Can we get real, here?

[jlh]

In the wake of all the LJ/6A stuff I've seen a bunch of posts reminding fen that mundanes will always think they're weird no matter what they do, and that no really, fanfic is illegal, so we need to be careful about what we are asking for. It's not that I take issue with either of these things, exactly; it's the implication that they only apply to fandoms. (I'm not going to touch, here, the ongoing irony that RPS/RPF is probably in a more legal space than FPF/FPS, because seriously, whatever.)

First, the kind of copyright issues that could threaten fanfic are already, right now, threatening fantasy sports leagues. The sports leagues have always been more harsh on protecting their copyright to the games and trying as hard as they can to extend that copyright to everything they can think of, be it the statistics of the players (the basis of Major League Baseball's lawsuit) or the locker room press conferences (see more about the NFL controlling sports reporters' access). The NCAA booted one reporter out of their press box for liveblogging the game, which they felt was an infringement of their copyright. Now that the sports leagues have started cable channels and websites, they are competing with the sports channels that once featured them, which lead to the MLB's ridiculous decision (since rescinded) to drop pay cable access to out-of-town games in favor of a deal they did with DirecTV.

I could go into a long digression here about the major sports leagues and why they're wrong-headed not just about this treatment of their super-fans but so many other things, but it is important to note that they are only going after the websites that are making money off fantasy sports, and not the fans themselves. Still: copyright fights, not just for nutty media or SF/F fans anymore!

Porn, well, that's where my own life experience sort of breaks down. I live in the northeast, I grew up in a very small town in the northeast, and there's porn around. Porn has permeated our media culture. I've been writing the stuff for the last 25 years, almost, and my non-fandom friends were more surprised that I was writing fanfiction than that I was writing porn. Larry Flynt is a giant in the law mostly because he couldn't be bothered to worry what people think of him. Hugh Hefner's girlfriends have a show on E! Really, no, really, it's not the porn in and of itself. There's a lot of talk about HP, and a lot of confusion about it, but that's a distraction.

Mostly, it's two things: One, those mundanes often don't really have hobbies, and don't value anything that you might spend your time on that won't ultimately make you money. Those crazy scrapbookers! Those crazy quilters! Why are you spending time looking for that last baseball card to make your collection of the 1967 Mets--not even the team that won, but some other team--complete? Why are you still playing music when your band hasn't made it onto MTV and you can't quit your day job? We like to think, in this fannish persecution mode that we adopted in high school (when everyone was a freak, remember?) that some kinds of fannishness is put down and other kinds are okay, but that's not actually true. Casual fannishness of anything is okay. Passionate fannishness of anything, isn't.

And yet, marketers target those passionate folks, want to reach them when they're doing their quilting or whatever, not only to sell them quilting needles, but to sponsor their mini-marathons or many other things. Look at Warner Brothers' involvement in some of the Pottercons. Comic Con has become an industry event such that even E!News was down there this year, and they weren't making fun of the cos players. Care "too much" about anything, and you leave yourself open to both ridicule and marketing.

Two, there's a hysteria at the moment about online predators, which reminds me of the 90s hysteria about kidnappers. Even the infamous "50,000" statistic has reared its ugly head. But as you can see here, the vast majority of missing children are kidnapped by noncustodial parents, run away, or have been kicked out of their house. These children are still in danger--there's usually a very good reason that parent is noncustodial, and we all know what can happen to kids living out on the streets--but they have not been taken by strangers. Similarly, most sexual abuse to children occurs with people they didn't consider strangers, like a family member, a teacher, a coach, a family friend. Believe me, these kids are traumatized, not just because of what happened but because a sacred trust has been violated. But they were not abused by someone trolling for them on the internet.

So why the scare stories in the media? Why the shock groups going after livejournal or myspace? Well, first, news reports the unusual, not what happens every day. If abuse happens within a family, it's considered a private matter and won't hit the papers. Second, it's just a better bogeyman. We'd all love to take our fear of children being hurt and put it off on a monster rather than recognizing that the monster is more often someone we know, someone we might have trusted to take care of our children. By the way, there's an excellent guide for safety programs for kids put together by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, from which I gathered many of my statistics.

The kidnapping fear passed, eventually, Amber Alert laws notwithstanding. The sexual abuse of children fear will also hopefully move to where it should be, not about strangers, but about friends, with an emphasis on creating an environment for children and teens to be able to disclose abuse that has occurred and give them the resources to say no, to not give into the pressure to go along with the adult. Kicking people off myspace and watching NBC entrap folks online, however, isn't going to keep many kids safer.

Comments

[sundancekid.livejournal.com]

Hi, I found this via friendsfriends and wanted to comment basically to say, "Word." Especially to the stuff about how being a super fan is hard for those without hobbies to understand, and this: Care "too much" about anything, and you leave yourself open to both ridicule and marketing. I wrote a paper for a class last year about super fans (I focused on Star Trek, because there's so much written about them), and about how being a fan is considered less deviant than it used to be, on account of how they've figured out us fans have money to spend. While we're all too aware that many people are looking at us like we're weirdos, we forget that people are also looking at us as a source of revenue.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Well, and also, with the internet, it's so much easier for fans of esoteric things to find each other. I used to have a client who collected vintage Victrola record players from the turn of the century. He found them on ebay, and went to talks about them and things like that. Twenty years ago, would he even have been aware of a whole community of collectors?

Also, with the way that everyone wants to be a little expert on some niche thing, it's like everyone gets to be a nerdy superfan. But I think that class then gets sort of mixed up into it.

if only I had an Ugly Betty icon to reciprocate!

[sundancekid.livejournal.com]

Well, and also, with the internet, it's so much easier for fans of esoteric things to find each other.
Hee, that was the other half of my argument in that paper -- fans, upon finding out how not-rare they were, realized they weren't so deviant as they had thought. :)

[kitsune13.livejournal.com]

You rock, you know that? Between this and your great posts on the race wank, I have decided to set up a shrine in your honor. :D

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness! Thank you so much!

[locumtenens.livejournal.com]

This is a little OT, but you hit upon a sore spot in my life right now...

The rebuke of fannishness basically falls under 'people fear what they do not understand', which extremely tedius and frustrating. Just because you don't understand my hobbies, doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with them. (Yes, mom, I'm talking to you.)

I was thrilled about E! covering ComicCon. As much as I like the like corner of the world we've all carved out for ourselves, it would be nice not to have to hide what I'm passionate about.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there are those that feel that people should really go along these very traditional routes and really cannot accept deviance from the script. More and more kids ARE deviating from the script, and that's what causes the tension in the culture: why isn't what your parents did "good enough" for you? When, you know, that isn't really the question you're asking yourself.

[olympia-m.livejournal.com]

even though I agree with you about marketers and how fans are being seen as a source of income, I still think that for 'outsiders' fans are mostly considered weird.

I don't know how it is in the US, but here I've found that education makes a difference on how fans are perceived. The more educated the non-fans, the more likely they are to understand someone being passionately fannish about something. They may not understand why one is attracted, for example, to HP slash, but they can understand being totally involved into it. Also, comparing my fannish experiences in Greece and the UK, I've seen that the more open and cosmopolitan a society is - or wants to be - the more likely its members are going to be accepting of such fannish 'obsessions.' So, I don't think it's just a matter of 'casual' versus 'passionate' fannishness.

As for the predators issue: word!

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying that fans aren't considered weird by outsiders. What I mean to say is that fans of anything are considered weird by outsiders, not just the traditional nerdy things. If you have read the HP books and were looking forward to book 7, that's not weird. Even going at midnight, not particularly weird. But dressing up, or talking about the books online, or whatever, weird. If you like football and you like to watch it on TV, not weird. If you have season tickets to your favorite club, not weird. But if you play in a fantasy league and your house is full of memorabilia and you dress up in more than just a jersey to go to the games, weird. That's what I mean by casual vs. passionate.

I think you're right about education and a sort of cosmopolitanism which really speaks to an ability to live and let live, to not feel that there has to be a group agreement on the "appropriate" way for everyone to act and feel and think. That kind of pull is very strong in working class communities in both the US and the UK at least, if not in other places.

[meezergal.livejournal.com]

(Please forgive me for going off on yet another thread; I have two other comments you made to two of mine I have to reply to. You write such intelligent, considered replies they deserve no less back!)

Bullshit. Bullshit. Parents HAVE to start taking responsibility for their own kids sometime. I saw EVERY DAY, at the libraries I worked at, what happens when parents do NOT do so. I found a pre-verbal child left TOTALLY ALONE in the kids' dept. at my last job, while mom was ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE BUILDING looking at self-help books (I'm not joking) in the adult section. I picked up that girl and CARRIED her with me to adults'--she made no fuss, I didn't want to leave her alone, I didn't know her name and didn't want to advertise I had a pre-verbal kid alone & I didn't know what else to do--what if I hadn't been the one to take her to mom? Any stranger could've carried her out of the library to God knows where.

AND THIS SORT OF STUFF HAPPENED ALL THE TIME.

AND PEOPLE GOT FURIOUSLY ANGRY WITH ME AND MY COLLEAGUES WHEN WE DARED SUGGEST THEY MIGHT WANT TO KEEP AN EYE ON THEIR CHILDREN. (Hey, we have actual WORK to do when we're at the reference desk. We're not free babysitters. Or free daycare, as some people seem to think.)

And I, myself, was molested by a doctor, a DOCTOR, of all people, when I was a teen. It's just that it's so much more exciting to pin it on the Internet, and say that this fanfic, which is more than likely read by only a rather small subgroup of HP fans, is to blame. Me, I'd be much more suspicious of some guy trawling on, say, a community dedicated to the Babysitter Club books, or the Saddle Club books, or some other thing dear to the hearts of pre-adolescent girls. THAT'S probably far more likely where you'd find someone trying to make friends with little girls so he can seduce them.

Whew! This is very long-winded, and it's getting late. Does this even make any sense? This whole bit of parental responsibility is dear to my heart, being a children's librarian. You want kids, please take care of them! You know them better than anyone, or you should, I hope!

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I just sort of am unsure how to respond to this because while it was inspired by my post it isn't a reply to what I said per se. I mean, I don't feel like you're actually talking TO me, if that makes sense? I guess I already agree with you?

I know that when I have reactions like that I tend to post them in my own LJ because they go off on a tangent and also so more people will see it. I tend to not think that that many people are reading millions of comments to my LJ, so I wonder if more people would see your thoughts if you posted it as a post rather than as a comment here?

That said, I certainly don't mind your replies! I guess I just am having trouble working out how they are conversation rather than declarations. I feel like posts are often declarations (thought they can start conversations) while comments are definitely furthering the conversation. But that could be just my own distinction.

[chinawolf.livejournal.com]

So much with the WORD.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[cryptoxin.livejournal.com]

This is a really excellent post. One of the problems for me with what you describe as "fannish persecution mode" is its corollary, "fannish exceptionalism." That is, the idea that whatever's going on elsewhere or legally viz. copyright and "obscenity", fandom warrants a special exemption. And while I certainly don't want to see fandom caught up in DMCA sweeps or "online predator" witchhunts, I don't think "but fandom is different!" is always or necessarily the best or most strategic argument nor the strongest way to ground our analysis and critique. Yet it often seems to be the default mode, and we risk a certain provincialism that weakens and impedes us if we can't make the kinds of connections that you outline here and develop a broader assessment of the forces at play and the possibilities for resistance.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

It's so true. We don't WANT to think that we have anything in common with sports superfans because weren't they the people who teased us in high school? But like, let it go! A lot of the movement in copyright law is coming not from fandoms but from other creators who don't want to have their hands tied by all these rights issues, and the general consumer sense that those rights payments go to corporations, not artists. WKRP was held up from DVD release (as was Miami Vice) for years because they had to clear all that music. Documentary filmmakers have to be careful about their subjects listening to music—which is why on reality shows they can't listen to music or watch TV. They even have to be careful about the way people talk—make a quote from a movie or a song, or sing a bit of it, and the lawyers will want to clear it, because they'd rather be safe than sorry. It's a mess, and it leads to an artificial representation of our lives now because they are so permeated by media.

So you know, perhaps we need to put our oar in or behind other movements that are creating spaces that we can live in, particularly as fandom becomes more and more mainstream.