About the recent round of purity wank about AO3 is it’s actually been effective. It’s crystallised for me that fandom, while it has problems, is fucking amazing.
It’s taught me more about safe sex than my parents did. Sure, my parents taught me about condoms and birth control but they never talked to me about bacterial vaginosis or dental dams.
I’ve had older people (mostly women) to talk to about every life experience I’ve had. All of them have different experiences and viewpoints to contribute. I’ve talked to a lot of them about sex. Fandom were the people who taught me to own my desires. They modeled how to communicate and led to me finding my identity. They actually taught me more about enthusiastic consent than any single other community I’ve found anywhere: including my real life LGBT community.
(This doesn’t mean there are no abusers in fandom. I regularly warn people against some famous fandom missing stairs. As always, you let people in, you get all types, from the zenith to the nadir.)
Fandom were the people who when I said “He never actually hit me” said “that doesn’t mean he wasn’t abusing you.”
Kinky unrealistic BDSM AUs were a way for me to process actual physical abuse that happened to me. I don’t care if the writer was getting off or processing something of their own: the works were there for me and they helped. For every “THIS IS ABUSIVE!!!” person pointing fingers, I guarantee there are people who were helped by that. And don’t talk to me about “unhealthy coping mechanisms”, because reading about fictional characters who were not actually harmed is a fuckload better than going out and fucking random dudes who actually hurt me. Which I also did. That sex was bad and reading was more enjoyable.
Fandom taught me that free artistic expression and joyful play are important.
Fandom taught me that women are important. That the story doesn’t end when the heroine gets married, that women are complete people with complex inner lives and that a relationship can end and people can still be happy.
Fandom and especially fans of colour taught me more about racism and intersectionality than I ever learned in any university course. Than I ever learned in my (limited, white) real world. We’ve still got a long way to go, but where we are is so much better than where we were. I’m old enough to remember that.
The latest round of “The AO3 is disgusting” are appallingly naive at best, reductionist, purity-bullshit-peddling bullies at worst. It’s not enough for them to create their own community if ours doesn’t suit them. No, they want to come in and strike at one of the core principles of the AO3–no censorship. Instead of donating, working to become an influencer, voting, volunteering, trying to make things better, they’d rather blow up the entire thing.
Instead of getting mad and writing a fanwork which is a criticism of and magnitudes better than the problematic original (I may have mentioned my fannishness of Helenish’s Take Clothes Off As Directed before), these people would rather people not write anything.
The enemy of free speech is not criticism, it’s forced silence.
So let’s build and become better from what’s gone before. Go donate.
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