uhhh yeah they do, there’s a pretty obvious page that asks you if you’re over 18 to proceed. the only way you *don’t* see that is if you’ve already registered and said you were over 18.
that “proceed” page can literally just link you right to the fic. even without an account. no need to enter any info at all. people lie about their ages online bud
so? don’t enter an adult-only space and be surprised it’s for adults?
Dusty, this building with the giant neon VB sign out the front serves alcohol, how was I supposed to know that was gonna be the case?
also, a thirteen year old absolutely can go to the library and borrow something nsfw in many places. That is their right as a borrower, and often parents have to sign a form acknowledging that the librarians are not responsible for what content kids check out, their parents or guardians are responsible. as in, if you take your thirteen year old sister to the library, it’s your job to make sure she doesn’t borrow fifty shades
because it sucksalso, there are adult books that are literally about children but are not for children. lots of them. sometimes authors write books about people without the book being for those people, this is a thing that happens, it has always happened, william shakespeare did not write romeo and juliet as a kids’ play
and if you don’t think people ever lie about their age (or use fake id) to get into 18+ movies (or buy alcohol or cigarettes, or mature rated computer games like gta) when they’re underage, you must only know very, very well-behaved teenagers
Also sometimes there’s a copy of American Psycho in the high school library and neither the librarians nor the parents apparently notice when the seventeen-year-old borrows it and reads it.
That would be the most egregious example I guess. How did that happen? Why would you have that book in a high school library?
I started reading smutty fanfic at about the age of fourteen. Some of it was light, but some of it was stuff I definitely shouldn’t have been reading at that age. Whose fault was that?
Mine.
As inverted as it sounds, give kids some credit. I read all of the warnings hpff.net had to offer. I chose to click on the links marked “mature” and I chose to keep scrolling after reading author’s notes that warned for explicit content. That’s on me, not the people who ran the site, not the people who wrote the fic. It’s not the job of fic housing websites to be parents, babysitters, or moral guardians, and it’s not the job of fic writers to be those things either. If you’re worried about minors being exposed to age-inappropriate content, great! Focus on educating minors about internet safety and making responsible decisions. But blanket “think of the children!” statements don’t actually help .
Children absolutely can gt NSFW content at just about any age from libraries and bookstores. I read my first NSFW romance novel at 12. It was from the library, my nine year old sisters were going and I just asked them to get a book to read and they brought that back. And I got to read words like cock, throbbing manhood, etc…at the tender age of 12.
I continued to read bodie ripper romance novels for the next several years. I bought them used with my own allowance from the local convinience store.
The only people who cared that I was reading these books were my male peers who thought it might give me improper expectations about relationships. And before you ask my mother knew what kind of stuff they had in bodice rippers. She didn’t care she figured bodice rippers only appealed to jr high aged girls anyway.
I somehow managed to rent what should’ve been rated 18+ anime (not hentai but wow was there definitely sexual content despite not being actual sex, and it was violent sexual content at that) when I was 7 years old from our local video store because it was “a cartoon” and they didn’t bother to give ratings to anime when I was a kid.
My fucking 7th grade English class had to read a book set on the premise that a girl runs away at age 13 after an attempted rape, with the rape attempt awkwardly described in the narrative and we had to read this shit out loud in class.
I got my older sister to buy me manga that was 18+ starting when I was 15-16 from the stores that actually checked IDs. I had my first drink of alcohol at 12 and could readily get my hands on it (if I wanted it) by 14-15. I started lying about my age online by the time I was 13? And I was a “very well-behaved teenager” almost to the point of being stuffy and boring, by all accounts.
Young people can and do get access to things they want if they aim to, and that’s on them if they seek it out. Well, them and their parents and guardians. I probably could have pulled bodice rippers off the shelf at home and read them because seriously, my mother had about a million crappy romance novels laying around the house that we weren’t supposed to read but easily could have.
AO3 is no different to this. And beyond that, it actually has tags and warnings that let young readers (who choose to bypass these systems) know what they’re getting into, and which they can use to avoid content that they aren’t ready for or which makes them uncomfortable. Which again, is a lot more than my 7-year-old self got from my local video store, or my 13-year-old self got when I first discovered FF.net.
Honestly the argument of comparing ao3 to real books with that content fails b/c those books aren’t about children or marketed towards them. Like you had to be 18+ to see 50 Shades in theaters, elementary books don’t have erotica, I doubt my 13 yr old sister could go to library and rent something nsfw. But sites like ao3 don’t have age markers not to mention are about literally children. There’s no similarities.
Published
if it happened at all, it happened like that 