astercontrol:

On the subject of problematic stories, fanfiction archive policies, and “(x) fans DNI"…

Here’s my analysis on… well, how a visceral moral/ethical response can never fully work in tandem with the practical considerations of policy and enforcement.

Yes, there are some stories that I find irredeemable, stories so upsetting that I would genuinely not want the writers of them to ever interact with me. Mostly these are stories about truly horrible acts– things like rape, child molesting, domestic abuse, racist hate-crimes, genocide–

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I guess another important point is… in the cases of these truly awful stories that are just expressing a fantasy about some truly awful thing that the author seems to actually want to do…

Assuming we could agree on which stories those were, and assuming that we could devise a policy that had a good chance of actually eliminating them from an archive (though at the expense of other, more acceptable stories as well, because drawing a line is always inexact)…

Assuming all that… does allowing those stories in an archive pose a risk of real harm? Would removing them help prevent real harm?

As I see it, the presence of fiction about unethical acts could only cause harm insofar as it might encourage that behavior– maybe promoting the idea that such acts would be enjoyable in real life, maybe contributing to the idea that they are acceptable or normal or at least possible to get away with.

And I think, in reality, it's… extremely hard to know this.

And especially hard to weigh it against the other effects that the same fiction could have.

Taking the example of a harmful sexual fantasy, and comparing it to how sexual fantasies work in my own experience…

Now, personally, the sexy things I fantasize about are pretty tame, compared to a lot of the stuff that gets debated in "problematic content” discourse. But I think some of the same general tendencies hold true.

Namely: when I get into a sexual kink, something I’ve never done IRL, and start exploring it by reading fiction about it– there are, in my experience, four different things that can happen to that kink over time.

1. I may get increasingly interested in the kink, to the point that fiction no longer satisfies the desire and I want to try it in real life.
2. I may get tired of the kink, and move on to entirely different interests.
3. My interest in the kink may remain the same, and so does the degree to which I’m satisfied with fictional depictions of it.
4. My interest in the kink may get increasingly focused, to the point that only very specific fictional scenarios will satisfy it. These scenarios never trend toward getting increasingly easy to achieve in real life. They often trend toward becoming literally impossible in real life (e.g., it only turns me on when I imagine specific kinds of fictional characters doing it).

If the kink was something truly harmful, only Option 1 would be a problem.

All the other ways that reading fiction about a kink can affect it– all the possibilities from 2 through 4– would actually make it become less of a problem in terms of real-world harm it could do.

So I guess the question is… whether real-world harm from option 1 is common enough to cancel out real-world harm reduction from options 2 through 4?

And as far as I can see, there doesn’t seem to be any actual science exploring this question.

So I dunno.