Tag: antis

shipping-isnt-morality:

totaldisgrace:

fozzie:

shipping-isnt-morality:

I seriously wonder about minors who are like “THERES A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A 16 YEAR OLD AND A 20 YEAR OLD!!!” bc like….. please. please go interact with people outside of your high school

go be a camp counselor or make friends at conventions or join a community theater or – something. literally anything that gets you interacting on an equal level with people more than a year or two older than you. school creates an artificial power imbalance that is highly dependent on age, that’s not how maturity works. You SHOULD be having more and more experiences as you approach adulthood where you’re on equal footing with adults. Having adult friends who aren’t directly responsible for your wellbeing is healthy and it’s insane and concerning to me that that’s so RARE now.

(When I say “responsible for your wellbeing” I mean, like, legally liable in some way. A decent friend shouldn’t endanger you or help you break the law, that’s not what I’m talking about here.)

as someone who has experienced being both older and younger than 16 and 20 years old? The difference is NOT as big as you feel it is, and that feeling is shaped by culture, not actual maturity. make friends outside your immediate age bracket, for god’s sake.

you sound like a fucking pedophile.

without infantilizing teenagers or thinking they’re the same as young kids, any reasonable adult knows that there is still a difference in maturity and experience between a teen and an adult.

teens, please stay away from adults who say shit like “there’s really not such a difference between (mid-teen age) and (early-20s age).” there is. watch out for creeps like this.

I wonder how a blog about shipping and being angry at “antis” suddenly makes the leap to endorsing 16 year olds dating 20 year olds /s

1) the argument was contextual in reference to someone specifically, verbatim, saying “THERES A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A 16 AND A 20 YEAR OLD!!!” Followed by “ADULTS HAVE NO REASON TO BE FRIENDS WITH TEENS EXCEPT PREYING ON THEM” which is. not true and a terrifying thing to say to teens.

2) how many times do I have to say “friends” and “don’t do anything illegal” in one post before someone jumps wholesale to calling me a pedophile for…. saying that young adults and late teens can and should be friends?

3) given the number of people calling 16 year olds “literal children”, I’m not at all sure that infantilizing teens isn’t what’s happening here

4) the post wasn’t about romantic relationships, the comments weren’t about romantic relationships, romantic relationships are different from friendships and even small power imbalances should be approached more carefully except that I said the word friendship in EVERY PARAGRAPH OF THE ORIGINAL POST

In my experience, most 16-year-olds are morons. In fact, most 18-year-olds are morons. But a very few won’t be. And those non-moronic teenagers might be aware that almost everyone else their age is a moron and they might want to spend time with someone who isn’t a moron. They can and should MAKE FRIENDS with people older than them.

Most undergrads are morons. But a few aren’t. Some of them might get their heads out of their asses for long enough to realize that grad students are not strange gremlins who live in caves and only come out to lead discussion sections before returning to their caves to grade papers and cackle over all the points they’re taking off. (I don’t cackle. I drink.) Some of those undergrads are my friends. I have an undergrad friend who is 10 years younger than me. We are both music nerds. We both sing in choirs. We both have a snarky, slightly bitchy sense of humor, as do the rest of our group of mutual friends (who are between us in age). She doesn’t understand my references to early 2000s internet culture and I don’t understand her preoccupation with Snapchat, but other than that we have a fair amount in common.

If you think I sound like a pedophile for saying that, you are, like most people your age, a moron.

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.

ardwynna:

I am disgusted by the insistence of some younger fans that AO3 be made child safe and fit to be an electronic babysitter. AO3 was dreamed up and built out of the ashes of the ff.net purge, Strikethrough, Boldthrough, and any number of smaller scale attempts at silencing us, isolating us or making us create less than we can. It was built by adults for adults from the ground up. It’s entire purpose was to give fandom a hub nobody else could drive us from.

And now these young folk, some of them well-meaning but misguided, but too many of them just thrilling on the ‘power’ they think comes from their pseudoactivism, are demanding that we abandon what we made and why we made it, and turn it over to their control, in the fine tradition of the lawsuit-happy lazy parents and homophobic fundamentalists before them.

They could go to ff.net, there’s still plenty of traffic there and the work of content limitation is half done. They could revive something tame as they like on LJ. They could even learn to code and build their own damn site if they really cared to. But no, they’d rather have AO3. Because it’s the cool place. The place with all the views. With no thought to how long it would stay the cool place if all the adults moved on like they think we should. Who’s paying for the servers and tweaking code? Not them. Who’s making that crowd they want to be viewing their works? Not them.

The censorship and fake activism was bad enough but this attitude of theirs, that they’re entitled to what we built and what we made, entitled to change it for their purposes and profit while we get fuck all, but that we should still stick around and do the heavy labor behind it for them of course, that needs to be driven the hell out of these little neo-colonizers before they start trying it on a bigger scale. Had quite enough of that already, children. Stop.

Millennial culture is spending your teenage years rolling your eyes at adults claiming violent video games will make you a killer, and spending your adult years rolling your eyes at teenagers claiming fictional ships will make you a pedophile.

copperbadge:

It’s too true. Though I think it’s also important to remember that the adults who claimed violent video games would make us all murderers had all the power and all the influence; they “put the stickers on your record sleeves,” as Chumbawamba said. We had no money and no say in anything and they just fuckin’ did it. Whereas the kids claiming fictional ships will make you a pedophile are, well, kids. 

That’s not to say they’re dumb or clueless, or that they can’t cause real harm. It’s just that unlike the adults, they haven’t got much real power. In fact they are probably one of the most restricted generations of children in decades, if not in the past century. 

I think that’s often why that specific sector of fandom frames interaction the way that they do: as people without much power or autonomy, the only way they know how to exert control or assert authority is by using that powerlessness. When you don’t like your parents’ rules, you situate them as dictators, but because most adults out in the world aren’t really trying to control kids they don’t know, they have to be framed as predators who are actively seeking to hurt kids. Being powerless is what they’re used to, and now there’s this weird new way of weaponizing that powerlessness. 

And this has the nasty side effect of minimizing the very real abuses that kids who are actually subject to predators and abusers suffer. 

I mean, I don’t know, I don’t talk to these people, and the teens and young adults I do talk to in fandom are generally enviably smart and self-assured. Like I wish I had my shit as together at thirty as they seem to at sixteen. So I can’t really speak to the motivations of the rest. But I can see how, having found a method of asserting independence and authority, kids without much of either in their brickspace lives would find that narrative attractive.

“now there’s this weird new way of weaponizing that powerlessness”

I think it’s a reflex of the cult of victimhood and oppression that started with Christianity – or “slave morality,” in Nietzschean terms, which is both a specific component of Christianity and a more general phenomenon that is separable from Christian theology and persists in secular forms in post-Christian Western culture. There’s a tendency to equate victimhood/oppression with virtue and moral importance, which is part of why conservatives, the Christian Right, “men’s rights activists,” et al. like to insist that they’re oppressed despite all the obvious evidence to the contrary.

Interestingly, though, the internet does give kids a power they never had before: the power to harass strangers without any material consequences to themselves; the power to find and distribute those strangers’ contact information and make their lives hell. But of course, it’s easier to justify such actions to themselves if they can convince themselves that the strangers deserve it because they’re evil predators.

labyrinthphanlivingafacade:

Responses Against Antis

  • Lol go take a nap buddy
  • Purely Performative Progressiveness isn’t a substitute for a Personality
  • Please go feed your clearly neglected cat
  • *The Entire Bee Movie Script*
  • 42.5195° N, 70.8967° W (the exact coordinates of Salem Massachusetts)
  • You know you’re going to have to have a real job at some point, right?
  • Listen I know you’re just trying to build a base of loyal fans so you can sell bullshit nutraceuticals later in life, but can you not do that here?
  • The 16th century called, they want their puritanism back
  • Oh dear, I see, I’ve changed my ways, now I too am going to harass people on their blogs because they too enjoy ~problematic~ content
  • ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

And then, you know, block them. Bc they don’t care about you, or any real life victims, or anyone other than the idealized versions of their favorite characters that they then use to bash real life people.

obinopekenobi:

18th century Discourse: Women, especially young ones, are ruled by affect and lack critical thinking. Their minds are so soft and their sense of self so permeable that they identify with any fictional characters they come across, and must be shielded from sexual and morally ambiguous tales. The fictional stories they consume will effect the way they view the world (in particular their ideals of romantic relationships), which will effect the way they raise their offspring, which will in the long run poison the minds of our children and destroy our nation. We must socially regulate women’s tastes, making sure that all women are shamed into consuming only what we deem pure and morally didactic fiction.

Tumblr antis 2018: same

kingloptr:

ultrasanaposts:

kingloptr:

i have met five year olds with a better grasp on critical thinking, human nature, and the creative mind than every single anti ive ever seen

you are so wrong, anti’s are the most critical thinking people I’ve ever met…sure they have a tendency of cursing in their blogs but anti’s are what you’d call critics. Literary criticism is actually a field of study by the way. 

Um, no. My exact problem with antis is that they are NOT doing any proper criticizing. They misuse buzzwords to guilt trip anyone who doesn’t follow their rhetoric. You try to talk it out with them and nope, you’re terrible/bad/wrong and ‘just trying to get away with keeping your nasty fiction’. Antis know fucking nothing about proper critiquing of the subject matter they love to fucking harass and suicide bait people over. If they were just properly analyzing literature I would have zero problem with them whatsoever but their movement (meaning of course its not every single person who might call themselves ‘anti’ bc they probs don’t know the disgusting reputation other people with that label are developing for themselves on this hellsite) is based on purity culture, bullying, telling people to ‘piss their pants’ and generally acting worse than 5 year olds because they can’t understand that not everyone sees fictional topics in the same way they do and they can’t for the life of them keep in mind that its NOT THEIR BUSINESS TO POLICE OTHER PEOPLE’S FICTIONAL DESIRES. So….sorry. If you really agree with antis after I’ve said all this then I have nothing more to say to you at all, ever.

I know most people use “criticism” to mean “saying bad things about something,” regardless of the tone or depth of the bad things. But if you’re going to use “criticism” in that loose, colloquial way, you can’t then turn around and appeal to the academic discipline of literary criticism as if it’s the same sense of the word.

The discipline of “literary criticism” is not about crapping on great works of literature. It’s not even (primarily) about pointing out how socially Problematic™ they are (though that has become a major theme in recent decades…). It’s about sensitively interpreting literary works, drawing out non-obvious meanings, making connections with the historical context or other works of literature that shed light on the significance of features of the work. Have you ever seen an anti do that? I don’t think so.

nederys:

humancallednobody:

tenaflyviper:

osunism:

It’s grown men out here fucking stuffed My Little Pony dolls and ruining a children’s cartoon to the point where kids can’t even google it without being assaulted by Rule 34, but sure let’s not judge people for their fandom habits because that’s petty and dramatic. I don’t think y’all realize (or maybe you don’t care) that predators, abusers, and bigots occupy fandom spaces too, and don’t think they not smart enough to couch their sick and disgusting interests in language that makes t sound reasonable and agreeable. This isn’t like some ‘date me mothman’ type shit. Like folks out here really exploring sick ass pedo and incest fantasies via fandom and we supposed to just sit here and let them because y’all don’t wanna cause ‘drama’? Literally shut the fuck up, Susan. Just because you white and literally none of the shitty parts of fandom affect you outside of someone not liking your dumbass ship doesn’t mean the rest of us have to keep quiet when the fandom is anything but fun and safe for us.

I can’t fucking stand that mealy-mouthed fauxgressive ‘ship and let ship’ shit for that reason.

Gee, that’s funny.  I’ve done a Google search for My Little Pony with Safe Search OFF, and found absolutely nothing:

http://tenaflyviper.tumblr.com/post/122111408130/this-is-an-actual-google-search-for-my-little

Google bases its results on YOUR browsing.  If you’re finding fucked-up shit, you were probably looking for fucked-up shit.

And you can stop pretending any time now that it’s only men that do this:

http://tenaflyviper.tumblr.com/post/128353351965/guys-ruin-fandoms-they-sexualize-everything

The reality is that probably 90% of the people you’re bitching at are teenage girls, and the shit people like you are doing and saying is actively harming and shaming them at a point in their lives when they’re trying to figure out their own sexuality:

https://antisdontdoshit.tumblr.com/post/160113624453/shipwhateveryouwant-so-this-post-was-really

Here’s the thing:

The internet?  It’s not a babysitter.  It’s the job of PARENTS to keep their kids safe–NOT total strangers.  Furthermore, your mental well-being isn’t our responsibility, either.  It’s frankly manipulative to try to force that onto people that don’t even know you.  You honestly cannot expect millions of people the world over to be PG every moment of the day.  That’s asinine and unrealistic.  With that said, parents have tools at their disposal to filter out what they don’t want to be seen.  So do YOU.  If you’re old enough to be on tumblr, you’re old enough to have some personal fuckin’ accountability.  I may not like everything I see on here, but I also know I can’t do anything to stop anyone, and neither can you.  In the end, you’re not only wasting your time, but you’re probably causing people to make more of what you don’t like just to spite you (hello?  Streisand Effect, anyone?).  In other words, being a loud, obnoxious, intrusive asshole is just making things even worse for you.

Not only does fiction not impact reality, it’s like a valve: It may very well PREVENT real children from being victimized, and there is legitimate study behind this.  Not that any of you truly care about anyone besides yourselves, and being personally inconvenienced by seeing things you can easily avoid.

As for claims of “grooming”, you don’t seem to understand how that process actually works.  An abuser can groom a victim without ever using anything sexual whatsoever.  It’s about trust.  It can be something as simple as an interest in model airplanes–does that make those “problematic”?  As for those abusers, chances are that they’re not some random stranger on the internet, but someone known to the victim.  You may not want to hear this, but the greatest threat to children statistically?  Their own mothers.

You need to understand that you don’t speak for every person.  None of you in the notes prior to this reblog do.  You don’t represent millions of others, including the many CSA victims who have stepped forward to disagree with your claims many times, only to be dismissed as if their personal experiences didn’t matter.  The things you’re seeing now?  They’ve been in fandoms for a long time (Google “Tijuana bibles”…this shit’s been around for literally 100 YEARS), and yet, they don’t seem to have affected the rest of us.  As shown in an earlier link, all types of violent crime and abuse have dramatically gone down as our media has become increasingly violent, and increasingly available.  Your argument just does not hold up to reality.

I haven’t encountered a single one of you fandom-policing nitwits that knows any of these statistics, any of these studies, etc.  NONE of you actually know what you’re talking about.  Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has already ruled that cartoon drawings of fictional characters do NOT equate to the very serious accusations you’re putting forth (but hey–congrats on trivializing serious issues, and making it harder for victims to be taken seriously).  Pretty sure people that are required to be educated in law to hold their position know more about this than you do.

Anyhow, I know you’re not even going to bother to read any of this, and will probably also assume my race and gender, as if that’s somehow relevant to the discussion, and doesn’t just make you look hilariously immature.

Also their assumption that the MLP fandom does nothing to prevent R34 from showing up in safesearch is absolutely false.

The fandom actually does a regular cleaning out of R34 from safesearch, known as Safe Search Wrap Up.

So they are actively trying to prevent porn from being shown to kids.

puritans why you always lyiiiiin

honestly… that antis are advocating for actual censorship, disregarding that they’re targeting often victims of abuse and/or discrimination, is the most terrifying part of their rhetoric. even if they don’t use the word themselves, that’s what they’re doing, and censorship has no place in a free, open, frankly liberal society. censorship is the tool of authoritarianism, something i don’t think most of them realize, which is equally scary.

freedom-of-fanfic:

what a good ask. censorship is always great in the first person (I censor dangerous content) and oppressive in the third person (they censor dangerous content).  And it’s not just a tool of authoritarianism: it’s a tool of maintaining the status quo.

what many antis fail to consider is that while they’re out here getting offended at disgusting fanworks and demanding they disappear, people with far more power and authority than them are offended, too, and want those same works to disappear … in addition to hundreds of thousands of other works.

  •  that ‘every ship I hate is pedophilia’ sword that anti-shippers picked up? that’s a favorite conservative mantra against all content containing LGB/queer sexual orientations. (‘Gay’ and ‘pedophile’ were treated as quite the same thing in mainstream American consciousness up until very, very recently.)
  • The ‘non-vanilla/kinky fan content is abuse apologism and inappropriate sexualization’ dagger? SWERF rhetoric against sex workers repurposed for fandom, which itself bears a striking resemblance to puritan repression of sexual expression. (also: kink and queer/LGBT communities have a long, friendly history. Is it coincidence conservatives hate kink, even straight kinksters? I think not.)
  • the ‘mlm fiction is only for mlm to create and consume’ maul? it’s the exact same weapon against queer representation in the mainstream relabled to sound progressive. (conservatives don’t care if you’re trying to protect straight people from ‘corruption’ or gay men from ‘fetishization’: either way, non-straight content is out of the picture!)

In a bittersweet way, it’s good news that younger fandom members who are LGBT/queer and/or like non-straight/non-cis content are utterly free of fear that somebody will try to censor fan content simply for being LGBT/queer. It goes to show how far we’ve come in online – and to some degree, offline! – spaces in promoting acceptance of non-straight orientations and non-cis gender identities.

Unfortunately, antis use the same anti-minority censorship weapons on ‘smaller’ targets, and I worry that it will blind them to the warning signs of incoming content purges.  they’ll be in for a very unpleasant shock if a bigger fish comes into our little fandom pond and reminds us all what these censorship weapons are really for: destroying anything that doesn’t suit the comfort zone of the mainstream population. (such as – drumroll, please – LGBT/queer content of any kind. (sorry antis – that includes sfw kl@nce.))

(and all of this applies to more than lgbt/queer content, of course. it’s just been the main thing to come up again and again.)