for making changes in the future to prevent more people from being like that.

Assuming that “rapists are monsters” means not blaming parents, schools, and the media for teaching boys that “a man’s got needs and it’s a woman’s job to provide sex!” It means pretending that there’s no way we could discourage rape in the future, no way to teach young men not to become rapists.

It also dodges the question of whether some of them could be redeemed, whether they could learn to understand what they did wrong and not do it in the future. But even if you don’t care about criminals’ redemption possibilities, you should care about creating a society that produces fewer criminals.

And we can’t do that, if people claim that criminality is a matter of “evil souls” instead of a combination of societal influences and personal choices, and how people learn to be criminals (or “monsters,” who may be doing horrible things that aren’t technically crimes) based on the consequences provided - or not provided - for their early actions.

Just Anti Things #why are y’all like this?

are you really going to ship a 14 year old with a 16 year old? what do you mean that’s a normal high school relationship?

Also since lately there’s been a lot of talk about how it’s inappropriate to speculate on someone’s masturbatory habits, as well as fic discourse, I’d like to just throw one more reminder into the ring: just because someone writes erotica/porn fanfiction does not mean they have consented to hearing about your arousal. The same goes for drawn art or erotic roleplay or whatever. Unless there is an agreement between you and that person that you can disclose personal details of their arousal, they are not obligated to hear it.

I say this because sometimes I get comments on my fanfic that for me, personally, cross a line. Comments like “this made me so wet” or “god this is going in the spank bank” or “I’m gonna schlick to this” are for me, personally, too much information. I do not need to know my fic has aroused you or that you’re going to masturbate to it. I have zero interest in that, and reading comments like those actually make me immensely uncomfortable. Comments like “this was hot” or “I looove this” or “you write sex stuff real good” are fine. To me, they don’t indicate any breeching of my personal boundaries, because they don’t indicate anything about the reader’s personal sexual needs. But comments indicating to me my fic turned you on? No thank you. We do not have that kind of contract, and I have not consented to it merely because I have written erotica, and I appreciate an understanding of that. 

Some authors may be ok with them, but unless you know who those authors are, I would ask you kindly to err on the side of caution with what you disclose in your comments. If all else fails, “I really enjoyed this” is usually plenty sufficient. 

It's kinda like the difference between complimenting someone and sending them an unrequested dick pic, ya know.

anti-fujoshi when they get called racist:

Also see; I’m not homophobic/misogynistic! I’m a lgbt/queer woman!

An Idea To Prevent A Nuclear War

“My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.” - Richard Fisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1981)

Never forget that part of the reason this system was never implemented was that when he presented it to his colleagues, their response was IIRC “George, that’s terrible! If he has to take an innocent life, he may never press the button.”