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and erase me
Aug. 11th, 2007 06:56 pmI just want to stick my head into the current Strikethrough mess and express my desperate frustration at lj's definitions of "child" and "pornography," as seen here.
Because, for one thing, so many verses have canon that violates those rules. Buffy/Angel violates it all over the place, in the same ways that Ponderosa's Snarry art does. Romeo and Juliet are in violation. Percy and Mary Shelley are in violation. This is absolutely ridiculous.
Pedophilia refers to a very specific desire - that of an adult for a child. Prepubescent. The thing about pedophilia that makes it sick is that it is, by definition, non-mutual. Pedophilia is, as I understand it, the desire to have sex with someone who doesn't have a sexuality. Someone who's body isn't built for sexual pleasure. Someone who can't demand tit for tat, as it were. It's the masturbatory use of a child's body. There's no exchange of sexual pleasure going on. And I'll tell you, I was doing exchange of pleasure when I was sixteen, mutual and loving and in no way abusive.
Again, and I feel like I keep saying this, but it means enough to me that I feel like it bears repeating: fandom was the greatest of boons to me as a young girl. Because my culture sexualized me and made me hate and fear myself, gave me only the pain and insecurity of womanhood to look forward to. It wasn't until fandom that I had any real inkling of pleasure, of authentic and real and joyous sexuality, of the things that make growing up necessary. I was an early bloomer, and I have a very feminine figure. I started menstruating when I was eleven, and it hurt. It took fandom to allow me to view my biology as anything but a burden and a location of suffering.
Women don't talk authentically about desire anywhere else like they do here. When women - and girls most especially - talk about desire, it's performative. The men are watching, and we want to give the right answers, to titillate just enough but not be too slutty. "Snape giving Harry Potter a blow job" is never going to be written on the Playmate interviews, but it actually is one of my turn-ons. So is sibling incest. So are stories of first love and first sexuality, which usually occur sometime in the space between fourteen and nineteen. I'm desperately in love with the stories of the discovery of sensuality and eroticism, the stories about minds and bodies unfolding, opening, realizing for the first time that there are good parts to growing up. Those stories turn me on like crazy, and men sure as hell don't want to hear about it. Strikethrough being the case in point.
(this is, incidentally, the reason why I absolutely don't want fandom moving to JournalFen. I understand why they have the policies that they do, but for the main hub of this community to be somewhere where girls aren't welcome isn't a thing that I'm okay with. I needed this too much at fifteen to deny anyone else her chance at it.)
I just really regret that we're forced to be sexualized without being sexual. We can only suffer in out bodies - heaven forbid we enjoy them, either as women in erotic communities in cyberspace or as young people trying to find narratives of love and desire in a world that insists that we be looked at constantly but have no agency to bring ourselves to pleasure. It's sick both intra- and extra-textually.
Because, for one thing, so many verses have canon that violates those rules. Buffy/Angel violates it all over the place, in the same ways that Ponderosa's Snarry art does. Romeo and Juliet are in violation. Percy and Mary Shelley are in violation. This is absolutely ridiculous.
Pedophilia refers to a very specific desire - that of an adult for a child. Prepubescent. The thing about pedophilia that makes it sick is that it is, by definition, non-mutual. Pedophilia is, as I understand it, the desire to have sex with someone who doesn't have a sexuality. Someone who's body isn't built for sexual pleasure. Someone who can't demand tit for tat, as it were. It's the masturbatory use of a child's body. There's no exchange of sexual pleasure going on. And I'll tell you, I was doing exchange of pleasure when I was sixteen, mutual and loving and in no way abusive.
Again, and I feel like I keep saying this, but it means enough to me that I feel like it bears repeating: fandom was the greatest of boons to me as a young girl. Because my culture sexualized me and made me hate and fear myself, gave me only the pain and insecurity of womanhood to look forward to. It wasn't until fandom that I had any real inkling of pleasure, of authentic and real and joyous sexuality, of the things that make growing up necessary. I was an early bloomer, and I have a very feminine figure. I started menstruating when I was eleven, and it hurt. It took fandom to allow me to view my biology as anything but a burden and a location of suffering.
Women don't talk authentically about desire anywhere else like they do here. When women - and girls most especially - talk about desire, it's performative. The men are watching, and we want to give the right answers, to titillate just enough but not be too slutty. "Snape giving Harry Potter a blow job" is never going to be written on the Playmate interviews, but it actually is one of my turn-ons. So is sibling incest. So are stories of first love and first sexuality, which usually occur sometime in the space between fourteen and nineteen. I'm desperately in love with the stories of the discovery of sensuality and eroticism, the stories about minds and bodies unfolding, opening, realizing for the first time that there are good parts to growing up. Those stories turn me on like crazy, and men sure as hell don't want to hear about it. Strikethrough being the case in point.
(this is, incidentally, the reason why I absolutely don't want fandom moving to JournalFen. I understand why they have the policies that they do, but for the main hub of this community to be somewhere where girls aren't welcome isn't a thing that I'm okay with. I needed this too much at fifteen to deny anyone else her chance at it.)
I just really regret that we're forced to be sexualized without being sexual. We can only suffer in out bodies - heaven forbid we enjoy them, either as women in erotic communities in cyberspace or as young people trying to find narratives of love and desire in a world that insists that we be looked at constantly but have no agency to bring ourselves to pleasure. It's sick both intra- and extra-textually.