We tried. It doesn't work.

Never be too eager to be another person's judge or jury. Mob-motivated punishment does more harm than good and consistently goes way too fucking far. We have to stop sending deaththreats to people, we have to stop suicide baiting and all the other crap and start openly and kindly enganging with people. Criticism =/= Cancelling Sideblog to say the stuff that's on my mind I'm Brick (they/them)

[playwrongs]

Questions I think to myself a lot when confronted with certain kinds of Online Posting:

Do you want a better world, or do you want revenge on those you think aren’t doing enough to improve it?

Do you want a more just world, or do you want to see bad people suffer merciless punishment?

Do you want a less oppressive world, or do you want the reins of power for yourself?

Do you want to do the right thing, or do you want to feel righteous?

[cat-servant]

Also, Do you care more about accomplishing something or getting credit?

A lot can be done if you don't care who gets the credit

[butchfagminotaur]

just saw a post where someone put “detrans dni” and like… hey we should be supporting detransitioned people bc if we don’t terfs will

[butchfagminotaur]

sometimes you’re wrong about your identity and that’s ok like i used to think i was bi but it turns out i was wrong and i know ppl who thought they were trans but it turns out they were wrong and it should be ok and accepted that sometimes people don’t get it right on the first try

[etrianodysseyobsession-hd-deact]

And a majority of detransitioned people re-transition later when their situation is safer... we need to let them know they are always welcome, no matter what. WE need to be safe for them.

[patricia-taxxon]

the thing is, if your younger self was a bigot or an abuser, u can't make people forgive you. but you still gotta forgive yourself, like that's non-negotiable, dude. that happens before u can even ask the question of earning forgiveness from anyone lese

[patricia-taxxon]

oops, in your attempt to martyr yourself out of respect for your victims you accidentally sabotaged your own ability to conceptualize yourself as anything but a perpetual evildoer who is always one bad day away from hurting everyone you love, all but guaranteeing history to repeat itself. rookie mistake

[patricia-taxxon]

im gonna try explaining myself, cus im a gambling addict and im waiting for the day that it actually works.

"forgiveness" is personal, that's why I said in the post that you might inflict harm on people for which they can never forgive you, but that's their quest. if you abuse someone, you can't go no-contact with yourself. you actually keep living in your own head indefinitely, and ultimately you need to learn to live with yourself in order to continue living a full life without further harm. this is not necessarily an anti-carceral thought, although i am generally anti-carceral myself. I simply want people to like, fix their heart and atone for real with measured accountability & self love instead of dissociating, self-marking themselves forever and guaranteeing their recidivism.

You and a remorseful abuser would both think I'm giving the easy, coddling path. It's actually the tough pragmatic path in disguise.

[dark-fire-thoughts]

Ok. I see where you going, but I strongly disagree. The one person who can't be allowed to forgive ones crimes is oneself.

Even if everyone else has forgiven you for the abuse you did, you must never allow yourself to let what you did be forgiven. Once you've done that, you've gotten to the point where you might do it again.

Never let up. Always strive towards improvement. Never let yourself live down the horrors of the past. Only by comparing ourselves to who we were can we grow.

[patricia-taxxon]

this is called OCD

[yuyurana]

It’s so fucking frustrating to argue about this on tumblr.com. Because people might pay lip service to the idea of criminal justice reform or even prison abolition. But deep down they always come back to the Calvinism of it all: there are good people (victims) and bad people (abusers) and once someone has revealed themselves to be an abuser they can never be forgiven, never be part of society again.

And if you believe the world works like that one other thing also has to be true: You know you are a ‘good person’, so nothing you ever do could be truly abusive. You could never truly harm another person. And if you did they must have deserved it. Because you are a good person.

And wow, does that not just sound like something abusers usually say, when confronted with their own behavior?

I would leave the rest up to the reader but because we are on the piss on the poor reading comprehension site here, I’m going to spell it out: get comfortable with your own fallibility. Acknowledge that you could indeed severely harm someone else. And that means that you NEED to learn to forgive yourself.

[thyfleshc0nsumed]

No you don't get it, I'm a Good Person. You don't understand. I'm a Good Person which makes it okay for me to think violently about the Enemy, who is Bad Person. I'm commenting "you should be violently murdered" because I'm Good Person and you're Bad Person. You think saying that to someone is fucked up?? You should be violently murdered, you're probably Bad Person anyway

[wolfertinger666]

the scariest thing about a smear campaign is not having everyone turn on you suddenly (although it's very traumatic) but the isolation and loneliness you deal with afterwards. when everyone abandons you and treats you like you're contagious. people, vultures trying to pick at what's left of you, as you fade away into obscurity, unless they immortalize your name through sheer hatred.

[wolfertinger666]

the fact that it's easier to ruin a queer creators life over shit that was calculated and blown out of proportion,. mixing it in with their actual faults, and adding hints of misinformation, is horrific to me. I'm not spreading your stupid callout post on a random trans girl go explode into the sun.

[lizardsfromspace]

Every time I check in on Intense Queer Discourse People they've come up with and discarded a half dozen new categorization systems for declaring which trans people are Good or Bad & have done zero introspection on if, perhaps, we do not actually need a categorization system for which trans people are Good or Bad. When your gender leaves the binary but your brain doesn't

[sic-semper-hominibus]

re: that last post, ive said it before and ill say it again: no one deserves to die (deserving is fake and death is bad) but some people need to be stopped and choose to make death the only way to stop them

[richard-lengthenhancer]

I disagree. Pedophiles 100% deserve death.

[sic-semper-hominibus]

you are moralizing and weaponizing your disgust in order to construct and justify a category of person you're allowed to murder

what do you think you deserve for this?

[richard-lengthenhancer]

Sorry, no person deserves to die, thankfully child molesters and pedophiles aren't human, so this doesnt apply to them.

[sic-semper-hominibus]

denying the humanity of people who do horrible things accomplishes exactly three things:

give cover to people who haven't been caught yet by allowing them to use their humanity as "proof" of their innocence

silence any criticism of societal structures and institutions that facilitate those horrible things by putting the focus on individuals who are assumed to be so uniquely monstrous that the ways it was made easy for them are irrelevant

provide a shortcut to dehumanize anyone you feel like killing: simply accuse them of doing a horrible thing

3.a. if you've already established that only an inhuman monster could kill a child, then all you have to do to get people to burn down the jewish quarter is say that jews kidnap christian children to bathe in their blood

3.b. if you've already established that only an inhuman monster could commit rape, then all you have to do to get people to string up a black man you don't like is find a white woman who's willing to point at him while she cries and babbles

3.c. if you've already established that only an inhuman monster could molest a child, then all you have to do to get people to drag gay people behind their trucks is say that since gay people can't have babies, the only way they can make more gay people is by following a nefarious Agenda to "convert" children by molesting them

3.c.a. meanwhile if you try to address the rampant sexual assault of catholic altar boys, you're met with "don't be ridiculous, he's a priest!" (see #1) and with assertions that even if it does happen sometimes, those priests are just infiltrators who don't represent the church and there's no reason to make sure priests and altar boys are never alone together (see #2)

tl;dr: your disgust-based violent politics are not less reactionary than any run-of-the-mill homophobe or racist's disgust-based violent politics

[richard-lengthenhancer]

I realized how bad of a take this was after I added my last bit, i apologize for the idiocy i portrayed in my half thought out statements. And I appreciate the way you rebutted this with reasonable statements rather than going hog wild because I said something you didnt agree with.

[sic-semper-hominibus]

hey no worries. we've all been there, and anyone who says they havent is either 11 or afraid of their social circle

unlearning our kneejerk reactions is a process, and it's not a linear one. its good to practice thinking before we post, but sometimes thinking after we post just has to be good enough

[edgebug]

the thing that sucks most about Joanne Rowling being a terf is that she is actively hurting real life trans people every day.

the second worst thing about joanne being a terf is that the Harry Potter intellectual property is So Much Larger than her. look at the credits for just one of the harry potter movies. every single one of those people put YEARS of time and effort and dare i say love into those films. think of all the people involved in theme park design and operation who put together the wizarding world park lands and detailed them so lovingly and fully

and yet even though the intellectual property of harry potter is so much larger than joanne, she's poisoned the whole well

i feel so. so immensely sorry for every person involved in the harry potter ip who isn't jkr. doubly sorry for every trans person involved. it's fucking sad

[edgebug]

I want to be very clear, before we have a category 4 piss on the poor moment, that this post is not saying "it's ok to like Harry Potter still because other people were involved in it, and the ip is larger than jkr" NO! you must fully divest yourself from the harry potter intellectual property!

if you go to universal studios, it's fine to ride the rides and appreciate them on a theme park artistry level. jkr had nothing to do with the engineering. and you're already there for other reasons--riding the rides doesn't give any more money to jkr. but do NOT buy any hp branded merch, at the parks or anywhere else! that's where joanne makes her money! hp merch funds anti-trans legislation! almost directly!

"What about buying indie merch? What if I buy from artists on etsy? Nothing goes to JKR then..." I hear you cry. and you have a point. that's harm reduction. buying indie merch is unambiguously better than buying licensed merch.

but you must be aware that it still makes trans people feel unsafe. you become schrodinger's terf. i see people with hogwarts houses in their bios and i feel a chill. i see cars with glasses-and-lightning-scar bumper stickers and i have to wonder if those people literally wants my wife dead or if they're just clueless.

it's just horrifically sad that so many people put so much love and years of work and artistry and blood sweat tears etc into an IP that is now retroactively so emblematic of transphobia

[doberbutts]

Actually turning things over in my brain and yeah, I'd say that's probably my feeling on a lot of these conversations. The wrong thing is getting blamed.

White people do experience racism. The problem is when people hear that they think "people of color have power over white people" and not "under white supremacy, there are white people who are regarded as Not White Enough".

Men are oppressed. The problem is that people tend to think the ending of that sentence is "by women" and not "under the patriarchy, men are forced into a very specific and often harmful role and are heavily punished for any deviance from that role".

And the well has been poisoned by bad actors, so it's hard to get any amount of conversation about this going without either attracting said bad actors to totally derail the whole thing or without having kneejerk suspicion from the getgo due to said bad actors' previous actions.

[doberbutts]

Which is also why literally any time anyone says "this is a thing that sucks" the reaction usually is "booooo you think women oppress men" or "boooooo you think reverse racism is real" even when the post literally says otherwise.

I say "trans men who are not yet/never able/don't want to pass as men are often treated like women and subjected to misogyny" and "trans men who fit a very specific cishet passing picture often have access to male privilege in the way that others may not" in the same post and I'm told "booooooooo you think trans women oppress trans men" when I not only didn't mention trans women at all but also am talking about the way cishet society treats trans men and how our relationship to misogyny and male privilege is incredibly complicated and often interwoven throughout the various phases of our individual journeys.

I say "I had a boyfriend who was a white guy with monolid eyes and he confided in me about how badly people treat him when they think he's Asian" and I get "booooo you think reverse racism is real" when I'm talking about how white racists beat him up when he was walking down the street.

I say "I've seen white feminists advocate for genocide by saying we should kill all the men in various war-torn countries like Afghanistan and Syria" and "white people do not understand the black experience and to understand the black experience you need to also study black feminism" and I get "booooo you think women oppress men" when I'm talking about how even white liberals and leftists are often still racist.

And yeah I know piss on the poor website and all that but like. Come on folks, it's not that hard to read.

[doberbutts]

Anyway. I'm not joking lol I say "the patriarchy creates problems for men and we should spend some effort fixing that in conjunction with everything else we've gotta fix about society" which is LITERAL ACTUAL FEMINIST LITERATURE and I'm told "boooooooo meninist mra incel gtow you think women oppress men and are identical to the people who want to blow up schools"

Woe, bell hooks be upon ye or something. Read some black feminism and maybe you'll feel better.

[doberbutts]

No that's it exactly!!! Folks I am occasionally *directly* quoting black feminist theory I was raised with IN THE NINTIES and y'all are out here going "hmmmmmmm sounds like MRA bullshit to me" if I dare suggest anyone besides women suffer under the current sexism system.

Well I'm telling you [general] black women have been talking about this since before I was born and y'all are at minimum 30 years late to the conversation if this is so groundshaking and earthshattering to you to consider that maybe the patriarchy is bad for everyone it touches.

bell hooks hasn't even been in the ground for a full 2 years yet and she'd been writing on this topic since the 80s. Come on guys.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

This was central to Tumblr leftist philosophy as recently as 2014. I remember it well. I can't help but feel like this is in no small way down to the rise of TERF-ism.

But also a phenomenon that happens literally everywhere you get humans interacting about anything at all, which is the creep towards the binary. You start with, for example, a very good position like "The bulk of social discussion should be intra-community, because those are the people actually affected." And then that drifts, just a little, into "The opinions of the directly affected people have more worth than anyone else", which... isn't quite the same thing? And then it drifts more and more, until by the end it's "Unless you are directly and incontrovertibly in the affected group, you must entirely be silent and never speak on this topic AT ALL, not even to express a personal preference for an aesthetic e.g. which of the 27 lesbian flag designs you personally like best (genuine discourse I have seen)."

And like, obviously I get it. I've sat through plenty of cis men weighing in on feminist stuff with the most moronic and ignorant takes imaginable. But I actually think my leftist husband, a basically cis-man, has considerably more valuable thoughts on the role of gender and feminism than some tradwife creep who wants us all to return to a world of one baby and zero orgasms per year because she hasn't understood that she could just do BDSM and then she'd still get her own bank account.

I think the main area I'm personally seeing this in on Tumblr atm is in neurodiversity discourse, actually, and in particular as it pertains to autism. We've now gone rapidly from "ND folks are an oppressed group by an NT social majority and we should discuss all those avenues of social nuance to push for equity" to "ND folks are unique and perfect unicorns who always without exception get along perfectly with each other and are never ever at fault for anything or capable of being assholes, and literally all asshole behaviour on the planet is done by those evil mean NTs who shouldn't be allowed to raise children anymore. Also if anyone ever dislikes someone ND it's because they're an evil ableist sea witch (all genuine discourse I have seen)."

And again! I get it!! God do I get it. When you have been made to feel ashamed your whole life of who you are, Christ there is so much healing in instead being proud. In particular, in taking aspects of yourself that others have denigrated, and saying no; these are objectively good, actually. And it is tempting, isn't it? To take that extra step? To say these are BETTER, actually.

And then before you know it you have posts circling with thousands of notes claiming that if ND folks live together they all magically do each other's accommodations perfectly without a single clash but not a single NT has ever successfully provided accommodations in their lives so we should segregate the population (no, bro, the eugenics is good this time I swear), and anyone who disagrees gets the "Boooooo you're an evil ableist who hates autistic people" treatment that OP talks about here.

It's the same phenomenon you get with terminology too. People learn a new term for a thing, and then it drifts as it creeps to the binary. Gaslight, Karen, trigger, sustainability, cancel, literally, queerbait, special interest. Nuance is lost as the heavy cudgel of easy meaning comes down. And, I think, it's also tied in with the urge to form a rigid and highly parochial community. We see this particularly in the queer community, of course - for a social movement that's supposed to be about removing the boxes, so many queer people are absolutely obsessed with making new boxes and then gatekeeping/enforcing them as strongly as cishet society ever did. It's a stupid and mean part of human nature - we're a social species, so when feeling threatened, we want the support of our tribe around us, but that means needing to define exactly who the tribe is ("Queers only! But not those icky trans people, and aces are basically straight somehow, and bis are dangerous greedy posers trying to look like us and prey on us..."). Once you've got your tribe, then it's easy to identify threats ("Straight people! And those gross other queers, who might make us look bad in front of the straight people, who might then hurt us!")

And then THAT means that anything at all that shakes that perception of the world is itself a threat. "If queer people bully a straight person for being straight - a thing that absolutely does happen - that is harmful and unacceptable." "HOW DARE YOU SAY THE STRAIGHTS ARE OPPRESSED BY THE GAYS. I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU'RE SAYING THIS ONE PERSON BEING BULLIED IS THE SAME AS SYSTEMIC HOMOPHOBIA. I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU HATE GAY PEOPLE. HOW CAN I, A QUEER PERSON, POSSIBLY BE HARMFUL TO A STRAIGHT PERSON. I'M GOING TO DOXX YOU FOR SAYING THAT."

(Genuine discourse I have seen. Including the doxxing.)

Anyway. Sorry OP, I've been thinking about this for a while, so it was your post that got the addition!

[flork-of-cows-official]

reliable source

[flork-of-cows-official]

[demilypyro]

This tweet had me absolutely flabbergasted twice because I read this and I was like "Dame Aylin? The tall, blonde, supermodel demigoddess? How is she at all outside of the beauty standard? This is stupid" and then I scrolled down and there were a hundred replies by straight dudes who were calling her ugly and talking about anime women they prefer

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Two and a half years ago now, I made a 60 second video briefly discussing the lack of variety of body-types in female characters, and I made what I thought was a very gentle and restrained argument. I showed some pictures of Olympic-level female athletes and said "hey, if you're designing physically powerful characters, maybe this is a better reference point to start from than supermodels."

It went... unpleasantly viral, and still to this day it gets a dozen to a hundred comments per day, depending on how much the algorithm is pushing it. And they go basically like this:

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments like this, completely non-stop. I've removed the most heinous bigotry from the screenshots here (transphobia, racism, violent misogyny, etc), but they are all the same two or three arguments, the same thought-terminating clichés, regurgitated on auto-pilot, forever.

I think it's easy to underestimate just how deeply brain-poisoned culture is by the beauty standards that are pushed on us. There is this reflexive and instant disgust response in so many people at the mere suggestion that anything other than the beauty ideal could possibly be desirable. And it is disgust, because nothing else can produce such amounts of venom and moral judgment so fast.

The women that these people are all so offended by look like this, by the way:

From the photo collection Athlete by Howard Schatz, 2002

I thought was making a mild, inoffensive, milquetoast suggestion in my video. I wrote it thinking "okay, what's the broadest, most mainstream acceptable, gentlest, most non-controversial version of this argument I can make?"

But it turns out there is no gentle version of that argument you can make. The suggestion that women in particular could or should be anything other than idealized objects of beauty is a form of totalizing violence, an obscenity, to the sensibilities of a distressing number of people.

[yharnamsnewslug]

*taps the glass* hey, y'all know that what you might want isn't necessarily what's best to legislate?

[yharnamsnewslug]

Explanation:

- You cannot be judge, jury and executioner because the division of powers was created for a reason; to remain impartial and try to keep corruption to a minimum.

- Every single living person has human rights. Including the most evil people you could ever meet. Those people have a right to live, to get healthcare, to eat and to have a job. YES, even evil people.

I've seen a lot of people talk about abolishing prison, because it's the cool, new hip thing that everyone is talking about. And instead of understand what it means, they think it's the liberation of wrongfully imprisoned minorities - which it is. But also:

Prison abolition means setting up a system of psychological and physical help for the people whom are deemed dangerous to society. Yes, that includes Evil Fucking People. Recovery and rehabilitation should be the goal, not incarceration. THAT is abolishing prison.

Of course I want that abusive piece of shit father who abused his children to die. I want him dead! DEAD. But it does not mean that that's what I want as an official law, because as much as I'd love to see him dead, the betterment of society and the rehabilitation and development of a human fucking being is important.

The benefits to prison abolition are ENDLESS. But it is also a struggle, and y'all can't keep going through life with a 5 year old's justice mentality. I swear, fandom has rotted your fucking brains off, because we NEED ACTIVISTS. We NEED TO KNOW WHY WE WANT WHAT WE WANT, AND WHAT IT ENTAILS.

You believe in something? Look up the activists who are doing work there. Read up on it. Look up videos. Follow them on their social media. Work in your communities, if you've the opportunity.

And stop being so fucking stupid about abolishing human rights. You're doing the work for the far right when you call on all pedophiles to be executed on sight. Not even twenty years ago, gay people were mostly thought of as PEDOPHILES.

You see how this shit goes? Yeah?

Then figure yourself the fuck out.

[wetwareproblem]

“I really want that fucker to suffer, but I don’t want a society run by my worst impulses” is a really important moral principle that more people need to learn.

[demonprincex]

unfortunately social media puts the activist meeting, the bitching session, the public outreach, the group therapy session, the silly blow off some steam gossiping about people private chat, and the group d&d session all in the same place, and so people mistake, for example, an outpouring of legitimate grief and rage as somehow a public-facing political statement, or a carefully edited and tactical political statement as a reflection of a person's most deeply held private feelings, etc

[thesewersofparis]

[lastoneout]

Seein' too many Twitter refugees asking if they'll get in trouble for saying "kill yourself" to people and while no, you're not gonna get nuked from orbit, that is maybe something you just shouldn't be doing in general perhaps?? Maybe telling people to kill themselves is bad actually?? Some of y'all are wild, why is the first thing you can think to ask on a new platform if you can send one of the worst kinds of harassment to people?? Grow tf up and learn how to use the block button. It'll do wonders for your mood, trust me.

[lastoneout]

"It's a joke!"

[banrionceallach]

When the Redditors fled here they wanted to know if the could say the likes of 'I wish billionaires would die'.

The twitter escapees want to know if they can suicide bait people.

I think that helps explain the difference in Tumblrs general reaction to both groups.

[palant1r]

not proshipper not anti but a secret third thing (person who has a career in the media and, through covering legislative politics, has watched "associating with problematic fiction or entertainment is an indicator of moral degeneracy" rapidly become a mainstream GOP position that they are encoding in legislation to target the queer community under the guise of protecting children, thus coming to the conclusion that positioning the "can people enjoy things that would be immoral IRL in their fiction" debate as a proship v anti fandom debate is akin to pretending that "should we have the death penalty" is a discussion that only matters in Death Note discourse — the extent and manner to which fiction affects reality is an issue that is immediately relevant to today's US politics, and to summarize my opinions on the matter in fandom terms would be to diminish the ways this debate is affecting america Right The Fuck Now. and i have stopped taking "this person is bad for shipping the wrong anime thing and being horny about it" in any sort of good faith ever since I saw it literally used as part of a GOP smear campaign against a transgender state legislator in an attempt to defend the right from backlash after they used their supermajority in the Montana house to prevent her from speaking on the floor. Anyway I think everyone on this site, especially Americans, could benefit from ceasing to think in proship v anti vocabulary and instead developing coherent political positions on the nature of fiction that do not directly align with current fascist political tactics)

[palant1r]

and yes, this does pretty much align with the "proshipper" position — to be clear, i'm firmly in the camp that it's literally fine to ship whatever and engage in fiction however you want and people are not morally wrong for making art that engages, even gleefully or pornographically, in dark topics. the reason i still choose to not call myself a proshipper is for a few reasons:

-there are so many different implications under that umbrella, and i resent the dichotomy that reduces so many different positions on so many different aspects of media studies to two different labels. such a framing actively stifles discussion and prevents people from having tough and thorny conversations about media with people they mostly agree with

-i think "proshipper" is only a useful positional label for people whos primary mode of engagement with media is through fandom. but as a journalist and queer person, the main ways in which the "does fiction affect reality and how" issue interfaces with my life have nothing to do with fandom, so it feels backwards to me to define my opinions regarding media in relation to the area that has the least relevance to my life

-i want my actual opinions to be the most visible part of how i engage with fandom, rather than a label that will cause everyone to draw nuance-stripped conclusions that vary depending on which "side" they fall on. i want people to listen to me, not project their expectations onto me and listen to a phantom of me they've created

-why should i? if people are willing to engage with me regarding media discussion, it shouldn't matter whether i choose to identify as a proshipper or not — they should treat my ideas on their own merits. and if people think that i'm a sick freak for "condoning" whatever is problematic these days, they're not going to care what i call myself, they're going to call me a sick freak anyways. and im kinda petty and want them to actually have to read my posts and rub two braincells together to interpret things and think critically about how to label me instead of seeing "proship" and slamming the cancel button

[palant1r]

ok also im seeing some misinformation in the tags about zooey zephyr so let me clarify. she was NOT blocked from speaking on the house floor because of an anime tweet, she was blocked because she told republican legislators they had "blood on their hands" for voting for a bill banning gender affirming care for minors. this resulted in insane amounts of backlash from pretty much everyone anywhere left of center, so naturally right wing talking heads not directly involved in montana politics started finding reasons to discredit her. one such talking head is that asshole whos gotten plastic surgery to look like jimin from bts and identifies as transracial or whatever. that was the person who dragged up the genshin impact tweet she made a few years ago in an effort to distract from the blatantly undemocratic actions of the Montana GOP.

but that isn't to say that these issues have nothing to do with the legislative session this year — far from it. for my job, ive had to watch hearings or read transcripts for almost every anti-trans bill in the montana legislature this session. ive followed those politicians on twitter, talked to bill sponsors and majority leaders. and i kept seeing the same underlying rhetoric as ive seen used in "anti" spaces. namely: that children need to be protected from degeneracy at all costs, that this can be done through restricting access to certain fiction and entertainment, and that fiction and entertainment being unsuitable for children means it and any of its creators must be morally corrupt. that there is no reason to enjoy transgressive art beyond sexual titillation. that enjoying things for pornographic reasons is inherently wrong, especially if those things are not perfectly good and christian. that harassment and dehumanization is an appropriate response to creating degenerate entertainment. that people can't be trusted to interpret art and fiction, but instead must be protected from anything potentially objectionable. these arguments barely need to be changed at all to be leveraged against problematic shipping instead of like, drag shows. because they're all part and parcel of the same underlying ideology

of course, this is just one state, and people in the notes have correctly pointed out that this is by no means a new thing. but i think what is new is how GOP puritanism has dovetailed with the vocabulary, rather than just the ideology, of fandom puritanism

i think one reason why so many US antis don't recognize this commonality is because the left-of-center perception of conservative ideology is a monolith. there's this common idea that "conservatism" is a bloc of ideas that always go together and cannot be separated from each other, leading to the idea that it's impossible to internalize any conservative ideals without being right-wing oneself. and in a country where the right is explicitly trying to enshrine and preserve ideals that are already woven into society, largely trying to preserve existing biases rather than creating new bigotry, that could not be further from the truth. i guess this is my protip for everyone in america: if the GOP supports something, there's a good chance that you have also absorbed some of the underlying ideology beneath that thing, and that's worth examining

[schniggles]

#REALLY really good post op #this is a really good articulation of how rightwing ideals can sneak into otherwise progressive spaces #and fandom as well #in particular the point about how holding progressive views doesn't preclude you from absorbing rightwing bullshit? VERY good #and something I don't see talked about very often surprisingly enough #bc it's true! you can identify as progressive and hold mostly progressive views but still absorb conservative bullshit #bc they are not monolithic package deals #and it's ESPECIALLY easy right now when there's so much hysteria over moral Purity and Ethics and Correctness #and it's all soooo often tied into queerphobia #interesting how that works 👀(via skellagirl)

[nsfwitchy]

My favorite thing about online queer discourse is that it literally repeats every year but with a different identity and so many people just go along with it. It’s like watching a series of people literally never learn their lesson.

[nsfwitchy]

Let’s see if I can make a timeline so if I remember correctly it was bisexuals first right because y’all wanted them to pick a side (no irony there, clearly forcing people into a sexuality they don’t fit with has historically worked great and been a net positive)

Then pansexuals because people had the audacity to experience multi-attraction but not identify with your specific label

And then there was the ace discourse about how people who are ace/aro aren’t REALLY lgbt because?? Y’all said lack of attraction wasn’t a sexuality and clearly they were just?? Broken??? (Again, no irony in this. Telling people with sexualities you don’t understand that they’re broken has always been a net positive and worked out great for everybody in the end)

Oh and then y’all came for bi-lesbians because y’all forgot people can experience different romantic and sexual attraction

Then y’all started calling trans women pedophiles (AGAIN WITH NO IRONY, NOT LIKE THE COMMUNITY HAS A RAMPANT HISTORY OF QUEER PEOPLE BEING CALLED PEDOPHILES AS A FEAR MONGERING TACTIC)

And then y’all started insulting trans men for speaking out about possibly suffering from their own set of issues that comes with being trans men (god forbid people have their own set of issues they wanna address separately, everyone knows the queer experience is universal right?)

And literally every single time all I hear is:

Like maybe I’m crazy but perhaps the biggest threat to our community is not people making up labels or mixing labels or talking about their own personal forms of oppression they face - but maybe. Just maybe. It’s the hoards of just genuinely straight up homophobic bigoted people who are actively trying to cut trans health care and take away gay marriage. Idk maybe that’s just me.