Episode 148: Do Not Interact
In Episode 148, Flourish and Elizabeth discuss “Do Not Interact” warnings, a kind of social signalling that’s proliferated across social media sites recently—including in fandom spaces. Topics covered include the framing and efficacy of these warnings, and intergenerational fandom clashes around how much information about yourself you should put on the internet. They also read two listener letters in response to the “Writing Women” episode, about the writers’ experiences in f/f spaces.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:00] We interviewed breathedout in Episode 144, “Writing Women.”
[00:12:00] The “writing about Black characters is not like eating your vegetables” comparison shows up in many of our episodes about race and fandom, but particularly in Episode 89, “Rukmini Pande.”
[00:21:25] Our interstitial music is “What Happened in the Past Doesn’t Stay There” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:30:02] Carrd.co is where you can make a Carrd, if this episode is inspiring to you.
[00:35:40] The Tumblr thread Elizabeth was referring to, which includes the timeless image of Lisa Simpson:
[00:41:38] You have to click the “Proceed” button to see anything “Mature” or “Explicit” on AO3! (Of course, that doesn’t cover everything that could possibly be objectionable…but…)
[00:48:36]
[00:53:07] There are many, many branches of the Tumblr thread that began with someone saying they don’t trust people without Carrds, but this is a representative example.
[00:53:35] We spoke about generational differences among fans in Episode 85, “Age and Fandom.”
[00:55:55] We first talked about purity culture in Episode 84. (We also revisited the topic last year, in Episode 132.)
...and, we didn’t talk about this in the episode itself, but earlier-era DNIs have been parodied in memes to the extent that there is a Know Your Meme page. Our favorite (and one that applies to this podcast!! We are serious!!):
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #148, “Do Not Interact.”
FK: I’m trying to think of something, you know, funny and jokey to say about that, but it all comes out wrong.
ELM: So skip it!
FK: All of it. So I’m gonna skip it.
ELM: Very briefly, we got an ask about DNIs, and we will explain what that means. This is not something that’s unique to fandom, but it’s definitely something that’s proliferated in fandom spaces, I would say, in the last year or so.
FK: Yeah, and I think it has a big impact on fandom interactions.
ELM: Yeah, so let’s keep that—if you don’t know what it is, we’ll keep you guessing.
FK: Keep it secret.
ELM: Yeah yeah, we’ll keep it a secret. But first we have two letters that we wanna read from an episode a few months ago now. We were just waiting until we had enough space to read them, because they’re both fairly long. About our interview with breathedout about writing female characters, about writing femslash. So we got two letters from femslash readers and writers, which was great. We were really hoping to hear from folks involved in those spaces. So, I’m excited to read them!
FK: Yeah, I’m excited. Shall I read the first one?
ELM: Yes please! They’re both anonymous, by the way.
FK: All right.
“Hi Fansplaining! I’ve recently discovered your podcast, and I’m loving staying caught up with the recent releases as well as exploring your library of earlier episodes. This letter is in regards to Episode 144, Writing Women; I’d love to hear more from you (and possibly guests) about the State of Femslash Fandoms in the future, and I guess I wanted to share some thoughts that resonated with me.
“I was primarily a slash and het writer through high school and my early twenties, even though I was a fan of a lot of queer media featuring queer women even then. I’m a lesbian, married to my non-binary partner, and both they and I are butch; so it felt like a revelation to me when I came back from a four-year fandom hiatus by writing fanfiction about women. Since coming ‘back to fandom’ I’ve pretty much exclusively written femslash or gen fic, and if writing slash helped me think about dynamics and scenarios I was interested in exploring while also having a ‘safe’ cushion from my own experiences, then coming back to write femslash feels incredibly freeing and wonderful. I’ve been able to explore gender (including complicated relationships to gender and/or dysphoria), women’s interiority, desire, sexuality. I look back on my earlier fandom days with a lot of fondness, because I was writing what I needed at the time, and it turns out what I need right now is to see the experiences of myself and of my friends and loved ones reflected in fandom without distancing myself from those experiences as much.
“What you and breathedout discussed at length really resonated with me—about messiness, and perceived limitations to the emotional and dynamic options that can be explored, and purity culture, and chilling effects. And I suppose that’s one of the things that stuck with me from this episode, and what I’ve been thinking about since then. I had some conversations with friends about this episode, and some of what we talked about was like, encouragement and positive onboarding for people who want to write femslash but might feel alienated or spooked in the space. Or how to create and nurture positive experiences for fen who might not be used to f/f-associated writing conventions, attention-levels paid to femslash, and other issues.
“Most of the femslash I’ve been interested in or engaged with has been for smaller fandoms—or, for smaller pairings in juggernaut fandoms. The engagement these fics has gotten is utterly lovely, and it’s clear to me that femslash works often times mean a lot to the people who vibe with them (regardless of the tropes or pairings). That said, I have a separate pseud on AO3 where I write so-called ‘messier’ pairings—fic involving an older woman and a younger one, for instance, or generally kinkier pieces that I like keeping separate from my main fannish pseud—and the engagement on those fics is dramatically lower. I’ve been having a lot of discussions about feedback loops. I feel very comfortable in my fannish identity, and I love writing pieces that are meaningful to me even as I also love getting some attention towards what I write, so lower engagement doesn’t always bother me. But from what I’ve observed and read about, it seems there are a couple feedback loops running in tandem in femslash spaces.
“The fandoms I’ve been in which are predominantly femslash are still dramatically smaller than the juggernaut femslash fandoms, and I’m often not interested in the genre or framing of the juggernaut f/f fandoms. The femslash pairings I’ve written for in mid-sized fandoms make up 10% or less of the overall works. Femslash pairings that are ‘less complicated’ seem to be dramatically more popular. And the net result of all of these parallel issues seems to be that there’s a self-reinforcing cycle around authorship and exploration of varied themes, pairings, or scenarios. I think positive attention and validation feels really good to get when you’re sharing a creation… and really bad not to receive if you’re hoping to get it, with the result that some authors I know dip into femslash and back out again really quickly, or femslash creators feel generally disheartened. In some ways, it feels like if you’re in a smaller or mid-sized femslash fandom (or interested in a rarepair, or a pairing that is on the receiving end of a lot of backlash) then there’s definitely this internal pressure I’ve seen come up in myself, friends, or other creators whose works I see in the fandom space to conform your works to what you think people want or will respond to favorably. And it also feels like for smaller or mid-sized fandoms or pairings, there’s a push to create a general greater quantity of fanworks, regardless of the quality or focus thereof.
“In some ways that means there can be a lot of internal support and excitement around any new fanwork, depending on the fandom…but in others, it means that if purity culture becomes an issue in a femslash fandom, you probably know exactly who it involves because it can be a smaller pool of creators, and so fandomentalist behaviour cuts really deeply and hurts a lot to witness (let alone be on the receiving end of). Which then corresponds to either withdrawing from the fandom at the first sign that someone might take issue with what you like to write, or creators really hedging their bets by trying to avoid causing offense. The scaling of the issue feels different because these are smaller spaces to begin with—and for a similar reason, ‘write what you want to see’ starts to break down as a valid argument to make, especially if you're the only or one of the only creators for a given pairing.
“Some friends and I have talked about ways to foster or nurture encouraging spaces to support f/f works—through fandom events like Yuletide or multi-fandom exchanges or dedicated femslash events—but I was wondering if you had any thoughts around this particular kind of conundrum? Can you see any ways for femslash to gain greater visibility and diversity in the topics covered? Do you think it’s just a matter of making slow, gradual progress? How can fen balance out competing needs, and show both sensitivity to marginalization and trauma while not shying away from complicated stories or characters?
“This letter got long on me so I’ll end it, and I didn’t even get to talk about other thoughts I’ve been having (like how to create more f/f works that deal positively with gender non-conformity, trans and non-binary experiences, or bisexuality). But I’d love to hear from you, and thank you Elizabeth and Flourish for hosting so many nuanced, engaging discussions through your podcast.” And that was from an anonymous writer.
ELM: What a letter!
FK: Great letter.
ELM: Well, should I read the second one? Cause I actually feel like they are working around similar themes and we can discuss them together.
FK: That’s great, let’s do it.
ELM: OK. Also anon. Different anon. [laughs] It would be incredible if someone wrote two very long, thoughtful letters anonymously. All right.
FK: About the same topic.
ELM: [laughs] More to say! Different person, different anon, says:
“Hello, Fansplaining! I’m a longtime listener. I’ve listened to every episode, plus some of the special episodes (as a fic writer, I love your trope talks!). It’s always a delight to listen to your thoughtful deep dives into fandom, and your guests have taught me so much about topics I had never even considered.
“I’m also a longtime femslash fan. I’m in my late 20s, have been in fandom since I was a preteen, and have shipped femslash for most of that time. It’s not my only mode of fandom—about half of my content is femslash. However, as a nonbinary sapphic, I have always been naturally driven to seek out f/f in both canon and fanon.
“I was therefore beyond stoked about the topic of one of your recent episodes. I was so grateful to your guest for sharing their experiences with f/f fic after coming from literature spaces. A lot of the conversation resonated with me. It was also enlightening to hear your discussion on how fic authors are often willing to set aside the politics of the oppressor, but not the oppressed.
“Of course, everyone’s experiences are different, so I wanted to share some of mine. I’ve been in fandoms where I had to invent the AO3 tags for some of my f/f ships, or create sideblogs on Tumblr to curate content solely about women just so archives like that would exist. It’s frustrating and alienating, to say the least. I’ve heard many femslash fans express similar feelings and experiences.
“On the other hand, I’m often into smaller fandoms or niche interests, so I’m used to not having a ton of content or feedback—including negative feedback, thankfully. Some fandoms have popular f/f ships, especially in recent years, and I’ve been seeing more media featuring canon f/f couples. I also surround myself with people who ship femslash, many of whom prioritize it; my fandom friends are a variety of genders and all enjoy various types of characters and relationships, so the typical narratives around fandom, gender, and sexuality often don’t reflect my experiences.
“I’m sure much of my experience with fandom and media would be easier if I wasn’t invested in f/f romance and female characters in general—it sucks when I have to do deep dives just to find content for things I care about, or weigh the inevitably lower view count while writing fics. Still, so much of my time with these things has been positive. I’ve loved shipping a range of dynamics, digging into the complex emotions of female characters, and just making ladies kiss! While of course no group is a monolith, femslash fans can be so supportive, uplifting each other’s content and interests even when their ships or fandoms don’t align. I’ve made close, lasting friendships just by posting a fic of an obscure female relationship, or reblog-spamming someone’s fanart of a mutual rarepair. I’ve also had a blast participating in femslash events, one annually (and not even in February!).
“Sometimes, discussions of femslash can make it feel like some sad, scary, limiting thing in a cobweb-covered corner. I worry people who want to dip in their toes get scared away. While I of course don’t want to diminish anybody else’s feelings about it, I’ve personally found f/f content to be so freeing and meaningful, and met lots of people who care about it. All of this is to say that I sincerely hope you will keep inviting femslash fans to continue the conversation past the ways femslash is ignored or policed. I’d love to see more discussion of trends within femslash, the history of femslash and how its fans have organized in different spaces, how tropes function within femslash, and just the joy of letting women support each other, or be messy, or sexy, or anything else. Of course, I’d also welcome more critiques of problems within femslash fandom—the prioritization of privileged white femmes comes to mind.
“Either way, I will continue looking forward to your fun banter and careful analysis! Thanks for your time, as well as everything else you do.”
FK: Aw! That was so cheerful! That made me feel so good.
ELM: Yeah, one thing that really strikes me about both these letters—both of which I love—is the positivity of them in response to, you know, I get it, because breathedout was describing a lot of frustrations, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And that is her personal experience, and I think that’s also one that’s resonated with people. We saw comments from people saying “This has been really real, this has been my experience.” But I really appreciate that both of these writers wanted to take the time to kind of outline the positives for them.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know? Because—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: This last, the start of this last paragraph here, you know—“discussions of femslash can make it sound like some sad scary limiting thing in a cobweb-covered corner,” like, absolutely. And I don’t think breathedout was doing that necessarily, but I do think that that is kind of this narrative, especially when people get very numbers-focused and, you know.
FK: Yes.
ELM: Looking at all—you’re only gonna…
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: “There’s only this tiny pool of fics?” Like, eh. That’s a weird corner, you know?
FK: Yeah, I think that’s a common problem that happens when people are talking about any kind of fic that is—I was gonna say “fic about marginalized people,” a lot of fic is about marginalized people. But people who are marginalized within the fanfic fandom, you know what I mean. The types of characters, the types of stories, when people talk about—
ELM: You mean not white male bodies.
FK: Exactly! Anything that’s about not white male bodies is, you know—yeah, there genuinely is less fic that’s not about white male bodies. But I’m thinking back to our “Race and Fandom” episodes where people were talking about like, “this is not spinach.” You know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah. I think it was broccoli, Flourish.
FK: OK. I like both spinach and broccoli, so I don’t know, I don’t know which…
ELM: Me too, but I’m a vegetarian so I’m not, I don’t speak for everyone. I love those vegetables. Deeply.
FK: Yeah, this is not, this is not the vegetable that you hated when you were a kid, you know.
ELM: Don’t have one of those.
FK: Yeah, I know. I know. But a lot of people do. [ELM laughing] I don’t like lima beans to this day.
ELM: They’re so good Flourish! That’s wrong. Oh my God, I loved them when I was a child.
FK: I believe that I could—
ELM: The second you just said that, I wanted a lima bean. Imagine some big nice lima beans, nice salt and pepper on your lima beans…
FK: I fully believe that there are lima beans that I would like—
ELM: …cook them in a little butter…
FK: —but I had a lot of lima beans that I didn’t like when I was a kid, so.
ELM: This is brutal to me.
FK: Well, you can cook me lima beans that I’ll like! Anyway, my point being: insert whatever food you don’t like for “lima beans” that’s good for you but you don’t wanna eat it, you know?
ELM: I am a vegetarian, so it’s a long list.
FK: This is not that, you know?!
ELM: Yeah. Continue. [laughs]
FK: Yeah! This is not that. And I think that’s really, I think that’s really important and it’s important to—I do sometimes think about this in the context of our episodes, which is that we do love critiquing things, and often our episodes are about critique, and I wanna make sure that we leave space for that joy also. Right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Always. And I don’t know—I mean, it’s hard to keep the balance sometimes, because obviously you wanna, you wanna get into like…I mean, we both are the kind of people who want to get into a knotty problem, you know what I mean. And sometimes that’s like—
ELM: Knotty—you mean like K-N-O-T-T-Y.
FK: K-N. Not, yeah. Not like sexy.
ELM: No, I got you.
FK: Maybe sexy, I don’t know.
ELM: Different—it’s fine. Yeah. Absolutely. I don’t know, it’s interesting too because I feel like when we talk about the small stuff—and I think that we also had this in the “Race and Fandom” episodes…part of the challenge that I have here is that I see so many anxious, angry, sometimes somewhat entitled posts about feedback, and people feeling that they’re deserving of a lot of it, you know. Not a critique, but comments, right? And kudos. And “if I don’t get kudos, then I will shrivel up and die and never write another word again,” et cetera et cetera, and this is not—I have no idea what kind of fic, what kind of characters these folks are writing about.
But these posts tend to be very widely circulated on my feed, and very popular, and I worry that if you come up in a white guy slash fandom that’s big and popular, and you are used to like, part of your writing process is then receiving, you know, 1000 kudos or something—or like, “Oh, my fic didn’t do too well, it only got 10,000 hits” or something like that. If that’s the scale you’re working in, right, because of the sheer number of people there—and that’s a part of your process, which a lot of people seem to frame it as. “I don’t want to write if I don’t get a lot of validation.” It’s like, how can you convince someone who made that a necessary function to give that up?
And I find it interesting that at least one of these letters—possibly both—mentioned the kind of, like, lower numbers also like, lowered some of the bullshit, a little bit. You know? In the sense of like—you get less feedback, but you get really meaningful small amounts of feedback, right? And I see the nonsense that goes on in some of these juggernaut ships, and it’s like: you also get less of that, right? You know? If you don’t have a giant mass of people, all with different priorities, jockeying for these massive numbers or whatever…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So you know what I mean? I feel like—but I feel like that’s a hard sell for people who’ve made that integral to what fic-writing means to them, is “I wanna get a lot of hits cause it’s important to me, or a lot of kudos, it’s important to me.”
FK: I also don’t know how much it is, like, made it, as much as it is…I mean, I think a lot, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that social media gives you dopamine when people like your tweet or whatever, and I’ve been thinking about this in the context of fanfic because, you know, when I was younger I only wrote fanfic, and I basically didn’t write original fiction. I took an original fiction writing class in college. But that was basically the only original fiction I wrote for probably—whatever, I guess that’s not strictly true. But it was pretty close for 10 years, maybe, there was probably a period where I was just writing fanfic and that was it.
And why? The reason I was doing that was that, like, writing on my own felt like I was writing into a void. And I would get, like, dopamine hits if I wrote fanfic and I put it out there, and someone liked it or had a thought about it or whatever. And that became really necessary to me in a way that I think—it’s not like I made the decision to make that necessary to me. It just…
ELM: It fueled you.
FK: Yeah, it just fueled me and I woke up one day and it felt necessary. Since then, I have done a lot of work—at a certain point I decided to try and decouple those things, and I no longer feel like that’s as important to me. But I have a lot of sympathy for people who it is that important, because I don’t think it’s a conscious choice people necessarily make.
ELM: Oh yeah, I’m not suggesting it is.
FK: It’s just a habit you get into, yeah?
ELM: Oh yeah, absolutely, right? Yeah. And I think that the habitualness that you’re describing is like—I’m not saying that anyone sets out there to actively cultivate this cycle, right? And like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, now I immediately want to psychoanalyze you and I’m like, “I think you were just very used to teachers giving you validating feedback!” or whatever. But I think that’s huge.
FK: Yeah, probably! No doubt.
ELM: Honestly, like…I think you’re motivated by, you know, gold stars in that way. No offense. That is something that I have observed.
FK: Sure, I like a gold star. Everyone loves a gold star.
ELM: I mean…I don’t know. I don’t feel, I do think that we are potentially different in this way.
FK: Sure. I’m being glib. [laughs]
ELM: No, I know, but I’m also just trying to think about the ways that I think about this stuff and the ways I think about my professional work and things like that, and it’s often not about external validation but about: I have extremely high internal unrelenting standards and a low tolerance for incompetence, and something needs to be done correctly and well, right? Which comes from my mother, shout-out to my mother.
So it’s like—that is my motivator, right? And it’s somewhat externalized now with having a beta, who I find also is very similar and quite scary, as I’ve said in the past, right. So the idea of her reading something and being like, “You really missed the mark,” is devastating to me. And that’s great! That’s a great motivator for me, which is super weird, right? But like, that makes sense internally. But like, the idea that I would get X number of—you know, I like comments! I like kudos.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Who doesn’t? But that’s not driving me in any way. You know? And so that’s interesting. This is a little bit of a tangent, I guess. But I sort of think about like—I’ve seen people kind of wanting to enter fandoms because there’s like a critical mass there and stuff like that, and I appreciate that these letters are trying to stress and kind of dig into the nuances of like, the different things that happen when it’s not all about scale, you know? From all angles.
FK: Yeah, mm-hmm.
ELM: And that’s hard to say in the abstract too, because like, “Oh, I got a few meaningful comments and they were really meaningful,” like, that’s pretty personal and there’s no guarantee that if I were to go write in some small, small femslash fandom that I would have that experience. Right? And so…
FK: Right.
ELM: When you’re talking about a diminished pool of endless feedback loops, it’s tricky. But, then I go back to the kind of idea that like—a lot of people aren’t picking their ships because they are concerned about the volume or something, right? You know? Like, sometimes you’re just drawn to characters! And so then we’re in a whole different realm. I love, I love that these writers are drawn to these characters, and these dynamics, women’s bodies and women’s experiences, but there’s other sets of habits that people develop where they just kinda have tunnel vision about the kind of bodies they want to write about. So…
FK: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I guess that the…I’d be very interested to hear from anybody who had thoughts about this stuff. I think the thing that I’m taking away from this is that—I think it’s good for everybody to examine their assumptions and their habits, right? What are the, you know, sort of ruts that you’re falling into, because I think that one thing that the two writers have in common is saying: “I find femslash freeing and exciting.” And I wonder whether—I feel like often in my life, when I have found something that felt freeing like that, like, it had been in front of me for a long time and I hadn’t been able to see it. So I don’t know. I guess I just—I find this inspiring, to be like “What’s going on? What should I shake up? What should I think about? What might make me feel as free and happy as these two letter-writers?”
ELM: What would, I mean, I don’t even know what you’re workin’ on, now that I’m your beta!
FK: [laughs] Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. This is one of the things that I have to think about!
ELM: All right. Next time we meet, I’m gonna ask if you’ve thought about it.
FK: OK. That’s gonna be in like a few hours and I probably will not have.
ELM: Next time we meet to record this podcast.
FK: Great. Wonderful. All right, shall we take a break and then get into the main topic of our episode?
ELM: Yeah! I wanna interact with that topic.
FK: Oh my God.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we are back. Are you ready to interact?
ELM: Uh, yeah, I’ve decided: you’re all right.
FK: So before we dive into it, I think we need to talk about Patreon.
ELM: [laughs] I immediately just thought of We Need to Talk About Kevin.
FK: Yeah, my goal is to find a different way to make that question sound awkward and connect it to some cultural thing. Every time a new way.
ELM: Great. OK. [both laugh] So.
FK: You’re like “I’m displeased at this, maybe I don’t want to interact with you at all.”
ELM: Yeah, that’s how I feel. That’s fine. I’ll keep interacting with you. So, Patreon. That is a website that we have…
FK: You are useless. [ELM laughs] You’re so useless! Patreon.com/fansplaining is the way that we support this podcast. You can help us out by pledging as little as a dollar a month, as much as however you want to—but realistically like 10 bucks or so.
ELM: We’ve had people do more than 10!
FK: We have, we have had people pledge more than 10. But the majority of people are lower pledge levels. And we have different—I always wanna say “prizes” and they’re not prizes.
ELM: Nope.
FK: They’re rewards, or benefits, for different levels of pledging.
ELM: Semantically “prizes,” “rewards,” I guess there’s a distinction there, but “rewards” is a little—they’re prizes.
FK: I’m so glad you agree with me on this. [laughs] OK. So for example, we have a ton of special episodes, including the ones that our letter-writers, from the first half of this episode, mentioned: the tropefest episodes.
ELM: OK, let me try to name all of the tropes that we discussed. Ready? Trapped together.
FK: Uh-huh.
ELM: You’re not—are you gonna know if I miss one?
FK: I don’t know.
ELM: Let’s see.
FK: Maybe!
ELM: Trapped together. Enemies to lovers. Hurt/comfort. A/B/O, Omegaverse. Found family. I swear there was one more. Oh! Canon-divergent AUs.
FK: Correct!
ELM: Was that it?
FK: I think that was it.
ELM: Well, hope that was it. And I will say, to your comment earlier—and I wonder if this is one thing that the letter-writer likes about those episodes—those are pretty positive episodes, you know?
FK: That’s true.
ELM: They’re ways for us to talk about the things we find interesting in those tropes and the things we’ve observed in our reading or writing.
FK: It’s true. They are not episodes about us hating a trope. That’s not how that works.
ELM: I mean, it’s not like full love, you know. I don’t think either of us are like huge huge omegaverse fans.
FK: No. I do like it, though.
ELM: I’m, I can take it or leave it. Anyway!
FK: It was a good episode though.
ELM: Not just tropefests! There’s like 20-plus special episodes, and the rest of them are about—mostly about media. Like WandaVision, Watchmen, Schitt’s Creek, Succession, way back in the day Harry Potter and the Cursed Child—we will never discuss Harry Potter again, and so if for some reason you’d like to hear some critique about a Harry Potter property you gotta go back to 2016.
FK: All right.
ELM: It’s a big range and we’re gonna keep making more because people seem to like them, so.
FK: We also have enameled pins at the $5 level. You can get your name in the credits. We have a little Tiny Zine that we periodically put out for people. So you know, go and check that out! And if you don’t have money, or don’t want to give us your money, totally understood. There’s other ways you can support us! The best way is by sharing news of the podcast—the good news of the podcast—fo your friends.
ELM: I don’t even get to say the non-monetary ways to support? You just wanna say all the ways?
FK: I wasn’t gonna say all the ways, I was gonna stop after saying “spread the word of the podcast” and then hand back over to you!
ELM: All right. Now stop. You can also get in touch with us like these two letter-writers who wrote to fansplaining at gmail dot com. That is the suggested method if you want to write a letter of that length. As you saw both of the letter-writers specified that they want to remain anonymous. That is absolutely fine! We will call you whatever you would like to be called.
You can also give us your voice at 1-401-526-FANS. You can leave a voice mail. You can also obviously stay anon on that, if you are comfortable sharing your voice, it’s great to have other people’s voices on here so we don’t mangle your thoughts with our voices—we read them. The other two places you can leave a message: one is fansplaining.com. We have a form. The other place, where we got today’s episode topic, is on Tumblr. You can leave an ask. Anon is on there. This was an anonymous ask. And sometimes we actually just publish them on Tumblr, like in a normal ask, also. So if it feels Tumblr-y, that’s a great place to do it.
And finally, you can get in touch with us—though please don’t leave questions this way, because it’s not really the best format for it—at fansplaining on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We share things on Twitter. We don’t really share anything new on Facebook or Instagram. That’s more to remind you, on those platforms, that we made a new thing.
FK: Yep. Exactly. OK. Well, since you gave us that lovely segue into our topic, shall I read the ask that like, led us to this topic? And on the way, will explain a little bit about what “Do Not Interact” means?
ELM: I mean, not on the way. After you read it.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: We’re not gonna pause the one paragraph and explain the terms.
FK: No. We’re not gonna pause that. That’s not realistically what’s gonna happen. We are gonna read the whole paragraph and then explain after.
ELM: All right, go ahead. Read it.
FK: All right.
“Hi! I’m a newer listener, and I love the podcast and both of your insights on fandom. Sorry if you’ve already discussed this or it’s too far outside your purview, but do you have thoughts on DNIs (Do Not Interact advisories)? It seems like Tumblr has exploded in them in the past several months, in both fandom and non-fandom spaces. Do they work? Are they just a way of signaling to a community? Tumblr is such a public space—is there even a point? Thanks for a thoughtful and entertaining pod!” And that’s from anonymous.
ELM: That is from anonymous. Thank you very much, anonymous. This is a topic I’ve had my eye on, as an observer of internet culture, for the last few months or so. I mean, maybe longer than that. So, do you want me to do a little defining?
FK: Yeah, tell me what are Do Not Interact advisories, Elizabeth?
ELM: So, at the base level, it’s a warning that you put on your own profile—whoever that is—that says who should not interact with you. So there’s a few different ways this functions. One is around age. You will see minors, which obviously is an age line that varies based on location, but generally between like probably 16 and 18 globally, you know, you’ll see minors saying “I’m a minor, do not interact with me if you are over 18, or you’re a legal adult.” Very often you’ll see it in the opposite direction: you’ll see “minors do not interact” as a kind of signal saying, I’m going to post adult content, and this is my blanket warning, FYI, minors stay away because you should not be involved with this, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: You also see people giving kind of blanket warnings about the types of bigotry they do not want to engage with. The most common you will see is “TERFs DNI,” which is trans-exclusionary radical feminist, for anyone who doesn’t know that term at this point: a transphobic person, although the term “TERF” has in my opinion lost a lot of meaning in the last few years of internet discourse. But that’s cool.
FK: As so many things do.
ELM: [laughs] So I’ve literally seen asks on Tumblr where people are saying “I don’t actually really know what this means but I think it’s bad,” and so it’s like—
FK: Oh my God.
ELM: Really?! You’ll see, you know, “Racists DNI, homophobes DNI,” these kind of blanket, like, “I don’t stand for these bigoted things and don’t want to have any engagement with these bigoted people.”
FK: Right.
ELM: You also see it get more fandom-specific. You might put a ship that you hate.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Or a type of fan that you could identify, you know, in a label, and you say “Just stay away. Get the fuck out if you like this ship.” And so you’ll see these kind of quick sort of DNIs in people’s bios on Tumblr or Twitter or wherever. But where it really gets into the weeds, I feel like, is with Carrds. C-A-R-R-D, which is a linking website where you can essentially make what feels very familiar from my own adolescence, though the format may be a little different—a kind of about me page. I have found when I mention Carrds to other people in their 30s, if they’re not extremely extremely online, they don’t know what I’m talking about, so if you haven’t heard of these or if you’ve never clicked on one but you’ve seen them in passing, people—they’ll be like kinda stylized, they may have some art, like, theming, they’re often pretty cute, and people will have a list of their likes and their dislikes and they might have a DNI list of people that, just what I was describing.
FK: It’s super familiar. It feels like a LiveJournal—to me, Carrds feel like a LiveJournal bio.
ELM: Yeah, or even MySpace or—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: To some degree AIM, to take it back, you know? That kind of thing. Or an About Me page on your personal website that you made in 1998 or whatever, like, they feel very familiar. But the content feels a little less familiar, especially with the DNI stuff. And so people will have more descriptive ways of saying the people they don’t want to engage with. And one of the biggest problems with Carrds—and there’s been a lot of discourse about this in the last few weeks, maybe months—is that some people are putting a lot of identifying information in there, like full names, date of births, where they go to school, their towns, you know. And so there’s been some kind of inter-generational clashes, people saying “Take this information off the internet! This is, you are literally making a little map for someone who actually does want to cause you harm.”
FK: But it’s framed—but the challenge being that that’s all framed in the “Do not interact.” Like, “I am a minor, do not interact with me.”
ELM: Right. “I’m a minor—”
FK: “I go to this high school, don’t go to this high school, if you don’t go to this high school don’t interact with me,” all of these things, like, OK, well, uh…
ELM: Right.
FK: Now I know where to find you.
ELM: So, then that exactly segues into the kind of fallacies of the DNI, right? Which is like—it seems to function in a few different ways. One way is to kind of signal who you are, right?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: I’m an X/Y shipper, Y/Z shippers: don’t interact. Right? And you’re saying, in that way it feels somewhat healthy to me, in the sense of like, very clearly stating your boundaries. It’s not like “Oh, we’re all in whatever fandom together!” It’s like, “I like this ship! I don’t wanna deal with you if you like this ship. You stay in your lane, I’ll stay in my lane,” right? You know, that kind of thing.
FK: Yeah, yeah. It seems like more—that part seems more direct—that’s one of the things I thought feels familiar about Carrds and DNIs, from the past, is that I feel like in the past you would have on your LiveJournal bio or whatever, you might say your favorite ships and you might say ships that you didn’t like.
ELM: Yeah, and then your squicks.
FK: Not as explicitly…
ELM: Right, you know?
FK: And your squicks! Right.
ELM: And say like—
FK: Things you didn’t want to deal with, like, and so that wouldn’t exactly be as direct as a DNI, but it would be like “here are the things that I don’t like, here are the things that squick me, I’m not into that stuff.”
ELM: And I look at you and I look at your profile and I’m like, “Oh, maybe a new fandom friend!” And I’ll see like “Oh my God, they listed the best ship, my ship as their NOTP, and their squick is like, my favorite trope, and so I guess we are not meant to be fandom friends.” And that’s that. You know?
FK: Exactly.
ELM: And that’s great! And I think that one of the biggest things Tumblr, one of the biggest problems with Tumblr over the last 10 years of fandom there is this kind of context collapse of people kind of sharing the same tags but having different affective relationships to those tags, right? You know? And so you have no idea if you’re, you know, the “don’t tag your hate” thing, that kind of thing.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. You really need some kind of a Carrd or a flag to tell you where someone is coming from.
ELM: A sentiment around those tags, exactly.
FK: Yeah, you need to be able to understand something about people’s experience of the world.
ELM: So there is that. That feels, can feel positive to me. But often, so when it comes down to the kind of vague ones of the—you know, “homophobes, TERFs, racists DNI,” and I’ve seen a lot of critique and discourse about this over the last few months, like—to me, it often feels utterly meaningless, right? Like, “racists DNI,” what does that mean? Right?
FK: Yeah! [laughs] Oh gee, am I gonna look at that and go “Wow, I’m a racist, so I just won’t interact with them”? Not unless I am literally a member of, you know, some neo-Nazi organization that proudly embraces the term “racist.”
ELM: [laughs] Right, absolutely.
FK: No other human being is going to look at that and go “Yeah! I’m a racist. I’ll fuck off.” That’s not what’s gonna happen.
ELM: Exactly! And the great irony with these is you’ll see—and this has ben brought up in critique after critique—but you’ll see the person with this stuff in their bio actually saying something that maybe is, they don’t know, but is you know, racist or is homophobic or whatever, or some of these things are in the eye of the beholder, right?
FK: Completely.
ELM: Obviously these are complex topics. And so it doesn’t mean anything at all.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s not like you’re accountable to it, and especially if you’re younger and you’re still learning and kind of feeling about the way, I mean, whatever. We also learn at all ages and are constantly evolving our thinking on stuff too, you know. But like…
FK: But if you’re, it is different if you’re very young and you’re sort of feeling out the boundaries of what all those things even mean for the first time ever.
ELM: I mean like, I truly have people say “I don’t know what TERF means but people say it’s bad so I don’t like them.” You know? And it’s like—I mean, they are bad, but you gotta, you gotta learn some of the basics before you just toss in “fuck you TERFs,” you know?
FK: Yep.
ELM: At least I think you do! So, so there’s that. And then there’s the kind of, “Here’s who I am, here’s what I like and don’t like” elements, which seem straightforward, but then there’s a kind of expectation that puts on another person who’s encountering you.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: There was one good post on this, and [laughs] it included a screencap from an episode of The Simpsons where it was a sign and the sign said like, “Keep out,” I’m paraphrasing. The sign is, Lisa, I think, is approaching the sign, and the sign said, “Keep out—or don’t, I’m a sign, not a cop.” You know? And it was just like… [FK laughs] I thought that was a perfect summation of what this is, you know? “Stay away from me, but this is utterly unenforceable,” and in fact in one of the biggest critiques is this kind of idea—now you’ve given someone who wants to cause you harm a map to kind of the buttons to push. And like, adding to that, the literal map that some people are giving by sharing personal information.
FK: Right.
ELM: And you’re actually just making it a whole lot easier for someone who wants to cause you harm to do so. And I don’t necessarily mean someone who wants to snatch you off the playground or whatever. [FK laughs] It also just may be someone else in fandom who doesn’t like you and doesn’t like something you said and now can go look at your information and the DNI…it’s a sign, not a cop, right? It’s problematic to use “cop” this way also, because it’s not like cops actually do anything in this way.
But you know, you can put all the warning signs you want, that’s not gonna stop anyone from doing it, and it does seem there is some expectation—it’s like “Well, didn’t you read? I said don’t interact with me.” And it’s like…OK. You know? That is not, I don’t know if that actually works in practice. However well-meaning it might be.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I think that—as we’ve been talking about this, the more I feel like Do Not Interact warnings, which are—I mean, and this is the part where I think I’m willing to start sounding like an old person.
ELM: You are.
FK: You know? But I am.
ELM: Hey hey, let me just say, let’s let them know that you were a little bit late to record this morning because you were on line at the farmer’s market for ramps.
FK: That’s true. That was a very grown up moment.
ELM: If that’s not a signal that you’re old—
FK: At 8:30 in the morning on a Saturday.
ELM: 8 a.m. on a Saturday. On line at the farmer’s market for a…
FK: Yeah. If that’s not a sign that I’m an old person—that’s literally the kind of thing that teenagers should say instead of “go do your taxes.” Go get in line, go buy ramps at the farmer’s market.
ELM: And I bet you had your little reusable tote, maybe it was like…
FK: Of course I did.
ELM: Maybe it looked like a net, you know the ones people bring to the farmer’s market that looks like a net?
FK: It actually was the one that you gave me.
ELM: Oh, that’s nice! The one I got in India?
FK: Yeah yeah! You gave me a little tote bag from India. Yeah.
ELM: That’s sweet!
FK: So there you go. Anyway. So we’ve now established that I am fully a grown-up, and…
ELM: You do pay your taxes.
FK: I will say…I do pay my taxes. Actually I hire someone else to do my taxes, so that’s even a step up from doin’ it myself. [ELM laughs] But I feel like there’s so much in this that’s about self-definition and defining yourself as opposed to other groups, and it feels very teenage to me. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen somebody—that’s probably not true. But I rarely see people who are over the age of about, you know, certainly over the age of 30…
ELM: I would say generally the cut-off when I see someone with DNI stuff is usually around 23, except the “minors DNI” stuff, which I see people of all ages.
FK: That being an exception. “Minors DNI” stuff is an exception.
ELM: “This is an NSFW account, minors DNI,” and the 18, the 🔞 emoji.
FK: Right, right. But I feel that’s a little bit different because that’s not really saying anything about you as a person beyond that you’re over 18 and you’re maybe gonna post some sexy stuff, right? I’m talking about the sort of big, elaborate, you know, Carrd situation. And it feels like it’s really about defining yourself and defining yourself against other people as, like, being a member of this group and not that group, and frankly when I look back at my fandom experiences as a teenager, and at the many dramas I was involved in, a lot of those were fundamentally about that. It was just about trying to find an identity for myself as opposed to those other people, you know? [laughs]
ELM: Sure.
FK: It wasn’t even about fandom. It was just about the normal attempting to figure out who you are in the world stuff. When I think about it that way, I feel like it’s serving a purpose that doesn’t have anything to do with genuinely telling somebody not to interact with you. I mean, maybe it does serve that purpose, but the fundamental purpose—if my theory about this is true—isn’t really about the other people at all. It’s about who you are.
ELM: Yeah, I definitely agree with that element, but I think there’s a lot of other things going on here too. And I’m not suggesting that you are saying that is the sole thing that’s happening.
FK: No no no, but I was—I was putting it forth as a primary theory of DNIs, so [laughs] it’s worth a pushback.
ELM: To me, it feels a little bit more protective. Because I’m contextualizing it in the broader shape of the internet in the last 10-15 years. You know, I’m thinking also about the recent round of AO3 wank, which was maybe the stupidest, and I say that once every six months. [FK laughs] But there are always new depths to reach here with this conversation. Basically every time the AO3 does a fundraiser, everyone needs to put on their stupidest hats and shout. Is that a good summary?
FK: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know how else I would describe it. It’s just, it’s always the same things but people have innovated new ways to be—
ELM: Yeah, it’s innovative, it’s innovative. In the utterly, almost nothing or nothing to do with the actual like, substantive critiques that people have been making about the OTW and the AO3, et cetera et cetera.
FK: I was gonna say, both of us—despite liking, you know, liking the AO3 in general, I think both of us have some pretty major critiques of it, and yet this is not that.
ELM: No. So one, one thing I did see in the last few long, long weeks of this was someone being like, “They just put this stuff out there for any minor to see! These triggering things,” or something like that. And then the obvious response is: “You literally need to check a consent page before you go to,” I think like, even mature.
FK: Yes, yes.
ELM: They show you that big, very legally page. It’s mostly white and you have to check a box and you have to say “proceed.” And like, did you miss that? Cause you checked it! Right? Like…
FK: Yep, yep. That was in fact basically—doing more than a DNI!
ELM: That’s it! And that’s the way it was in the past. I mean, we didn’t take them seriously in the fact that obviously we ignored all of them and just checked it, right.
FK: Clearly.
ELM: But I feel like that was a part of the vernacular of the internet in the past, in the way that now it’s like—did you miss that thing? Because it was right there, right? But there’s this kind of idea, because I think probably because of partly, like, the broad social linking culture, it just sort of feels like “Well, it’s everywhere,” right? Like, people are talking about it on Twitter, people are talking about it on TikTok or whatever.
So I say that, and tying it back to our purity culture discussions, about this kind of deep, deep anxiety about being exposed to things you don’t want to be exposed to, and feeling like the internet is a dangerous place where people are just trying to trigger you. You know.
The great irony is in that big long DNI post, where people are like “please don’t put your high school and your date of birth in this,” there was a reblog where someone said “LOL it’s not 1998 anymore.” And I clicked on their blog and they were 17, and like…and obviously there was a lot of indignant but well-meaning adults being like “What the hell are you talking about?!” You know, in the replies. Being like “That’s ridiculous, in fact predators now are far more sophisticated,” you know, it’s not just like hoping someone will A/S/L you in a chatroom [FK laughs] and you can lure them with cookies. People actually have the tools to literally stalk you, right?
FK: Yep.
ELM: But this kind of idea that like, the internet of the past and people who are our age grew up in a time where everyone thought that the internet was full of predators, and that was kind of the framing of it, versus now when a lot of younger people act like that, but also scoff at the idea—at that kind of like, Dateline Special idea that the internet is full of predators, right? But kind of frame the internet as something full of, just waiting for someone to kind of come into your space and be super offensive.
And so it feels like just putting up a wall, you know, saying “Stay away from me! I don’t wanna see any of this stuff,” as a kind of an attempt at control and trying to control an experience that you can’t control because these tools don’t allow anyone to control in that way.
FK: That’s really wise, and I think that the best thing that you just said there—I mean, you said a lot of good things.
ELM: Thank you. [laughs]
FK: The thing that really hits with me is that idea of the cultural narrative around the internet changing. Because I think that in a context where everybody said “the internet is full of predators and you have to be careful,” right—
ELM: John Stossel, 20/20. I just got such a vibe thinking about this, of like 1999, “do you know who your kids are talking to?” [laughs]
FK: Yeah! And you know, obviously you and I were both people who sort of didn’t buy into that fear in the same way, but there were—I remember there were a lot of people who were our age who did buy into that fear, who did have…
ELM: Well hold on, I wasn’t talking to strangers. I mean, I don’t remember being particularly afraid, but I also wasn’t talking to adults like you were.
FK: Sure, but you weren’t—but what I’m saying is, you don’t remember being particularly afraid. You were reading things on the internet.
ELM: Oh yeah.
FK: You weren’t talking to people and stuff, but like, you know—but there were people that I knew who were genuinely frightened of the internet and who thought, you know, that it was just a place that was gonna lead you into bad places, right?
ELM: Oh yeah. Yeah.
FK: So that was the dominant cultural narrative. And now, I feel like, the dominant cultural narrative is like—every adult is on the internet and they’re sharing things that like, you know, like old people share stuff that I would never share, and like, you know, use all of their real names and all of their information and put everything out there and have no…it’s just a complete free-for-all at this point, right? Everybody that you have ever met is doing this. And so I think that is the cultural attitude.
ELM: Oh, you mean like old people. Actual, not like this person who’s 34 and buys ramps.
FK: Not like us.
ELM: You mean elderly people on Facebook.
FK: I mean elderly people on Facebook, I mean every human being that you know—
ELM: People who have been fully vaxed for weeks.
FK: Basically every person that you know and every interaction that you have and everything that you do assumes that you’re going to have an online persona that’s the same as your real persona, at least a little bit, and so that’s the normal thing. And so then I guess I can understand, then, in the context of that, having the reaction be, “But no, there’s actually predators,” but actually not being able to completely change the water in which you swim, right?
I get that! I get someone who like—quote, “the kids today,” the people using DNI, they’re smart to know that there are in fact predators and there are in fact people who are bad on the internet who can find you, right? It’s, they’re smart to know that in a way that I suspect most people around them don’t necessarily have the same awareness. Certainly I know that my older family doesn’t all have the same awareness of this. But they’re not—it’s not going down the right path, do you seem what I’m saying?
ELM: Sure. Yeah, I think too, like, I mean…obviously there are many many many anecdotes of people who came up in online fandom spaces in the ’90s and the 2000s, who actually were involved in abusive dynamics with other fans, right? And like, so they can come in and say, you know, there are these cautionary tales. And it’s not, it would be absurd to say that these things don’t happen, right? Fandom is just like regular life, except like, people also slightly turn off their brains in their like, fervor over their favorite thing, right? [FK laughs] It’s very easy to develop cults of personality, because also you have that kind of underpinning of the fandom thing that brought you there, and it’s not just pure influencer culture. Also honestly that seems to be developing some cult followings also.
So you have these things and it’s like, these things are real, but like—the platforms haven’t given anyone the tools to actually control. There are very few tools to actually control your experience.
FK: Right.
ELM: And in a way, control—full control of your experience—is not possible in a public space. I cannot stop, when I go on Twitter, I sometimes use the word “drive-by” when I have to see someone’s stupid opinion just fly past my eyes, right? It’d be very hard to completely stop this, because I could turn off other people’s retweets, but I don’t know—you could tweet something stupid tomorrow, and I would see it, and I’d be “Argh, Flourish ruined my day with a dumb tweet!” Right? And what am I gonna—there’s no social media then, if I start. There’s no, if you winnow it down, it’s not social media anymore, because then I follow zero people, so I won’t be exposed to anyone else’s thoughts ever, right?
Similarly, when you’re walking out on the street—and I live in New York City, so this happens very frequently—I walk by…
FK: Oh yes. People share their, people share their lives with you.
ELM: I just hear things I don’t want to hear about other people. Maybe it’s directed at me, maybe I hear it in passing, and I go “Oh God, come on, I didn’t want that!” [FK laughs] So I mean, and sometimes you get pleasant things. Like the other day I was just walking around the corner in my very nice neighborhood, and an extremely large rat just trotted across. I thought it was a squirrel. And the woman who was coming the other direction was like an older lady, we both had our umbrellas, and we just kinda shook our heads in our masks, and she was like—
FK: I love how this, I like how you’re like “This is the pleasant thing: a large rat ran in front of me.” [ELM laughs] I’m like, OK.
ELM: It was actually really nice to have another human be like, “What the fuck, come on.” She was like, “I guess it’s garbage day!” and kinda like rolled her eyes, and we gave each other eye smiles or whatever. So like, there’s good too! Right? And you can have that interaction on Twitter. [FK laughing] Look, I don’t know, I choose to live here, it’s fine.
And so like, I think that it’s really…it’s really hard, especially if you do spend a huge portion of your life online, and you actually limit the time you have in those public spaces, right? And there’s school, obviously, if you’re a teen, but you know, increasing numbers of teens don’t have after-school jobs. The stats say. And so you may actually have very limited time when you’re exposed to anyone IRL, outside of maybe your class and your school and your family.
FK: And I’m sure the pandemic has helped with this.
ELM: Right. So further isolation of not being exposed—and I don’t wanna say “buck up, kiddo,” but I also do think that learning to manage your daily experience when other people’s lives just intrude into yours is like a really important skill to have, and it sucks! You know? There’s so many things I encounter on a daily basis that I wish I hadn’t encountered out here in this stupid city, right? But like, it’s a trade-off. You know? Cause I want to live here, right. And obviously this is an extreme example, cause this is a very large city, and you know, you don’t have…
FK: Sure, sure, sure.
ELM: You know what I mean? The point is that like, I get these instincts, but if you’re mostly living your life online, it can feel like there’s an illusion you can be able to control that. Because unlike walking around the street, you can mute people. You know? You can block them. I can’t block these people, right? Out here, I don’t wanna hear their dumb interactions with me, you know? But it’s a false sense of control.
FK: Yeah, I think that’s true, and I think that the other thing is the internet provides you with so many people, you know what I mean?
ELM: Too many.
FK: Who could possibly interact with you, too many people who can possibly interact with you.
ELM: It’s exhausting!
FK: And it’s tiring. One of the differences is, when we’re talking about this stuff in person—even in the largest city you live in a building, there are people in your neighborhood you’re going to interact with, like, you’re going to the corner store and there’s the person who works at the corner store who’s gonna continue to be there…there’s a limited palette of people you’re engaging with.
ELM: Corner store! Flourish.
FK: I’m not originally from New York, you know?
ELM: I think Mayor Yang wants you to talk about bodegas that are actually delis.
FK: Oh my God. [both laugh] Whatever. When I said the “corner store” I was literally thinking of any store that you might go to, not specifically the bodega or the deli or the grocery store. But there’s a limited number of people who you’re going to interact with, and you know that you need to get along with them, so you sort of like have to, right? You figure out how to make it happen because you have to, because you’re gonna see them on a regular basis. And it doesn’t actually matter. Obviously it can feel really bad if one of them says things that you find offensive, and that can be traumatic and bad, but you also sort of have to figure out a way that you’re going to deal with that, whether that’s by ignoring it or by shopping somewhere else or by doing whatever.
And I guess I feel like one of the things that it requires to live in a space like that is some amount of vulnerability. Not like vulnerability in a big way, not like I’m telling everybody about my life, but you have to be vulnerable in the sense that you have to know that whenever you interact with somebody that something bad could happen and you’re gonna have to deal with it if it does, and that’s it, you know? It’s just how life is.
And I do understand—when you’re on the internet and there’s so many more opportunities for that kind of an interaction, there’s so many people you might be engaging with, it feels overwhelming. So that’s the flip side of that coin. It feels like you could have control of it online, but it also feels like you could have infinite numbers of people, right? As opposed to walking out of my house and walking down the street, yeah, I can’t mute people, but also even in a really big city…
ELM: Sure.
FK: How many of those peole are going to interact with me? Versus online where I could get sixty comments of people being jerks, you know?
ELM: Yeah, I absolutely agree with what you’re saying. I, you know, I do feel like there’s an element of…one of the things that we’re seeing with this, right, is that post-saying…I think actually the Tumblr post that I’m referring to, and hopefully I can find it so we can include it in the show notes, began with a screenshot of a Tweet saying something like “If someone doesn’t have a Carrd in their bio, I can’t trust them. You have to put a Carrd in your bio.” Right?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Maybe you saw this on Twitter too, cause it was going around, and that was what spurred this like, “Why are you giving people a full list of all your vulnerabilities and also your weak points and also your literal geolocation and your identifying details.” But I do think this person was speaking for a lot of other people and saying, “You’re some weirdo that I don’t—I don’t know who you are!” And it’s this huge generational clash, this idea in fandom, of—there’s still so so so many older people in fandom or, you know, older-school people, right, who came up in an era where for fandom in particular—yeah, maybe on Facebook everyone is completely open—
FK: Yeah, but in fandom…
ELM: —with your Aunt Dorises or whatever. But in fandom, just complete hardcore like, won’t even allow a picture of yourself at a con to go online, you’ve gotta, you know, just like—that kind of thing, absolutely no identifying details or any way for anyone to know what state you live in or country you live in or whatever. And that, I get why that looks suspect to a 15-year-old who is used to everyone around them putting up extremely large signs explaining all the details about themselves, right? And it looks like you’re hiding something.
And I think that’s where we see a lot of these clashes, and I feel like this is setting—as this kind of snowballs, as different practices…no one who came up in an era of extreme pseudonymity in fandom is going to suddenly be like, “Oh, I should get myself one of those Carrds.”
FK: No.
ELM: [laughs] You know?! Like…
FK: Right!
ELM: The precursor to this was people putting a ton of information in Tumblr bios, listing all the microlabels and just really specifics about them. Or really long, like, who they block, you know, that kind of very long Tumblr bio, like… “These are the things I block and why.” And so it’s like, that’s gonna be an inherent clash. That’s a huge norms clash.
And it’s one that makes both sides, even though it’s more of a spectrum, the extremes of both sides look at each other with extreme suspicion, right? And obviously I think most of these older-school fandom people are just like, “These kids, I don’t,” you know, I’m doing a kind of dismissive gesture, like “I don’t need anything to do with that.” But, on a daily basis, we also see these groups clashing. And trying to, you know, trying to talk to each other, but talking to each other. Maybe not wanting to talk to each other. Especially around stuff like whether you should be able to write or ship whatever you want, you know, and the people who have kind of made the right to do whatever you want in fandom, like, their hill to die on—that kind of, you know, people who put that in their bio.
FK: Yep.
ELM: I see so many clashes, and it’s just increasing as these cultures become more entrenched. And so that, you know, it makes me worry—and I will say that a few years ago, when we first talked about purity culture, we speculated “what’s going to happen in a few years when these folks are no longer in high school and college, or maybe out in the world?” And now often when I’ll see this kind of stuff happening, especially with purity culture discourse, and I’ll look at the person who’s arguing purity culture stuff, often they’ll be like 22 or 23. And so the answer is “nothing, they just get older.” [laughs] You know?
So that—it’s kind of like, makes me reticent to be like “What’s going to happen in three or four years to this current thing?” It’s gonna be worse and people are just gonna be a little bit older and there will be more young people who will come online and are allowed to have a little more digital autonomy because they’re no longer 10, they’re 14, and they can come in and join this cohort, so you know.
FK: Yeah, totally. Well, I hope that if nothing else talking about this…certainly I feel like through talking about this, I don’t know. I guess I always had a sense of empathy for different people, but actually talking through it has helped me feel a little bit more like “No, actually it’s not just this thing that’s annoying to me that I have a knee-jerk reaction to,” you know. Why do people do it and what are they feeling when they do it? And I guess I would hope that people would be able to look beyond their assumptions in this and to try and actually see the person behind it and like…you know, interact like humans as opposed to just people staking out different positions on this spectrum. I don’t know. I guess that’s my hope for us and for our listeners, you know, for anybody who’s hearing this, that anybody could be a little bit—generous to each other, is maybe how I would frame it.
ELM: You say this, but my response is the opposite. [FK laughs] Be generous in your mind, but I honestly think that, you know, if your stance is “I don’t wanna interact with anyone who doesn’t have a Carrd in their bio,” I doubt a lot of people listening to this podcast fall in that group, but…
FK: Have that stance, yeah.
ELM: Maybe! Maybe. If that’s your stance, then all right!
FK: Oh, I’m not gonna try and interact with somebody who said that they don’t wanna interact with me! Why would I do that?
ELM: Right, so that kinda suggests to me that actually the solution is for people to interact less, which I don’t think would be a terrible idea. You know. Honestly, I have seen many instances in the last few months of people with these stances or people going into, like—minors who say “don’t interact with me if you’re over 18” going into adults’ mentions and then getting mad when the adult responds.
FK: Right.
ELM: And like, I get why they do that…
FK: Yeah, that’s no—but that’s not how that works. That’s not how that’s gonna work.
ELM: I was once in this age demographic! But no, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, that’s not right.
ELM: And I would advise to any adult that notices this—but it’s also not an adult’s, it’s not anyone’s responsibility to click on your bio.
FK: Yeah, fair.
ELM: Because the way that Twitter set this up, or the way that Tumblr set it up or whatever? That’s one more click! You are not responsible for investigating every single person who engages with you. So yeah, if you say “adults aren’t allowed to interact with me” and then you interact with an adult, you’re in the wrong.
FK: Yeah, that’s true.
ELM: And that’s a lesson that you gotta learn. You can’t just go poke a bear and then get mad when the bear goes “WHAT?” you know? All adults are bears. [both laugh]
So this is a problem, but I think for the most part it’s not a great long-term solution, but in the short term the way to reduce friction is for people to not pick fights with people who have very different worldviews, which I think is happening. And if you are coming from this perspective where you really want everything to be super clear and transparent about all of your individual beliefs and the things you like and dislike, and you don’t trust anyone who doesn’t do that—
FK: Great!
ELM: Don’t interact with them. DNI. [laughs] Like…you know? I didn’t even mean to say that, but that’s the words that came out, right?
FK: There you go.
ELM: Someone’s DNI list, or someone’s list of likes and dislikes, for an older person you may look at that and be like “Kids these days!” Ignore them! But I see so many adults wrapping themselves up in knots being like, “Oh, why are they doing it this way?!” And it’s like, you know, whatever! There’s a lot of information about how you shouldn’t put your school and your birthday and your full name directly on the internet all in one place, right? And it’s not your responsibility, it’s not your child, it’s not your responsibility to tell them. Then you get into concern-trolling, kind of. And it’s like—just let it go, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Deal with your own kids, your own ramps, your own kitchen remodeling was another one I saw recently.
FK: Taxes.
ELM: Why do you care about fandom? Why don’t you go remodel your kitchen.
FK: I can do both.
ELM: Yeah, you literally just did. I’m a renter, so I’m not allowed to remodel.
FK: No.
ELM: I’d like to opt out of this gas stove narrative, but I cook on what they give me. These are extremely boring adult topics, I’m sorry. Ramps! Not boring. I’m gonna use my gas stove in my rental apartment to cook some of those ramps you bought for me.
FK: Great, great.
ELM: Maybe I’ll make a little pesto!
FK: Yeah! I support this fully. All right. I feel like we’re perhaps coming to the point—if we’re now talking about ramp pesto—that we should probably wrap up this podcast.
ELM: I just, we said “ramps” and I’ve just been thinking about them constantly ever since. It’s ramp season, I love ramps, it’s a short window—
FK: It is a short window.
ELM: I know it’s cheesy, but they’re really good, and I’m grateful that we get to eat them, even if it’s so fleeting.
FK: Great. All right. In that case, I’m gonna go and I’m gonna cook some ramps, probably! Genuinely I’m probably gonna go—
ELM: Ten in the morning, are you gonna make ramps right now? Are you gonna make like eggs with ramps?
FK: Exactly! I’m gonna make myself a nice little brunch.
ELM: Oh, it’s so good! That’s so delicious.
FK: It’s gonna be perfect.
ELM: Oh man, I’m so jealous!
FK: It will be you soon.
ELM: OK. Well, the moral of the—oh God, I can’t wait to see you to get the ramps handoff! The moral of the story is, this is complicated and if anyone tells you that you have to do these things to participate in fandom, then you need to find another corner of your fandom, because you don’t have to.
FK: Agreed.
ELM: And if anyone mocks you for doing this, get away from them, you guys are not gonna see eye to eye. It’s basically like build giant walls and don’t talk to each other, which is depressing, and maybe a way to reduce harm.
FK: Well, yeah, I mean, I think ultimately my idea of having empathy with people also involves having empathy and therefore not necessarily talking to them, but being like, “all right! I believe you.”
ELM: Right! Like when people on the street are saying things I don’t want to engage with, I don’t just walk up and be like “What are you saying? I don’t like that!”
FK: Yeah!
ELM: “I don’t like the way you’re speaking right now,” you know? I’m ignoring you right now!
FK: I can have empathy with someone’s thing that they are doing, and that can sometimes lead me to not interact.
ELM: Yes.
FK: All right.
ELM: Perfect.
FK: Now I’m ready to stop interacting with you. I will talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: Bye, Flourish. [FK laughs]
[Outro music, thank yous and credits]