The constant attempted shaming and silencing of survivors on this hellsite? that makes me deeply uncomfortable.
Every time someone writes “you can’t write about that even if you’re a survivor and if you do you have to keep it to yourself”, what I read is the implied “you can’t write about your own trauma with the comforting distance of putting it on fictional characters, and if you do you’re not allowed to look for validation from other people.”
I read “you can’t share your story because it makes me uncomfortable to see it”.
I read “you should just be ashamed of the bad things that happened to you”.
I read “you should just suffer in silence”.
People act like not talking about abuse can… somehow stop it? And that’s not how it works. Shaming survivors only makes it easier for abusers to manipulate their victims. Silence protects abusers from discovery. It harms survivors by not letting them have the catharsis of understanding, and keeping them from support.
And I don’t feel like it’s anyone’s place to tell a survivor they have to out themselves to share, either.
So yeah. It’s not the only reason I’m anti-censorship, by a long shot, but there’s one reason I’m very much not on the side of “bad things can’t ever be written”- or on the side of shaming people who do write “bad things”, no matter what apparent reasons they have.
fiction–fanfic and profic–was what gave me the tools to contextualize what had happened to me s a teenager and young adult. yeah, probably i should have had therapy, but that wasn’t accessible to me when i needed it, for a variety of reasons. books were. fanfic was. it was the first time i felt like i wasn’t alone, that other people understood all that messy, ugly, complicated shit i was dealing with. that even if i’d never be able to talk about it out loud, i could write about it, and someone out there would understand.
so i have pretty much less than zero patience with people who want to delete everything that isn’t perfectly wholesome from fiction. sometimes you need to be able to read something ugly. and you know what? i don’t actually give a flying fuck if people are reading or writing it as masturbation material. human sexuality is a strange and complicated thing, and what other people jerk off to is none of my business. i care that it’s tagged and warned for properly, but beyond that, all that dark, disturbing, violent fic gets to exist. not only that, i want it to exist, because i guarantee you someone out there needs it