When Harry Met Draco
how fanfic created an epidemic
This post is not paywalled, but I have a lot of content that is, including two ongoing series: “How to Not Suck at Math,” and another of creative writing. If you’d like a paid subscription but cannot afford one, email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com for a free year.
WARNING: this post is NSFW. It contains a clear description of the role that a particular type of adult content has played in the trans social contagion.
Edited and expanded on February 29, 2024.
When I got my grown-up job, I was introduced to the world of corporate sexual harassment awareness training. My company did this through a series of cartoon videos. One of my favorites was the one about inter-office romances.
It featured an interesting scenario: a male manager who starts dating a male subordinate. The problem we were presented with was this: did it constitute sexual harassment when, after six months of exclusive dating, the manager boyfriend started pressuring the subordinate boyfriend to have sex? Or would it only be sexual harassment if the manager boyfriend implied that the subordinate boyfriend’s performance evaluation would be affected if sex did not soon commence?
Having had several close friendships with gay men, the absurdity of the scenario was instantly obvious to me. Gay men who date exclusively for six months without having sex are entirely theoretical. The scenario would have been wildly more realistic if it posited the sex-pressure happening after six hours.
Generally speaking, women need a reason to have sex; men need a place. The sexual universe of gay men is the sexual universe of men without the civilizing, restraining influence of women. To paraphrase one of my gay male friends: “It’s the most dirty, piggish, nasty, lust-driven world imaginable. Orgasm as a purely physical function and the desire for it as a purely physical need, no more meaningful or important than digestion or excretion.”
This seems like common sense to most adults, but it’s regarded as heresy by many people under thirty—which is how something so utterly ridiculous became the script for a large company’s sexual harassment training.
I would bet a kidney that I know exactly where the people in HR who approved that video for our sexual harassment awareness training got their ideas about gay men. It’s the same place that the enormous cohort of young women who identify as gay men and medically transition got their ideas about gay men.
It’s the place I’m going to tell you about: the world of fan fiction, which is inexorably tied up with Tumblr.
What Tumblr Is
Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform that has a lot in common with Twitter structurally. Blogs and re-blogs on Tumblr are roughly equivalent to tweets and quote-tweets on Twitter. Tumblr is better optimized for different types of posts, including photos, videos, sound clips, quotes, and others.
It’s not as massive and popular as it once was, having been largely supplanted by TikTok, but it’s still plenty popular.
Unlike Twitter, Tumblr is much more all-encompassing. It has its own etiquette, social rules, hierarchies, moral norms, and customs. It also has many overlapping “-blrs.” During the summer I spent doing Khan Academy fourteen hours a day to get ready for majoring in math, I found “studyblr”, a segment of Tumblr devoted to promoting academic success through study tips and techniques, inspirational stories, and aesthetically pleasing pictures of to-do lists, notes, planners, and calendars.
Confession: it was my time on studyblr that made me decide to change my handwriting before I started college. I wanted my notes to be beautiful and easy to follow, as well as complete.
Mathematics majors live and die by partial credit points, and I’ve no doubt that the fact my work was always easy on the eyes and easy to follow helped me live by mine.
The Way to Think About Tumblr
Tumblr is best thought of as analogous to a university. Just as a college campus is both part of the larger world and also its own dimension, with its own hierarchies, rules, norms, etiquette, customs, etc., and even its own police force—so is Tumblr part of the larger internet, but still its own dimension.
The positive side of Tumblr is that it has high-quality content for almost any niche interest. Many people who are weirdos have found others who share their interests on Tumblr, consequently feeling less alone.
However, this comes at much too high a price for any impressionable youth, since Tumblr is a portal to derangement so severe that it is probably impossible to exaggerate either its severity or its influence.
Much has been written about Tumblr’s destructive influence on American youth, including its destructive call-out culture, simplistic and toxic notions of “social justice.” Tumblr also deserves its reputation as an epicenter for promotion of mental illness and self-diagnosis of same, as well as being the Ground Zero for the social contagion of gender ideology and its offshoots (including the split attraction model, which is where moronic notions like ‘demisexual’ began, and which I discuss at length in a review of the Wokest novel I’ve ever read). To fully explain the power and influence of Tumblr would require a book, so I’m going to give you what I hope is a helpful metaphor.
The way to think about Tumblr is this: Tumblr is like a university, and fan fiction (“fanfic”) is one of the most popular majors. Fanfic is a general ed requirement. Many, many students at Tumblr U are experts in fanfic, majors with wide expertise producing their own work (including, in many cases, multiple full-length novels). But everyone at Tumblr U has studied a little fanfic, and everyone knows some of the basic terminology of the field, even though not everyone will go on to major in it.
In the rest of this essay, I’m going to give you an introduction to fanfic and explain its massive role in the cohort of young women transitioning to “live as” gay men.
What is Fanfic?
Fan fiction is fiction written by fans of a particular fictional world using the characters, themes, and settings of that world. The novels published telling other stories of Star Trek characters (stories not told in the TV shows and films) are a type of fan fiction, but they are a professional offshoot. More commonly, fan fiction is an amateur pursuit, one the internet is full of, in so many arenas and archives that it’s always amazing to me when someone doesn’t know about it.
To give you one example, AO3, a major fan fiction archive, presently has the following number of fan fictions in the following fandoms: Harry Potter 491,353; Sherlock Holmes 151,542; Star Trek 115,226. And there are thousands of fandoms, of which AO3 is just one archive.
Guide to Fanfic Terminology
Fan fiction has its own conventions and genres. Here is some language necessary to understanding it. I’m going to use examples from stories that have already been long told, since I think that’s more clarifying.
Fandom: this refers to a TV show, movie, franchise, book series, cartoon, or other creative entity that has fans. Fandoms you might recognize include Star Trek, Breaking Bad, Little House on the Prairie, or The Hunger Games.
Slash: when a fiction involves a relationship, with or without sexual activity, between two characters, their sexes are denoted with a slash between them. A story that involves a gay male pairing would have M/M at the beginning. This originally served as a warning for readers who didn’t want to read this sort of story, but over time the word “slash” began to refer simply to gay pairings as a general term.
Shipping: based on “relationship,” this refers to wanting two characters in a fandom to become involved. Someone who wanted to see the sexual tension between Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher resolved with a romantic relationship would be said to “ship” Picard/Crusher. Hunger Games fans often shipped Katniss/Peeta or Katniss/Gale.
OTP: an acronym which stands for “one true pairing.” This is the relationship within a fandom that a person is most deeply emotionally invested in. There have been dramatic and nasty intra-fandom fights between fans who wanted things to go one way or another. Fans who thought Katniss should marry Peeta vs fans who thought she should marry Gale, for example. Expressing one’s OTP is meant to give a category where intense emotional reactions are expected. Someone who wanted very, very, very, very, very much for Katniss to marry Peeta and also wanted Harry Potter to marry Hermione, but was tolerant of the possibility that Harry would end up with Ginny Weasley, might say that Katniss/Peeta is her OTP.
Categories (roughly equivalent to genres): these are particular types of fanfics that pop up over and over. Many are sexual in nature (first time, rape, dubious consent, spanking, BDSM, and others are examples) while others are not often or typically sexual. A common one is Alternate Universe, where a single fact of the story is changed and the alternate timeline is explored: for example, if Harry Potter had been sorted into Slytherin instead of Gryffindor, or if the Borg had killed Captain Picard when they kidnapped him to turn him into Locutus. Another very popular one is H/C, which stands for hurt/comfort, a genre in which one character experiences deep pain or trauma and another character comforts and cares for them, often as a parent might.
If you’re thinking, “Good God, these kids are being raised by the internet to the point that they even read and write stories wherein fictional characters get emotional needs met as a proxy for having their own emotional needs met. No wonder we are so entirely fucked and they’re turning all of public policy into an orgy of emotional need-meeting,” congratulations! You’re starting to understand.
Fanfic As Sex Ed to a Generation of Girls
Speaking generally (supply your own not-alls, please) boys get their sexual education from porn of the hardcore variety, and girls get theirs from fan fiction. What girls think they know about sex is often based in whole or in part on stories written by other teenagers, stories in which sexual activity is either wildly unrealistic—boys who last for half an hour on their first ever sexual intercourse; girls who are multiply orgasmic both their first time and from penetration alone—or is the most sappy, overly idealized romantic fantasy imaginable, often with literal rose petals. Often, the stories are both wildly unrealistic on the details and sappy, overly idealized romantic fantasies.
Fanfic as Miseducation about Male Intimacy
The scenario in my corporate sexual harassment video is straight out of fan fiction. Before college and employment gave me more grown-up things to think about, I read at least a couple of gigabytes worth of fan fiction. While I tended towards hurt/comfort or alternate universe, I did read plenty of romance, some of it sexually graphic and some not. Scenarios of two male characters who date exclusively for a long time, finally consummating their relationship on their one-year anniversary, was typical.
In these stories, as you might imagine—given that they were nearly all written by teenage girls—the male characters are emotionally intelligent, express their feelings with eloquence and ease, and are empathetic, caring, and romantic in the extreme.
Fanfic As An Alternative to Exploration with Pornsick Boys
I have no tolerance for debates about whether porn is damaging. If you look at porn and it has only helped your relationships, good for you. Don’t tell me about it. I don’t care.
My experience is that of girlfriends calling me in tears because the guy they are dating, when they took him home after three dates, choked them during sex, thinking it the ultimate sexy move. Their tears, by the way, are usually tears of shame and wondering if they’re prudes or otherwise sexually deficient because they didn’t like it at all, finding it terrifying.
Because I have written about these issues, a medical professional I know asked my advice last year. She had treated a tenth grade girl for anal prolapse. Upon investigation, it was neither her father nor her stepfather nor any other adult male—it was just a consequence of having a boyfriend. Anal sex was normal among her group.
I am not remotely surprised that many girls transition in an attempt to escape womanhood, and I think it’s at least in part because they think that doing what boys—nearly all of whom got a smartphone for their twelfth birthdays (at the latest) and have been jerking off to hardcore porn three or four times a day for five years—expect with regard to sex is what it means to be a woman.
To be clear: I do not intend this description to cast aspersions on these boys. It is entirely their parents’ fault. Allowing them unrestricted internet access was egregiously irresponsible, and they often suffer terribly, too. Dr. Debra Soh has talked on her podcast about doctors telling her they treat 18-24 year old men for erectile dysfunction regularly. The guys have imprinted on porn and when they finally get flesh-and-blood girlfriends, find arousal impossible. Real women just can’t compete. Chris Rock talked about this in a Netflix special. Porn made him impotent for a time, and though he made it funny (“I needed an Asian girl with Beyonce’s ass….”) he regretted it.
Nor am I surprised that rates of sexual activity are lower among Generation Z than other generations. With such a sexual wasteland, why wouldn’t they be?
Compare all of the above, with its heinous risks and horrors, to what fanfic offers a teenage girl. She can read, alone in her room, about a perfect night wherein two hot male characters show emotional depth, sensitivity, gentleness, and real love to each other, allowing her to feel like she’s explored the world of men and sex in some way but without any risk to her—no physical risk, no emotional risk.
Tumblr/Fanfic Culture As Catalyst for FtM Transitions
How does this cause girls to become trans? Simple—that’s where the larger culture of trans-as-trendy, trans-as-top-of-oppression-hierarchy, which is nowhere more influential than on Tumblr, comes in.
Tumblr promotes transition in two ways. One, trans people are regarded as the ultimate victims, having more social power and credibility than any other group. This is true nearly everywhere in the west, but Tumblr’s uniquely intense Woke culture makes it an even more powerful dynamic there. Transmen are second only to transwomen of color in the hierarchy. Two, Tumblr is absolutely full of the asinine notion that girls who are attracted to erotica, M/M stories, fan art of the sort that I chose for the image at the top of this essay, or other expressions of male homosexuality are, themselves, gay men—especially if they have any discomfort or disgust for their own female bodies. (Which includes, of course, nearly 100% of pubescent girls, for at least some part of their adolescence.)
I realize it is hard for normal people to wrap their head around the notion of women pretending to be gay men, living their lives that way, dating, etc., so I’m going to expand on that a little.
This really is happening, and gay men are getting pressure to date these women. The reverse situation—lesbians getting pressured to date men who identify as women—gets a lot more attention, perhaps understandably. Males are a physical threat to females vastly more often than the reverse is true, so the scenario with a greater potential for physical harm to a vulnerable victim gets the most attention. But this type of homophobia affects gay men, too, and the social pressure gay men experience in this arena helps convince these confused young women that they’re actually gay men.
Here is a comic—note the date, 2013, which is when Tumblr was in its rocketship growth phase—that goes into the mindset with great detail. It’s an in-depth justification of a self-identified “gay” man who dates and has sex with women justifying engaging in this behavior while still identifying as gay (not bisexual), and demonstrating that this makes him virtuous.
This comic is ubiquitous on Tumblr and in other internet circles where young women masquerade as gay men, but it’s also worth reading because it beautifully illustrates the mindset behind the “split attraction” model. One panel:
This idea (and, to be frank, this comic) is a foundational one behind the epidemic of girls transitioning to masquerade as gay men: that virtue and morality are found in engaging sexually with any genitals, regardless of the sexual orientation you normally experience and claim, and doing this consciously by attaching whatever the Woke meaning is to those genitals. If you’re a gay man, to be moral you must conclude that what’s in front of you is a male vagina (which they call, among other things, a “man cave.”) If you’re a lesbian, you must be perfectly willing to suck a “ladydick.” Otherwise you are a bigot and a transphobe, who wants to perpetuate literal genocide against the most marginalized group that ever existed!
This mindset is how you end up with women who are proud of pressuring gay men into sex:
Girls who turn to Tumblr for a social life, for a way to find content related to niche interests that other kids their age or in their schools don’t typically share, or simply as a kind of university to learn about adult life will be barraged with the message that being trans is good, a marker of virtue and self-knowledge, combined with the nobility of suffering.
The influence of Tumblr (plenty of other Woke internet spaces too, of course) in normalizing the path from being a straight girl who is attracted to pictures, stories, or “fan art” images of gay men to being a straight girl who pretends to actually be a gay man is so totalizing that it requires something of a big-picture view. There’s the power of the victim hierarchy with trans at the top, combined with the split-attraction model, combined with the notion that morality demands this behavior—thus engaging in it is a powerful virtue-signal.
And Tumblr provides all of this, in addition arming these girls with memes to mock all possible counter-arguments and representations of other people’s perspectives:
I conservatively estimate that, when I was on Tumblr, I saw 1,000 different versions of “ha ha how did I not know I was a guy for so long?” They were nearly always lists of stereotypes, many of which included offensive things like liking Legos or mathematics (as if girls can’t, and don’t, do both!) and quite a few referenced fanfic with things like “I had over 5,000 slash fics on my hard drive.” This doesn’t just lay the foundation, create the mental infrastructure, provide the language, and make the arguments—it even creates the mental place for laughing recognition of how silly they were not to see it for themselves.
It’s really not hard to see how a year or two of being on Tumblr for hours every day played a huge role in the social contagion of teenage girls becoming trans, nor why the drastic change in demographics of trans parallels the rise of fanfic and Tumblr.
Tumblr’s Lasting Influence In Other Areas
Tumblr’s lasting influence can be seen everywhere, from neopronouns to the cultural custom of first acknowledging one’s privileges in any conversation on any contentious topic. On Tumblr, putting one’s privileges and oppressions in one’s bio remains standard.
It is normal today to issue caveats and disclaimers and “not alls” in any conversation, but this first became ingrained in Tumblr, both as practice and as social signaling.
For example, if I were to rejoin Tumblr today, my bio would need to look something like this:
White cis woman, demisexual, het, mono and vanilla, 1st gen student and 1st gen MC, allistic, deaf/HOH, C-PTSD from CSA and childhood DV, other invisible disabilities, woman in STEM. DNI: kink, porn, evangelicals.
What this bio means and—much more importantly—what it implies in Tumblr world, according to Tumblr’s cultural norms, is below. Note that I am not, I repeat, NOT, claiming that I believe these things in any way. I am telling you what these terms mean in the context of Tumblr, nothing more. (If this post gets a great deal of readers, it is inevitable that someone will quote the below out of context and attribute these beliefs to me in earnest. Please mock them and their lack of reading comprehension relentlessly if you see such.)
White cis woman: I am a white woman with a female body who has no desire to transition to live as male. I am listing these first as a signal that I understand that being white comes with a lot of privileges, that I recognize transwomen of color and transmen to be the most oppressed beings currently alive, and to demonstrate my willingness to defer to people who aren’t white, especially trans people, in any conflict or potential conflict.
Demisexual, het, mono and vanilla: I only engage in sexual activity after the establishment of a close emotional bond, and only with men. I am monogamous and do not participate in BDSM, preferring my sexual activity to be free from violence. I am listing these to signal that I am highly unlikely to welcome any sexual or romantic overtures of any kind and, in the unlikely event I do welcome these, they will not result in sexual activity unless a significant real-life relationship happens first.
1st gen student and 1st gen MC: I was the first person in my family to graduate college as well as the first to join the middle class, so you can expect me to have one foot in the world of poverty and the working class and my other foot in the world of the middle class, but to have knowledge gaps regarding the latter. I am pre-confessing to my ignorance by listing these facts, so you must demonstrate your compassion by being gentle if/when I make mistakes on these fronts.
Allistic: I am not autistic, and I recognize the oppression of autistic people. I will defer to them in any conflict out of respect for their suffering in a world committed to oppressing them for their differences.
deaf/HOH: I have an audiological hearing loss, but I do not identify as culturally Deaf. You should take the time to include captions or transcripts to any auditory content you share, especially if we are mutual followers of each other, in order to signal your own virtue and lack of ableism. If you do not, you will have no defense when I make a call-out post calling you out.
C-PTSD from CSA and childhood DV: I have complex-PTSD from childhood sexual abuse and domestic violence. You must tag any content you post that may end up on my Tumblr dashboard that relates to these issues in any sense. If you do not, you will have no defense when I make a call-out post calling you out.
Other invisible disabilities: Though I am not listing them here, I have invisible disabilities (meaning, ones that aren’t obvious, the way that a wheelchair or blind person’s assistance dog is obvious). I am listing these to signal that you must respect the difficulty of my journey in the world, especially if you are not disabled in any way, and defer to me in any conflict.
Woman in STEM: I work in a STEM field and as such am to be regarded as an expert in toxic masculinity. Despite the relative prestige and pay, I am to be regarded as a victim whose ideas and proper credit are stolen by default and should be deferred to as an expert in any discussion on these topics.
DNI: this stands for “Do Not Interact,” and the three categories listed here — kink, porn, evangelicals — are meant to refer to a person’s entire Tumblr presence. Anyone who posts any content related to any of the three in any way should not follow my Tumblr or interact with me in any way. If you do, you will have no defense when I make a call-out post calling you out.
Besides the normalization of splitting one’s existence into areas of privilege vs lack of privilege and the habit of deferring, always, to those with presumed lesser privilege, Tumblr’s influence is massive in other ways.
I was taught in university about “demisexuality” and other areas of “split attraction,” the idea that sexual attraction, romantic attraction, and aesthetic attraction are all separate. I was taught these things as facts, which regularly made me laugh since I saw some of them evolve, in real time, on Tumblr.
Tumblr is also the primary source from which sprang both “call-out culture,” the notion that a public statement accusing someone else of problematic behavior—from racism, transphobia, or another -ism or -phobia to out-and-out criminal behavior—and self-diagnosis of mental illness. It’s where transgenderism went from something that, it was generally agreed upon, required gender dysphoria to the exact opposite: truscum or transmedicalism as terms for those who regard gender dysphoria to be necessary in order to be trans became commonplace on Tumblr.
If You Find This Hard to Believe
I don’t blame you. I grew up in a religious quasi-cult and it’s only in the last eight years, since I moved to New England, went to college, got a job, and started living in mainstream American culture that many aspects of America that are totally normal to other people make sense to me.
It can be very hard to believe that something is powerful and influential to a huge contingent of other people, people all around you, and you just missed it. But it really is the case, and the ideas of the girls who majored in fanfic at Tumblr U are everywhere—as in the sexual harassment awareness training of my company.
If you’re interested in a broader look at Tumblr-as-university, here’s a blog post written for 4th Wave Now by Helena, a noted detransitioner, that will give you a perspective beyond mine.
If You Have Kids
What you’ve read so far should make this clear, but I’ll say it anyway, and I’m going to be blunt here. And no, I don’t care if I piss you off. If your kids have unrestricted internet access, you are being an irresponsible parent. Fix it. Make sure that they’re not looking at porn (a greater risk for boys, but risky for both sexes) and that they’re not on Tumblr or fan fiction sites (a greater risk for girls, but risky for both sexes). And make sure they’re not in any Discords, ever.
If you don’t know how to do this, find out. Search YouTube for “how to put parental controls on (device)”. Do whatever you have to do—up to and including locking their devices up when you can’t supervise them.
The internet is a complex system that your kids desperately need your guidance and protection to navigate. Step up. Be the parent your kids need you to be.
Their future happiness—and in many cases, their future fertility—depends on it.
About My Substack: I’m a data scientist who would rather be a math teacher but, being unwilling to brainwash kids into Woke nonsense, am presently unqualified to teach in the US. So I bring my “math is fun and anyone can learn it” approach to mathematics here to Substack in my series, “How to Not Suck at Math,” (first five entries not paywalled, links at the top of part 5, here). Paid subscribers also have access to a creative writing series in which I post a variety of things, including fiction, descriptions, and other “writing experiments,” along with personal stories that don’t relate to Larger Points I Want To Make About The World.
My other posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews, including of the Wokest novel I’ve ever read and memoirs by Rob Henderson and Konstantin Kisin. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
I'm closing comments on this because I have a metric ton of work to do in the next few days and I'm also not feeling well. Need to focus. Sorry; will reopen them over the weekend when I'm caught up, assuming I also feel better.
I’m so glad I grew up on the internet before this crap happened