Back in My Day:
On Being a Teen in the Late 90s/Early 00s & Reading Fictional Porn Before AO3 Existed
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So like, when I was a horny high school sophomore, I greedily hunted down – and masturbated to – all the fictional porn I could get my hands on. I hadn’t discovered fandom yet. But my parents let me read whatever the fuck I wanted at Barnes and Noble.
Some of my masturbatory material included:
Romance novels by popular romance novel author Johanna Lindsey – typical hetero romance novel fare, usually featuring an innocent young virgin and a love interest at least 15 years her senior. Pretty much all of the sex scenes were dubious consent at best, with some outright rape fantasies thrown in.
Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series, book 2: The Valley of Horses in particular. A ton of porn in that book. There’s a fairly graphic scene in which the main protagonist gets horny watching horses go at it. There’s also a sex scene in which the male romantic lead gets super excited to have finally found a woman whose vagina is deep enough to take his entire giant horsecock schlong without banging up her cervix. Or was that book 3?
Sex scenes buried in sci-fi novels.
My parents had a huge sci-fi collection. Octavia Butler’s Imago has a long, involved dub-con poly sexfest between two fraternal twins and an alien hybrid.
Scott Westerfeld, before he got into young adult fiction, wrote a very adult sci-fi novel called Polymorph about a shapeshifter who has a ton of kinky shapeshifter sex with people of all genders. One of the sex scenes towards the end of the book involves the protagonist battling the villain while he’s fused his nervous system with hers and is giving her a ton of orgasms while simultaneously trying to murder her.
The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror anthology series. I bought like 5 of these. There was usually at least one short story in there with queer people, and it usually had a sex scene, and the sex scene usually had a bunch of dub-con or non-con because it was a sex scene in a horror anthology.
By the time I discovered fanfiction at age 16, I’d already been reading and getting off on book porn for years – published romance, fantasy and sci-fi novels geared towards adults, featuring adult characters having sex.
I didn’t read these stories because I wanted to have sex with adults. I didn’t even want to have sex with older teens. I didn’t even want to have sex at all at that point. I just wanted to read porn, and masturbate to it, in the privacy of my own teenaged bedroom. My wanting fictional porn to masturbate to had nothing to do with wanting to have sex in real life. I didn’t even try to lose my virginity until I was 21.
My first fandoms were Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville, and Harry Potter. The characters in those fandoms were mostly close to my age. I was excited to be reading porn about characters who I could kind of relate to for once.
I didn’t care how old the people writing said fanfic were – though I noticed that the porn written by adults tended to be a lot better, in terms of writing quality, than the porn written by teenagers.
It never occurred to me to think of the adults who wrote that fanfiction as predators who wanted to molest teenagers. First off, I had to lie about my age in order to read it, which was a glaring sign that the adults who wrote this fiction had no interest in targeting people my age with it.
For another, I was a teen reading and writing pornography about characters older than myself, who did not, at the time want to have sex with either adults or fellow teens. So I didn’t assume that adults writing characters my age wanted to have sex with people my age either.
Fictional porn and real-life sex have always been to very clearly separate categories in my head.
Now that I’m an allosexual adult, who has had and enjoys sex, I still don’t want to have the kind of sex I like to read about in fanfic porn. The kind of sex I like having and the kind of porn I like reading have very little in common.
I think the same goes for the adults who were writing pornographic Harry Potter fanfic back in 2007 when strikethrough happened.
I find that often when adults do write about teenagers, it’s more about remembering themselves as teens, and exploring the unfulfilled fantasies they themselves remember having as teenagers, and re-living their own pasts, and re-examining their own psycho-sexual development, than it is about having any interest whatsoever in the teens that exist in the real world now.
It’s perhaps worth noting that the Harry Potter series seems to take place pre-internet, even though the internet had already been around for many years by the time the books came out. Meaning: Rowling was likely drawing on her own teen experiences to write the characters, rather than trying to relate her books to contemporary teens.
Which also explains why the books garnered such a large adult audience when they were initially released, and also why most millennials found the series epilogue particularly difficult to relate to.
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TL&DR I’m just using my own anecdotal experiences as someone who’s been in fandom since I was a teenager, to explain why I find the current anti-discourse surrounding AO3, and underage fiction on AO3, spurious. The arguments against AO3 porn seem largely predicated on false equivalencies, and a misunderstanding of the pschology behind and the sociological function of textual porn in fandom in particular or in fiction in general.