Zee made me post this.

[schmerica]

Dear fandom, sometimes people are a) immature b) bitchy or c) wanky. Surprisingly enough, there is no direct correlation between this and being under 18. Seriously, you deal with underage people ALL THE FREAKING TIME, and you don't know it, because we don't choose to tell you. Most people CAN'T TELL, and that's FINE. If you do have the emotional maturity to deal with fandom reasonably, and you don't broadcast your age and make it into a issue for list owners and such, nobody SHOULD care.

(Less life experience CAN mean more wankiness, but you know what? That's usually if you are a person prone to it anyway. Other people just keep getting worse and worse about the longer they go on. Seriously, there's a certain type of kerfuffle-raising that's a skill; you get better at it with time.)

I have to admit, too, that when I entered fandom as a teenager (after I started college, but before I was legal for anything), one of the things I absolutely loved about it was its age-blindness. On the internet, what matters is how you present yourself and how you act that matters, not your age. At 17, it is kind of amazing to be able to strike up discussions and friendships with people anywhere from your own age to three decades older than you and have none of them automatically, without even thinking, treating you like a silly kid.

Signed with love and frustration,
Pearl-"I Was a Baby Fangirl and I Lived to Tell About It!"-o

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're perfectly correct that most underage readers and writers by the very fact that they don't stand out do suggest the maturity to engage. And you're totally correct that it's offensive to "explain" someone's wanky behavior via their age when we see grownups behave worse every day around here. And you're right that age-blindness is one of the really cool things that this environment affords us.

And yes...I just came from reading a thread where an adult voiced her concerns about interacting with someone underage, exchanging porn etc. and many of the underage (or barely of age) respondents believed "But I've read porn since I was 1X" to be sufficient response. And given the legal situation many places as well as the sheer discomfort I'd feel were I to write with/for someone whom I'd later found out to be more than 20 years younger than I and not a legal adult yet, I felt this lack of understanding and compassion, this complete ignorance of anyone but themselves and their own wish to read fic was indeed immature.

I don't have answers to this, and this wasn't what your post was about. Assuming the reason someone's wanky is their age is silly, you're right.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

That is totally a good point you're making -- but I wonder how much of those responses have to do with the tone of the post in question, too? Because if we're talking about the same one, and I assume we are, I found it breathtakingly condescending and insulting. Plus, while I agree that's not a sufficient response to the post, in some of the comment threads there was definitely a tangent that became *about* teen and youth sexuality, more or less. And when the original poster starts saying things like "that's gross" and "you should talk to your therapist about that" in response to "I've read porn since age X" ... I can understand why other commenters would continue to pursue that response, I guess? As a refutation of not the post itself, but of the message of "You are fucked up and weird if you became sexually curious and/or mature at an age lower than 18", maybe.

tona and ausience...as always :D

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

yes. the that's gross comment got me riled up as well. I really wish people would be a bit more conscientious that there's another person on the other side of the computer (just this morning I read a comment on sth we metafandomed, so virtual stranger, I assume, which was an honest and good rebuttal but ended with wtf. ... i mean, WTF!!!)

So, yes, the entire thread really shouldn't have been ever about teen sexuality, b/c the entire point of the OP was meant to be that withholding or lying about age might endanger the adult in their involuntarily interaction with minors. The teen's sexuality should not be an issue (except with the constant I read porn when I was it kind of came in and...clusterfuck!)

audiences as well!!!

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

.

Re: tona and ausience...as always :D

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

*nods* I think the one thing I might disagree with a little is that the teen sexuality thing *was* totally off topic -- just because I read the OP slightly differently than you did. It didn't seem totally focused on simply the legal isses/consequences for the adults so much as ... hmm. There definitely was, to me, a sense that the underage are *fundamentally different*, in terms of intelligence, emotions, maturity, pretty much everything, if that makes sense, -- as if the day you turn 18 something actually physically changes in your brain somehow. If you're treating teenagers as squicky freaks who shouldn't be thinking about ADULT things, it makes sense that the conversation is going to derail like that.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

hmmm..yes and no. i do believe that there are issues of maturity, and that I have a hard time imagining I could have a balanced emotional relationship with someone underage (or 18 or 20 for that matter).

I'll be forty this year (and boy, it freaks me out just to type this :), and while there are certainly many experiences the teen may have had that I do not share, I do have a couple of decades of adult-on-adult interaction on them. In fact, I have about 15 years of adult-on-almost adult uni teaching on them, where I am confronted with exactly this gap every day.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm always right or even that I'm more emotionally mature. Hmmm...it does mean that the number of teens who are aware of their situatedness while simultaneously attempting to understand that of others is smaller than that of adults who have lived both teen and adulthood, who've been dependents and have had dependents, who've been students and teachers,... etc.

So, yes, I do have moral/emotional issues here above and beyond the legal ones. I don't want to be in a sexually charged interaction with a minor, not because of her but because of *me*. [And I should admit that I do have a huge RL age squick which may clearly color my kneejerk reaction here.]

Otoh, that doesn't mean that I look down on younger fans or that I don't engage with them as equals. And since I don't write fic, the issue is less problematic for me. If someone can hold their own in a discussion in my LJ, I could care less what their age is. And in fact, that experience has taught me to respect my students more as equals (not that I was talking down to them before, but when younger I was a bit obsessed with factual knowledge being the be all and end all :).

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

*nodding* I'm not trying to say your personal reactions or comfort levels aren't fair, it's just ... hmm. More that I have issues with the huge blanket assumptions some people feel comfortable with, I suppose? And -- again, this is shown pretty well by the other post -- I think there's a clear difference between "underage people and porn is an issue for the legal repercussions for adults in our community", which I think most people would agree with, and "underage people and porn is an issue because it is wrong, because their brains and psyches are unformed and we need to save them from themselves somehow."