LiveJournal users fight erotic ‘Harry Potter’ deletions:
The LiveJournal Harry Potter sex fans are revolting in their parents’ basements again over some more deletions of accounts that in my opinion were long overdue by LJ.
LiveJournal users who patronize sex-themed Harry Potter fan art and fiction communities–and a host of other concerned users–are revolting a second time over account suspension notices they say are unpredictable and trample on their free-expression rights.
The most recent saga over user-generated Harry Potter artwork appears to have started late last week, when at least two users, “ponderosa121” and “elaboration,” reported receiving notices from a LiveJournal abuse team member who informed them that their accounts had been “permanently suspended.” (One user tracking the situation says an “undetermined” number of other Harry Potter artists have also been suspended in recent weeks, but we’ve yet to get official confirmation on that.)
The reason for the deletions? The users’ journal entries contained “drawings depicting minors in explicit sexual situations,” which represented a violation of LiveJournal’s policies, according to copies of the letters posted by their recipients.
In ponderosa121’s case, the offending image depicted an unclothed Harry Potter of ambiguous age receiving oral sex from sometimes-villain Severus Snape. The image posted by elaboration, who describes herself on an external site as a 21-year-old Atlanta sometimes-resident with a fondness for “zombies, pie and cold pizza,” showed the twin brothers of Ron Weasley, Harry’s good friend, in their own intimate moment. There were no ages listed in the fantasy images, however, so they could have been meant to depict the lads when they were 18 years old.
Now let’s see what the basement dwellers had to say…
One user who goes by the name Guma Kawauso argued that by that logic, people could face journal shutdowns for posting images by the renowned photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose common themes were flowers, portraits of famous people and nudes–which encountered charges of “pandering obscenity.”
“‘Obscenity’ is the perfect tool to weed out everything that doesn’t fit in a nice, clean, straight, male-dominated and preferably white world,” charged a user named erestor.
Except we’re not talking about Mapplethorpe. We’re talking about bizarre sexual fetish drawings (I refuse to call then art) of underage characters that someone else invented.
“The policy makes LJ an unwelcoming environment for sexual expression and experimentation, which is a change; in the past, LJ has been a valuable environment for many groups who are expressing, experimenting with, or identifying as non-normative sexualities to speak free of constraints which are often backed by patriarchical [sic], racist, classist, or heterosexist behavioral norms,” another user, who goes by the moniker “coffeeandink,” wrote in a recent entry.
This is the same argument I used to see in the LJ Pedo forums. Hey, if the Furries want to get their freak on at LJ I have no problem with that as long as it only involves adults. Any kind of sexual activity that takes place on LJ should not in any way, shape, or form involve children real or imagined.
Harry Potter fans, in general, creep me out but these “fan artists” wrote the book on creep. Or should I say stole the book on creep then put the creep characters in sexual situations? Anyway, these fan artists are uber-creepy. Not only that but LJ and its parent company SixApart are a private company and have the right to banish any material they see fit. With their userbase, I doubt they’ll even miss the Harry Potter porn freaks.