The thing about Tumblr that probably makes me saddest is the underlying assumption that women past a certain age (which seems to be about 25?) stop having any sort of outside interests beyond family/career/kids. Like, y’all are always so shocked that grown women have lives and can fangirl as hard as we did as teenagers.
It makes me sad not because it makes me feel old (although it does), but because these younger women are constricting their own lives–they fully expect that this will happen to them someday. Y’all deserve better. Y’all deserve to EXPECT better.
And worse than that, the idea that there’s something WRONG with a grown woman who has other interests.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
One of the biggest things I realized growing up?
It doesn’t happen.
You expect somehow you will change when you are finally An Adult™. You’ll stop enjoying the things you enjoy now for something more “adult” or “mature.” You’ll FEEL like an adult and not like a child anymore. You’ll feel comfortable and secure and not scared and unsure and confused. You expect you will feel like you have your shit together.
But I can tell you that it doesn’t happen. You’ll still feel like the “you” you were at 15 or 17 or 19.
You just have these…things to deal with. Like rent. And insurance.
You have a job either because a) you like it or b) it keeps the lights and internet on.
You’ll look up from fangirling one day and realize “Shit. I am twenty eight years old. That’s almost 30!”Or maybe it will be that you look down at the small child clasped around your legs and realize “That is my child. I have a child. A human being child.” Or maybe it will be that you have to negotiate your budget around con tickets AND a mortgage payment.
Growing up isn’t a thing that happens.
It’s a realization that it doesn’t happen.
Holy shit, y’all. There are some AMAZING responses to this post. Yes, everything alwayshometomarvel says. All that.
Feeling like I wasn’t ‘adult’ enough fucked me up for years. I would cry at night and feel like a total piece of shit because I was married with a kid, and yet I still did ‘not adult’ things–I played MMOs, I cosplayed and went to conventions, I drew fan art and wrote fan fic. I kept waiting for the day that I would wake up and realize that what I really needed to be doing was the laundry, cleaning the house, making dinner every night, etc. Basically, be the ‘perfect’ wife and mother.
And somewhere between then and now, I somehow managed to tell myself…fuck it. I AM an adult. I go to work every day and pay the bills and help raise my son and take care of the house. I do legit adult things. AND I play MMOs, go to conventions, and participate in fandom. And THAT’S OKAY. I’m 32 years old now and finally at peace with that part of myself. (Having a supportive husband and kid doesn’t hurt either!)
All of this is such truth. Believing these things about growing up, and especially about being over 25? Really made it hard for me when I turned 30.
I was literally suicidal on my 30th birthday. I spent the whole day in tears. I felt like I had died and my life was now worthless and small and never going to be hopeful or full of promise or fun again. I felt like killing myself on my birthday because I bought into this lie that somewhere after your mid-twenties, you diminish as a woman because the only thing that made you alive and shiny was your youth.
I’m 31 now and I’m done with that shit. I’m over it. I don’t care if you think I’m too old for something. If I’m an old lady in Tumblr terms, then I’m past the legal age where I’m obligated to care what you think.
So, I’m telling you girls out there right now who are in your teens and twenties, get rid of this idea of what older women are “supposed” to look like. Get rid of this idea that “soccer moms” don’t play video games or that all women over 25 should be married and contemplating kids. Get rid of the idea that fanfic and fandom and fun things are for “kids.”
Mostly, get rid of this notion that the only thing really valuable about you is your youth. Youth is part of life, but it’s not the most valuable or beautiful or exciting time of your life. I like my life at 30 about 1000% than I did at 15, 18, 20, even 25.
on her deathbed, my grandmother pulled my mom close to her and said, “i don’t feel old. i don’t know how i’m supposed to feel. but inside, i still feel seventeen.” when I was a teenager, I used to think that story was sad; sad and strange somehow, like she’d been frozen in time. but now that i am a woman in my thirties, I understand. I understand her. I am a grown woman in the ways that matter. I listen to myself more, trust my experience more. but inside? I still feel the joy and rage and mess; I am still changing. we’re not frozen in time. we are just still growing.
the more we acknowledge that modern “adulthood” is largely a concept designed to sell vacuums and sedans, and not an arbitrary total overhaul of self at age 35, the more we can admit our ongoing capacity– no, our ongoing NEED for play and playfulness and exploration. those are childish things we should never have to put away.
I’m heading into the last year of my 40′s. I own a home (ok, I own a very small apartment) and I’ve held down a job in the same industry for 25+ years, in varying forms. I do laundry and wash dishes when they need doing, and pay my bills on time (except the times I don’t, ooops). I am, dog help us all, the more adulting adult people are always looking for.
And I wallow in fanfic and fandom, I go to concerts and dance my ass off and eat Chinese food after midnight, I have Funko Pop! figures staring down at me from the top of my fridge, I color my hair (or not) depending on whim, not expectation, and some of my closest friends and mischief-partners are in their 30′s (and some are in their 60′s).
Claim it all. This is your birthright.
I’ll be 60 next year. I’ll also be going to SPN cons and writing meta and buying merch and flailing about Show and Destiel.
When my kids were little, I wrote fanfic and published fanzines and went to fan-run cons because I needed something that was ~mine~, that wasn’t about being a mom or a wife–something that was about being ME. It’s easy to lose sight of that uniqueness when you have to worry about diapers and soccer practice and getting kids on the bus every morning, but y’all, it’s so important. SO IMPORTANT to hold onto YOU.
Amen to all of this. Adult(ing)™ is what you do, not what you are.
No matter your age.
Burn down the presumption that being into fandom as an adult is somehow juvenile.
You know who doesn’t have to deal with this shit? Male sports fans, who are apparently entitled not to let go of the things they loved as children, while us fangirls have to suck it up. How nice for them!!
Please, stop hating your future self. Stop thinking that fun and frivolousness and pleasure and possibility are not for her. Stop thinking you’re trapped. Just stop.
33 yrs old here. I too used to feel terribly, terribly guilty for “still” drawing/reading comics and watching anime at my ripe old age. (Have to admit my parents’ “when will you grow out of this” attitude didn’t help much). But you know what?
I landed some of my jobs (I work in translation/communication) thanks to my hobbies: I spent insane amounts of time online reading comics, looking for tutorials and watching animes and films in foreign languages. I thus got a good grasp on both English and French (I’m Italian) and I’ve become pretty good with computers.
If anything makes you happy just keep doing it. Life’s hard, there’s no need for you to take away the things that you enjoy just because people perceive them as “childish”. Plus, they make you more interesting (as a person and also as a worker, which doesn’t hurt)
This post was triggered by something that @roachpatrol said over here about the expectation for girls to be sweet and clean and harmless:
Holy shit, if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would’ve fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets.
Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder. Concentrate on what is good and righteous and pure to the exclusion of all else, this is how you be a good person.
You are also a fully-functioning human being, one who can feel stressed or lonely or angry or any number of bad things. Mostly, with emotions that are still working themselves out, you feel this rumbling, white-hot white noise under everything, all the time. Sometimes it rolls in like a thunderstorm and everything else gets drowned out, and sometimes it’s only quietly muttering in the distance. Either way it’s always there, and the sound shreds uncomfortably at the inside of your brain.
When you were younger, before you were in charge of your own media consumption, your brain would shred up a myriad of saccharine stories to try and match the noise of the shredder in your head. Bad things happening, people getting hurt, characters trapped in unhealthy relationships of all kinds.
Fanfiction, the product of a hundred thousand other mumbledyteens whose brains are all screaming the same way, makes something in your brain go ping.
Unfortunately, if the planet had ever been united on any single message, it was probably that no matter how you feel: 1) your feelings weren’t unique 2) they didn’t matter 3) they didn’t matter because they weren’t unique, they were shared among millions of hysterical, worthless teenaged girls just like you.
Fandom was confirmation of the first, but (with some hiccups along the way) outright rejection of the last two. Fuck you, our feelings do matter, and this is a story just for us.
A disclaimer: these aren’t good stories, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be defended. Their flavor of topic is not within societally acceptable bounds. Fictional characters have sex and get tortured and raped and abused, but their screaming harmonizes with the pitch of the shredder when it’s burrowing deepest.
As a teenager I never thought that my feelings were important enough to deal with, but these stories let me look at them sideways. Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.
And hell, these days I’m a happy, healthy adult who barely even has the urge to go looking for whump fic when I’ve had a bad week. I’m not going to forget just how much bad stuff that fic helped me air out, though, not ever. (Not to mention that thanks to all of those abuse!fics, I can recognize an unhealthy relationship at 500 paces, even if the fictional abuse was depicted as something loving and romantic. Abusers in real life don’t go around with helpful warning tags on their sleeves anyway.)
But holy shit, can you imagine if I’d found fandom as it is today.
Yes, your church is right, your family is right. Horrible things in stories are only there because they were written by horrible people, and they’re only popular because horrible people read them. The very concepts they address corrupt everything they touch.
That shredder in your head, the one that takes innocent cartoons but then shits out sadness and mayhem? That’s disgusting, you’re disgusting. How dare you think about minors having underaged sex, you minor? How dare you consider another person getting hurt? Your feelings don’t matter, they aren’t unique, they’re shared with all kinds of worthless shitbags just like you.
Every ounce of what you read and write and enjoy is going to be weighed for sin and tested for purity. You know, just like the rest of your life, except this time there’s no deity who’s handing out second chances.
Maybe that’s what bothers me most about all of this. It’s the same petty fandom bullshit as always, but “you’re wrong for liking a ship because IT WILL NEVER BE CANON” is a hell of a lot easier to laugh off when you’re young than “you’re wrong for liking a ship because YOU’RE AN ABUSIVE PEDOPHILE AND IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS IT’S YOUR FAULT FOR PERPETUATING IT.”
My fault, my bad thoughts, no outlet for any of them. The message to repress all the bad things so I can look like a good person, but my brain is so full of unprocessed shit that it’s solidified. Nobody actually saved any real children, but my brain sure is getting a second dose of fucked-up.
Are the people getting attacked going to be okay, will they be able to go and address their braingremlins somewhere else? I’d also ask if the people doing the attacking are okay, with all of the denial and repression they must deal with, but it seems like they’ve got venting pretty well handled by taking it out on strangers.
Hey, c’mon, calm down friends. I bet I’ve read a story that’s got a character screaming at just the same pitch you are.
It helps to read one of those and harmonize your voices, I promise.
holy shit, dude, this is powerful. i’ll delete this reblog if you don’t want the extra attention, but thank you for your thoughts.
Roachpatrol speaks my mind on this matter.
Posting because I know so many traumatized people, and so many of them just really need to see this, right now, for so many reasons.
I do not have the time or patience to respond to attacks on my character that stem from ignorance and emotionally charged thinking. My position on shaming in fandom is this.
– Fictional characters are not real people
– People, even fictional ones do age with time. If you write a fic set years after canon, the character is no longer the same age they were at the end of canon.
– Fanworks and fiction are an instrument where people of all ages can explore issues they face in reality in a manner that doesn’t hurt anybody. The following are examples … there are endless possibilities for why people create or consume fanwork content.
*A rape survivor can explore rape in a fic where they are able to be in control and process their grief, can find empowerment. The fictional characters are not injured in the process. Fanfiction does not become canon .
* A young person living in a homophobic family can explore their sexuality through fanworks without coming out and risking judgement by putting fictional characters through the paces of what ‘could’ happen.
* A person who has extreme depression can process their feelings and experience with it by writing a fictional character with the same issues. They can put distance between their reality through fictional projection and sometimes find the ability to resolve a truth about themselves they couldn’t see when it was all them and reality.
– Shaming people for writing anything about FICTIONAL characters is uncool and harmful. It is much better to avoid reading works that squick you and to accept that your lived experience is not everybody else’s lived experience. Who are you to judge what you do not (CAN NOT) understand?
– Smut in fanfiction read by underage people or written by underage people is a safe alternative to having actual real life sex when a person is underage. It also allows those who are underage, who do have sexual drives, to explore those urges, fantasies, or even the messy repercussions that can result from them, without ACTUALLY fucking up their lives by bringing real life repercussions down on themselves. It is a SAFE alternative to sex.
– Sex is NOT bad. Sex is a normal part of biology and shaming that or denying that is why we have real life predators, why we have rape culture, why so many people are ashamed of their emotions. Fiction is a safe and wonderful alternative to exploring ‘what ifs’, to growing as a person, to learning about how other people live and what experiences they have.
– It is vitally important to tag fanworks with appropriate tags. NSFW, underage, violent content, trigger warnings, etc… so that the people who do not want to view such content can avoid it. But demanding that it be suppressed because it offends you is a very narrow-minded viewpoint. Understand that fanworks creators come from a rainbow of lived experiences. Cultural differences, Different sexualities, Survivors of a plethora of experiences. The fact is that the writer writing a fic about rape, might be a survivor of rape and find the process therapeutic… You can not know that. A writer of underage smut may have been a teen who was pressured into it young and the act of writing about it, normalizing it, is their therapy to no longer carry guilt and shameful feelings about it. You can’t know that.
– If you don’t like something, do not read it/view it. Simple.
Earlier this week, I ran a Twitter poll on comment replies and invited discussion on it. The objective was to find out whether people expect replies to their comments on fics, whether it influences their engagement or opinion with the fic/author, and how/why.
As you can see, I received 154 votes and the results were overwhelmingly in favour of nice, but not necessary…
…but the variety of elaborations really surprised me, and it was very interesting to sift through replies. Here are some of the key points. All quotes are pretty much directly from what people sent me in response to the poll.
1. The bottom line is: most people, as commenters, do not expect comment replies.
Even if they say yeah, it’s nice. They don’t expect it.
This was usually for one of two reasons, the first being that authors are simply not obliged to reply (or to do anything, really).
It’s definitely a no from me. I don’t consider the OP has to take all that time to reply when they already gave us the fic in the first place.
Since authors have their own lives, I wouldn’t know what they’re feeling etc. Getting a reply to a comment is a nice surprise imo.
The author has already done their part in writing and sharing and they don’t owe you anything for enjoying their work. If they want to step away after that then so be it.
this is really cool and worth reading if this is something you worry about (like i do) or even just if you’re interested in fandom etiquette~. i have historically been bad at replying to comments because it makes me anxious (note: everything makes me anxious, and i love receiving comments), but i do like making it so that people don’t just feel like they’re talking to a void when they’re commenting, so i want to get better at it.
I see a lot of posts going around talking about the need to be critical of fanfic, and how we gotta watch out for the messages we’re sending
Well, here’s one thing I’m gonna need us to be critical about:
Every statistic I’ve ever seen says fanfic authors are heavily female (or nb)
And Tumblr, which is a fairly US-centric cross-section of fandom, is filled with this discourse about fanfic writers who create pornography
I need us to stop and think about why we’ve decided that fictional sex is the most damaging thing anyone could ever find on the internet
I need us to think about the culture we live in, which encourages us to be sexually available (to straight men) but punishes us if we (sluts) enjoy it
Because here’s the thing: fanfic is not coming from a position of power and prestige in our society
It is a niche genre primarily written by women, for women, for free
And it is a place where many of us do find power in exploring our own sexuality (or asexuality)
Even when that exploration takes us to gritty, horrifying (or cathartic) places
I’m going to need us to think long and hard about why we’re prioritizing fictional characters over the needs of real women
And I’m going to need it to stop
Fandom purity wank is absolutely about control over women and women’s sexuality. There’s nothing ambiguous about it.
Just think about the hot-button issues in the fannish community, the topics that consistently and reliably get people worked up into a lather, the themes that provoke the nastiest conflicts and inspire the most dedicated resistance movements. Think about the fights that are most likely to spill out over their cyber boundaries and start affecting people in the real world – in public harassment at cons, in doxxing and ‘outing’ to family and employers, in malicious legal allegations.
It’s about sex. It’s always about sex.
From the constant tantrums over ‘problematic’ shipping to the righteous doxxing of ‘pedophiles’ (which in current tumblr parlance means anyone who draws or writes canonically underage characters in romantic or erotic scenarios), fandom’s big efforts at moral reform always seem to revolve around restricting and controlling the sexual expression of the majority-women community. You won’t meet many people who stay up past their bedtime to scream at strangers on the internet about unethical portrayals of non-sexual violence – unless, of course, they suspect the women involved in its creation are getting off on it. You’ll struggle to find an anti blog dedicated to the insidious social ills of torture whump fic, or goopy hurt-comfort where all manner of human suffering is put on display for the viewer’s enjoyment. The purity crew dress up their agenda as a desire for collective self-improvement and raised moral standards, but they don’t seem too worried about aspects of public morality that don’t somehow tie back into sex. What they’re upset about is the same thing conservative minds have been upset about since basically the dawn of time – there are women out there in the world doing icky sex things without the permission of their communities.
And these people, these moral guardians, they’ve gotten really good at couching their fundamentalist views in progressive language. They don’t say ‘you’re to blame if you provoke men to rape’ – they say ‘your fic normalises sexual violence and contributes to rape culture’. They don’t say ‘women ought to be chaste’ – they say ‘your fantasies are socially harmful and you owe it to the world to be more self-critical’. The messages are the same and the desired outcomes are literally identical.
The core assumption underlying all of it – an assumption that I’m sure our puritan forebears would find deeply comforting – is that women’s sexual expression is a matter of public concern, and that women are directly responsible for upholding the moral standards of their communities by restricting themselves to a narrow repertoire of publicly controlled, socially condoned sexual outlets. Anything beyond that repertoire is a grave moral breach.
To anyone who’s reading this – and there’s always a few – thinking, “this is just deflection! [X hot-button topic] is really bad and harmful!’, I’d like to encourage you to sit back for just a moment and think about why it is, exactly, that you feel the best and most important place to wage your war against moral corruption is in one of the only pockets of popular media that women unequivocally control. Of all the spaces in the world where you could be fighting for your view of a better society, you’ve chosen a place where women come together to share the fantasies that mainstream culture refuses to let them indulge. Why?
It’s bible banging bullshit in a progressive mask.
THIS is why the current trend to refer to smut in fanfic as “sin” is quite so worrying. Sex is not wrong. Enjoying pleasure and feeling good are not things to be ashamed of. If you don’t enjoy them, if you are asexual or aromantic or have a low to nonexistent libido, that is all just as fine as enjoying them, or reading or writing about them. There is no default that is ok, there is no default that is bad.
Western history has a tend of being terrified of women enjoying their bodies, their relationships, their experiences. If we “sin” in doing so, people can point to it and say it is wrong, there is some higher power – holy or societal – that disapproves. Please don’t fall into this mental trap, even in jest or sarcasm. Normalizing “sexual things as bad” is just continuing this problem.
Come one come all for the first of (what we hope to be) monthly fandom brunch get togethers. Fangirls (and fan-males and alternate gender identified-fans) are invited to participate in a coming together, a hanging out, and a light social affair in the style of a BRUNCH-N-ING.
What’s happening: Brunch! Weren’t you listening?
Where: Union Pub patio at 201 Massachusetts Ave NE, Washington, DC 20002
When: Sunday, September 25th, starting 11:30 AM and going until 2pm at least
Who can come: Anybody fandom, fan-adjacent, or respectfully non-fannish but affiliated with you who you think would enjoy it for some reason. It’s a pub, so maybe not kids, but I don’t make your rules so if you think it’s cool and they’re your kids…
Any particular fandoms? Well, I know we got everything from classic literature folks to comics, movies, bandom, hockey, all kinds of stuff. Just let folks know what you’re looking for and we can probably find someone else who’s into it to squee with. If you’re worried you’ll be left out in the cold, worry not!
Can I forward this invite to other folks? Sure! It’s open to the public and we’d love to get all sorts of folks together! There IS a basic code of conduct, though, so please be respectful of peoples’ gender identities, LGBT statuses, race, ethnicity, etc. Basically don’t be horrible, or invite people you think are horrible. Pretty simple right?
What do I need to do to come? Let me know that you plan to attend by pm’ing me or emailing at daroos at gmail (dot) com by September 20th (along with how many people are coming with you if it’s more than just you) so that I can inform the pub about our numbers. Then you need to arrive the day of and have a ball!
Calling all DC-area fans! I won’t be there, but you should all attend, Federal Fandom Senate is great.
hmm! this is a great question and one I’m not 100% sure of how to answer, because for the most part I have had very positive fandom experiences. but when it comes to making your fandom experience as relaxed & fun as possible, here are my tips:
1) accept right now and forever that everyone does fandom differently, and everyone is in fandom for different reasons and to get different things out of it. it doesn’t matter if people don’t ship what you ship. it doesn’t matter if they write stories of which the summary makes you recoil in horror. they are not doing this at you. accept that you are going to do you, and everyone else is going to do themselves, and unless their shit spills over into your personal space (see point 3)) then there is literally no point in trying to control the fannish experience that anyone else is having. fandom’s a large space! there’s room for everyone!
so the thing to do is:
2) CURATE YOUR FANNISH EXPERIENCE. I’ve been doing this since ye olde days of livejournal and do it even more intensely now. essentially: find the people you like, and the parts of fandom you like, and carve out your own corners where you can hang with like-minded people. you don’t have to be right in the thick of it, reading everything, interacting with everything and everyone. you don’t have to track all the tags which are crammed full of stuff that annoys you. you can take it slowly, and be discerning.
if you want to read meta, find the people who write it and follow them. ditto art. learn to embrace ao3’s excellent search function, and to use a tumblr blacklist. if you want to read fic and are bemoaning the fact that none of it is quite what you want: write your own! enthuse about your ideas on tumblr! leave prompts on kinkmemes! befriend some writers! I have to admit I am still pretty lost when it comes making friends on tumblr because the etiquette is bizarre and variable, but hey: the messaging system exists, askboxes exist, comments on ao3 exist. sure, different people have different levels of openness to making new bosom friends, but nobody minds being engaged. we’re in fandom to be fannish, together.
3) if people are being jerks in your space, block ‘em. ignore ‘em. delete ‘em. I am not even remotely internet famous enough to be at risk of being deluged by trolls, but on the rare occasions that I’ve engaged in good faith and subsequently decided that I was being concern-trolled, I’ve noped cheerfully out of there. the few accusatory or unpleasant anon (because they’re always anon!) messages that have landed in my inbox, I’ve deleted without batting an eye. sometimes I share it with a friend via chat or email and we have a laugh about it, and that helps settle any residual hurt or irritation that I might feel. I’m a grown fucking woman. I keep a calm sympathetic face while being shouted at, cried on, confided in, manipulated, and projected onto, for a living. and I have zero qualms about policing the boundaries of the spaces I’ve carved out for myself–the fun, creative, relaxing, incredible places–in fandom.
4) manage your entitlement. just remind yourself every so often that nobody owes you the next chapter of that story, or the exact piece of art you want to see, or the paragraph-long comment, or the attention you crave, or the whole-hearted agreement you seek. remember that everyone has their own lives, and you’re never seeing the full picture.
be gracious. be kind.
try to resist the urge to snipe and snark and finger-point and complain in public; I enjoy a bit of fandom bitching as much as the next person, but I inflict it all on my friends, in chat.
5) the flipside of this is: show appreciation of the things you like. comment on that story. reblog that art with a furious tag spiral of capslock (creators LOVE tag spirals). put together a rec list–this is also a great way to show people what kind of things you like, so people who share your tastes know who to gravitate towards.
if you are frequently frustrated by a large portion of the fanbase, anon, then ask yourself: are you reading the comments? ie. are you making yourself engage with parts of fandom where people have THE WRONG OPINIONS and are writing your beloved characters THE WRONG WAY? if so: just scroll past. don’t read it. unless you really enjoy an argument, don’t feel obliged to reblog it with a detailed explanation of why they’re wrong: you’re gonna frustrate yourself and, yes, maybe end up looking like a jerk. just shrug and move on. maybe this isn’t the corner for you.
I have been following my own advice in this regard for almost 14 years. I’ve kept a handful of enduring and awesome friends from most of the major fandoms I’ve been part of, and I’m still making new ones, and I’ve (mostly) managed to avoid wank. I write what I like, and I read what I like, and I try to communicate generously and enthusiastically with people who are creating the things that I enjoy.
tl;dr – seek out the things that make you feel good, and follow them. weed out the things that make you feel bad, and ignore them. it’s fandom. it can be as serious or unserious as you like, but it IS supposed to be fun.
The comment I’ve outlined in red is by @svollga and reads: “Sin is a term used for smut now (personally, I find it really, really terrible and -phobic, yikes)”
Folks, please, we have to quash this one, and fast. I’ve been around a long time. I understand that language changes. I gave in to the fact that “slash” came to mean m/m only, and accepted that “femslash” was a necessary term. I put up with smushnames. And I went to the wall fighting for “trigger” to keep it’s actual meaning, and get fandom using “squick” again.
But this is WRONG. Using a word that is so loaded, one that carries the baggage of religion and morality, to mean “smut” demonizes sex. Fanficiton is one of the healthiest, most open, sex-positive environments available to North Americans (and I’m making that distinction because there are huge swathes of Europe and Asia that don’t have our deeply unhealthy hangups about sex) and particularly to American teenagers who get most of their information about sex online.
Please, please, PLEASE stand with me on this. If you see it used, refute it. Sex and smut aren’t “sin”. Don’t let it happen. We can win this one.
Urgh, hadn’t heard about this one before. I agree that calling sex ‘sin’ as a casual thing is a horrible, horrible idea, much like calling anything bad or wrong ‘gay’. It builds that association.
For the record, I’m also deeply frustrated with people (mostly teenaged girls, from what I’ve seen) calling themselves ‘garbage’ for liking a particular character or pairing. I mean. I get that slang exists, but it’s just…frustrating.
Young people might take your slang literally. What you say matters, even in fun.
Recognize when it might be time to change the words you use to talk about yourself and your friends, even if it’s been the common fashion for a while, even if it is not *meant* in anything but a light-hearted and positive way. Think about how and why that trend might have started. Is it just a creative language “we-say-the-opposite-of-what-me-mean-as-a-form-of-emphasis” thing, or is it one of the times where it’s a “I’m-trying-to-make-light-of-the-fact-that-others-and-maybe-even-myself-see-me-as-this-worth-negating-term” thing?
There's a Mirror on the Wall 