Fandom is not your safe space.
Nor should fandom be your safe space. Fandom is for people to explore all sorts of possibilities in fiction and art. Not all of those possibilities are going to be fluffy, âwholesome,â âhealthy,â âuplifting,â or whatever other adjective the Morality Brigade here on Tumblr wants to trot out.
Fiction is not reality. Depiction is not endorsement. No, it may never be âjust a movie/fic/artwork,â but that does not make it reality. Fiction serves particular purposes, and one of them is to permit us to vicariously experience certain dangerous or otherwise unpleasant things safely.
If you believe that the purpose of fiction is to âupliftâ us and fiction that does not is wrong and bad, congratulations: Youâre a right-winger. (Or maybe youâre on the extreme left. When you get that far out to the ends of the spectrum, it doesnât matter.)
If you think that anyone who writes or reads noncon is a rapist or rape apologist, you are too stupid for words. If you think that anyone who ships an incest ship or an adult/teen ship is an apologist for incest or pedophilia, you are too stupid for words.
It is none of your business what other people write, draw, and ship. Let me repeat that: It is none of your business what other people write, draw, and ship. You do not get to tell them theyâre âtrash,â you do not get to concern-troll them with passive-aggressive nonsense like âlove yourself more uwu,â and you absolutely do not get to harass them off Tumblr or elsewhere.
Also, their past trauma or lack thereof is none of your business, either. Nobody has to present their âcredâ as a rape or incest survivor before theyâre allowed to enjoy fanworks that donât meet with your approval. Total strangers donât owe you their backstories. For that matter, not even your friends owe you every detail of their backstories. Mind your own business.
Donât want to see all this âproblematicâ content on your dash or elsewhere? Unfollow people. Learn how to use Tumblr Savior, XKit, AO3 Savior, and similar tools. Control your own online experience. It is not the responsibility of others on this site to take care of you, who are a total stranger to them. Given how heavily female Tumblr skews, such demands are nothing but reinforcement of the expectation that women are supposed to take care of everyone else but themselves. (Yes, women are still oppressed as a class, even before you factor in intersectionalities.)
Itâs amusing how some of you have the âcourageâ to dogpile, harass, and stalk others on this website whose taste doesnât meet your oh-so-pure standards. People who create fanworks are soft, easy targets to kinkshame, arenât they? Especially when, again, most of them are not cis straight men. Women have been policed and shamed throughout history for exploring their own sexuality â including by other feminists. The 1980s were full of feminists policing other feminists:
Often conďŹated with radical feminism, antiporn feminism grew out of radical feminism in the late â70s and early â80sâas did its counterpart, pro-sex feminism. The feminist porn wars of the â80s are largely forgotten to the general public by now, but at the time they were heated, divisive, and intensely personal. In 1982, BarÂnard Collegeâs Center for Research on Women held a conference called âTowards a Politics of Sexuality,â which was picketed by antiporn feminists for including explorations of s&m and overall pro-sex viewpoints along with discussions of race and sexuality as well as sexual history (many of which were published in the 1983 anthology Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality).
Yes, sex-positive feminism was eventually co-opted by patriarchal forces, but it started out because a great many feminists were heartily tired of radfems telling them they were âtraitorsâ and âbrainwashedâ for liking anything but the blandest, most euphemistic, and most painfully egalitarian erotica. (If you like that sort of thing, more power to you. Your tastes donât make you better than the rest of us.)
Getting back to the here and now, I donât see you going over to 4chan or Reddit with these morality campaigns. More importantly, I donât see you organizing to go after big media corporations, especially those whose TV shows, movies, and books help form the toxic backdrop of misogyny, racism, rape culture, homophobia, transphobia, and similar bigotries behind everyday modern life. The occasional blogpost calling out this animator or that author, no matter how many notes it gets, is not the same thing as an organized campaign.
No, harassing David Gaider off Tumblr doesnât count, not when Bioware makes more of an effort with social justice in its games than any other game company does. You can scream all you want about how âallies suck.â You need them in the real world, beyond the hothouse environment of Tumblr. If people in general could be trusted to do the right thing for the right reasons all the time, without pressure, there would be no need for any kind of activism at all.
Nor does screaming âpedophileâ at John Green and insinuating that any grown man who reaches out to teenage girls is âcreepy.â Yes, his âcool dadâ act is annoying, and his books leave a lot to be desired. Have you considered that such outreach is part of his job as a YA writer? Have you also considered that stigmatizing men for trying to be mentors to adolescents, when you have no evidence that theyâre actually perverts, reinforces traditional gender roles?
Tl;dr: Fandom is not your safe space. Tumblr is not your safe space. AO3 sure as fuck isnât your safe space. People will post things you donât like in all three spaces, which they have every right to do. Get over it, grow the fuck up, take responsibility for your own mental health, and stop confusing your oversized sense of entitlement with âsocial justice.â
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