Moo 🌸

Some incomplete thoughts, in no particular order:

• I think it's dangerous to assume that all media is didactic (or demand that it should be)
• there is a difference between media aimed at adults vs. media aimed at teens/kids. Not that teens should never engage with media aimed at adults, but it's important for that age group to know that they have "safe" media aimed at them and their lives, if they want it
• by "safe" I don't necessarily mean "free from violence/sex/fucked up relationships" but more so that those topics are treated in a way that is specifically aimed at a teen audience. Be it with a more obvious didactic bent, a less graphic depiction, a style that is drawing from teen experiences, etc.
• there's something to be said about trends and the "snowflake in the avalanche" effect. A single work depicting an imbalanced power dynamic is one thing, but when it's every work, everywhere, and this is the only kind of relationship shown, then it can have an effect on the culture. At the same time, it's not any single piece of media's "fault"
• in general I think pushing for media literacy and active engagement with our media is better than censorship of "problematic" works
• also "problematic" should be the start of a conversation about the work, not the end
• not wanting to engage with/platform/publish a work because of its shitty politics is not censorship
• you're not immune to propaganda and some fiction is specifically written to be propaganda. (Thinking about certain kinds of "Christian romance")
• we're all immersed in this white, cishet, patriarchal culture and people write what they know

my long comment got swallowed by a cohost bug (not eggbug) so here is the simplified unsourced rundown of what the science says:

the main influence on how likely someone is to commit non/dubious consent paraphilic actions is social pressure from groups they feel connected to. this is why ostracizing folks actually increases risks. seeing their paraphilia acted out does reduce the urges but in a vacuum (and if consumed too much) it can switch to increasing the urges.

unfortunately, for csa, the research shows the majority of it comes from a perceived lack of power as well as negative reinforcement from unhealthy social dynamics and lack of positive social connections. as little as one solid positive, non-familial connection that discourages (without disparaging) the behavior can prevent offending in a non-consentual area. providing an environment of consent and support reduces risk to the point where it takes a major acute stressor to even risk offending.

i am talking vaguely here bc the research in this area is sensitive and mostly involves csam and pedophilia as the focus and i didn’t know if it was appropriate.

the number one thing we can do for the children is sex education around consent and understanding of power imbalances. the better their understanding of consent the less likely any situation is to proceed. the research shows that direct (non-familial, though family is important) social influences greatly outweigh indirect (movies, tv, etc).

if you want more info i am happy to write a more in depth view later, with sources and research.

this is an interesting collection of thoughts, thanks for sharing it!

"MEDIA LITERACY" is definitely the big thing that I'm constantly repeating over and over in these sorts of discussions, although I recognize that's not a complete answer in and of itself. I'm thinking about stuff like this program that taught high schoolers to critically evaluate porn, and I do feel like in general a lot of the problem here ties back to horribly inadequate sex ed rather than specific works of media. maybe also part of it is the need to have a clear understanding of whether you're watching/reading something as porn or not, and that framing can happen in a lot of different ways, both internal and external to the actual work of media you're looking at.

thinking about PLL in particular though (which I know nothing about other than what I've read here), and about Hannah talking Aria out of accusing Ezra, and telling her "You did the right thing" – setting aside questions about target audience for a minute, while I do want gaslighting/manipulation kink porn to exist, this isn't it. from the description given here, this doesn't sound sexy, it doesn't sound like a power exchange fantasy, it just sounds like modeling a shitty dynamic in the context of a generic storytelling beat. I'm sure somewhere out in the world there's someone who'd get off to it, but I don't imagine that's how most people would approach it or receive it? and when I think about what I'm contrasting it to, I feel like well-executed gaslighting kink would actually much more clearly present this as a negative thing – it'd be an arc that the reader wants to see, and that the story wants to happen, but there'd be more focus on how this incident furthers the protagonist's loss of agency, because in that sort of fantasy, that's the point. a power exchange fantasy that knows it's a power exchange fantasy will want to focus on how all these interactions are disempowering, and in that way it's kind of teaching a better lesson?

Tangential thought about how people talk about "problematic" topics in media. How a piece of media frames a fictional event can do a TON of lifting on how the audience perceives it. Film and Television have some easy mode solutions to color the perception of an event through camera work, cinematography, music, etc. Written fiction can as well, through narrative viewpoint, character POVs, descriptions, etc. You can depict the same narrative events in a ton of different ways that radically change the themes and messaging of your work, so I think it's important to remember that it's not just depictions of potentially harmful topics that drive this but the actual framing in the work itself. Not all depictions are normalizing! Its just kind of depressing when people fall into the line of thinking that various topics are forbidden from media because normalizing those topics can be a problem.

Now more to the point about stuff that IS actively normalizing harmful things. The existence of such media is a given. It will exist. It probably should exist (within limits, obviously nobody should be banned from writing Twilight, but also obviously nobody should be producing actual csa media), because people should be free to express and share those desires, those fantasies. So what IS the problem? The problem in my opinion is the promotion of uncritical consumption of these works to people that would be harmed by them. The problem is people and systems that care more about promoting them, then the harm they cause. THAT is what truly normalizes them. (Now not to just say "the problem is capitalism," but it is a huge driver for massive social normalization of things through uncritical media consumption.) Someone actively searching for media for themselves that contains themes and depictions of "harmful to normalize" content doesn't do a lot of directly normalize anything because normalization is a social pressure.

But if you want to reconcile the ideas that Twilight or PLL might be harmful to some, and romance novels are a healthy outlet depicting the same desires, I think the answer is functionally entirely outside the text of the works. Hell, to tie it back to my initial tangent, the context of engagement with a fictional work, itself acts as a meta framing of the work, and impacts if and how people engage with them.

Why are there some depictions of this I think are potentially harmful to some audience members (PLL) and others I think are fine and just a medium for fantasy.

Because you don't have to have a singular, unified theory of depicting taboo in media. The two poles of the discourse aren't something you have to decide either/or on, even though our dichotomous discourse likes to frame it that way. I can see you agree that the answer doesn't lie in either extreme though.

The beginning of the answer to your question is that a person can condemn certain pieces of media as having harmful representation of taboo subject matter, including normalizing taboos that they don't want normalized, and people can also embrace other pieces of media that represent similar subject matter but in ways that they don't believe are worthy of condemnation.

There are countless things that can affect those judgements, including many metatexual elements. Popularity, broadcast time, audience ratings such as PG or 18+, content warnings, education, and even active discourse around that specific piece of media can all have an effect on both the potential harm that can be done by the media, as well as our condemnation of it.

A lot of these safeguards we've built and practiced in decades past don't work in the age of the internet though. As a teenager, I was banned from watching The Simpsons because my mother decided it had too many crude jokes. I wasn't allowed to play T-rated video games until I was 14. (M games game a few years later because my mother gave up.) That sort of curation can come from schools, parents, libraries, other family, and laws, but almost all of that goes out the window as soon as a child gains control over their access to the internet. To be clear, this is not an argument in support of parental spyware or sheltering children and teens from any and all questionable media. Add it to the pile of things I don't know the answer to.

I think another pair of problems are that

① Kids and young adults aren’t uniformly mature and even mature people aren’t uniformly well-supported by their community, and what’s just fine™ for one person can be totally inappropriate for someone else.

② Anglo society does a (deliberately, in my opinion) terrible job of helping kids gain maturity in the realm of sex and romance. Sex ed is generally bad, education around consent is spottily existent, scaffolding is non-existent, and the broad cultural narratives around adolescence seem designed to alienate teens from older mentors. (

As an example: older queers—i include myself here—did a shit job of mentoring younger queers during the 2000s and 2010s, probably due to social pressure and stigma, so now we have teens, twentysomethings, and thirtysomethings who don’t know any queer history and in some cases lament that lack. As an end result, we have lots of black-and-white discourse around movies like Call Me By Your Name, which represented a relatively common queer 80s experience. Like, I personally knew people who had relationships with that kind of upward age gap at age 17, because the age distribution of out guys to have relationships with made it hard to find people your age.

And also, I did know one person in high school who dated a teacher. That was a terrible relationship all around, and it also inflicted psychological trauma on a close friend of mine who was enlisted to provide plausible deniability for what was going on.

Anyway, of course individuals can’t provide good sex and relationship education and support for teenagers across the board, and advocating for that kind of broad social policy is advocating for the kind of societal change which is slow and subject to attack. Advocating for bright-line bans on media that “could cause harm” is easier and actually a more feasible policy to implement. So it’s not surprising that people skew towards the latter rather than the former.