People Already Condemn Relationships Between 20 Year Olds And 25 Year Olds. People Already Condemn Teenagers

People already condemn relationships between 20 year olds and 25 year olds. People already condemn teenagers safely exploring sex and sexuality through literature. People already condemn 18 year olds having sex.

We are living in an era that is striving to simultaneously shove sex down our throats and make it borderline illegal to even think about sex. Drink adverts will show half-naked girls fawning over bottles and cans but women in the streets are being beaten and raped for wearing skirts or showing their hair or simply having the misfortune of being born with an extra hole.

The word 'pedophilia' has been watered down so badly that men in their forties are being accused of it for dating women in their late twenties. There's a post that's been circulating Facebook for as long as I can remember loudly declaring that 20 and 25 is still pedophilia. 16 and 18 is still pedophilia. 60 and 30 is still pedophilia.

Men dating short women is pedophilia. Men dating skinny women is pedophilia. Men dating women with small breasts or youthful faces or girls with higher voices is pedophilia.

Women dressing in cute outfits is pedobaiting. Women striving to look cute instead of hot is pedobaiting. Women who enjoy older men are pedobaiting.

I cannot stress this enough. One, none of that is correct. Two, literature does not equate to real actions.

If pedophiles genuinely are writing out their desires on AO3 instead of touching real children, guess what?

That's a good thing.

If victims of pedophilia are using AO3 to write about their trauma and process it and outlet it?

That's a good thing.

If reading a piece of fiction where your favorite character is groomed actually helps you realize the signs and methods of grooming?

That's a good thing.

If people are using literature to explore harmless desires and ideas?

That is literally what literature is for.

Re; censorship, if you still think discussing how one seemingly harmless act of censorship can actually trigger a landslide of creative suffocation is just dramatics, understand that Conservatives hopped straight from 'we need to stop pedophiles having such easy access to children' to 'saying the word gay or teaching children about their own biology is tantamount to grooming.'

Censorship is biased, prejudiced, and dangerous. It has its place within very careful structures but it is not something to wield like a hammer and it is certainly not something to advocate for in artistic and creative spaces.

You want an AO3 without all of that stuff? Guess what? They tried to make one. It never got further than a domain and an idea because nobody involved or supporting it could actually agree on their own rules and ideas about what should be censored and why.

Nobody is forcing you to look at that literature. AO3 explicitly gives you multiple tools to help you stay away from it. AO3, across literally any literature collection online, gives you the most tools to avoid it.

"Why can't the freaks on AO3 just go and make a site for all the gross stuff and leave AO3 alone."

Because AO3 is that site. Because AO3 was that site long before you decided AO3 was better than the sites you bullied us off of before, and I can promise you if someone somehow comes up with a fanfic site you like better specifically for the 'gross stuff' you'll try to bully us off that too so you can benefit from it.

AO3's specific core purpose is to preserve fanfiction, yes, but it was also instigated as a host site for the fanfiction that kept getting yeeted off other platforms like Wattpad. Its designed to preserve all fanfiction, not just the fanfiction you, personally, think is 'allowed' to be written.

AO3 is the site for all the gross stuff the freaks make. We've been there just as long as you. We've been funding it just as long as you have. AO3 has specifically said you have a place here. The timeline was literally:

Wattpad/FF.net/LiveJournal purge fanfics > AO3 is born > The people who's fics got purged moved over to AO3 > AO3 gains popularity as the best functioning site > The people who pushed for the fics to be purged off Wattpad move to AO3 > The same people try to push for AO3 to purge fics.

AO3's source coding is open-access. You go make a polished, strict, rigid site where nothing 'icky' is allowed. You go make a site where you can control what is hosted. We already have our space.

Or. Y'know. You can just let people rest without also turning their need for emotional and mental respite into a massive guilt trip about activism. Again.

Its a nice sentiment, it really is, but that isn't actually rest. Reducing people's privilege and right to rest and enjoyment back down to activism and the horrors of the world literally just voids the entire purpose and nature of rest and enjoyment.

I can assure you that when I'm in those political spaces I'm already thinking about people's rights and the things I have that others do not. I do not need you dangling my respite over my head like an unreachable carrot just to make me keep running on the wheel.

I am actually begging some people to just let some spaces exist untouched by real-world issues and horrors.

Like I've lost count of the amount of times peaceful game or fandom servers have been ruined by people stampeding in with political rants, bitching about world issues, demanding internal activism, demanding vent channels so they can whine about their shitty parents, ect.

Like. Respectfully. Not every single space has to be inclusive of and welcoming of outside topics. The real world sucks. We don't needed to be reminded of that absolutely everywhere.

Can I steal that victim card picture that is so funny

By all means, its just a free-use image off the internet. There are plenty of them and plenty of memes available on the same basis.

“ao3 was our site” the site of scamming people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars to host child porn on a broken shit site? yeah what an epic hill to die and kill for

Virtue signalling becomes "bad" when it becomes weaponised or used in place of actual activism. There's absolutely nothing wrong with signalling your stances, virtues and morals to other people or expressing support for something or someone.

Unfortunately, a lot of people use virtue signalling as a means of pressure, targeting, and other unpleasant behaviors.

For example; "if you don't use this Facebook profile frame you're clearly a horrible person who doesn't give a fuck about veterans and can't be bothered to do one tiny thing to show support!"

Or; "if you're too lazy to tell everyone all the time that you're not a pedophile I'm going to automatically assume you're a pedophile."

When people use virtue signalling to harass others, apply pressure to them to conform to expectations or to be awarded basic decency is when virtue signalling becomes something that is harmful rather than something that is beneficial.

Virtue signalling in terms of things like profile frames and window stickers is a fun, sweet way of showing support and raising awareness, but it isn't a moral obligation nor is it paramount activism. Especially when it becomes a consistent expectation that you absolutely must participate in every single public signalling trend or be condemned.

Am I the only person who doesn’t think ‘virtue signaling’ is inherently bad/useless? That post talking about FB frames is so bizarre to me because to me that’s like. Walking past a business with a rainbow flag flying. That was genuinely incredibly important to me as a terrified closeted teen! And someone having a Facebook frame for the same reasons is like - hey that’s one person who doesn’t want me to change or die! I don’t think that’s ’doing nothing’.

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Thanks for answering my question re: red flags. I've been silently checking the fandom discord since then, and I'm now seeing buzzwords like "fiction that makes abuse look sexy deserves to be called out", "certain relationship tropes are a danger to young girls", "HEA in romance can be harmful as it sets too high standards"...I understand everyone has their opinions, and when worded as personal preference it doesn't alarm me, but I shudder to think what would happen if these ppl found out I write taboo ships with a happy ending. I don't think it's worth the stress for me to stay. And I never considered that the "media literacy" argument could be thrown back at the people who aim to overcompensate for society's lack of critical thinking skills by themselves not engaging in critical thinking.

Once you start noticing it, its impossible not to see/ignore it. Unfortunately you'll find those kinds of slogans and gotcha buzzwords everywhere in fandom and even in real life. TikTok at the moment is just a breeding ground for it, especially as TikTok's ridiculous content policies will allow it as long as its generating income.

Re; the latter part, almost every argument can be reversed. So many people these days are twisting themselves ass backwards to not be A Bad Person that they're just blindly white knighting and waging war without actually stopping and considering if they need to. Or even if they're wielding the right weapon.