Hindsight is 2021

TW: Mentions of rape, assault, and pedophilia

I’m not the best at personal pieces, so this will probably come out awkward and clunky, but I need an outlet and I've published worse stories on this site, so fuck it.

Every woman has a story about a guy. They can range from “this guy on the bus stared at me the whole ride” to “this guy I thought I could trust raped me when we were alone”. Some are worse. Others don’t survive to tell their story.

With that spectrum in mind, I’ve been lucky. I’ve never been stalked, I haven’t been assaulted, I’ve been pretty safe. But I’ve still met my share of creeps. And one of them still makes me feel sick. So this is my story.

I used to be in a lot of fandom communities. Too many, if I’m being honest. My late teens were filled with fanfiction, Facebook groups, and internet friends. And one of those friends was M. M and I met in a Facebook group for one specific fandom, and soon became friends through our mutual love of the show. It was about 99% of what we talked about. When we met I was 16, and he was 22. I didn’t see anything wrong with that.

We only ever talked through text, and never met in real life, but during the year we kept in touch, M started to see the relationship beyond its platonic nature. Less than a week after my 17th birthday, he brought up the idea of us going to a convention together, sharing a room, and playing all sorts of “games” in the shower. He also said that the convention we were talking about would be after I turned 18, which “would be good for him”.

Being as young and as clueless as I was at 17, the only problem I had with that was that I was asexual, didn’t like sex, and wasn’t attracted to him. It wasn’t until a couple of years later, when I was more aware of things, that I realised how creepy he was. And it wasn’t until the other day that I went back and re-read the conversation, as well as some other sexual remarks he’d made, that I truly understood how predatory the whole situation was. And now I feel sick and can’t get it out of my head.

Nothing ever happened, luckily, and we soon fell out of touch (hopefully it was because he realised there was no way he was going to get me into bed with him), but it still scares me. It could have been so much worse, and the worst part is that it all would have been legal (the age of consent in England is 16). What happened was nowhere near what too many women and children go through, I’m aware of that, but thinking about that conversation with M leaves me feeling on edge, and scared about what could have been. Part of me wishes I’d clued in to what was going on sooner, but even if I had, there wasn't much I could have done. M was a creep and a low-key pedophile, if it wasn’t me he probably would have latched on to someone else.

So what's the takeaway here? What grand lesson typically reserved for a corny 90s sitcom is there to be learned from this whole mess? Well for starters, protect children in fandom spaces. Especially ones created around shows, films, etc made for them. Because creepy people, both similar to and much worse than M exist, and will continue to exist in these spaces, no matter how much fandom tries to convince you otherwise. If you see or even just suspect this shit going on, call out the people doing it. Confront them, block them, kick them out, do everything in your power to keep others safe.