why fanworks are such a convenient social scapegoat

freedom-of-fanfic:

(this post is mostly an expansion on the twitter thread i did a while back, which addressed this question: why is fanfiction often blamed for harming young people in fandom? (please also read the spinoff additions to the end of the thread, which start here.)

this post deliberately does not address whether or not fandom should have particular social expectations/obligations. I think these ethical questions are complicated and require nuanced address, particularly because of how social media works these days. rather, this is my offered explanation for why fanworks are the chosen scapegoat for the cumulative harm of systemic social problems.)

Note this post is US-centric because the scapegoating of fanworks seems to come primarily from Americans in English-speaking fandom spaces.

I think that because fanworks have long been slapped with warnings of dark content (abuse, noncon/dubcon, etc) it’s difficult for me to believe they directly play a major part in setting young people up for abusive situations irl … for the most part.  It’s less the fanworks themselves and more the environment in which fanworks have been presented over the last 5-8 years.

In my opinion, the sad irony is that fanworks only have the potential to cause direct harm by causing people to believe their contents are models for safe sex/relationships/etc because of the expectation that fandom is a space for education.

fanworks have been around for ages, but currently they are:

• in a post 9/11 social environment where the unknown/unfamiliar is feared, critical thinking is discouraged, safety is prioritized over freedom, and censorship is treated as protection, 

•  (but information is available in unchecked quantities that outstrips the individual’s ability to process it);
• available in a viral-sharing environment featuring nigh-infinite freedom/no moderating authority and on a highly-networked, easily-searched internet;
• where young people are often more expert at navigation than their guardians, and thus easily able to access content that isn’t age-appropriate/safe for them
• (but being young people, they often think they’re ready for that content);
• furthermore, content that is not only inappropriate for their age/maturity, but also on topics that they will never/have never received a proper, thorough education on
• (because schools have their hands tied by religiously-motivated regulations and guardians have abdicated responsibility for sex ed and lack acceptance for non-straight/non-cis identities);
• targeted marketing has encouraged and exacerbated existing stratification by income, age, gender, and sexual orientation; and
• increasing social awareness is constantly creating tension between social tradition and social advancement, putting incredible stress on anyone who represents ‘advancement’.

On that last point, my thread and this post are particularly concerned with (perceived) women, who are burdened by both traditional and ‘progressive’ social roles:*

• women are traditionally seen as child caretakers, educators, and burdened with upholding social morality as the heart of homemaking. all perceived women have to deal with this social expectation.
• as agents of social advancement, those perceived as women are still burdened with educating the ignorant and being ‘good examples’, as their mistakes will be magnified as evidence that tradition is better.

*these problems are SUPER magnified by being non-white. (and I didn’t even get into the sexual expectations.)

As an isolated space, fandom – with majority women and/or afab participation – did a pretty good job of shaking off the social expectation that perceived women are educators and caretakers. but when fandom gained visibility by the move to tumblr and Google trawling tumblr content/content going viral + all the social factors above, the ‘(perceived) women as educators’ expectation came back on fandom, and with additional exacerbation:

• in a culture focused on purity and prioritizing safety over freedom, disgust & feelings of shame both act like a moral compass & a safety warning. fandom’s judgement-free attitude about nsfw/kinky/horrible-irl content looks like a community of people who condone all these things as ‘safe’, if that’s how you’ve been taught to view the world. 
• Basically: if the people who are writing/creating this stuff are treating it as nothing to be ashamed of, it must not be dangerous. right?
• Combined with the not-unusual adolescent belief that you’re ready for literally anything and know more than most adults, it’s a recipe for disaster.

• fanworks often echo aspects of the source material, including aspects that are not healthy: canon romanticization of abusive relationship dynamics, for instance. Fanworks that share canon’s unhealthy features can become a form of reinforcement/seen as tacit approval of existing messages in mass media for fans who don’t have outside education to protect them.
• in fact, fanworks are often (deliberately or not) ‘in dialogue’ with the existence of these kinds of harmful cliches. it’s important to view fanworks as what they frequently are: individual reactions/remixes/retakes on things in mass media and real life, created by victims/potential victims of the harm those things can cause. (viral sharing sites often separate these works from this context.)
• on fandom tumblr in particular, people are consuming a cominbation of fanworks, fantasies about fictional characters that may or may not be nsfw, educational posts about safe sex / queer/lgbt history / sexual orientiations / gender identity / being a good ally / intersectionalism, and the importance of minority representation in mass media. conflating fanworks with good representation & educational content seems a natural consequence.
• within fandom spaces, the expectation is that fans are enlightened on social justice issues. as victims of marginalization, or at least people who are constantly exposed to education on marginalization, we obviously know better than creators of mass media.  This contributes to the attitude that fan content should be ‘better’. 
• Ironically, the content warnings, lack of fan culture shame, and the creators being vulnerable to negative responses together contribute to making fanworks/fan creators unusually visible examples of ‘corrupting’ content to point at and condemn.

between terrible education, a reactionary and conservative background radiation to English-speaking internet culture thanks to the US being a mess, and the fact most people are blind to social constructs that have formed their whole worldview, fanworks are getting a really bad rap.

altogether: fanworks are treated as being on par with mass media, social expectations, and culture norms in terms of the harm they can cause, even though they have comparatively little visibility and are usually created by marginalized people with little relative influence. They are reactions to mass media, social expectations, and culture norms rather than the cause of them.

however, because fanworks are easy to access without supervision, open about the content being potentially harmful, and produced by people who should ‘know better’ or are perceived as caretakers/educators, fanworks get blamed for the cumulative effect of culture/mass media/social norms. And unfortunately, because young people have formed expectations that fanworks will educate them due to those same social norms, the possibility that people will treat fanworks as models for social behavior or comprehensive guidelines to material they lack education on is increased.

–

I can’t hope to propose a comprehensive solution in this post. Taken altogether, fandom is really the tip of a large iceberg of systemic problems: sexist expectations, lack of outside education, and a reactionary cultural environment are the underlying issues.

 Anything fandom can do on its own will amount to little more than a band-aid. Antis will never wipe out potentially harmful fanworks, and all the declarations by fandom members that they abdicate responsibility for educating young fandom people won’t make society less expectant of us.  

the only things I know we have to do in the long run is keep fighting for real sex ed, keep warning for and flagging adult-oriented fan content, and do our best to respect each other’s taste and comfort levels. (and it would be a lie to say that I expect any of it to be easy.)