Is it me or is the anti movement… really american? We have that stereotype over here that americans are super uptight about sex and super shy about it and obsessed with purity and hiding it from the children and stuff. Idk as a european it always striked me as a product of american culture

freedom-of-fanfic:

freedom-of-fanfic:

it’s very, very American. While there are certainly antis who aren’t American, many of them are.

I have a lot of theories as to why this is, but a lot of them are covered in this post: anti-shipping as the cool new trend (while it’s mostly about the age bracket of anti-shippers as of June 2017 (this time last year), it’s an americentric post talking almost entirely about US phenomena).

tl;dr version? anti-shipping is:

• the natural result of growing up both LGBT+/queer and marinated in American-flavored Puritan Christianity/purity culture 
• with a side order of valuing safety over freedom 
• b/c you’ve always had freedom of information 
• but you’ve never known a sense of security 
• thanks to lifelong internet access 
• paired with post-9/11 paranoia.

• add a dash of radical feminism/exclusionist thinking

• never being taught how to think critically, and
• zero education on sex of any kind, and

viola: anti-shippers. 

someone* added these tags to their reblog of this post, which, uh: this is literally the basic, standard fandom anti-shipper position on ships.

 Whether you call yourself an ‘anti’ or not, this is precisely what a fandom anti does: ‘throw down’ if they think someone’s ships are ‘abusive’, ‘pedophilia’, or ‘incest’ (generally with widely expanded definitions, hence the scare quotes).

it’s a pretty solid example of how this works, though:

• tag op is 21: too young to remember a world before 9/11 happened or remember a world without internet access
• tag op’s strong feelings about fictional ships suggests they flatten fiction and reality to equal levels of potential danger: classic black & white thinking structure that is strongly encouraged by American Protestant Christianity
• tag op didn’t read this post with self-awareness and/or application of critical thought, much less click the link that the tl;dr list references
• tag op feels justified in limiting other people’s freedom to use fictional ships to explore certain social/romantic/sexual dynamics, threatening to throw down over it.
• this is because those social/romantic/sexual dynamics are not safe or healthy in real life.
• even though ships are fictional, the safety of censorship is more important than freedom of expression or thought.
• the concern is always about ships/sex fantasies: never violence/fantasies about harming others. this is the combined effect of purity culture and radical feminism in a society that glorifies and normalizes violence.
• tag op will fight you for bad ships, because it is okay to fantasize about fighting people but not okay to fantasize about unhealthy fictional relationships

Anyway. 

I have a lot of sympathy for antis because I think their lives often set them up to favor censorship and abhor education-as-inoculation, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re being jerks to fellow fans on the basis of assuming things about the core of their person because of what they ship.

fandom policing of this sort is assumptive, presumptive, and deeply damaging, both to the victims of anti-shipper cyberbullying and the anti-shippers themselves, who are encouraged in this abusive cycle hellhole behavior by emotional manipulation and coercion.

(I want to end this with a joke about how American this is, but assholes are everywhere tbh. Americans are just especially susceptible to the thinking patterns established by fandom antis at this precise moment in history because of the factors listed above.)

*if you figure out who it is, kindly be a decent person and leave them the hell alone.