alixtii | I Aim to Misbehave

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I Aim to Misbehave

You know what what? In some ways, I think I miss the days when everyone in fandom thought fanfic was illegal. (I say this is as someone who entered fandom in 2004, so I'm not sure if there has exactly been a sea-change, but it sure feels like it to me.) Because now everyone's on about what we can do to look like fine upstanding citizens, and at least when we thought we were criminals we were more genuinely subversive. When we thought we were all committing copyright infringement, other things which may have been illegal but ethical, like providing porn to teenagers, didn't seem like such a big deal. But now the "fanfic is legal" zeitgesit is taking over, and everyone's calling for us to clean up our acts, and I have to wonder what exactly we're losing out on.

The specific post that got me to post this is this one, "Looking Ahead as Fen," but it's nothing new and mirrors conversations I've been seeing going on all through the FanLib and ~~Strikethrough07~~ discussions.

I don't like disclaimers (and for the most part don't use them), don't like warnings (and only warn for rape), don't like ratings (I've switched to just using "Work Safe" and "NWS," and am thinking about a "Maybe Work Safe" option). I refuse to flock a post just because it contains adult content (even if that content is incest or cross-gen). I've ranted about most of these issues (often in

metafandom-linked posts) before, and the idea that we have to start doing these things (making our art and literature fit into cookie-cutter boxes) to make ourselves acceptable to the Man just sort of makes me retch.

Let's be bad guys?

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Yeah... I really have no interest in being "good".

*is a bad guy with you*

From my point of view... fanfic is not illegal but neither is porn. And in the US, even stories with underage child rape, while they may be distasteful, are not illegal. There's no law (in the US) against hurting fictional people.

So I'm not disclaiming or locking anything, and I don't see any real reason why anyone else would either. When I am in charge they will fall in line, damnit. :P

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.

the presence of SEX, that was meant to say

Well, I don't remember ever thinking that fanfiction was illegal, other than concern about RPF, but fandom used to be so vast and splintered, there was a lot less overlap among circles than there are now. Obviously, I've just locked down my entire journal, but it wasn't in order to clean my act up or to make myself acceptable. I'm just sick of the attention from outside fandom. I'm writing for myself and my community, maybe even posterity, but I certainly don't need or want validation or denigration from journalists, academics, Six Apart, Fanlib, WfI or whoever. I'd rather lock my doors, and only let in people I invite, rather than leave the door open for strangers I can't trust.

(making our art and literature fit into cookie-cutter boxes)
About the "need for warning" debate and similar, I think a lot of the problem comes in with people not considering fanfic (and vids and all else) art and literature. Some of the people on my friends list are actually virulently against the idea. It's a hobby and a past-time, and somehow it would be "less fun" if we called it art. It's as if people these days think that art can't be enjoyable, and perhaps that's the same place these legitimizing efforts are coming from. We have deep emotional responses to the taboo aspects of fanfic, which means it can't be art, so the only way to make it respectable and "museum quality" is to take all that squishy id-stuff out.

Did you intend to respond to me or to

alixtii?

good grief--sorry! to

alixtii primarily, though I may have picked up on one of your points!

Sorry -- misclicked!

(Here from metafandom)

The post you linked...ow. I feel very anti-authoritarian now.

I've been in fandom since 2001, definitely before 2004, and if anything, I've seen a lot more of people openly posting chan/smut/kink/etc. in recent years. Back in the days of personal webpages (many of which were still around when I was a newbie fan), I remember having to click past numerous warnings -- and possibly submit an age statement -- just to get to garden-variety slash.

Warnings and ratings have also been around throughout my fannish experience (along with pairing labels, which were so common in GW and Weiss yaoi and on Fiction Alley that I assumed that not including them constituted leaving out a vital part of a fic, comparable to forgetting to give it a title). I'd always assumed that they were assigned and included as a courtesy to other fans (especially other fans reading on family or public computers, who might not want someone looking over their shoulders and seeing a screen full of explicit sex), rather than as some kind of attempt to "clean fandom up." Clearly labeling for content is a far cry from hiding it or being ashamed of it.

If anything, I've generally found that ratings and labels make porn and darkfic easier to find.

yeah, who's wanting us to "clean up our acts"? of all the things that's come out of the strikethrough07 thing, and the talk about FanLib and "An Archive of Our Own," I have not seen any urge that we need to somehow write less porny porn?

where have you picked up that idea that we need to pull back from the id vortex? am I not hanging around the same places you have been?

as far as i know, pornography in literary form is not illegal in the US, and it's not illegal on the internet in the US. So we're cool there. (Obscenity has a narrower definition and fanfic in general is not obscenity by US practices. That's oversimplifying and i am not a lawyer, but that's my take on it.)

Now CHILD pornography is something else again, but you're not talking about that are you? or are you?

the whole fair use or first-amendment-exception under copyright thing -- i'll have to say that cesperanza made me change my paradigm about that. but i don't want to stop writing nc 17 because of that. far from it.

I'm not really sure I see your point. When I was in Trek fandom in the seventies, I never heard about slash (still grumpy), learned about it through academic presentations.

The disclaimer, warnings, issues, was well in place when I came back to fandom in 2003 (meaning online LJ LOTR fandom), with all sorts of kerfuffles if people didn't "warn" for x, y, or z (heck, in some lotr spaces, "hobbit/man interspecies" was supposed to be a warning for those people too upset with hobbit/man sex (which apparently on some of ye olden days listservs was equated with pedophilia, driving the interspecies folks early into LJ to set up their own comms).

Having read some great posts (think one was by

cesperanza, I'm about to cut the disclaimers (except at least one comm I just joined,

pirategasm requires disclaimers (and this isn't new, they're like 2K members, been around since the first pirate movie, probably set up within a day of it if not sometime before).

Warnings--eh, I warn for the darker things. I'd rather be over-warning than trigger somebody.

But where's all this other stuff coming? I lock down my more personal stuff to my flist but all my fan meta and adult/nonworksafe fics are posted openly (and after a request from a fan in China--where they apparently have moved to block all citizen access to LJ!!!!--I have allowed Google spiders and opened up my entries to RSS feed). I've set up a professional real life journal and will be (soon) coming out. I spent a couple of hours last night writing my application to

astolat for volunteering to help out with

fanarchive. I haven't seen a call to "clean up our acts."

What's recently happened has been building ever since fandom went public on the internet (even with some of the locked comms and such, a lot of what we do is there).

Good point: a lot of people found us and joined us (a lot of the slashers I've known found the LOTR slash while just googling characters' or actors' names).

Bad point: the media can write about us (some well, some pretty badly--and I suspect some of the better articles come from people who are also fans). Academia, ditto (*points at self and a bunch of friends*).

When I compare being in Star Trek fandom, in an Outpost, attending conferences, interacting with other fans for something like four-five years and *never learn of slash* because it was under the table, locked down, and I never met the criteria to be told versus being on LJ and have people in China, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Canada, reading my stuff, and me reading theirs, and us talking and getting together--well, it's better, that's all I can say.

I don't consider either the media nor academia give fandom validation--but in today's world, it's not possible to hide out either (even back then, I remember an Outpost members' Star Trek themed wedding getting featured on a Seattle news station to be pointed at and mocked).

I'll go read the post you link to--but you know, saying that fandom was always wild and free and unfettered sort of ignores all the demands for conformity w/in fandom, all the exclusions and marginalizations (*eek get those furries outta my comm*), etc.

Becuase I am a queer woman, and because I tend to interpret everything in my terms, as we all tend to do, I see these latest events (the latest wave in a long movement of the tide, so to speak) as coming out of the closet. That's a very long and complex and messy process, and every individual will do it differently, and there's no right set of rules for everybody.

But it's coming--and I think it's more than time.

Very nice to glory in being all illegal and such (and you know that's not going away--*lots* of people cannot come out publicly by their real name!), but there are problems with it as well.

I may be misunderstanding your post entirely--but I can only say that on my flist and comms and such, I've seen no such sentiments expressed.

*goes to read link*

*shrugs*

That fan is living in another universe than I do.

As far as I know the mainstream media has discovered fandom way back when and periodically covers it.

Nor is there a single msm that we can interact with to preserve our image--and this call for unity! Wow.

I already have offline interactions with fans in my community--granted, mostly at academic conferences, because, whoa Texas! rural Texas! (actually one of my former students is now on my flist--there aren't that many fans around here).

The standardizing ratings--whoa boy, let's not even go there--and some of the other stuff--totally unrealistic.

I guess I just cannot take that sort of thing seriously, nor, I suspect, will much of fandom.

deleted and reposted--again my apologies!

(Although now that I reread your comment--when was RPF considered "illegal" if FPF wasn't? I mean different laws -- copyright vs. slander/libel, but I've always heard in the U.S. at least the RPS writers would be at less risk because "public figures" don't have a lot of control over what's written about them?)

it was Ces, thank you! and me too--fair use, yeah, and no, not stopping me from writing adult stuff. what's stopping me is lack of freaking time and too much *work*!!!! *grumbles quietly to self*

I haven't seen many calls to write less porny porn--although I have seen some--but I've seen many calls to modify the way we distribute it to make it more acceptable to the government and to public opinion. Even if you go through the comments of Shallot's first post for An Archive of Our Own, you can see people trying to control how we write. Those trying to control what we write--for example, those suggesting chan not be allowed--were thankfully shouted down fairly quickly (although it should be acknowledged that they did exist at all), but there were others who were given much more time, especially those discussing how to respond to COPA's inevitable successor. Responses ranged from the nudge-nudge-wink-wink approach of requiring underaged fen to lie about their age in order to participate (which I'd accept reluctantly as a necessary evil) to those who want to cordon off soi-disant "safe" areas for them to play in. If you go through those comments, you can find my own comments pointing to places where I found the response troubling.

I have to say I like having Six Apart being required to deal with the legal issues (taking action only if forced, although obviously that's now ambiguous) and having do as thou wilt be the sum of the law.

Let me say that none of the suggestions that were made in the post I linked were ones that I saw for the first time in that post. They're opinions that I've seen again and again in these discussions and while I don't think they represent the majority view, I've seen them enough times to find the trend troubling.

Bad phrasing on my part. I didn't mean that anyone considered RPF illegal, just that there used to be a widespread belief that it was wrong, even in fandom, even among fanfic writers.

However, I'm going to comment anyway on the libel thing. I'm not an expert or a lawyer, just someone with a brief journalistic background, so standard disclaimer, but it's an oversimplification that public figures (I think the phrase is actually those "in the public eye") don't have a lot of control over what's written about them. In a libel suit, it's certainly true the burden of proof is on the person claiming to have been libeled. Private citizens pretty much need only prove a statement was false and that no attempt was made to assess the statement's veracity to prove libel. The burden of proof is greater for public citizens, but not insurmountable. They must additionally prove that the statement was knowingly false (the libeler knew for sure it wasn't true, not just failed to check) and harmful (almost certainly monetarily, not just "emotional trauma," for example, someone who cannot get a job because all prospective employers read on Famous Blog A that s/he is a cocaine addict). Public figures who wanted to bring libel suits for RPF would find it very easy to prove stories were knowingly false, but they'd have a lot harder time proving they'd been damaged (the writer doesn't really think X and his co-star have sprouted wings and are having nightly sex, and no one else does either).

I'm here from metafandom, and I just want to wholeheartedly agree. I first started posting fanfic online in 1997, back when it seemed like the most freakish and subversive thing anyone in the world could do. My first smut? I posted it under a pseudonym, because in my fandom adult fiction was completely unheard of.

It was the most wonderful, giddy, incandescent feeling to break laws that hadn't even been written yet. These days, fanfic is just too close to pro. It's the farm team, which makes it serious in ways it never used to be. Like so much of the internet, the Wild West has been tamed into corporation-sponsored suburbs. Which is a major bummer.

Word to that - it's rare for me to ever bother reading anything rated less than NC-17 (the most ridiculous rating of all time if you ask me... it's X, for heaven's sake, if you want to get all MPAA on it).

I've been a smutfic writer for longer than most people who are interested it now have been alive, since before there was readily available internet, and I consider the present day to be something like a Golden Age for the availability and smuttasticness of fic.

So yeah, being bad is good.

so the issue that brought it up is the perennial one of people under 18 finding what is considered in the US "adult" material or X-rated material? and how to try to stop that? kind of like adult bookstores or ratings on movies?

hmm.

yeah, I have to confess that I did not look through all the many dozens of comments on that original discussion. i just did not want to devote the time to what is certainly a very preliminary discussion.

i have to agree that "18 and above only" is a very arbitrary way of dealing the legal issues that, at least in the US, define the "adults only content" issues, but I have no idea what the ideal system, or even a proper system, would be.

so yeah. i myself was reading explicit stuff when i was well under 18, but i am totally not up on the implications of all that for an archive. i probably need to go back and revisit some of these rules now that this is going on, huh....

all i know is, the fannish names i've seen associated with forming the archive are totally in support of nc 17 content, so it's not going to be another situation where explicit stuff is not allowed in this archive. i'm sure the legal issues are real but i am not informed enough to have an opinion on the best way to proceed at this point.

so much of the slash i love is explicit sex; and i think that view is shared widely, so i'm glad to have a better understanding of where you're coming from with your concerns.

Yeah, I do trust the main names behind the project, indeed so much so that all of the recent talk about members voting rights is almost making me nervous--part of me would rather have Shalot as benevelent dictator.

Having been in fandom, to a greater or lesser extent, for almost a decade, I'd say there have been two sea changes. The first is the view you talk about regarding copyright infringement. The second one, which I think a lot of people who've come into fandom in recent years aren't really aware of, is actually in the nature of the content being produced: not only is there a lot more smut, but it's smut that ten or even five years ago may well have gotten you booted from your mailing list and branded a deviant. Fandom has always been pushing boundaries (think Kirk/Spock), but never, I think, so far, so quickly. It seems that the only fannish taboo left among older fen is the Mary Sue.

I admit that I fall into the camp that says we should be cleaning up our act to a certain extent before someone does it for us, because they will be less tolerant and come down harder than we ever would. That doesn't mean that I think that the smut should go away; I think we should turn that famous propensity for self-reflection on and examine why we do write chan and incest and bestiality and all sorts of things that we know the greater public will take issue with and, yes, make some of it harder to access.

It's not a 'protect the kids' thing for me - if they don't have an idea of what their kids are doing online, they don't deserve to either have the interwebs or the children - it's about my concerns that the face of fandom is becoming skewed towards the extreme end of the spectrum. I'll admit my biases here: I come from a more vanilla fandom and am, indeed, a fairly vanilla fan (I write or wrote gen and het, ye gods!), and the things I've listed above generally squick me badly. It's frustrating and worrisome for me that, at the same time as it's being made hard for me to avoid such material, to turn a wilful blind eye as I have in the past, I'm being told that I'm not supposed to talk about it in a negative manner because it somehow violates someone else's right to free speech.

It's an issue on which I'm deeply conflicted; my exact stance changes from hour to hour.

As a side note: regardless of our differing opinions on the above, would you please consider warning for chan? I realise that it's not illegal where you are, but reading sexualised depictions of people under 18, even if they are over the age of consent and purely fictional creations, is of dubious legality where I live. Yay Australia. :P

OT: I find the concept of "work safe" bizarre, because Big Brother watches everything I do on the computer at work, which means the only work safe stuff is...work. And the occasional email check when I'm on break, provided I stick to non-questionable emails, which are defined broadly.

I sort of envy people who can read fic at work.

I've been feeling hostile about copyright law lately for archival, totally non-fan-related reasons. I am really beginning to think that copyright doesn't serve the public interest, and doesn't need to be so restrictive to protect the individual's interest. But I could just be grouchy because it'll be another century before we're sure all our sketchily-documented archival photos have passed into the public domain where they can be used for exhibit and education. Still, it's pleasing to have a non-fannish reason to be critical of copyright law.

[Warning for spoilers is excluded from this comment for obvious fandom reasons--spoiler warnings are, I believe, a common courtesy.]

Worksafe and all that is all well and good, but in the younger fandoms (think anime) you get a few different shades. For example, there's actually a genre called deathfic, in which characters die. I started labelling mine after a few people complained about reading fics where people died. I think the problem with worksafe and not worksafe is that first of all, more mature themes are difficult to deal with. Calling a romp in the park (an innocent one, darnit) gen and calling one where a character deals with the death of their best friend gen ... both are difficult calls for me. I've devolved into three rating levels. Gen, for the absolutely safe, sub-teens-can-read-this-too work. PG, for the kissing as well as much more (death, controversial issues such as racism etc). And R/NC-17, for the sex.

Now, as for f-locking ... I've constantly toyed with the idea, and still haven't actually done it yet. On the internet, no one knows you're a dog. I don't want to know if children are reading the BDSM I write. I read some myself as a child, and I'm still a balanced, reasonable adult. (We would hope.)

Of course, I completely skipped past your "let's be bad guys" point. ^_^;;; Sorry. This is what distraction does. I will keep writing and posting until they slap a cease-and-desist on me, but at the same time, it's not like I'm going around insisting people accept my fanfic.

My original work, on the other hand, is another matter. ^_^

Some sites even had *fake* entrance links. The idea was to force people to go back and read the warnings with more care. And yeah, generally those sites had run-of-the-mill vanilla slash fic.

I remember the days before pairing labels and warnings and they were not pretty. Back when everyone had their own site and you had to navigate twenty-million nested links before you found something even in the ballpark of what you were looking for, only to discover the fic centered on some crack pairing you loathed. But I'm not still bitter.

I agree that labels and warnings were part of an effort to make fandom *easier* and seem to recall that they came out of list-culture.

Here from a newsletter link.

I agree with your main point-- let's be bad guys! *cheers*

That said, honestly, I view putting ratings and pairings on my stories as advertising, not an onerous burden. It helps those who want to read certain things find it, which means they're more likely to comment to me afterwards. :)

I'm glad I wasn't the only one. Because it seemed all very sensible on one level, and I'd seen all the arguments made before, but the end vision was very much not one I wanted to see for fandom.

Lost in my ranting against those things is the fact that I have no problem with authors using them to advertize--I mean, yeah, I put the pairings on my fics, exactly because if I write a Lilah/Eve story I expect people who'd be interested in reading a Lilah/Eve story might want to read it and wouldn't find it otherwise. And I understand that a lot of ratings and warnings can work the same way. It's the culture that assumes an author must accurately label her fic in this way to which I object.

Fair enough, but I do think "work safe" is meaningful to enough people, and enough of a real issue in terms of real-world consequences, to be useful.

Copyright law as it stands now sucks. Agreed.

I think we should turn that famous propensity for self-reflection on and examine why we do write chan and incest and bestiality and all sorts of things that we know the greater public will take issue with

I laugh at myself because I've written loads and loads about why do we read and write incest....and maybe a couple hundred words, tops, of actual incest.

So far.

I don't like the idea of making stuff harder to access unless absolutely forced by legal necessity, and would much rather just exploit someone else's safe harbor (and then move when the crackdown comes).

I'm being told that I'm not supposed to talk about it in a negative manner because it somehow violates someone else's right to free speech.

Oh, the right to free speech people are annoying no matter what side they are. Not that I don't support free speach, but rarely does actual free speach issues have anything to do with what they're talking about.

I do applaud efforts to build online spaces that allows for a freer exchange of text, OTOH.

As a side note: regardless of our differing opinions on the above, would you please consider warning for chan? I realise that it's not illegal where you are, but reading sexualised depictions of people under 18, even if they are over the age of consent and purely fictional creations, is of dubious legality where I live.

That's the best reason I'v heard yet for any warning, and my bitter distaste for warnings in no way exist in response to your request, which is resonable and in response to a real need. I don't know if I write much of what could be considered chan (the line is so bloody fuzzy!) but I'll try to be cognizant of the issue in the future.

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I Aim to Misbehave

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deleted from wrong place in thread and reposted (I hope)

Re: deleted from wrong place in thread and reposted (I hope)

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