texasdreamer01

[texasdreamer01]

Sometimes being the mum who exists in fandom spaces leads to awkward, even concerning, conversations. Such as the one which happened this morning. The mum of my daughter's best mate asked me if one of their mutual friends had sent her a specific message. This message was a link to a fic on ao3, if this had been a G rated fic this conversation would not have happened. It was not G rated. It was an E rated fic. Our kids aren't even 12 yet. As it happens, both of our kids have their internet access heavily locked down and monitored. They have phones because of how their school manages homework. The mutual friend, however, is not so monitored. Or she wasn't, given what her mum found she's about to be. This kid had found a fandom, joined it, and found it chock full of antis. The fic had been sent to her by one of them as an example of the sort of terrible people out there who need to be harassed and attacked because they wrote a smutty story.

Someone thought it was appropriate to send written porn to an 11 year old to encourage her to attack the author.

This resulted in a very awkward conversation where I had to explain to multiple horrified parents the anti culture that is becoming so prevalent. The fact that there are adults who use that purity message to groom kids. The way they escalate and how it bleeds into real life. One parent told me she'd wondered why her 14 year old was suddenly concerned about the two year age gap between her parents. The more I explained, the more absolutely ludicrous it sounded and the more baffled these poor mums looked. More than once I was told "but the characters aren't real, it's really weird but it isn't hurting anyone". Which is the point. The fictional situation isn't hurting anyone. The person who sent porn to an 11 year old is.

Was the person who sent it the author? Doubtful, that thing was tagged in the extreme. Was the person who sent it an adult? Almost certainly. The parent who's child received the original message has found more concerning stuff and gone to the police, but from the language the person doing the sending was in the US. We aren't. Did my daughter receive it? No, she isn't interested in that fandom and therefore wouldn't have bothered with it. Is this the fault of the author? No, they didn't send the link, they didn't ask to be harassed, they wrote a story and put it on ao3, the website created in response to rampant censorship and designed to allow for all kinds of fiction. Is this the fault of the parents? Partially, they should have been looking at their daughter's internet use and clocked what was happening sooner. Is this the fault of the child? No, she's 11, she didn't know better.

This has been a difficult day. Multiple parents have had their eyes opened to parts of fandom culture they had no idea existed. And the thing of it is, they aren't concerned about the why of anti rhetoric. They don't care about the adults writing about teens or rape or incest or torture or any of the rest, because they looked at the clearly tagged and rated fics and figured that it worked the same as a warning on any streaming service. They only cared because some utterly vile individual decided to expose their child to something this girl might not have looked at for years.

Proshippers did not cause what I have spent afternoon helping several sets of parents navigate. Antis did. Normally I'm fairly quiet about the whole debate because I just want to get on with my life and share my experiences. Today I got dragged into that mess in my every day life and the adults in the equation didn't react the way Antis like to think they would. They didn't condemn the author. They condemned the anti who shared the work with a preteen.

[texasdreamer01]

“This is your daily, friendly reminder to use commas instead of periods during the dialogue of your story,” she said with a smile.

[texasdreamer01]

insane how sexism damaged how we research (and what we know about) animals. did you grow up being taught that only male birds sing? you may be entitled to financial compensation

[texasdreamer01]

wow this is really clever because [USA law that isn't applicable in the country this is happening in]!

OP you need to get a lawyer because [USA law that isn't applicable in the country this is happening in]!

um but it's literally illegal for them to [thing that isn't illegal in the country this is happening in]

I'd really recommend you contact [US group who aren't in the country this is happening in]

oh here's a link for [thing that isn't applicable in the country this is happening in]

[texasdreamer01]

(opening the author’s works page after finishing a fic) and if im lucky they’ll have written this exact same fic but different a bunch more times

[texasdreamer01]

Battle of the Barbies: 1990s (Round 1)

[texasdreamer01]

Do you have glow in the dark stats on your bedroom ceiling?

- yes

- I have another glow in the dark decoration

- no, I’m really boring :(

[texasdreamer01]

[texasdreamer01]

General tumblr reminder, since some people don't know: If the person's URL has "deactivated" plus a string of numbers (a date) after it, that means that they manually deleted their own blog. It doesn't mean they were banned. Banned blogs don't have "deactivated" after them and will just be the normal URL you can't click on or interact with. They look very similar and function the same, but they were caused by two very different things.

[texasdreamer01]

Stargate Universe "Blockade"

[texasdreamer01]

[texasdreamer01]

Going to a city you know a mutual lives in like hello general area my friend is in. You’re somewhere

[texasdreamer01]

Stanley Bielen (Polish/American), Tender Hearted, 2024, Oil on paper/mounted

[texasdreamer01]

Marble relief: terminal figure of the fertility god Priapus set in a landscape with a sepulchral urn on a pillar.

Roman, c. 1st century CE

[texasdreamer01]

can i matchmake you guys somehow?