@ straight people: if you happen to be buying a cake for your wedding, your first question for every possible vendor needs to be “Would you provide this service for a same-sex couple?” If they say no, don’t hire them. Do right. Be allies.
You ever heard of “no shoes no shirt no service”
A store has a right to not serve you
If you were to walk into my store and talk to me with disrespectful, I wouldn’t serve you.
Just like I have the right to refuse you service because of my religion.
We allow Muslims to wear their headdresses to express their religion, but Christians aren’t allowed to refuse service to someone because of their religion?
@theshitneyspears , please explain why your rights are more important than others’.
How the hell is wearing a headdress in any way comparable to refusing service to someone?
And if you use “freedom” as your argument, then businesses have the right to refuse service, but customers also have the right to refuse their business. And that’s exactly what OP said.
Also lol they both missed the point. Do you but doing you is gonna hurt that dollar sign. We promise you that.
The point about this is religion of freedom.
It’s against our religion (mine and the baker) to support SIN. For a SINFUL EVENT. Decorating a cake with a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Against our religion.
You being black and coming into a store has no relevance to this situation
“Our religion”
I was raised in the South between Baptist and Catholic families on one end, Jewish on the other.
Also, religion and religious ‘freedom’ was literally used as a justification to deny my people rights and services for, oh, a few centuries. Also also– ‘Curse of Ham’. The Klan.
I know your religion far too well to buy this bullshit.
Need I go on? Gay people are a legal minority. Same as being Black is.
So answer my question, please.
Why does your freedom of religion supersede my freedom to go out and buy a cake??
Why does your religion have anything to do with selling me a cake??
Why does your right to buy a cake supercede someone’s freedom of religion?
Because there are laws against discrimination and your religion– which Conservatives have been using as an excuse since time immemorial to exclude and abuse any part of the ‘Out group’– does not supersede that. Yes. even after that supreme court ruling. If you read the actual ruling, they only moved in his favoor because Colorado state mishandled the case. Legally, it does not strike down any anti discrimination laws.
So yeah. You want your “religious freedom”? Do it in the fucking church.
…says the guy whose About excludes half the damn planet.
We get it. Your discrimination is good and righteous and holy. The First Amendment’s guaranteed rights of freedom of religion and of association don’t apply to Christians.
Yawn.
Oooh you’re one of those doofy people with no reading comprehension who also thinks “Half the damned planet” is oppressed for being in the majority religion with the most political power e v e r. Also lmao please point out where I said literally anything about excluding Christians from my business? As someone who is actually a tradeworker and sells a product, that is.
Again, don’t worry. I’ll wait! And, bonus– by your own logic shouldnt it be perfectly legal to tell Christians to keep it fucking moving? Regardless of what the laws say? Because I’m positive that would go over VERY well with you, huh? Y’knnow, since you have such a victim narrative that you think Christians are persecuted. Which is hysterical, by the way.
I want to break this down because I was raised to be a conservative christian and I kinda hate this argument every time it comes up.
This is aimed at what @coolmanfromthepast, @millennialrepublican, and @theconcealedweapon have said, but really I’m writing for everyone else who might read this and should know something about modern conservative Christianity in the US:
It’s not against Christianity to support someone who commits a sin. It’s just not, no matter how much religious freedom you claim. The fact of the matter is that you’re actually compelled to do good things for other people because we are all sinners and it is only through the forgiveness of Christ and emulation of his ways that we will be saved.
People living are not sinful. Nor are people getting married. Expressing your romantic love for another human being who just happens to be the same gender as you isn’t a form of sin according to the bible. The closest we get, and the only real support for Christian hatred of gay people, is in Leviticus, and it’s been well documented at this point how the popular interpretation of that book misrepresents the rules provided therein. Namely, that the prohibition wasn’t men fucking other men, it was men fucking in a woman’s bed and violating her private space.
Render unto Caesar [what is Caesar’s] is usually read as advice to obey secular laws in the land in which you reside rather than disregarding them in the name of God’s laws. In this regard a Christian baker who chooses to act as a baker to a community has accepted the responsibility of doing so without discrimination. Choosing to not serve gay people or black people or anyone that you could classify as ‘sinful’ in some way is a direct violation of this responsibility.
Really what it comes down to is that you want the to discriminate as you see fit and you just happen to be disgusted by the fact that gay people exist. This is somewhat expected, as after all conservative Christianity in the US was just as disgusted by black people. And you’ll twist the Christian bible into whatever shape you need it in to get the justification you need for your disgust.
Do you know why people so often try to remind Christians about the laws against wearing multiple fibers, against eating pork, against adultery and drunkenness? It’s because as the world has changed so too has Christianity changed. Most modern Christians are well aware of the rules and precepts from their bible that are no longer relevant, or even compassionate, in today’s world.
If you don’t feel like discriminating against someone for eating pork, you shouldn’t be discriminating against a gay couple for being gay.
If you feel like discriminating against someone for eating pork, but serve them anyway because you forgive them their sin, you shouldn’t be discriminating against a gay couple for being gay, you should be serving them anyway because you forgive them their sin.
You shouldn’t be telling other people whether or not they’re sinners. You are supposed to worry about your own sin before anyone else’s sin.
Discriminating against someone, expressing disgust at them or judging them, is sinful. It speaks to a sinful pride in the person doing the judging.
The core thing here is that you shouldn’t be discriminating against anyone. To do so is nothing but the sinful pride that is directly spoken against in the bible.
And if you don’t believe that, Jesus is pretty clear on that whole ‘forgive’ thing. Like, he may have been a revolutionary zealot who wanted to topple the Roman power structure, but he was pretty certain on the role of forgiveness in everyone’s life.
I feel like I live in a world where everyone knows that Christianity doesn’t say anything about discriminating against gay people or calling them sinners, but people do it any way and we let them get away with it. But it also disgusts me that so many Christians want to act against the words of Christ on matters of prejudice and persecution.
You really have no idea what disgusts me. Hint: It’s not gay people.
What disgusts me is the government forcing itself into my decision on who to do business with. My faith has nothing to do with it.
So you should just stop.
I do though. You told me, by supporting this line of reasoning.
If it isn’t against your religion to serve gay people, in a conversation about religious people stating that gay people are sinful and therefore should not be served, how does that read as anything other than you being disgusted by gay people?
I could understand your faith having nothing to do with it, but you came into a thread about religious discrimination and then started arguing about freedom of religion.
And last I checked, we all accept limitations on our behavior as a part of living in this society. Why should you be exempt from the laws that protect us from discrimination? Why is it forcing you to do something when the rest of us accept that it’s a responsibility instead? The responsibility to be kind and compassionate towards others?
Why do you want to get special treatment? It kinda sounds like you’re looking for a free handout, friendo.
Are you functionally illiterate?
That just sounds like quibbling coming from someone who wants a free ride.
Where I come from, being part of a community means being responsible to that community. It means not inventing reasons to refuse service to people just because you’re feeling put out.
me: this is what i believe
you: NUH UH YOU BELEIVE THIS
I never said I wanted a free ride. That’s your insane misrepresentation of my clearly-stated position, which I’ll repeat:
People should be able to do business, or not, with anyone, for any reason…or no reason at all.
Again, clearly stated.
Do me a favor. Read the words I actually write instead of filtering them through your prejudices.
^^^^ Agreed If I own a shop and don’t like your blue and tell you to fuck off, I should be able to. I’m not concerned with backlash of public opinion, but rather the government telling a shop owner how to operate.
@korrasera You seem to be kind of knowledgeable in the Bible because you were spot on with your Old Testiment examples, but you’ve completely left out any of the examples given in the New Testament, like when Paul addresses this issue in Romans 1:26-27: “For this reason God gave them up to dishonourable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.” And again in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10: “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Corinthians.” This leads me to believe that you either aren’t as knowledgeable as you claim to be (or think you are), or you’re simply cherry picking what you want to fit in with your argument. I’m not even claiming to be a Christian myself (even though I was also raised in a Christian family), but my point is that it’s incredibly dangerous to leave out or miss information because it leads to a plethora of new problems.
@coolmanfromthepast, sorry, I don’t make the rules, I just point out how you’re happy to take and take and take and refuse to give anything back. If you want to run a business and make a profit from the exchange of goods and services with people you’re required to do so in a way that doesn’t let you discriminate. Doesn’t matter if your customer is Christian, a nazi, gay or straight, part of the contract of getting help from society to run your business is that you live by the rules of our society that attempt to make a fair and level playing field for everyone.
It’s not that you ever said you wanted a free ride, not explicitly. It’s just between the lines in everything you said. I’m sorry if you’re not comfortable confronting this fact, but all I can do is tell you what is.
@masculinityfuckyeah, the problem with passages you’ve called out are as follows:
Romans 1:26-27
Paul is talking about the nature of the world being unfit in God’s eyes and in this passage is talking specifically about people giving themselves over to lust, using a term that means unnatural. The emphasis in the text is that these are lustful people, not that they’re homosexual. You should also take note of the way it points out that it talks about women partaking in relations that are contrary to nature without specifying them, as well as the way he talks similarly in first Corinthians when describing how men with long hair are unnatural before the face of god.
Not exactly a great condemnation of homosexuality there.
Just because the New Testament changed the relationship Christians have with purity laws doesn’t mean those purity laws went away. So you should probably consider what else Paul said was unnatural if you want to use this as a condemnation of gay people. How long does your hair need to be for you to be considered unnatural, anyhow?
So, in short, weak.
1 Corinthians 6:9-10
The term that you’re looking for isn’t homosexuality. While gay people have always existed and did exist back in the days of Christ, the terms that are being used here are two Greek words, malakoi and arsenokoitai, which don’t translate to homosexuality.
IIRC, arsenokoitai was probably Paul referring to the practice of sexual service by temple prostitutes. One of the interesting elements of both Romans and Corinthians is that they’re describing the Christian view of the outside world and the ways in which Christians are separate from gentiles, specifically the people of the Roman empire. Oh, and it’s also possible that this term referred to specific sexual practices associated with domination in Roman culture, but I’m less clear on that one. The point being that some men of the era would use sexual penetration as a way to establish some kind of social dominance and clearly the early church thought that was pretty shitty behavior.
As for malakoi, it’s important to note that this also touches on Christian hygiene traditions carried over from Jesus’s practice of Judaism. A man who was effeminate was unrighteous and unnatural. In this case that meant shaving your beard or shaving your sideburns, or referring back to my previous point, having long hair.
That people have mistranslated this to be a blanket condemnation
against homosexuality isn’t surprising, because, well, just look at
modern evangelical Christianity in the US. The minute we point out that
Jesus was a political revolutionary that wanted to topple the Roman
power structures and how a lot of the early parts of the New Testament
read like the condemnation of Roman culture, crickets.
So, in short, this one doesn’t even say what you think it says.
Look on the bright side though! I’m not even very knowledgeable about this stuff, so at least you got that one right! There’s a reason I didn’t claim to be an expert, but you might have missed that in your frenzy to type out a reply.
I just have a grounding in Christianity from my upbringing and I like debunking things so I’ve spent time learning how to do research and how to spot nonsense. And boy howdy, once my father got into The Bible Code, the nonsense that I got to read about. But I’ll wait until another time to talk about the possibility that Paul was a great big authoritarian asshole who seized control of the early church from the family of Jesus and had a hard on for calling people unnatural…
The Big Takeaway
No where in any of these passages does it suggest that it’s acceptable to discriminate against gay people. These passages are talking about God’s relationship with people, as “delivered” by Paul. They don’t call any Christian to action.
By comparison, the words of Jesus do, and those words command all Christians to be generous, compassionate, accepting of immigrants of all kinds, and supportive of their local secular community.
You know, like being willing to bake a cake for a gay wedding.
@korrasera , stop projecting your bigotries on other people.
It’s not bigotry, it’s just me pointing out what your argument means. Sorry! I wish you the best dealing with your discomfort. As a piece of advice, maybe try giving instead of taking and see how that feels. It’ll grow on you.
You make a lot of assumptions about people you have never even met
*buzzer noise* Sorry pal, wrong guess. Would you like to go for Double Jeopardy where the scores can really change?
Wasn’t a guess, that was verifiable fact that I stated….thank you for proving that you are completely ignorant
*buzzer noise* Sorry! Still wrong.
Your basic statement is still false. You want to characterize what I’ve said as assumptions because that makes you feel like you can ignore the argument that I’ve made.
You know, the one that points out that
a) people living in society have a responsibility to not simply take from that society and refuse to give back like those people who want to be free to make up any reason they want to discriminate and
b) that it’s not Christian to deny service to a gay couple and all of the reasons people bring up to support that kind of bigotry are easily disproven by referencing the very bible they claim supports their prejudice.
It’s all just deduction.
If someone make an argument that states you should be free to discriminate against gay people for being sinful, that suggests that they’re disgusted by gay people. Even if they’re saying they’re not, their actions speak otherwise.
If someone makes an argument that they should be free to discriminate against anyone they please in a society that agrees that we will all accept certain rules to protect and nourish our society, that suggests that they’re interested in profiting from the help they receive from society, but don’t want to accept their responsibility for supporting it. Hence, people who want something for free.
The basic problem here is that you misused the word assumption. Also that you misused it at me and I love argument so there you go.
Stop screaming at anybody that knows history that they’re “erasing it.” Stop worshiping treason as a god. Stop yelling the names of the constitutional rights you want to deny.
You don’t get to decide that treason is cool and then claim that anybody who, uh… stands for our founding principles and constitution (???) is the one not “acting like an American.”
Dissent is the most American thing you can do, and soldiers know that’s a freedom they’re defending.
Forced Patriotism is not American, and if you don’t like that, then move to North Korea.
This is the best explanation I could come up with for why it takes me so long to do updates sometimes when, at other times, I’m typing them up like clockwork.
I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.
The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.
So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”
1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.
Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.
Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! Hewrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.
It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.
dude had guts, someone needs to update his Wikipedia page
i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there – of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space – often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just – it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr – I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing – and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups – and their main support network – when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault.
(It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y’all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.
Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
I like this last addition.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.
So we did.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.
This thread keeps getting better.
It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over
Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y’all, so y’all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.
You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.
Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.
Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.
Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.
I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”. If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:
A preview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!
I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.
1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)
2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.
3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men.
Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.
Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.
(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)
The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.
Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable.They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.
This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.
History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.
(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)
Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.
He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyone got them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.
There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.
You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.
Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.
Any dumbass ever: dark-skinned girls can’t wear this hair/clothes color
Me, graduated from 4th grade art class: Brown is a NEUTRAL color, it goes with ANYTHING, you stupid bitch. You cowardly racist motherfucker. You absolute buffoon.
Artisan Scribbles 