What Happens When Antis Grow Up?
Angry Young Teens As Destructive Adults
Last night I had a tiff with a 27 year old user on TikTok who believed that somehow there was a difference between the censorship of traditional media and the censorship of fanfiction sites such as Ao3. There was no actual logic to this argument that I could parse as their stance seemed to be that “traditional books in libraries are organized and pornography isn’t in the kids section” without any kind of awareness that any child can go anywhere in a library and check out anything. They also did not seem to grasp the concept of a bookshelf in a private home and how cluttered and mixed up those books might be—in fact, bookshelves like these were what drove little me into a deep fascination for all kinds of subjects such as anatomical studies, medical texts, psychology, and of course: Stephen King.
From age 11 I was deeply fascinated by the horror genre and everything that it entailed, including the ultra-sexual themes that simply made the horror more spicy. Did sixth-grade JD bat an eyelash at the scene in Needful Things where the kid fantasizes about his teacher jerking him off or the scene where a character digs up polaroids of a woman fucking a cocker spaniel? No. In fact, none of the kids in my class who read King’s works (there were at least three of us) were concerned or at all fazed by sexual themes. (11 year-old JD was reading all of these Stephen King books months before she sat in a room with a bunch of other 11 year-olds watching thousands of real people dying on live television at 9AM on a Tuesday. Which of these things fucked us all up do you think?) We had all kinds of books at our disposal though very rarely my mother used to keep books from me for a year or two, an event that I always just smiled about because goodness gracious, mom, did you not think I could handle it after everything else I’d read?
My uncles were always on the same page—one of them got me King’s Dark Tower series (the first five) for Christmas one year and that was the year I stopped reading Harry Potter. I never did finish that series and knowing what we know now, I’ll have to send my uncle a thank you card. Where did I get all my King? Well it wasn’t just gifts and passing bookshelf perusal. There was a used bookstore on the main drag of this little town I still currently live in and I used to walk in after leaving my backpack at the Boys and Girl’s Club and I would count out my allowance cash and I would pick out the next bit of nasty horror I wanted to read. Misery. Roadwork. Desperation. ‘Salem’s Lot. Different Seasons. Pet Sematary. Christine. Four Past Midnight. Insomnia. Rose Madder. My parents used to take the dust jackets off the books I was reading when I went to my sister’s softball games so that other parents couldn’t judge them. They were terrified that I would lose my love of the written word if they told me I couldn’t read something I was desperately interested in.
My adoration of reading and writing and everything to do with genre fiction is as strong as ever and I value art and literature as the epitome of human expression—so what about the kids that don’t value art and literature? What about the kids and young adults who are convinced that artists and writers are to blame for the moral ills of society? What about the kids who believe in burning books? Recently, a Twitter user posted a video of their copy of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us burning after having stated that they would be disposing of their copy in such a fashion. The responses were mixed but weighted on the side of “burning books is inherently tied to the legacy of fascism and this is cringe.” A minority were supportive of the action, stating that all of Colleen Hoover’s works should be burned because she’s a “bad” person. Still further, some teenagers stated that they would like to see people burned for having written “bad” fiction that espouses “bad” themes. Their insistence that the “normalization” of these themes in fiction is the root of evil in society leads them naturally to the end that destroying the books and destroying the people will purge society of immorality.
As is a matter of course and what we well know, eventually anything can be transformed into immorality. Drag Queens sitting around reading books to children is, in some circles, immoral. Young transmen or transwomen simply walking into the bathroom is, for some people, immoral. Having sex before marriage in a huge amount of cultures is immoral. So when young adults on TikTok and Twitter tell me that something is “wrong” I immediately put it through the lens of this question: “Is this harmful or simply a matter of taste?” If you ask them, harm is being done in vague, uncertain ways that cannot be qualified by any reasonable deduction. It is the same arguments used by conservatives arguing against library Drag Hours—that this type of fiction is being used to “groom” underaged children.
In the past year, some conservative elected officials, right-wing media personalities and anti-LGBTQ social media accounts have characterized the program as inappropriate for children, and some have even gone so far as to describe it as sexually “grooming” minors, perpetuating a decades-old attack on LGBTQ people.
- NBC News “Drag Story Hour protest in NYC caps a year of anti-drag attacks”
New York City Council Member Erik Bottcher’s home was targeted by anti-drag protestors, their vandalism including phrases that could be interchanged seamlessly with the epithets thrown by teens and young adults crusading against the writers and readers of fanfiction such as “Ok Groomer” and “pedo child groomer.”
Obviously the Leftists who are often throwing around these accusations and threats are not the sort of people to be targeting Drag Story Hour. That simply doesn’t align with their views—after all, most of them are queer, marginalized, and have been harmed by the predominant societal structures that are currently in place—but they will target art and writing, specifically art and writing that is made by people who are easier targets. They’re not out there defunding or burning actual real-life libraries (yet) but they’re not above vehemently speaking out and threatening writers who they perceive have broken some ever-changing and arbitrary moralistic code. If this seems like it’s some Bizarro World Tucker Carlson cult offshoot, you are not the only one who has had that thought. Though these terminally online child soldiers are after fanfiction now, nothing is actually stopping them from growing up and getting convinced that libraries harbor the exact same things (because they do).
So…what then? How do we stop these moralistic crusaders from growing up to be hyper-conservative, brainwashed miniature Tucker Carlsons? How do we stop a whole lot of foaming at the mouth reactionaries from committing actual physical harm to their libraries or neighbors over what kinds of books they read? As someone who’s amassed a mid-size collection of erotica, history books (by the way, they hate these too), and spicy old magazines, it would be a heck of a bummer to find that the allegedly “progressive” younger generation would like to burn me at the stake for a few glossy pages of 70s bush, citing “pedophilia” as their reasoning. Tragically, even making the attempt to discuss these issues with these young adults causes them to spiral into frustration, anger, and poorly regulated emotions, the risk of accusations and threats rising with every youthful burst of rage, ultimately leading to their inevitable position that you are a pedophile because in their corner of the world, pedophiles are everywhere and if you disagree with them, you must be one.
My upbringing as a child who was devoted to reading fucked up books could theoretically be called into question by those who’ve never met me, who are convinced that the sexual scenes in IT must have permanently warped my brain (actually, I don’t remember them) but when it comes to how well-adjusted and progressive I ended up being, at the very least I can honestly say that I’ve never burned any books. If you ask me, I think that places me a little ahead of the curve.