Predatrix wrote:
huh wrote:
quite easy. Most adult art and stories are not advertised or
flaunted and
can be avoided by those not wishing to see them.
Unfortunately, on the internet this is not true.
Hmm. Not sure about that. Every so often I type 'slash fanfic' into a search engine, which comes up with some good stuff, some crap, and some totally irrelevant stuff. It doesn't tend to link right to stories, but to warning pages
Having received several replies to this off-list, and not being sure whether they were intended to go to the list, I just thought just answer Pred'x on-list in order to clarify.
With my e-mail client (Netscape), pointing at a message opens it automatically. I've played with the settings some and not found any way around it. That means that even if you already know you don't want to read it, you have to open it in order to delete it, or to mark the thread to ignore in a newsgroup.
I lurk in the Buffy newsgroup. My impression is that most of the fans are adults, but the show is marketed to teens, and there are teens involved in online Buffy fandom. At least twice (and I think more) I've opened an innocuously titled message and been exposed to sexually explicit photographs before I could realize what the material was and get it set to ignore. (It's just now occurred to me that may mean they're still lurking on my hard drive somewhere as well. Eww.) I certainly didn't go looking for them, and I'm just glad that I didn't have a niece or nephew looking over my shoulder at the time (which is often the case.)
No, they weren't fan art. I like the idea that we in B7 fandom don't have any of the sort of people who would do this. But one malicious or immature person could change that easily. I don't in any way consider this a caution, and I'm not really interested in a discussion about the pros and cons of explicit art; just wanted to say that on the net, one definitely _can_ (and IMO probably will be) exposed to explicit art without searching for it; in fact, even when one is trying to avoid it.
Mistral