meta: tl;dr because this is what I *do*

So I finished putting together the thing I want to do a challenge for, because I feel my interaction with the community should be a.) more than stories about cheese building and b.) rentboy John fic, As a sideline, I came to the horrified realization I have now officially written about someone prostituting themselves enough to add that as an actual interest.

And I don't even like rentboy fic.

The question will never be "Jenn, are you a hypocrite?" We are now at the enviable stage where "But no one beat them! ....until part sixteen." I don't even know where I set the bar anymore. I keep getting freaked out by my del.icio.us tags.

This Is a World of Women

Challenge, right. As soon as we have all recovered sufficiently from Election Drama and WisCon, which for the first time I want to attend, because any group of women who can walk away from the kind of shit that was thrown are pretty much the epitome of what we should try to be.

See A Response to Hate by purplefrog26:

So not only do you face the challenges of dealing with society but you tell yourself that you are ugly, worthless and disgusting. So it becomes a radical act when you choose to live your life and love yourself despite the negativity that we swim thorough every day.

I’m not sure what this person’s objective was in posting these pathetic attempts at humor. But I know that they did not change my commitment to living my life joyfully and abundantly. And I prefer pictures to include my face.

And this fantastic response at Fatshionista:

Do it. Take it. Take my picture and eviscerate me online. It’s just a public, out-loud, communal version of what people do to me inside their heads every single day. It’s happened to me before, online and off. It’ll happen again. It’ll happen every day I leave the house, for the rest of my life.

I am still fat, and I am still not sorry. And nothing you can say, nothing you can post, nothing you can do will change that. No matter how many times you try to humiliate me. No matter how much you want me to hate myself. Because it’s my fucking body. And I don’t owe you a damn thing.

That.

And This Is Community Standards

It's odd; the idiotic open source molestation for fun and profit, the backup project, the election, WisCon hit each after the other. I don't think there's less drama, believe it or not; I'm not even sure it's that I'm noticing it more. I just didn't pay attention.

There are a lot of parents on my flist. I'll take even odds half of us will have a child turned troll. I'll say the percentage is higher for boys, but as we have seen, the girls are catching up.



My son's a white male, relatively attractive, and going to a school that specializes in science and math with a mother who pays for the fastest internet access she can get without a government permit and studying for a degree in computer science with a kink for new technology. He's been web-enabled since his first birthday and can generally google for what he wants to know. He's started simple scripting with robot games and he likes things that blow up and horror movies and very large snakes.

I have about three years, maybe four if I'm lucky and I can keep his computer hobbled (you'd be surprised how much you can do with the registry and a few days of free time). Then goatse and two girls one cup and the myriad split penises will be everywhere all over again, because it's all new for him and my cache will never be the same. And it's not that I won't watch him. It's just the places he'll go for that after the first time won't be places I can follow.

Child's a potential of SA and it's not the first time I realized that or understood the inevitability there will come a moment where I will trace his cache and find something that I can't accept. What I didn't know is what to do about it. I'd like to thank UFB for this one; I would have avoided this train of thought until he hit puberty at least.

We didn't cover this. We didn't. We know what to do when it's slash, a flamewar, a convention fight over a pairing, what to do when the racism debates reach critical levels, when misogyny gets so hot everyone's eyeing the flist with trepidation. We know to go to metafandom to see what people are saying and to go to fandon-wank to see what they are talking about and to combine them to decide what people mean. We even have a hazy idea of what to do when RL breakups fracture an flist or long term friendships turn sour (hint: hide. Really).

Child is second generation fen; he'll know the culture by proxy, by the friends I introduce him to, by the world I expose to him. Who the hell knows where he'll end up; it could be anywhere. He watches anime and Dr. Who and wants to clone dinosaurs; wherever he goes, he'll take what I teach him in netiquette and the standards I apply to my online life and choose to accept them or reject him.

(He might become a conservative banker. I expect a pony if that happens. I'll need it.)

And one day, I might get an email from a friend with a link to an account that I didn't know existed and behavior I cannot condone with the silent question of whether community standards apply.

(Someone better sure as fuck email me, by the way. That part had better be community standards for minors; if it's not, can I declare it now?)

Rachel Moss wasn't a test case. And to tell the truth, she wasn't even the first. She's just the opening salvo of what we had to know what was coming, and she's not the worst. And I can say without fear of contradiction, one day it'll be one that is our own the way she wasn't and couldn't ever be. That will be our test case.

Comments

Part 2

[imagines.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'm going to attempt to explain my take on a touchy subject: explicit sexual images and writing on the internet. I don't know how well this will go, but I'm going to try. I would like to note that my parents are very, very strict fundamentalist Christians, and I promise I do not mean to slam Christianity; it's just that the fact is, the way I grew up was that you did not talk about sex. Ever. And if you did, you definitely didn't talk about how to have it safely, because the whole point was to get married and then have kids. Sex didn't have to be fun, it was just something people did to have kids and for no other reason. Also, gay people chose their lifestyles and God hated them. I believed all of this quite strongly until I was about twelve, which was when I discovered slash for the very first time. I am purely self- and friends-taught about sexuality, because I had no other recourse to learn about something that, yeah, greatly interested me. I'm still fascinated by it in a psychological sense, because I am a geek like that. You need to talk to your kids about sex. It will be uncomfortable. They are going to hate you for it. But they need to know about it, because they are going to find some very weird things on the internet, and it's better if they have a way to deal with it mentally when that happens. Just don't close off the lines of communication like my parents did. Let them know that they can talk to you about what they run into. I can't talk to mine, so I talk to my friends. I'm extremely lucky to have good and wise friends, but not all people's friends are going to be good and wise. I have my half-siblings' friends as a sort of anti-role model to prove that.

So in regards to some of the sites I visited when I was, um, too young to be visting them, I learned that there were people in the world who didn't think that two men kissing was such a great and terrible sin as my parents did. I would not even try to say that all children should be allowed to visit every site they want, but in my case, I am glad I found some of the things I did while I was still young enough to change my mind about certain things my parents had told me. The internet was truly the only resource I possessed to teach me about diversity, which is kind of terrifying to think about, but in the end I turned out to be a caring person with a good head on her shoulders who wants to be a high school librarian so she can ask how students' days are going--largely because of growing up with the internet.

I guess what I'm trying to say is--in my opinion, kids need to know how to deal with what they find even more than they need to know how to avoid finding it. Someday it will appear in a pop-up ad, or someone will email it to them, or they will simply go looking for it. They need to know how to react to it when that happens. The same goes for when they discover trolling. Some kids will be like me and think, "That looks stupid and hurtful. I'm not going to try it or condone it." Some kids will think it looks fun. Teach them ethics before they run into the dark side of the internet, and hopefully they will be able to handle it maturely when they do find it.

I made a few fuckups when I was younger. I will probably continue to make them now that I am older, but perhaps they will be fewer and less dramatic. The thing was, my mistakes never stayed hidden. My internet communities found me out every time, made my mistakes embarrassingly public, and explained in minute detail exactly where I had gone wrong and how not to do it again. You better believe I never did it again. So even if your kid ignores everything you say about correct online behaviour, the internet will do its damnedest to teach them itself.

I have a three-year-old nephew, he knows how to use the computer, and I hope to hell I can teach him some of this stuff, because I know more about computers than his mom does. Oh, how my fingers are crossed I can get through to him. I don't know whether he'll ever be in fandom or not, but I guess we'll see what happens. [/end]