I know what you mean. Okay, I don't write fic, and I find the fanarchive stuff totally amazing and feel like writing a paper about all these recent events... I think the organizing, radical forces in fandom are really being harnessed right now and it's extremely cool.
But, frankly, I'm rather in favour of the underage distribution of "adult" fiction. I doubt that the presence of will scar the little children for life, at least not in a bad way (the most 'scarring' book I ever read, Plague 99, was in the children's section of the library anyway; reading explicit sex in Samuel R. Delany at the same age just made me interested and sympathetic to deviancy, and I think that's a rather positive outcome). Especially given that the 'underage' we're talking about is often mid-to-late-teens, when 'childish innocence' is not a terribly relevant category, at least when it comes to the imagination...
It comes down to the fact that I don't see legality as a big deal, really; there are enough laws I passionately and politically disagree with, especially in the US, that I definitely think of legality as just something you have to conform to in order to avoid trouble, but not a good in and of itself. So yeah, I liked it when it was pretty much ignored.
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But, frankly, I'm rather in favour of the underage distribution of "adult" fiction. I doubt that the presence of will scar the little children for life, at least not in a bad way (the most 'scarring' book I ever read, Plague 99, was in the children's section of the library anyway; reading explicit sex in Samuel R. Delany at the same age just made me interested and sympathetic to deviancy, and I think that's a rather positive outcome). Especially given that the 'underage' we're talking about is often mid-to-late-teens, when 'childish innocence' is not a terribly relevant category, at least when it comes to the imagination...
It comes down to the fact that I don't see legality as a big deal, really; there are enough laws I passionately and politically disagree with, especially in the US, that I definitely think of legality as just something you have to conform to in order to avoid trouble, but not a good in and of itself. So yeah, I liked it when it was pretty much ignored.