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Call it irony, perhaps?
Feb. 9th, 2021 05:56 pmSo, the other day I started an all-ships, all-kinks, Hades discord. Because I got told off for daring to say I preferred "PZA" to "ThanZag" on another server.
Sigh.
Fandom. Can't live with them, can't live without them!
And of course this has me now having flashbacks to the time I got more or less chased entirely out of Good Omens fandom for being a "dangerous predator".
Which all goes to say, that I feel like talking about the reason why when I say "all kinks" on my server, I don't add in the one exception I see in most kinky spaces, the "but no pedos!"
Why not? Firstly, I'll say VERY CLEARLY up front: If you mean real world pedophiles, then yes, I would ban them. People who prey on children, or on teenagers, are not welcome in any space I host. (It's moot because it's an 18+ server, so predators won't go there to hunt, but yanno, still.)
That's not what the "no pedos" rule actually means, though, in fandom spaces. It means "nobody who might use the underage tag or write a story with teenagers who have sexual urges or engage in sexual behavior." It's become such a truism among fandom that those people are pedophiles that hardly anybody questions it, but since I'm one of those fucking people (read on, folks, read on, you'll see) I have some words to say. Because ironically, I get labeled with "pedo" quite literally because I'm NOT one.
Let me explain.
I am a trans man. I was raised as a girl and I went through a feminine sort of puberty (and was a late bloomer and religiously repressed on top of that.) I am also not taking T, for various reasons. I have never experienced masculine puberty. I have never whispered with my friends over somebody's borrowed Playboy. I have never woken up discovering I had a wet dream in the night. I have never had the alluring-uncomfortable experience of seeing somebody I found attractive and having my body react without my meaning it to. None of that. I missed it all.
I am obsessed with it.
So I write it. I write characters who are me, going through it. Teenagers, discovering what sex is.
But I am, as I said above, not a pedophile. The idea of looking at a teenage boy and finding him attractive is, frankly, laughable. Come on. Teenage boys are just...gods. No. Please. Save me. Keep them away. I don't even want to interact with most of them platonically, augh!
This means, though, that when I write out my "but what if I'd been a cis boy, god, please, I wish?" fantasies, I pair my self-insert characters with people I am attracted to. With adults.
And there it goes.
Every last one of those stories, totally reprehensible, according to the keepers of purity, because I write about grown men and teenage boys having sex.
If I were a pedophile, I would probably write stories that were teen-on-teen, and in a supreme irony, be considered "better" and "safer" because I would be writing things that should exist in the real world.
It's all fiction, people. It's all fiction! I no more want anything to do with molesting children than everybody who enjoyed, say, Godzilla wants to kill thousands of people by leveling a city, that's the degree of "reality" there is in those stories. And yet, of course, somehow everyone understands that the people making Godzilla movies aren't mass-murdering terrorists, but I'm a dangerous predator.
I sometimes think that the entirety of western culture needs to be tossed out the window.
But this is all to say that when I say "all kinks" I really do mean "all". If they're kinks (which means either fantasy, involving no real, living people (the gods aren't real and Achilles is dead, he's fair game, lol!) or 100% consensual) then they're allowed. No tags barred.
Sigh.
Fandom. Can't live with them, can't live without them!
And of course this has me now having flashbacks to the time I got more or less chased entirely out of Good Omens fandom for being a "dangerous predator".
Which all goes to say, that I feel like talking about the reason why when I say "all kinks" on my server, I don't add in the one exception I see in most kinky spaces, the "but no pedos!"
Why not? Firstly, I'll say VERY CLEARLY up front: If you mean real world pedophiles, then yes, I would ban them. People who prey on children, or on teenagers, are not welcome in any space I host. (It's moot because it's an 18+ server, so predators won't go there to hunt, but yanno, still.)
That's not what the "no pedos" rule actually means, though, in fandom spaces. It means "nobody who might use the underage tag or write a story with teenagers who have sexual urges or engage in sexual behavior." It's become such a truism among fandom that those people are pedophiles that hardly anybody questions it, but since I'm one of those fucking people (read on, folks, read on, you'll see) I have some words to say. Because ironically, I get labeled with "pedo" quite literally because I'm NOT one.
Let me explain.
I am a trans man. I was raised as a girl and I went through a feminine sort of puberty (and was a late bloomer and religiously repressed on top of that.) I am also not taking T, for various reasons. I have never experienced masculine puberty. I have never whispered with my friends over somebody's borrowed Playboy. I have never woken up discovering I had a wet dream in the night. I have never had the alluring-uncomfortable experience of seeing somebody I found attractive and having my body react without my meaning it to. None of that. I missed it all.
I am obsessed with it.
So I write it. I write characters who are me, going through it. Teenagers, discovering what sex is.
But I am, as I said above, not a pedophile. The idea of looking at a teenage boy and finding him attractive is, frankly, laughable. Come on. Teenage boys are just...gods. No. Please. Save me. Keep them away. I don't even want to interact with most of them platonically, augh!
This means, though, that when I write out my "but what if I'd been a cis boy, god, please, I wish?" fantasies, I pair my self-insert characters with people I am attracted to. With adults.
And there it goes.
Every last one of those stories, totally reprehensible, according to the keepers of purity, because I write about grown men and teenage boys having sex.
If I were a pedophile, I would probably write stories that were teen-on-teen, and in a supreme irony, be considered "better" and "safer" because I would be writing things that should exist in the real world.
It's all fiction, people. It's all fiction! I no more want anything to do with molesting children than everybody who enjoyed, say, Godzilla wants to kill thousands of people by leveling a city, that's the degree of "reality" there is in those stories. And yet, of course, somehow everyone understands that the people making Godzilla movies aren't mass-murdering terrorists, but I'm a dangerous predator.
I sometimes think that the entirety of western culture needs to be tossed out the window.
But this is all to say that when I say "all kinks" I really do mean "all". If they're kinks (which means either fantasy, involving no real, living people (the gods aren't real and Achilles is dead, he's fair game, lol!) or 100% consensual) then they're allowed. No tags barred.