like, u know there is a degree of moderation there, right? someone has to order the books to stock in the library. a library that lets any old creep stash their hastily scribbled shota pwp in between the shelves is a library that’s going to be shut down p quick. by the police. for providing ppl with child porn. (and yes if a picture of a tree or a description of a tree can make someone experience a tree, then the same can be said about a picture or description of a child in a sexual situation ffs)
I mean there’s like a million other logistical differences, and idk who checks erotica out of a library, but hey ppl can be wild abt these things
Hooboy. Well, as a librarian who has worked in many varieties of libraries, let me… try to… respond to this from a library and librarian perspective.
1) It is true that libraries have a process to go through for accepting materials, and that there is a degree of selectivity involved–this is because libraries have limited budgets, limited physical space, and limited staff to process and manage materials.
So, yes, any random junk written and left in the library would be thrown out. Not because the library would be concerned about its liability if anyone should see it; because we like to keep the library clean and organized, and leaving stuff on the shelf is not how we add things to the collection (how would they get CATALOGUED and LABELED???) And, of course, any adult attempting to show pornography (or, say, themselves) to actual children would be Removed From The Library because this would involve actual children being harmed by an actual adult in direct contact with them. Police do not shut down the libraries where this happens. They arrest the people harming the children.
Meanwhile, libraries spend VAST SUMS OF MONEY and ENDLESS STAFF HOURS to keep copies of Fifty Shades of Gray on the shelves where children actually can find them quite readily (and have them checked out on their library cards if mom’s has too many fines). Same with Last Tango in Paris and Flowers in the Attic and Year’s Best Erotica collections. (And Bibles, which get stolen at a ridiculous pace. I don’t know why, we were just forever having to order more of them.)
In an online space, which has effectively unlimited space, where adding new material costs nothing, and where the process of organizing that material and making it available is fully automated and what labor is involved is taken on by the contributing author, literally none of those constraints apply, so more content is more content! It’s catalogued and labeled as soon as it’s posted! It cannot be misshelved. Perfect!
2) This is not to say that no physical library has handwritten erotica in its collection somewhere. Many, many libraries collect rare local works such as self-published zines, and unique items like the personal papers of notable people (San Jose State University, for instance, holds the papers of the Kensington Ladies’ Erotica Society; The University of Iowa Zine Collection includes fanfic zines with erotic content; UCLA has the personal papers of Anais Nin), and doubtless some of these zines and personal papers include erotica. Because this handwritten material would be unique and its value would be presumed to lie mainly in the fact of its authorship, it would be properly collected, not in a library, but in an archive or special collection, where some archivist would dutifully folder it and make a note of what it was so future visitors to the collection could readily access it.
The main goal there would be to protect the material, not the person who might potentially view the material.
I worked in a public library which had an extensive collection of Playboy on microfilm, for instance. We kept it behind a desk where it had to be requested and checked out with a library card before it could be viewed. This was partly to prevent children viewing material inappropriate for their age–just as, say, the AO3 clearly marks adult material as such–but mainly to prevent vandalism of the material by people who disapproved of it. Several of the images on the film had been damaged by people trying to scratch them out; for the safety of the microfilm, we restricted access to it. This is also why the AO3 doesn’t allow people who dislike a fic to force it to be taken down.
This is also why most libraries celebrate Banned Books Week by eagerly higlighting works which people have ATTEMPTED to force to be removed from libraries–including work like Lolita, which is read by many as a titillating pedophile love affair. Librarians are not celebrating Lolita. They are celebrating the principle that they will not be stopped from collecting materials of interest and making them available to readers.
3) From your description of a library where children can freely access anything on the shelves, you seem to have only one conception of a library–a public library with open stacks, or perhaps a school library. There are, in fact, many kinds of libraries, with academic libraries being the most obvious foil to your description.
In an academic or university library, all authorized users of the library are adults who take adult responsibility for what they find in the library, much like when adult internet users indicate on a website that they are choosing to view adult content.
When I worked in a university library, I asked one of the librarians what do when a guy was sitting at a computer very obviously watching porn while a young woman, sitting next to him doing something text-based, seemed like she might be uncomfortable. I was told in no uncertain terms that the library’s policy was to relocate the person who was uncomfortable. The library was a repository of information and a place to access information: any kind of information, including the erotic. Under no circumstances would we curtail a library user’s access to that information.
(Unless he got his own actual dick out where people could see it, then we could call the campus police. Because, again: actual humans directly involved.)
Duke University Library Erotica Collection, 1940s-1960s (”An archive of original illustrations, sketchbooks, and erotic stories, depicting transgressive sex acts including (but not limited to) lesbian and heterosexual sex, incest, pedophilia, sadomassochistic behavior, and copulation with objects as varied as sex toys, produce, and household appliances. The stories and illustrations appear to be the work of a single individual, with nearly all narrative told from a female’s point of view. Also includes some amateur pornographic photography and magazine clippings.”)
I was hoping someone would bring up Duke’s collection because that’s my library and that’s where it’s at. So, fuck the haters and go get you some rare books library porn.
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 sucks
also, 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.
I am really baffled by the people attacking AO3 for hosting stories that involve rape, incest, pedophilia, and other dark things. Have…have they never been to a bookstore or library? People write stories about all manner of dark, horrible things. This is not remotely new. And at least on AO3 and other fandom platforms, the dark things are generally tagged. In bookstores and libraries, not so much.
V.C. Andrews was freaking popular when I was in jr. high and high school. Her books were in the school libraries. They needed to be stamped with trigger warning: EVERYTHING, but mainly things from the fun list of rape, incest, pedophilia, and child abuse. Her books are still sufficiently popular that there are new ones coming out despite the fact that she’s been dead for years!
Her books are in the library I work at. Her books are in most bookstores. Her books are probably still in the libraries of the jr high and high school I went to. Does that mean anywhere that has her books supports rape, incest, pedophilia, and child abuse?
That’s not how it works. Yes, there are occasionally things that a store or library will decide they don’t want to carry, no matter what. The first bookstore I worked at wouldn’t even special order The Turner Diaries. A lot of bookstores won’t even special order The Anarchist Cookbook. I’m sure there are other books out there that people are reluctant to touch, even with a ten foot pole. But, barring those few exceptions, most bookstores and libraries are not in the business of policing the content of the books they deal in.
Not because booksellers and librarians are all monsters who should be reported to the FBI, but because there’s a long history of censorship going very bad places very fast. Also, free speech is considered an American value. Hell, let me just link to the ALA page on censorship.
I don’t pretend to know why stuff like V.C. Andrews’ books, or the fics on AO3 that some people want to report to the FBI, are popular. I don’t get it. It doesn’t appeal to me. Yet I recognize that different dark things are in kinds of fiction that I do like – violence, murder, torture, war, other things that most of us really fervantly hope never to experience in our lives. I don’t know whether fiction is an outlet for whatever darkness lurks in everyone’s hearts, whether it’s a way of dealing with our fear of bad things happening, whether human culture just finds bad things fascinating, or what. Maybe humanity is just super fucked up and Pluto really is a warning buoy telling other civilizations not to go near the planet with the creepy mammal infestation on it.
But I don’t think going after fic platforms because some of the fic hosted there is disturbing is a solution to anything. (And if the people doing so are not also on an equivalent campaign against bookstores and libraries, I suspect that what’s going on is not what they claim is going on.)
VC Andrews was ABSOLUTELY the first thing I thought of when I started hearing about this, because hoooooo my god. And I definitely remember being able to get my hands on those at a young age.
There’s plenty of shit I don’t want to read on AO3. Luckily, that stuff – or at least most of it! – is TAGGED, so I don’t have to. That’s the ENTIRE POINT. It’s not breaking a law, and you are not being forced to read it.
Next time antis are being, well, antis, show them this:
So a child came to you with concerns and criticism, and rather than ignoring said criticism because it wasn’t relevant to the fan work (taking your word for this), you decided to belittle them and imply their parents should be monitoring their internet use.
Cool. Cool thing you did there. Cool way for an adult to treat a child.
I wonder how they’re going to respond the next time they see something fucked up in fandom, or worse, experience it. Like the rampant sexual harassment and assault at conventions. Do you think they’re going to talk to an adult? Or do you think they’re going to internalise it as just part of the fandom and their fault for showing up?
But hey, you sure showed that middle-schooler.
If a child came to OP with concerns and criticism about adult content they shouldn’t be viewing, then their parents should be monitoring their internet usage because they aren’t obeying rating based restrictions.
If a 12 year old snuck into see Deadpool or It and then complained to the threats about it, the theater would probably call their parents and report them for sneaking into an R rated movie.
Ratings are their for a reason.
Also, ‘talk to your parents/other trusted adult’ if something upsets you is good advice. OP is telling them they need to talk to an adult, their parents, not a stranger on the internet.
If an adult has a problem with a child’s behavior offline, a light warning and speaking to the parents is how it goes, nothing odd about that. But online, as much as we would like to have an adult conversation about how little Timmy needs to stop peeking in neighbor’s windows because he’s not ready to understand swinging and pony play yet and besides he’s breaking the law, we have to interact with the children themselves in a more direct fashion. We have to rely on them to ask their parents to step up and parent, and that’s more responsibility than some of them want to handle.
What I do find ironic about this entire situation is that the children don’t hesitate to demand that the adult fans treat them like the children they are, but when we do, they’re upset. They don’t want, “The sign means ‘stay out’ Timmy,” or “I’m going to have to talk to your mother, Timmy,” but “Pour the booze down the toilet, babyproof the house and turn the whole world into a Zero Tolerance zone because Timmy exists.” For a group that’s so staunchly anti-kink, they’re very into ageplay and topping from the bottom.
Misbehaving on the internet doesn’t give anyone a free pass, not even when you’re a kid.
Way back in 2002, I was admin of a big Dutch Harry Potter forum. These were the early days of the internet, when there were no social media sites like Tumblr or Facebook, and forums were all we had to get in touch with like-minded people.
Our Harry Potter forum had an average age of about 14-year-olds, and being 20 years at the time, me and my co-admins took pride in keeping it a friendly and safe place online for all the Harry Potter fans. If someone posted something inappropriate, we deleted it and if it was a repeated offense, blocked whoever was responsible.
Now enter this Flemish 14 year old kid who creates an account and starts posting porn EVERYWHERE. We’d be gone from the forum for half an hour, come back to find hundreds upon hundreds of pornographic images all over the forum, and obviously a lot of the other 14-year-olds going “oh please, stop it! You must block him!”
So we blocked him and began the annoying process of deleting every single porn post.
Next day, kid has a new IP address, does it again.
He repeats this for most of the week and we’re freaking annoyed, because back then, there was no anti-spam measure on that forum, and he could post a hundred messages a minute if he could click a hundred times in a row.
So I’m fed up. I take a list of his last IP addresses, see that it’s all coming from the same Belgian town. I look at his profile and suddenly realize that his emailaddress that he used to register has an actual name. Not an alias, but an actual person’s name. Possibly the father’s email account, we don’t know.
Now, Belgium is a small country, and our phone book that they still distributed every year back then has ALL phone numbers (unless you specifically ask not to be mentioned in the phone book.) So I look up this dude’s name, in the town, and I find one match. Just one.
I write it down.
Another evening, another spam of porn posts begins from another account, once again the same email address. I pick up the phone, I call the number.
A kid whose voice hasn’t even broken picks up and says hello. “Yes hello, I’m CartoonJessie, in case you are wondering. Can I speak to your parents?”
Kid is quite, I can hear him thinking as fast as he can. He says they’re not home. I tell him: “Okay, then I’ll make a deal with you. Stop spamming our forums with porn and I won’t call again. If I see any porn posted again, I’ll know it was you, and I will call back, at a time that you are not home or asleep, and I will talk to your parents about this.”
I hang up.
Kid never came back to the forums, but I do have a feeling he never ever again went on a porn posting spree on any forum ever again. Do I think the kid slept badly for a few weeks after that? Probably.
Do I feel guilty for calling this kid? Hell no. Cause the 500 other 14-year-olds on our forum at least no longer had to endure watching unwanted porn images because a little asshole thought he was being “the man” by harassing an entire forum. I would do it again in a heartbeat. (but due to the way forums are built now, with anti-spam measures and everything, it’s no longer something that happens.)
What is most ridiculous to me is the sheer entitlement of the teen contacting OP to change their writing to suit them.
If the story is triggering, upsetting, or distressing, you have the responsibility to nope out. No one is making you read it. No one here has to tailor their writing to you. It doesn’t matter if they’re another teen or if they’re an adult- if you don’t like it, don’t fucking read it.
If you want to talk about the fetishization and harassment in fandom culture? That’s another conversation. There is a problem with that. There’s also a problem with that in the modern world in general. That is also not what this kid approached OP about.
Younger individuals in fandom culture seem to expect other people to parent them. To keep them safe from anything offensive while giving them the warm fuzzies, yet simultaneously demanding we allow them to interact as an adult with other actual adults. They emotional support, reassurance, and hard lines so they can know if they are right or wrong with absolute surety.
If you are looking in fandom for some nurturing, caring bond to help you learn and grow, you are going to be disappointed. Let me say this very, very loudly:
Strangers online are not your parents.
They have no obligation to younger fans, and further, many want no obligation to take on any type of caretaker or mentor role. It is not their job to hold your hand when you’re upset or cater to your preferences. It’s not their job to protect or educate you. They have no obligation to change anything they do, write, or draw just because it makes you uncomfortable by simply existing. You have no power over anyone but yourself.
To go up to someone and say “I don’t like your work and it shouldn’t exist because x” shows entitlement. It’s the same entitlement that homophobic people have when they say “queer media shouldn’t exist because it offends me.”
if it happened at all, it happened like that 
