Do Normies Have a Right to Read Heated Rivalry Fanfic?

Last week, New York magazine published a cover story on Heated Rivalry and fujoshi, a Japanese term for women who love stories about sex and romance between men. The online discourse that the story inevitably inspired kept circling back to one specific detail. In his thorough and seemingly well-meaning story, the writer, E. Alex Jung, had linked directly to fanfiction on An Archive of Our Own (better known as “AO3”). Some people argued that this—directing a mainstream readership to pseudonymous fan writing that wasn’t intended for them—was unethical. The core question, as the literary agent Alyssa Morris wrote, was simple: What is a reasonable expectation of privacy for a community that publishes its work on the open Internet?