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Introduction The year 2018 saw drastic shifts in fan spaces where fan works, such as art, fiction, and videos, were once widely, openly shared, including those containing sexually explicit content, a.k.a. porno. Major catalysts were the highly contested United States legislations Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which addressed the liability of host sites for content shared by users. Shortly after, similar legislation appeared around the world, including Australia’s Online Safety Act 2021. In response, Websites once popular with adolescents, which were well known for the proliferation of fan works, reconfigured their terms and conditions to exclude porno. This ousted previously thriving communities, especially lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other related communities (LGBTQ+), who feared overcorrections would be exclusionary of content about sexuality and gender, broadly. This begs the questions, what drives this kind of legislation and how might it impact LGBTQ+ adolescents who often have fewer spaces for identity exploration? Building upon work by other researchers, this article asserts that there may even be potential benefits to the types of personalised and progressive pornos shared in online fan spaces, related specifically to identity development, sex education, and representation. Fandom and Porno Fan works make up a critical portion of the digital landscape that adolescents around the globe interact with every day. While not all fan works are pornos, sexually explicit material does exist on many platforms used by fans to share these transformative works (TW), including platforms which largely appeal to young people despite an overall mixed-age user base (McLelland 108–109). A fan work is considered transformative when it alters canonical events (what actually happened) in a franchise, or real life, in some meaningful way (Jenkins 47–48). TWs, unlike mainstream porno, have the benefit of being more personalisable, as they are created by fans, for fans, usually with some ability to interact with the material via embedded engagement features on the social media sites where works are hosted (McInroy and Craig, It’s Like 242–243). Also, unlike mainstream porno, fan-produced porno (FPP) has historically been created and shared by women, often utilising third-wave feminist critique to address sexual agency and shift away from the male gaze, thus creating more space for discussions about consent and sexual freedom (McLelland 111). FPP is additionally more likely to explore transformative elements that are more inclusive of LGBTQ+ content creators (McInroy et al. 632–633). While fan-produced TWs, including FPP, can be based on anything around which fandoms form, media properties most likely to inspire these works typically hold less connection to the real world, such as those based in fantasy, science fiction, and the supernatural (Hardin). This is because media properties already removed from reality more easily lend themselves to transformation. Further, the worldbuilding elements of these genres already address themes of body, agency, and belonging that women and LGBTQ+ fans are unlikely to find in other mainstream media, porno or otherwise. In spaces where adolescents are consuming FPP, they are not just passively being imprinted upon by sexually explicit material. Rather, adolescent fans contribute towards critical discussion and self-exploration via their own active production and distribution of porno through TWs (McLelland 103; McInroy and Craig, It’s Like 240). This differs from mainstream porno, which is produced by studios for adult-only audiences, often relying heavily on the male gaze and regressive tropes about sex, gender, and sexuality which do not explore agency, nor emotional or physical safety. This is not to lambast mainstream porno, simply to state that most of it is not produced with women or LGBTQ+ people’s specific wants and needs in mind. Mainstream porno, unlike fan works, is also not made with intent to heavily interact with its fans in the same way, in most cases. It certainly does not intend to interact with young fans, as that would clearly violate related legislation. There are porno conventions, just as there are pop-culture fan conventions, but fannish behaviour and critique is culturally distinct in both. FPP, by contrast, is both interactive and benefits from being about fictional characters, meaning it has the potential to subvert some, though not all, labour and obscenity laws (McLelland 109). Ostensibly, if the subjects of the work are not real, they cannot be exploited, creating a different ethical landscape from that of mainstream porno, including ethics related to consumption by minors. Fan-Produced Porno and Law Laws related to youth and porno are relatively new, showing up en masse in the 1970s and evolving based on contextual factors dictating the role of children in social life (McLelland 103–107). Legislation is also commonly intertwined with anti-porno social movements, with the dawn of laws against porno in the 1970s occurring, in part, through the split of anti-porno and pro-porno feminism (Bracewell). According to Lim et al., several academics have noted that “supporters of censorship of pornography historically have been more likely to be older, female, religious, sexually or politically conservative, more likely to show gender role stereotyping, and less likely to have ever seen pornography” (669). This is important because, as previously noted, fan works may be intended to directly challenge moralistic discourse in favour of third wave, pro-porno, feminist schools of thought, which tends to run counter to viewpoints of the above groups of people in every way except the overlap with higher interactivity of women. One of the first high-profile cases brought to court involved imagery fitting the definition of a TW. The image in question was a sexualised illustration of Rupert the Bear, a then-popular children’s character, published in Oz Magazine in an issue for young people by young people (McLelland 102–103). The artist, a fifteen-year-old boy, noted during the 1971 court case against the magazine’s editors that he drew it specifically as a countercultural statement designed to challenge the hypocrisy of the very adults it appeared to offend (McLelland 103). A major criticism of obscenity laws, in addition to being anti-feminist or anti-counterculture, is they are too contextual, and thus may over-reach without actually protecting youth at all (Al-Alosi 159), as was critiqued in the above case (McLelland). Consequently, recent attempts at legislation have focussed heavily on trafficking and other potential harms that are less politically divisive. The early 2000s and 2010s saw moral panics and Website-specific strikethroughs related to minors’ online citizenship and FPP (Hunting, McLelland), but without sweeping, associated legislation until 2018. While new laws were implemented throughout the world, over several years, the beginning of the end for Websites hosting FPP, specifically, started in the US with SESTA/FOSTA. The original intent of both acts was said to be reduction in human rights violations, specifically human trafficking. In her review of the history and implementation of SESTA/FOSTA, Cotterill notes that proponents claim exorbitant decreases in trafficking as a result of the legislation, yet fail to look at the full picture, ignoring ways in which business simply moved from one site to the next (28). She also points out the reality that the biggest drop came when Backpage.com, a main focus of the legislation, was taken down, something that occurred before SESTA/FOSTA were passed, accomplished through existing legal actions that did not require additional legislation. Despite this, similar laws were enacted elsewhere, including Australia’s Online Safety Act 2021. One of the Websites impacted upon the most by anti-porno and trafficking legislation around the globe was Tumblr. In 2018, Tumblr was one of the most heavily utilised sites for fanworks and LGBTQ+ communities (Byron 338–347). The implementation of SESTA/FOSTA led to Tumblr overhauling their terms and conditions to ban FPP (Pilipets Energy and Commerce. 115th Congress. Valkenburg, Patti M., et al. “The Associations of Active and Passive Social Media Use with Well-Being: A Critical Scoping Review.” New Media & Society 24.2 (2022): 530–549. . Vertongen, Robyn, et al. “Pornography and Adolescents: Unraveling Dominant Research Assumptions.” Porn Studies 9.4 (2022): 430–444. .
Joseph et al. (Wed,) studied this question.