An open letter

[holzman_tweed]

Dear people at fandom_scruples,

Your words and your deeds do not match. You claim:

We are asking those listed below to please lock down their fic. Nothing else.

Yet you maintain a black list headed with the words, Please don't read these author's works.

Blacklists and boycotts go well beyond "asking." "Asking" involves being willing to accept "no" for an answer. More accurate terms would be "demanding," "pressuring," and "attempting to force."

You say,

It's not about censorship.

yet you also say

There was some controversy about ivyblossom being on the list as she locks down her fics on her website. While we applaud her doing this, we've browsed several fics on her LJ containing what we consider to be adult content and she will remain on the list until those things are locked down.

You have set yourself up as the arbiter of what "ought" be locked away from minors. That makes you a censor, and what you are doing censorship.

Regards,

Dan

Comments

[vulgarweed.livejournal.com]

These people are so friggin' toxic.

I'm in this fandom, and they've hurt friends of mine (who agree with their basic principles about NC-17 incest- and rape-fic being a bad thing; I don't necessarily agree because I think exploring something in fiction is very different from real life and it can be helpful for people who've even been on the bad end...etcetera, it's a complicated issue, and this kind of moralistic oversimplification helps NO ONE.) If they hadn't actually hurt real people I care about, I'd take it as the joke it should be...

..but I still have to ask HAVE YOU NO SENSE OF DECENCY, SIR? AT LONG LAST, HAVE YOU NO SENSE OF DECENCY?

Our country's history being what it is, "blacklist" is so NOT cool, [as Bart Simpson would say:] on so many levels.

[holzman.livejournal.com]

I'm in this fandom, and they've hurt friends of mine

That's all I needed to hear to know that if they didn't suck so badly, I'd pity them.

I take it these motherfuckers have gone beyond siply writing up a list and asking people not to read them?

[vulgarweed.livejournal.com]

A couple of people I know participated in the initial discussion that got some yahoo to start this thing up. One friend of mine just said that she does worry about desensitizing, and because she works in a DA's office she sees a lot of terrible things she can't romanticize or turn off her brain about when reading fic. She did NOT advocate censorship, just said that callous treatment of incest or rape or whatever in stories disturbed her and that she wished people would give it more thought.

This blacklist "person" thought that meant endorsement of its position, so added this friend (and a whole bunch of other people) to its friendslist without permission--which meant that other people who didn't know the deal assumed they were in on it and agreed with it, which opened them up to a lot of flaming and harrassment.