• If you’re looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see–Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about ‘female sexuality’ until there is a control group. And there never will be.

-Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

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• Anonymous asked:

that maggie nelson quote is why the existence of fanfic communities makes me so happy and why i want to body slam into anyone that tries to deride fanfic

• on one hand yes: fic is corrective and transformative and often involves young people articulating a sexual vision that does not require the violation of women. on the other hand: when we write fic we bring with us all the preoccupations and assumptions and anxieties we’ve absorbed from our social contexts, we don’t write on a blank slate emptied of all the vicious pathologies we’re exposed to. i often see in fic the working out, consciously or not, of cultural influences similar to the ones nelson names here. sometimes i think the output of fic writers works against the culture and sometimes I think it reproduces it and often it’s a mix (including my own stories - just look at the frequency of the dubious consent tag). when nelson says there is no control group, part of what that means is there’s no way to know or imagine the stories we would read and write, or what we would find hot, if the available representations of sexuality weren’t bound up in violation and especially violation of women. so i guess i agree with you that fanfic exists in response to and in negotiation with the situation nelson describes, but i also think fic provides evidence for its inescapability. its perniciousness.

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