the original reason why people were making fun of “fandom moms” on this site wasnt because theyre misogynistic and hate women in their late 20s-30s its cuz on this site specifically, like this specific platform of blogging and socially interacting with people online, there has been set a precedent of older women quite literally preying on younger children under the guise of guiding and befriending them and using fandom to groom them sexually by sharing inappropriate content and rping with them. like it sucks that there are dumbasses who have warped this beyond repair for the sake of dumb jokes and women can and should be encouraged to pursue their interests without facing inane backlash but thats why people were wary of Fandom Moms for a good like. year on tumblr. thats it
lol let’s not pretend that a really significant number posts about ‘fandom moms’ that are 90% about being repulsed by older (and by older i mean like… 26) women doing innocuous but Embarrassing things with like, some perfunctory reference to actually heinous behavior to justify everything being said about a huge ### of women who are not all necessarily predators just because they like, read erotic fanfiction or whatever
it’s not missing the point or being dumb to point out that it’s necessarily to actually focus on the wrongness of predatory behavior on here because it’s predatory rather than using that as a bad faith pretense to couch petty misogyny, and it doesn’t just incidentally ‘suck’ that oops, apparently using sexual repulsion towards the concept of a woman existing after an arbitrary online cutoff date as a way to convince people that pedophilia is wrong has somehow, totally independent of anyone’s intentions, turned into counterproductive misogyny that doesnt actually protect anyone or deal with the actual issue
like just because the original reason had a good intention doesn’t mean it’s derailing or irrelevant or insidious to criticize the actual practice
Also acting like random innocuous shit is a red flag for pedophilia is like…. not doing anybody a favor. You’ll get already traumatized kids feeling further isolated because they think random adults are out to get them, adult child abuse survivors being portrayed as predatory for engaging in fandom, and it’s not going to make anything safer for anybody. If anything it could further obfuscate actual predatory behavior, which absolutely happens on here and is not at all a thing of the past btw. So with the extent that ppl on here really seem to be dedicated to defending their right to make and propagate these posts, you’d think that there would actually be a positive effect to them, but no. Like, I’d see the point if these posts actually pointed out abuse tactics or anything, but they’re literally just lists of traits that people find laughable in women once they’re over 18.
Yup thank you. I made a post about this that got popular and I think people are assuming I’m in favor of adults acting inappropriate around minors. As someone who has had adults act inappropriately around me when I was a minor, both online and irl, of course I think adults should watch how they interact with those who are underage. I just think “adults who try to roleplay smut with minors are creepy” and “adult women who like to wear pigtails are creepy” are two completely different statements
I think also context is necessary.
- on the Internet, no one knows you’re a kid unless you say so
- what qualifies as “roleplaying smut” may vary from person to person
I was once chiming in on an RP thread, in character. A person playing a character who’s canonically an enemy of the protagonists had made a threat toward the protagonists. I was playing a chaotic neutral kind of character who considers the protagonists to be their property and therefore no one else is allowed to hurt them. This character is also sarcastic and flippant. I made a comment about the enemy character needing to back off before I had to spank them.
I literally meant this in the context of “you are being bad and I will have to punish you”, said in character. It never occurred to me that anyone would take it as intended sexually until someone PM’d me to say the person playing the enemy character is a minor and was made very uncomfortable by the comment.
OK… the RP blog did not state in its about that the owner of the blog was a minor, and I had had no sexual intent behind the comment whatsoever, and part of me kind of felt like, if you are going to RP online as adult characters, you’re going to get comments that make you uncomfortable and honestly maybe you need to stick to RP’ing only with people you know rather than popping in on a general thread if you’re going to be bothered by such things. But at the same time, I also felt really guilty, because I don’t want to make kids feel like I’m making skeevy sexual comments at their expense… and I felt like I couldn’t continue to take the risk of participating in general RPs with that character, because to be in character, I’d have to say flippant and cruel things and I don’t want kids who haven’t declared themselves to be kids thinking I’m some kind of would-be child molester.
I have a suspicion that a lot of what kids have interpreted as “older women being inappropriately sexual toward teenagers” is actually “older women being used to an environment in fandom where we don’t have to heavily police our own sexuality, and kids not declaring that they are kids, coming into spaces where adults are having a conversation, and expecting adults to cater to them and protect them from sexual implications.” Because I just don’t think there are enough female predators out to groom kids on the Internet to account for what seems to be a large enough phenomenon that people got freaked out about it. What seems far more likely to me is that women in fandom are used to being openly sexual with other members of their fandom (not like “I want you”, more like “I want {hot guy from fandom who is half of favored OTP}”), and this new thing where a. everything is mixed together and there are no boundaries because of the way Tumblr works and b. kids are all over the place but unless you actually go to their blog and read their about you have no way of knowing they are kids has done a lot of damage.
Also, what qualifies as sexual varies between people, judging from the number of antis who seem to have genuinely not known that “pee your pants” references the omorashi kink, as well as my experience above (I mean… yes, I knew spanking can be a kink, but in context it was supposed to be a flippant threat to harm the enemy character, not a sexually harassing comment.)
Thank you. This is a highly valuable addition, because it clarifies some things hidden or twisted by the miasma of disinformation and hyperbole that fandom is marinating in right now. I’ve been in fandoms since the year 1999, when I was eleven years old. You’d expect that I’d have seen ample proof with my own eyes, if fandom were as filled with dangerous women trying to prey on minors as some corners of Tumblr would have people think.
But no – in twenty years, I directly ran into two women who turned out to be grooming children through the net (and in both cases, alarms kept going off in my head, so I stayed clear). What was going on (and what the Tumblr-addled Twit Brigade calls ‘predatory’ behavior is… bog-standard fannish behavior, such as:
- adult women talking to each other about their sexual interests (and minors seeing this, on account of minors lying about their age in order to get into adult-majority spaces – I did this and so did nearly every teen of my generation)
- adult women squeeing about fandom faves they find attractive
- adult women writing fic with teenage characters who do more than hold hands (for example, adult anyone writing smut-fic for shounen anime, where the majority of the casts are in their teens – literally, if you’d told me ten years ago that we’d have a mass of people screaming at other fans for writing smut-fic of shounen anime, I’d have crossed myself and told you to lay off the damn drugs)
- as in the example above, adult women taking part in roleplay where some parties have lied about their age / didn’t disclose their age and left the group to assume ‘over 18′. I have to stress how ubiquitous it was (and likely still is) for people to make accounts with fake ages, in order to get around age-gates and into various communities. For my part, I never lied about my age for the sake of roleplay (too much of a risk of causing trouble for the other people, just because I was impatient to hit majority) and got around the risk of other people lying by only roleplaying with trusted friends / only roleplaying in moderated communities, where anyone found to be lying about their age was summarily booted.
Is there a chance that there are women who genuinely go after very young users online / are trying to groom and sexually abuse said users, through fandom? There’s a chance of that everywhere, not just online. The thing is that
a. the chance is far smaller than a lot of incredibly paranoid ‘see-molesters-everywhere’ people on here would have one believe and
b. they do more harm than good when they muddy the waters by positing standard fannish behavior as a sign of someone being a predator.
We’ve already had examples here on Tumblr, of predators who got close to minors because they specifically wanted to roleplay inappropriate things with said minors – and they gained the minors’ trust by howling from the rooftops against ‘gross women who write fic about anime teenagers, but I’m not like them, I’m a Trustworthy Person.’