and erase me
Aug. 11th, 2007 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI 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.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-11 11:37 pm (UTC)cogent, articulate, personal without being whiny, and above all, right to the point.
-hugs-
hell, i wish there'd been something like this for me at age 14,15, instead of 'free love' and 'tune in, turn on, drop out', and planned parenthood (but not roe vx. wade). sigh.
xo
no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 02:08 am (UTC)I do think the sexual education of younger teens is a real problem. We teach stds and just say no, but nothing about saying yes. You can't say no unless you can say yes, and vice versa. Hell, more focus on pleasure might even lower the rates of teen pregnancy - skip PIV sex altogether, and go by what feels good. Pleasure, not reproduction.
How's this whole thing going down in rps circles? You're a lot more plugged into that than I am, but I know you guys have had huge kerfluffles over legality and obscenity before.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-13 07:07 pm (UTC)I agree with you. That I was married 6 years and already had had two children, and not been a virgin since I was 16, before I learned how to give myself an orgasm (or, indeed, how they worked at all, and how to get one off my husband without it's being, so to speak, hit or miss) appalled me- I did my best to [without embarrassing them unduly] teach my sons how pleasure works, as opposed to sex, before it became to hot to handle, just for that reason.
God. If only we taught real anatomy and physiology- not the complex '# of bones in the body' stuff but 'this is how nerves work, and where they are', simply and clearly and honestly right up front...
oh. ramble and rant. sorry. thoughts not even coherent about this, they're so strong and deep.
maybe we have a collaboration coming out of this? ya think? a set of ads, a comic, something?
no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 12:18 am (UTC)Sometimes I kind of wish there had been something like internet fandom when I grew up, too.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 02:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 10:54 am (UTC)but I haven't read anywhere near all links about this. If you remember what it was, please link me?
no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 10:56 am (UTC)It sure feels like that's what it is, at any rate.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 11:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-13 07:13 pm (UTC)right on. and it IS a damn shame.
Women of Ideas, and What Men Have Done to Them, by Dale Spender. I liked it so well that I had a small reprint done in the early 90's when I was working in the Women's Center at my uni.
HIGHLY recommended. (http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/spender2.html)
no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 06:21 am (UTC)Percy/Mary, Buffy/Angel and Romeo/Juliet would probably be banned if they were depicted on LJ in explicit fanart.
BTW, I started menstruating at 11 too - but it never hurt. I'm sorry.
You make a very good argument against 18+ journals. I'd already decided that's not for me - too closed up. I do actually think LJ allows sexual fic, even with minors, just not art.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 11:02 am (UTC)LiveJournal doesn't ban minors, but JournalFen has a policy that only 18+ are allowed in. So I feel like fandom moving from lj to jf is in many ways counterproductive, because that just locks the kids out unless they lie. Which is what I would have done, but I was a bad kid.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 12:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-13 07:01 am (UTC)