the ao3 discourse is interesting to me bc i feel like theres a big disconnect between ppl who Were There For Strikethrough of course but also in a more general way, people for whom Strikethrough was not a Weird Anomaly – people who grew up in the late 80s/early-mid 90s climate of BANNING JUDY BLUME BOOKS FROM LIBRARIES BC AN ADULT WROTE TEENS DOING SEX ! and stuff… like… ppl for whom “disingenuous right-wing ~for the family~ morality org claims to wanna protect vulnerable people but SOMEHOW MIRACULOUSLY ends up just banning kids from reading about sex or gay shit or talking about having been raped” is really… just… the norm. like. thats the baseline of this discourse… that’s… you know. i dont know. i dont mean this in a YOU GOTTA UNDERSTAND WHERE WE WISE OLD PPL ARE COMING FROM thing i mean it in a … i genuinely think that there are two paradigms here and that it is probably hard to grok aspects of them if you grew up in a cultural atmosphere which can lead you to claim ~Strikethrough was an anomaly~ rather than the system working as intended. Strikethrough wasnt a Good Protective Thing which ON THE EDGES also ACCIDENTALLY took out a FEW “innocent” comms and journals… Strikethrough did what it was intended to do, and it was only one incident in a long, looooong history of organizations like that one doing, or trying to do, the same damn thing,
Yeah, fandom was weird thing to be into (and not the kind other people find endearing), and definitely UNDERGROUND. You had to definitely go looking. And while not everybody elses weird stuff in fandom was your weird stuff, you were all the target of “normal” people together. AO3 was revolutionary!! I remeber when it was first posed as an idea. Also, I still remeber the women, who had a physical zine shipped to Germany and had to go to customs where they told her they check magazines so people don’t order porn, not that she (women) would!!! (Yeah, that K/S zine had some explicit gay art in it, she was lucky they didn’t actually look inside.) So that’s also were people are coming from. When I got into fandom, there was still a BIG Het/Slash divide, and Slash was a warning! (and slasher and identity). Not to say that everything was better, or something. But there was always the feeling that you were transgressing in some way by being there. And you knew you weren’t wanted on platforms made for “normal” people. The constant warnings people put on stuff, where “please don’t sue me!” was a real thing, and that adult stuff couldn’t be on many of the pages/archives, and sites that didn’t allow gay content, etc.. We remeber all the things that weren’t allowed to be posted on certain sites, that is why the AO3 even came into being.
Yeah, I got into fandom around the same time. I can remember getting banned off a Sentinel mailing list because I spoke up in defense of a person who’d accidentally forwarded a slash email to the wrong list. (It was an accident and yes they got hardcore yelled at).
I can remember having to mail proof of my legal age to a adult mailing list before I could get in. (Yes they were legit, no it wasn’t an identity scam)
We developed pseudonyms to protect ourselves online because people got fired for being fannish and for writing slash. People got harassed in their offline lives (yep, fandom doxxed long before the word got coined). I can remember some fans having it impact custody battles.
The OTW and the Ao3 rose out of fans basically swearing ‘never again’ because we got so damn tired of being attacked. The Ao3 gave us a place to post, bu the OTW’s advocacy work has done a lot to legitimize fandom.
Sometimes I think we did the job too well, because while it’s gotten better, all that stuff really hasn’t gone away and I worry so much about the kids coming up in fandom now. Throwing around personal details like it’s nbd, pics, whatever.
It can come back to haunt you.
Tag your shit so people don’t have to see it, but lay off the censorship talk. That’s a road you don’t want to go down.The Ao3 can and will make decisions to protect things you don’t like, sure, but trust me, that’s actually a reassuring thing because ultimately?
They’re also protecting you.for real though, speaking as someone who was actually personally affected by Strikethrough - I did have fic that was posted only to a targeted community (pornish_pixies) deleted when Strikethrough happened and I had to repost to my own LJ (and later to AO3) to ensure I could archive them and they wouldn’t just disappear again - the WHOLE POINT OF OWNING THE SERVERS IS SO THAT YOUR WEIRD STUFF WON’T GET DELETED because of some homophobic crusade masquerading as ~protecting the children~.
And also, the whole point of tagging and warning is so that people who don’t want to see your weird stuff can scroll or filter, and people who do want to can find it.We seem to have fallen into the trap of imagining the platonic ideal of a Safe Space, and thinking fandom should be it.
There is no such thing as a maximally Safe Space for all people at all times. You can only have a space that is Safe on specific terms for specific groups. The wider the groups, the more specific the terms have to be. The A03 is not designed to provide access to safe content, it is designed to be a place that is safe for content to be shared. That, on the up side, means it is a place where your kink - your personal work using your very personal sexuality or whatever - is okay, or at least is not going to be deleted. On the down side, it means some spectacularly racist shit, or homophobic shit, or whatever, is not going to be deleted either.
If you want a space where safety is determined in terms of the kind of content you will encounter more than the durability of the platform and the policies of free speech and so on, that is fine! But the AO3 is not that space, and is not designed to be that space.
Consider a real world analogy: if I organise a queer feminist reading group, and Mr Homophobe 2016 turns up, I, or I and the group, can kick his ass out. On the other hand, if I run a seminar in my university on queer feminist literature, and Student Homophobe 2016 turns up, I cannot kick him out. I can put expectations down about how he will speak to other students, I can ask him to bring his 101 criticisms of the theoretical grounding to discuss in my office when he’s derailing class, but I cannot kick him out just for having a political opposition to my texts and teaching (especially not if I think he is in fact learning from being there, as he may well do). I can only kick him out if he is directly abusive to other students, or me, and in order to exclude him I would have to involve other faculty.
That will almost certainly make the space less safe for some students than the hypothetical reading group, and I cannot do anything about that. Because my classroom is not a space specifically designed for queer feminist students. I can advance their interests, and protect them where I can, but I cannot change the fact that my classroom is open to any student of my faculty. That’s what it’s for. For educating all students of my faculty, regardless of identity or background. That same mechanism which protects Student Homophobe in my classroom would also protect, say, Angry Queer Feminist Student in the classroom of Old White Professor Who Doesn’t Like Being Questioned On The Representation of Women In Joyce. Unless I want it to be possible for black students to be excluded from a class where they question white literary canon and piss off white teachers, I cannot make it possible for me to exclude a conservative student just because he is opposed to my approach.
The AO3 is not a classroom; it does not have obligations to the state to provide education to citizens, etc. But it does have obligations according to its opening charter and policies. The AO3 opted for maximum inclusion and security as a content host, which means it is consequently limited in how much it can protect users from distasteful content. There are improvements that could be made! (A built-in tag excluder would be nice, so you could set your account to never show things tagged, idek, Kirk/Spock, say) But the Platonic Ideal of A Safe Space cannot be achieved here.