you're free to fic if you want to

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[freedom-of-fanfic]

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

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. 

[freedom-of-fanfic]

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.

[mikkeneko]

To take this the next step which is to say, why does this matter? There’s a phrase that’s hovering at the tip of my tongue, can’t quite remember it, but it’s a word that basically means “a culturally specific passcode.” (Ed. I looked it up – it’s “shibboleth”.) A thing that members of the community will use to challenge you on your authenticity, to verify your right to be in that community, with the specific implication that this kind of verification is essential for keeping the community safe. The classic example is that of an American brigade in the European theater in World War II, suspecting the presence of a German spy, remorselessly interrogating a new recruit about World Series baseball scores. Because of course, any TRUE American would know everything about baseball scores! – and no non-American would, so if someone fails this test you are righteous and justified in declaring them The Enemy.

The overt, performative denunciation of Bad Content has become the “shibboleth” for modern fandom, as managed by the increasing influence of antis. Why is that every time one of these posts come around people so inescapably feel the need to add “but of course I don’t condone the pedo stuff” to their reblogs? Do they have reason to assume that pedophiles are so universal and normative that any reasonable person would assume they were, unless they explicitly state otherwise? Of course not – it’s a passcode. A performance of cultural acceptability.

And as the anti movement is hugely American, that means that the passcodes and rituals are also firmly based in American culture. Why all the focus on who is and isn’t eighteen? That’s the age of legal adulthood in America. There’s no magical transition in America where you go to bed on the eve of your 18th birthday an infant and wake up the next day magically transformed into an adult, any more than this same metamorphosis occurs at 16 in the UK, or at 20 in Japan. Concepts like the age of adulthood are entirely arbitrary and culturally defined – but the only acceptable metric, among antis, is the American one.

All the other Unacceptables are equally foggy as soon as you step outside the USA boundaries. Are relationships between adopted siblings considered incest? What about non-blood related people raised in the same creche? Childhood friends? Step-siblings? Classmates? Second or twice-removed cousins? Ancestors or descendants? Different cultures don’t all answer these things the same ways (nor is there any reason that they should,) and that murkiness provides plenty of foothold to launch an attack from, when someone else is shipping in a way that Just Doesn’t Seem Right to you.

Anyway, a lot of this goes under the surface. Many antis don’t even realize how inherently American their anti-ness is, and how much of their opposition to Bad Fan Content is rooted in opposition to non-Americanness, because very little of this happens out in the open. They don’t say to themselves, “American culture and ideals are better than any others, and anyone who fails to adhere to those must be punished,” – instead it gets sublimated into passphrases and rituals, little things you do to signal that you are one of the Good Ones, you are Doing Fandom Correctly. And outsiders who don’t know the correct passphrases and don’t perform the right rituals aren’t just newcomers or people with different cultures – they’re abuse apologists and pedos and predators. Outsiders against whom the community must be defended, even if it comes to a fight.

[jackironsides]

Everything said above.

To give an example of the ‘widely expanded definitions’ that @freedom-of-fanfic mentions, I have seen antis decry a ship as ‘pedophilia’ where both characters were over the most rigid U.S. age of consent (it actually varies by state), but one character was a few years older than the other.

(I have actually seen this ‘logic’ applied to more than one ship, and also real people? The latter was particularly horrifying, because the relationship I remember being decried as ‘pedophilic’ was one where the younger of the two people was in their thirties.)

(God, I hope that latter example was people trolling. But when the trolling is so similar to the actual discourse, so much so that it’s virtually indistinguishable, does it really still count as trolling?)

[freetofic-replies]

This is a note to myself to address this absolutely amazing block of tags from a person who left no additional comment on this thread, & so therefore I assume agrees with the content thereof in general … but also clearly has drawn a line at ‘defending people who ship what I define as incest & pedophilia’, & therefore, for all practical purposes, is exactly the kind of person this thread is about.

Also the lack of knowledge about the origins of the term ‘anti’ in the context of fandom, because - once again - antis named themselves. When non-antis pick the term for people who (now) call themselves ‘anti-incest’ & ‘anti-pedophilia’, & used to call themselves ‘anti-[ship]’ & even, for a while, just ‘anti’, they get called ‘fandom police’, ‘thought police’, and ‘puritans’.

As usual, I request that anyone stumbling on this post does not seek out the OP of the tags.

[freedom-of-fanfic]

antishipping as the ‘cool new trend’

or: why are most antis under 25 years old? (posted June 2017)

I really think that antishipping is a movement that’s gaining ground with the younger & newer arrivals to fandom spaces; a kind of ‘cool trend’, so to speak. In aggregate, antishipping culture is beautifully constructed to be particularly appealing to teenage or college-age people in the late 2010′s - and especially American people - who are marginalized, oppressed, often social outcasts in real life and often under-educated about their own marginalized identity, and I kind of wanted to get into why.

EDIT (October 2018): this post is was originally put up in June 2017. I’ve tweaked it a bit to correct some stuff I now think is just patronizing/incorrect, but overall, I now think it’s overly reliant on adolescent growth stages when the best explanations are societal changes (fandom being on viral social media, fandom being conflated with social justice activism, and increasingly authoritarian trends in 21st century America.)

the other day I posted to talk a little about why I think antis tend to be young (and American). To sum up & simultaneously add a little more:

a brain still growing - until the age of 22-25, the frontal lobe of the brain does not finish development. the frontal lobe handles higher reasoning skills and complex problem-solving. Thus: the growing mind is particularly prone to incomplete reasoning, black and white thinking, and total empathy failure, making it hard for those under 25 to fully comprehend the impact of their actions, sympathize with others, or tackle social problems with nuance. Truly comprehending that others come from entirely different worldviews or have entirely different experiences and that being different doesn’t make them wrong and that most deep-seated problems need complex solutions that require nuance tends to come with this final brain growth. (Not always, of course. but often.) nah I’ve completely changed my mind on this. It’s true that physiological changes are still occurring in teens that make empathy harder, but they can respect the choices of others just as well as an adult can.

current American sex education being mostly scaremongering and abstinence-only + ready availability of sexual content, specifically pornographic material, online + hypersexual marketing = a deeply fucked cultural understanding of sex that adolescents are particularly unequipped to detangle

escaping religious/Christian fundamentalism but not  black&white thinking or authoritarian ‘us vs them’ mindset: the moral/communal purity that organized Christianity often demands can take years to deprogram (and this is not to mention the gender essentialism, homophobia/queerphobia, and anti-sex/anti-kink messages, accompanied by a strong undercurrent of anti-intellectualism to discourage self-education on these subjects!) teens just breaking away from this toxicity are especially unequipped to untangle themselves. Young ppl tend to take the same worldview/us vs them/b&w thinking they grew up with to a more liberal cause instead (such as enforcing ‘social justice’ in shipping), with a side-order of internalized, unexamined anti-lgbt/sex/kink/etc rhetoric that dovetails rather neatly with exclusionist rhetoric.

exclusionary gatekeeping as baby’s first lgbt/queer culture lesson - transformative fandom is a frequent haven for marginalized people who don’t see themselves in the media they consume (so they change the media to meet their emotional, sexual, social, etc needs, you see?). because it’s not taught in schools here in the US, it’s not too uncommon for newcomers to get their first big dose of history and cultural education that’s not centered around straight white men in fandom. but what are they learning? here on tumblr, since about 2013, exclusionists have used the relative lack of education on queer history to build an false history, one where the gender binary is strongly enforced and sexualities can only exist on the binary axis: nb/queer/ace/pan and sometimes even bi and trans -identifying people are erased or ‘not oppressed enough’. this history is the one that young entrants into fandom are more likely to encounter first and have no knowledge with which to counter it.  Antishipping derives its mode of operation and principle values from exclusionists. It dictates who can write or do what based on their sexual/gender identity (and sometimes race as well). Its definition of social justice is also heavily influenced by exclusionists because its members are mostly young people who learned all their queer history from exclusionists.

the particularly adolescent vulnerability to peer pressure (the need to belong & the fear of being ostracized): teens are particularly inclined to be influenced by friendships and maintaining social ties. […]  it’s easy to become an anti in order to keep your friends and almost impossible to quit without losing everything, and teens are especially vulnerable to this kind of social structure.  I think this was a factor 18 months ago, but not so much now. both ‘sides’ of this argument are pretty well-known and people in fandom can have strong opinions on shipping or anti-shipping from very early on.

less focus on teaching critical thinking & self-government. Education in America has long been aimed towards adequate training to work an assembly line, but 21st century American parenting and education both have neglected teaching young people how to make decisions for themselves & how to engage in critical analysis of what they see and read. antishipping is a highly cohesive, insular culture with enforced rules of conduct, striking clear in/out lines and valuing loyalty and groupthink over originality and intellectualism. also: keeping the party line & persecution of outsiders is encouraged, further strengthening the need to conform.

having a just cause & a space to control: antishipping rests its laurels on a(n incomplete, corrupted) form of social justice/righting the wrongs of the privileged. being an anti feels like making a difference b/c your actions have visible impact on your immediate surroundings. (and having a space you feel you can control can be even more urgent with additional pressures like abusive home situations, past traumatic experiences, academic pressure, untreated/unrecognized mental illness, being forced into the closet b/c of queer/transphobia, etc.)

an American (and to a lesser degree, western European) post 9/11* cultural shift from prioritizing personal freedom to prioritizing communal safety; those under the age of 20 were 3 or younger or not yet born when the shift happened. antishipping prioritizes communal ‘safety’ (‘bad’, ‘dangerous’, or ‘inappropriate’ things must never be mentioned to protect people from hearing about them and being either corrupted or harmed) over personal freedom (allowing ‘bad’/’dangerous’ things to be  discussed, and it is up to the individual to personally decide what content to avoid).

(*actually, this shift started in the US before 9/11. 9/11 just sped it up.)

of course, all of this is conjecture based on my own experiences and observations, and it’s not a set of rules - just circumstances that I believe absolutely encourage young fandom members to end up falling headfirst into antishipping and either never notice how hurtful it is or never get the courage to leave it behind. And I think there’s a lot more the popularity/prevalence of antishipping today, but this post is already longer than I meant it to be.

(I always go light on racism when i talk about antishipping because while antis frequently accuse shippers of racism, it’s disingenuous to class racism as the same kind of oppression as lgbt+-phobia & misogyny, particularly in America - they’re related, but not the same. Centering non-white (and especially black) voices does not get the same focus as centering lgbt and women’s voices in fandom, and I think it’s easy to dismiss legitimate charges of racism as ‘anti bullshit’ when we class all these types of marginalization together.)

[s-ponge32-deactivated20230521]

So you gonna accuse people of this bs because they are uncomfortable with people shipping 11 year olds with grown ass adults? Or people making fanfic glorifying rape? Especially children being uncomfortable with these things?

[freetofic-replies]

Nice tags.

What am I accusing people of in this post, exactly?

[kendallroy-deactivated20210425]

also with all due respect the main reason the left loses so much is that y’all refuse to compromise on the language and messaging you use to speak to voters. i swear if you rebranded “defund the police” as “invest in community safety from the ground up” most white suburban moderates would be like “that sounds great” and i know that because that’s how i’ve literally reframed it to white suburban moderates who think “defund the police” means we’re going to live in a scary lawless mad max world

[kendallroy-deactivated20210425]

like maybe it comes across as mealy-mouthed and corny to people steeped in online cynicism but just to be clear, this is the country that wouldn’t eat french fries after 9/11 so we renamed them “freedom fries” and everyone was suddenly cool again. americans are not, by and large, super sophisticated about this stuff

[kendallroy-deactivated20210425]

okay, so, as a followup…. basically, i joined this “christians against trump” fb group for a work research project in 2017 and just ended up never leaving, bc it turned out to be such a great experiment in just… observing and listening and talking to people and figuring out the language that works! so like, as a basic glossary for talking to the well-meaning anti-trump moderate dems in your life about progressive policies:

instead of “defund the police,” say “invest in community safety” and emphasize things like participatory budgeting giving you power over where YOUR taxes go and reallocating funds to after-school programs, social services, and food pantries

instead of “abolish ice,” say “immigration reform” and “create a new agency for immigration and citizenship services” 

instead of “medicare for all,” say “universal health care” or even just really harp on making healthcare affordable and accessible to everyone

instead of “the green new deal” (which was a great piece of messaging in the first place before it became inextricably tied up with aoc’s theatrics), talk about what an effective piece of climate legislation will create, not what it will destroy. when you say “ban fracking” or “ban fossil fuels” or “reduce methane emissions in agriculture” people go “YOU WON’T TAKE MY JOB OR MY FARTING COWS.” climate is really an area where being able to reframe it through the language of capitalism helps. say “let’s give tax breaks to farmers, especially small family farms who are already being squeezed out by the big guys, so they can invest in the future of their business” and other noise-shaped air stuff like that. instead of “ban fracking” talk about the jobs that renewable energy will create in communities that have been left behind by our reliance on foreign oil. i mean, fuck, the phrase “climate change” can be a real problem when you’re talking to the whole country because of how effective the “climate and weather are the same things” and “climate change is a hoax” disinfo campaigns have been over the past 20 years or so - but when you talk about “conserving our natural resources” and all that teddy roosevelt, ranger rick shit, it just comes across different. 

instead of “abortion rights”…. listen, you know i hate equivocating about abortion but at the end of the day, when you’re talking to people who are probably anti-abortion for religious reasons but will still vote democrat because they’re not a single-issue anti-abortion voter, don’t say “abortion (on demand without apology etc),” say “the constitutional right to privacy” or “the right to make personal medical decisions without the government intervening.” fearmonger about attacks on abortion the way sarah palin fearmongered about how obamacare would lead to “death panels” deciding whether your grandma would live or die! and if you’re talking to someone who just doesn’t feel that strongly about abortion because yada yada roe is settled who cares, talk about how “empowering women to decide when they start a family fuels economic growth and leads to more wanted children growing up in stable, happy two-parent homes” and so on. 

inversely, instead of “abolish the death penalty,” talk about “saving the lives of the innocent” and “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” if you’re talking to a christian and honestly just look at the libertarian arguments against the death penalty and ape some of those - cost to the taxpayer, high wrongful conviction rates as a reflection of government incompetence. honestly, the libertarian right is frequently aligned with the left on criminal justice issues and i know we all love to dunk on libertarians but the language they use is pretty appealing to moderates who might be coming from a more conservative background or region where it’s just normal

instead of “democratic socialism,” just talk about, like, values - ending poverty and hunger, living wages and better educational opportunities, creating jobs and protecting ordinary working people and families and putting money back in their pockets and creating a stable economy. people really do vote based on kitchen table issues and you can really make a moral appeal on the rest.

instead of “tax the rich,” say “cut taxes.” period. never talk about raising taxes. not on the rich, not on the middle class, not for any reason whatsoever, even if you’re saying “if we raise taxes on billionaires we can give everyone a pony.” i don’t care how much you want to tax billionaires, don’t fucking bring it up. i hate bezos as much as everyone but we live in america, where everyone is simply a temporarily embarrassed billionaire and convinced that taxing the ultra-rich will somehow hurt them too. don’t expect middle-of-the-road normies to get on board with the “i’ll pay more taxes if it means other people have health care” thing you see from avowed liberals and lefties, because they will not, i’m sorry. frankly *****i***** have no interest in paying more taxes because nyc already taxes you out the nose regardless of where you are on the socioeconomic scale and if someone suggested i should pay more, even if it meant paying less on private services in the long run, i would simply be like, “nope!” so like, yeah, obviously the goal is to eliminate corporate tax loopholes and tax the ultra-rich at a higher rate while cutting tax burdens on everyone else, but what you want to say is stuff like “small business owners shouldn’t pay more in taxes than the companies like apple and amazon that are already squeezing them out” and “we’ll cut taxes and frivolous government spending,” period, no embellishment. “making american companies pay american taxes” is a succinct catchphrase i like to use. 

instead of “defund/spend less on the military,” say “why is the government spending so much on building outdated outdated tanks and submarines from 50 years ago and so little on services for veterans? we need to revitalize our military spending so that we can spend less on safer, more modern equipment, preserve those manufacturing jobs, and make sure that veterans get the health care and job opportunities they deserve.” get it? like, republicans have been selling the “cut waste, cut taxes, cut spending” line for decades because it sounds good and people really respond to it. unfortunately, one of the many cursed legacies of ronald reagan is that most people still think that balancing a government budget is like balancing a checkbook, and obviously that’s not true but it lends a lot of familiar comparisons and metaphors, so like… use them.

don’t equivocate on “black lives matter” - it’s too important and too urgent - instead, give the non-activist liberals you already know the accessible language they can use to help normalize the phrase “black lives matter” in their own lives and encourage them to do so. they won’t convert the full-on blue lives matter cult members and other assorted balls-to-the-wall racists, but there are people in the middle who just need to hear a targeted explanation of why that isn’t a combative or controversial statement, and that totally depends on the individual… there’s the very basic 101-logicky “if saying ‘save the whales’ doesn’t mean you think dolphins can kick rocks, or if saying ‘spinach is a vegetable’ doesn’t mean that you think lettuce isn’t, why does ‘black lives matter’ imply that other lives don’t?” and i saw someone in the christians against trump group cite a brene brown quote they said (“In order for slavery to work, in order for us to buy, sell, beat, and trade people like animals, Americans had to completely dehumanize slaves. And whether we directly participated in that or were simply a member of a culture that at one time normalized that behavior, it shaped us. We can’t undo that level of dehumanizing in one or two generations. I believe Black Lives Matter is a movement to rehumanize black citizens. All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery.”) that made it click for them and they like to use to make it click for others, and there’s also this example that i think is probably pretty resonant for christians:

the point is, as with all the rest of this, that there are a lot of people out there who are alienated by the language (because there has been a billion-dollar media propaganda machine working overtime to make the language as alienating as possible) but not by the content of the argument. the right is SO good at messaging to its base by speaking their language, dog whistles and all. but because the democratic party is a coalition of moderates and liberals and leftists, you really have to be strategic about your messaging in a way that the right doesn’t. frankly, that’s why joe biden won - he made those same broad appeals to morality and civility and unity and prosperity that people want to hear. 

i realize that everyone feels that if you have the moral high ground, you shouldn’t have to put in work to persuade people because they should automatically grasp that you’re right, but like i said above, this is america, and it doesn’t work like that. we need to talk to people, not in buzzwords or in highly stigmatized language that risks turning them off immediately, but in language that already means something to them. if you want to persuade people you have to actually make things sound appealing to them, whether that means evoking warm and fuzzy mental images or appealing to their principles and moral convictions and religious beliefs or just doing your best to sound like the adults in the room. you gotta do this stuff to build a majority instead of just a plurality within this party, because that’s just what we need to win.

[stele3]

If you want to see this side of the argument in action: witness Dan Price on Fox News reframing Universal Basic Income as “taking money out of the government and putting it in the hands of everyday Americans,” which is just. *chef’s kiss* Speaking as someone raised by and around conservatives, they will eat that shit UP.

[fandomsandfeminism]

I think a big moral in all of this is that you can’t expect the VAST majority of Americans to be educated or knowledgeable about these kinds of issues. I don’t even mean that as a dig, just a reality. Most people, living their lives, working their jobs, do NOT use the internet for activism. They don’t read about these issues in detail. They don’t really understand WHAT those little phrases mean or WHY they should want them. Which means IF you want to be an activist and you if you want to get those people on board- you gotta get on their level and EXPLAIN it to them without the slogans. Which is work, and you are not obligated to spend your time doing it, or doing it all the time, or doing it with radicalized Trumpers who aren’t here in good faith; but it is THE work, ya know?

[biglawbear]

See also: Republicans have mastered this in the opposite direction. They take something Democrats or liberals want, reduce it to a Scary Soundbite, and done, now people hate it.

See: critical race theory

Critical race theory is actually a law school level class about how legal systems can disadvantage people of color in the United States. It’s been around for forty years.

Republicans have conflated it with “indoctrinating children to think being white is bad and hating America.” Moral panic ensues.

The Affordable Care Act becomes “Government takeover of Healthcare.” Etc etc etc

People need to be meet where they’re at with accessible language that understands the audience or else you’ll lose them

[ao3commentoftheday]

There is a writer, I love every work she has written so far and I comment or leave kudos every chapter/work that she had published. Is that too much? I'm feeling like a stalker.

Odds are you are now that author’s favourite reader and they have you specifically in mind when they write because they’re looking forward to your reaction to it :D

At least, that’s how it goes for me.

[ao3commentoftheday]

a-candle-for-sherlock‌:

Reblogging for @onedamnminuteadmiral‘s very accurate tags.

[embershx]

Something I’ve found being the commenter in this situation… They worry when you stop too. I’ve more than once been confronted with the fact I am Known and Acknowledged when an author’s been like ‘Oh thank goodness, you didn’t comment last chapter I thought you were sick of it’. I’ve also had authors hyped to hear from me if I’ve returned to a fandom after disappearing for a while. I’ve had one ask if I was ok because I disappeared for a while.  They know you and they love you. 

[wiredandrewired]

Can confirm my wife has a favorite commenter, when they leave a new comment on something she’s written I get ‘BABE BABE BABE COME HEAR I GOT A COMMMENT FROM X’ and I hustle to hear her read it out loud to me, her eyes shining the whole time, her whole body vibrating with joy, blushing her head off and smiling from ear to ear.  She reads them and rereads them and I can always tell by the look on her face.  Every comment from a favorite commenter is a love letter and listen friends you are loved in return.  

She speculates about what Favorite Commenter will think of things in the new chapter, if they’ll guess new twists coming up in the plot, if they’ll like how she works in a new character or a rarepair in the b plot of the story.  She talks about her hopes that Favorite Commenter will enjoy a new story she’s working on.  She says things like ‘Favorite Commenter was said something about Y and it’s not actually where I’m going, but it’s given me a new idea…’  Every comment from a favorite commenter is an inspiration, and they are writing for you.

And honestly, from my experience, having a favorite commenter can keep you writing even when you don’t have the emotional wherewithal to write for yourself.  A lot of people advise authors to write for themselves and to heck with anyone else, but there are times you can’t.  For years, I didn’t write for myself–I wrote for my favorite commenter.  It meant that was the only person who saw a lot of my writing.  But it also meant that I didn’t stop.  

Don’t ever hesitate to tell someone how much you love their writing or why.

[freetofic-replies]

Some positivity for the writers & commenters out there. :)

[mango-habanero-autism-deactivat]

If you’re genuinely interested in learning more about settler colonialism and answering questions like “wait what does land back look like?” “What can I do?” and “What are the contexts informing this and why do Indigenous people reject being part of the US/Canada?” there are free syllabi online which can answer these questions (they will not answer it directly, the point is to get you to think for yourself and ask more questions that can lead you to thinking more deeply about this and how you can personally take action towards better practices of solidarity) 

Here’s the Standing Rock Syllabus: 

https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/

Allyship and Solidarity Guidelines of Unsettling America:

https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/allyship/

Towards Decolonization and Settler Responsibility:

https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/towards-decolonization-and-settler-responsibility-reflections-on-a-decade-of-indigenous-solidarity-organizing/

Sample Syllabi of the DEcolonization Resource Collection:

https://nationalhistorycenter.org/decolonization-resource-collection-sample-syllabi/

Further Readings:

https://decolonization.wordpress.com/decolonization-readings/

These are limited resources that mainly deal with North America and English-speaking countries, because that’s the context I am coming from. If you have resources from other regions and other languages, I welcome them here, or anything from your local context. 

[effectiveresistance]

Accomplices Not Allies:

indigenousaction.org/accomplices-not-allies-abolishing-the-ally-industrial-complex

Autonomously And With Conviction:

itsgoingdown.org/autonomously-and-with-conviction-a-metis-refusal-of-state-led-reconciliation/

[freetofic-replies]

Reference for me

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Leaked NYPD "goon squad" manual

In New York City, the summer 2020 #BLM uprising became a grotesque spectacle, as legions of ultraviolent cops committed mass-scale, criminal human rights violations, spawning a new subgenre of viral video: the NYPD BLM violence video.

During and after this period, public attention focused on the systemic nature of the NYPD’s lawlessness, like the fact that the cops’ disciplinary records were held secret, obscuring the repeat offenders.

Indeed, Propublica’s brave publication of these records demonstrated that the force is riddled with violent, habitual sadists.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/#nypd-who

Propublica did incredible work, showing that cops who commits a strings of violent human rights abuses and cost the taxpayer vast fortunes in legal settlements aren’t disqualified from promotions - these monsters constitute the NYPD’s top brass.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/10/booksellers-vs-big-tech/#50a

Propublica also delved deep into the NYPD’s sham of a disciplinary process, for example, documenting the continued use of illegal choke-holds by officers, primarily against Black men, and how police officials did nothing to enforce their own policies.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/21/i-cant-breathe/#chokeholds

All of this leads up to impunity. As Propublica went on to report, out of the hundreds the NYPD officers caught on video committing crimes against protesters, only *two* were brought up for discipline, despite video evidence and eyewitness reports.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#nypd-black-and-blue

The cherry on the cake: last month, Propublica revealed the existence of a secretive, tax-funded slushfund that pays out millions to hire white-shoe lawyers to defend the cops who are so dirty the city refuses to defend them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#heads-you-lose-tails-they-win

Latent in all of this discussion is the assumption - on the part of NYPD critics *and* apologists - that the cops who commit these crimes are breaking their own rules. But as it turns out, that’s not true.

Today, The Intercept published the leaked, secret, destroy-after-reading procedural manuals for the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, an ultra-secretive good squad formed by former chief Bill Bratton in 2015.

https://theintercept.com/2021/04/07/nypd-strategic-response-unit-george-floyd-protests/

We don’t know how big the SRG is - it’s a secret - but we know that its inaugural budget was $13m in 2015 and today, it’s nearly $90m. As Alice Speri and John Bolger write, the crimes we witnessed last summer are literally straight out of the SRG’s playbook.

That thing where bike cops kettle a group of protesters, hoist their bikes up to their chest, forming a moving fence, and then beat the shit out of  protesters as they advance? That’s not the result of undertraining - it’s a maneuver they regularly drill.

When the BLM uprising began, the NYPD’s chief and commissioner both pledged that the SRG - theoretically designed to maintain order during mass riots, not political protests - wouldn’t be involved.

They lied.

“Investigators found a disproportionate number of SRG officers accused of wrongdoing to have exceeded their legal authority, when compared with the wider department.”

Despite its $90m budget and estimated 700 cops, it’s not clear why SRG exists at all. The NY AG’s office said SRG shouldn’t be used on protesters because they’re supposed to fight terrorism, but the NYPD already has an expensive, heavily resourced Counterterrorism Bureau.

One thing we do know about the SRG: they have a huge intelligence wing. Before deployments, SRG officers are briefed on “group size, planned arrests, key members of the protest group, and the group’s hierarchy,” and other intel. They go in with a plan.

That’s the point: the violence isn’t the result of rogue cops ignoring their training. It’s the result of cops doing *exactly* what they’re trained to do.

If you doubt it, read the manuals.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20584527-strategic_response_group_guide

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20584526-srg_field_force_modules

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20584525-srg_bike_squad_modules

Learn about the Bike Line Arrest Manuever, or BLAM, in which officers “shout ‘BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!’ as they advance,” and “[take] control of subjects head by clinching your hands and arms behind the head of subject and bringing head against your chest.”

This is exactly what Human Rights Watch documented in their report on a Jun 4, 2020 “planned assault” in the Bronx. NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea called the chaotic violence of that assault as “a plan which was executed nearly flawlessly.” He wasn’t lying.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/30/us-new-york-police-planned-assault-bronx-protesters

The authors warn that any reform that results in disbanding the SRG won’t be enough: the NYPD has a long history of dissolving its most criminal units and then reforming them with a new name, new insignia and even bigger budgets.

They give the final word to Joo-Hyun Kang of Communities United for Police Reform, who says that the real problem isn’t the SRG, it’s “the hyper-militarization, the hyper-aggressive policing tactics. That’s not an SRG problem only, that’s an NYPD problem”

[afroenby-deactivated20230831]

can we move past “should ace people be involved in lgbt spaces” and start examining how asexuality impacts all of us whether we identify as it or not. it particularly impacts people of color in a way that is distinct per racial group. i mean, trudy has written about this, danyi has written about this, vesper discusses this, hana examines this in her performance art, michael talks about this and created a whole online publication for other aces, primarily aces of color, to share their own experiences in their own way, mod fae over at fyeahasexual discusses this as well.

i think it’s important that we start shifting from “do aces belong” to “how does asexuality help me reclaim the agency white supremacy and western imperialism took from me?” by hearing out ace voices of color. and this doesnt have to end at BIPoC who are affected by western imperialism and white supremacy. we can move on towards people under the bracket of other issues in the world

[porterr-robinson]

v.2

[halovoid]

this is the BEST video on the entire internet. i’ve seen this hundreds of times over half a decade and it’s THE BEST.

[freetofic-replies]

Pure joy in a post

[butchniqabi]

every time i see people trying to normalize fatness by sexualizing it i think of that post thats like “what are you gonna tell a fucking 12 y/o? dont cry dude youre so thick? stop it” bc like. truly. not only do i personally not want my body to be sexualized lol but also its so harmful to kids like?? being fat is normal in all contexts not just when youre in lingerie with a beat face looking pouty at the camera like can we talk about the variances in human bodies without resorting to making them normal only when theyre sexy, my god

[soyest-boy]

your body is good, not because it is desirable to others, but because you live in it

[freetofic-replies]

‘Normalize fatness by making it equally sexually desirable as thinness according to the patriarchy’ is exactly the kind of half-assed ‘activism’ that achieves absolutely nothing except further empowering white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy

Both sexualization & desexualization are the tools of institutionalized bigotry, & they will never dismantle the systemic prejudice that hold us all down

[thethirdstageofdeath]

Y'all, listen, shit is going down on Ao3, luckily it hasn't reached The Dark Crystal, but I feel it still needs to be addressed.

So, some motherfuckers are thinking it's fucking hilarious to post only fics with few actual words, but the user (usually anon or an orphan account) puts an entire fanfiction in the additional tags. It takes up a huge portion of the page, and takes forever to scroll past.

Apparently some fuckers are thinking this shit is trendy, and think it's fun to include almost every fandom (including one I am new to and have been trying to enjoy) to try and affect -or rather inconvenience- the most people possible.

If they realize it or not, they are taking up and wasting the mods' time. THEY ARE VOLENTEERS, and these fucking pieces of shit think it's all shits and giggles to not only waste the mods' time, but the hundreds of thousands effected, people who just want to enjoy the website and its content.

Do not participate in these 'games'. It is not funny to anyone, and it is wasting the time of the people you share the website with and of the people who allow you to be on the site in the first place.

[alterumsinealterononest]

Guys do not touch Ao3. I'm coming for you if anything happens to it.

[lowhostrikesback]

What they said ^^^.

The same sentiments.

If any of you bottom-feeders touch Ao3, I AM COMING FOR YOUR ASS.

[iamanartichoke]

[alwida10]

I have a question @ao3commentoftheday (I am sorry if this comes at a bad time. I understand if you have to much to do right now to answer. You and all those volunteers doing a wonderful job! Thank you so much! ❤️)

My question: is there any possibility to report those fanfics, so the accounts get suspended? This is sabotaging our archives and I don’t think people who sabotage something should be allowed to use it (at least for a time). If so, please tell me and i will gladly sacrifice my free afternoons to report these people. Of course only as long as it makes the volunteers work easier and doesn’t add to it.

@everyone who’s annoyed by this madness: here is here a manual how to solve your problem via user scripts:

https://insanitysilver.tumblr.com/post/643767335759626240/ao3-userscripts-you

AO3 Userscripts & You

So there’s been an uptick in those stories with a thousand tags. With the right userscripts, this: Automatically displays like this instead:

[ao3commentoftheday]

ao3 is well aware of these fics. wranglers are waking up to 5000 new tags in their bins for them to deal with. support and policy&abuse are both being drowned in reports. all of this bs is making it incredibly difficult for them to do their usual work, and it's causing a lot of pain and frustration. I am personally enraged, and that's not a word I use lightly.

ignore the fics. use the tools available. I posted multiple different options yesterday, so they're still near the top of my blog

and anyone who thinks this is funny or cool or a great meme? kindly go fuck yourself

[freetofic-replies]

@ao3commentoftheday : would limiting the number of tags a person can put on a fic be a reasonable solution? It could still be an absurdly high number (like, say, 100 tags) but it would discourage this sort of behavior without fundamentally changing the Archive’s mission.

(It also might discourage the cross-fandom ficlet-per-chapter-in-one-massive-fic works.)

[capcourse]

all these people who say gay was never a slur are too young to remember those psas that told you to say stupid instead of gay

[wheatleylaboratoriez-deactivate]

what

[capcourse]

idk if this is a “i dont believe you” what or a “you mean there are people who havent seen these??” what but allow me to enlighten you

i havent watched this commercial in 10 years (which was also when it was posted) but yes i remember this playing on TV when i was younger

heres an article from 2009

heres an interview from 2009

in fact, these were so culturally relevant that i distinctly remember watching a dane cook special where he had a bit about it (i think he also mentions rape so tw for that) 

i grew up hearing gay be thrown left and right as a derogatory term, and its a small part of why i dont identify with the word.

if youre going to say that queer is a slur, then you have to mention that gay is used as one as well. otherwise, youre just spewing t///er/////f propaganda and im not about that bullshit   

[wheatleylaboratoriez-deactivate]

hey, thanks for providing sources! i genuinely did not know these existed because i never saw these PSA’s

[capcourse]

no problem! i dont think they were on air for a long time, so im sure there are a lot of people who dont know about ‘em! 

[kayas-wife]

There was a PSA made as recently as 2 or 3 years ago in New Zealand to stop using gay as a derogatory term

[leis-main-blog-deactivated20200]

hey, i’m 31 and actually lived through the period where gay was used as a derogatory slur. It was the major formation of my highschool and middle school years. Kids constantly would call each other, ideas, concepts, things “Gay” when they meant “stupid”. I literally had to retrain my brain for 5 years to not use it and I am part of the lgbtqia community. I was just too young to know better. 

This absolutely happened and is a major reason why we gotta be not only aware of our words but also understanding that people change. 

[drneverland]

I'm 35 and queer and I lived through that era, too. "Lesbian" was a term for any girl that was disliked, spoken in various intonations of disgust. Kind of used the same way incels spit the word "feminist," now that I think about it.

But there's more to it that some people aren't getting, either.

"Gay" and "Lesbian" were used as weapons; even if someone wasn't queer, if they were hated enough, the rumors spread. "Don't hang out with her, she's a lesbian." "Hey, should (name) be allowed to change in the locker room? You know they're gay, don't you?" And so on. Depending on where you were, especially if you were trying to have a career (like a teacher) being labeled "gay" enough times to be believed cost someone their career, because of "concerns," especially if the job involved particularly young kids. And that's just the people who got lucky enough to only lose a job.

Anything used to label us is coated in blood. Even the "good words" came from a bad past.

[reasonablywittyatbest]

I lived through this shit as well, when I was being viciously bullied in middle school they used to call me a lesbian all the time, as a way so to indicate how awful gross and terrible I was. You’ll still run into people my age using gay as a synonym for stupid and bad.

[uristmcdorf]

I was a child during the AIDs crisis.  My mum molded the sex education she gave me explicitly around protecting me from AIDs.  My school included gay sex and AIDs precautions in the sex education we got.  I grew up with our death as the first and most immediate thing I learned about what it meant to be queer.

Then spent my teen years hearing "homo", "gay", "lesbo", "dyke", "tranny", "fag", "shirtlifter", "poofter" and "queer" used as slurs against people. 

I saw the "scandals" that cost George Michael his music career, initially got Ellen's sitcom cancelled, and saw all the rumour-mongering and non-consentual outing of politicians and celebrities. 

I saw the first few ways queer folks were “allowed” to be seen on TV in my country - the original Queer Eye, Graham Norton and so on (aside from drag.  Drag was somehow always okay on British TV but I think we were supposed to pretend we all thought they were straight?).  Queer people were portrayed with humour.  If they were laughing at us, if they thought we were funny, we were safe (and GODS do I ever have some FEELINGS about Pratchett’s Count Otto and the ways he reflects the ways queer folks use the stereotypes against them as a means to seem non-threatening and therefore safe).

There are very few slurs from my youth I haven’t encountered at least one person who ID’d with.

But for "some reason" (hint: TERFs), Queer is the term the internet has apparently decided can never be reclaimed.  

How funny, isn't it, that

the most inclusive term

the term that allows people to keep the details of their identity private

the term that allows easy space for nonbinary, transgender, ace, questioning and fluid/complex identities

the unapologetically political, non-conformist and activist-associated term

the term associated with our anger, with our non-assimilation

the term associated with our history, studies and education that can empower us

is the one that's apparently unreclaimable.

[disease-danger-darkness-silence]

I'm 35. I grew up at the tail end of the AIDS crisis.

I remember, vividly, one of my mom’s friends (a major bulldyke, although I didn’t realize that was the term at the time) insisting that she was queer, and my mom was confused because she thought that was a mean thing people said about gay people.

Veronica replied, “I’m queer, because if I call myself that, they can’t use it against me.”

You’ll pry queer from my cold, dead hands. I’m here, I’m queer, get. Fucking. Used. To. It.

[catastrfy]

CW: i’m going to type out some terms that have been used as slurs without splatting them. every one that i’m listing, i have friends who reclaimed. every one can be used as a slur. none of them “are always a slur”. i’m 59. i came out in 1979, when the word gay was used by people who physically attacked us. just like dyke, fag, lez, lesbian, homo were. i started using queer in the 80s both because i’d realised i was genderqueer and felt uncomfortable using lesbian (which i’ve recently reclaimed due the increasing acceptance of nonbinary dykes) AND becaues of the yt centered respectability politics of the 80s. i’m here, i’m queer, GET OVER IT.

[recordsystem]

Dude I'm 21 and I saw gay being used as a slur when I was in elementary school

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

22 and was called lesbian as an insult in middle school.

[star-anise]

I've been seeing "anti-anti" as a dni on stimboards. Would you mind helping me understand what an anti-anti is? How can I know if I am one or if I'm allowing them to interact with me (yes if you allow them to interact is on the dni lists). This sort of thing seemed like your wheelhouse but I apologise if it's not or if the question is irritating.

Oh boy. Welcome to the mudfight.

Trigger warning: Child sexual abuse, bullying

“Anti” isn’t a thing people call themselves these days, but it comes from the world of anti-shipping in fanfic (thinking a certain relationship or pairing is disgusting and reprehensible and nobody should ship it). It also ties in to the anti-porn movement. The claim such people generally make about themselves is that they are trying to protect children from problematic fanfiction that “glamorizes” or “romanticizes” incest, pedophilia, and abuse. Here’s an attempt to define the term as it’s used now.

The anti definition of an “anti-anti” is, therefore, “a person who supports incest, pedophilia, and abuse”. Which sounds very terrible! Who wouldn’t want to stay as far away from those people as possible?

And, well, I’m an anti-anti. I actually care a lot about keeping children safe from sexual abuse. I just happen to think that “antis” are aimed at mostly the wrong targets, since they’re misdefining their central terms, have chosen the exact wrong methods to do it, and are in fact harming child sexual abuse survivors, doing nothing to prevent abuse, and generally behaving like an abusive cult.

What I think is a good way to make children safer in fandom, from my study of trauma, resilience, and healing: Promote widespread education about safe sex, healthy relationships, bodily autonomy, and consent; provide clear labels and warnings for all kinds of sexual content, even/especially if the relationship depicted is not entirely safe or healthy; teach fans how to find the kind of content they want and avoid the kind of content they don’t; allow for many diverse depictions of sex and relationships and encourage a healthy discussion about the relative merits and evils of different situations; encourage people to know that it’s totally normal and healthy to have weird sexual fantasies or desires, and that doesn’t mean you actually want or need that to happen in real life; promote knowledge about trauma and abuse, how to recognize it, and healthy ways to heal from it.

What antis think is a good way to make children safer in fandom, as far as I understand it: Prohibit all discussion or depiction of people under the age of 18 in relation to sex. Declare any adult who wants to talk about or depict people under the age of 18 in relation to sex a pedophile who is risky to children. Define “pedophilia” to mean any relationship that involves people under 18, any relationship containing anyone who is a minor in the source material who has grown up in the work of art, or any relationship between adults that has an age gap or in which one member seems visually smaller, younger, or less mature than the other. Define “incest” to mean any relationship in which characters have known each other since childhood or have a bond that seems familial (mentoring, comrades, “you’re like a brother to me”). Have no clear standards whatsoever for what “glamorizing” or “fetishizing” means, so any fan activity that includes forbidden topics is bad. When a fan is seen to be a fan of, or to produce or consume fanworks about them, assume this person is a “pedo” who will inevitably harm children if given the opportunity, and harass the shit out of them and/or dox them to parents or employers.

I… don’t actually have a ton of evidence for examples of antis saying this stuff, because honestly, it’s so toxic I have to avoid it for my mental health. If you wanna go dig through the garbage and see just how bad this gets, sources of Shit Antis Say closest to me are probably @lizcourserants​ and @shipcourse on Twitter.

Tl;dr: An “anti-anti” is someone who opposes the idea that the only way to “prevent child abuse” is to send violent and threatening messages to people whose ships or fanfic are insufficiently “morally pure”. “Anti-antis DNI” is a sign that someone is okay with censorship and abuse as ordinary parts of social life on the internet.

(@namings has had some good insight over the years on why there’s so much overlap between the stimboard community and antifandom and anti-BDSM, despite there being a big overlap between autistic people and people into kink, but their archive is not, she said fondly, optimized for easy browsing.)

[beatrice-otter]

Also, because antis are so incredibly toxic, things have come around to such a degree that in some fandoms the label “anti” gets slung around to silence anyone who wants to have a conversation that includes any kind of critique about anything in fandom.  So, for example, if there is a lot of racism in the way a fandom treats a black character, and someone points it out, they get labelled an anti because that way the people who enjoy the racist tropes don’t have to stop and think about why they like the stories they do.  “I don’t have to listen to anyone talking about racism because they’re just a horrible anti and a bully” is a great way of protecting oneself from having to think about serious issues.

There are several differences between the purity-culture antis (who everybody in fandom calls antis) and the anti-racism advocates (who sometimes get labelled antis in an attempt to shut them up and drive them out of fandom.  (Yes, yes, of course there are exceptions to every rule, and these neat distinctions are not 100% applicable in every case, but they are still a good rule of thumb in my experience.)

One difference is which direction the harassment goes.  Purity-culture antis use harassment and bullying as one of their main tactics.  They don’t just talk about general trends; they identify specific people they don’t like and harass them every way they can and lie about them to try and get everyone to think they’re a horrible evil person who abuses children when in reality the “worst” thing they’ve ever done is write stories about teenagers having crushes on one another.  They often target people in an attempt to silence them and/or drive them out of fandom, and they often whip up mobs of people against their victims.  Anti-racism advocates, however, are far more likely to be the victims of harassment than be the ones doing the harassing.  Instead of making targeted attacks of individual people, they tend to make general posts pointing out larger trends in a particular fandom and explaining how racism contributes to that trend.  They then get harassed, often viciously, by white fans who hate it when racism gets pointed out.  They often get nasty (and completely false) rumors spread about them.  So, yeah, in general, purity-culture antis harass people; anti-racism activists get called “antis” as part of the harassment they receive.

Another difference is whether or not the person who is critical of #thing has actual evidence to back them up.  “Reading or writing about two teenagers in a consensual relationship is pedophilia and makes people more likely to abuse children” is absolutely, verifiably untrue, as are pretty much all of the purity-culture anti claims.  “Fans consistently edit a black character out of gifsets to replace them with a white character so the black character’s good traits and/or relationships can be given to a white character, and this is caused by white prioritization which is a form of racial bias” is true and easily verified.  “Any fic which includes any mention of rape is glorifying abuse and encouraging rapists” is, again, provably false.  “The fandom trend of turning black protagonists into villains and giving all their good traits to white characters is based on racism and white prioritization” is provably true.  In general, purity-culture antis base their claims and views on sex, gender, age, abuse, and all related topics on ideas that are easily disproven by any study of actual scientific studies of the issues involved; anti-racism activists who are labelled as “antis” usually have pretty solid research backing up their claims of how racism, white prioritization, and white supremacy work.

tl;dr–purity-culture antis are nasty pieces of work who use harassment as one of their main tools and are really, really wrong about sex and gender and rape and child abuse in fiction and why people write those themes and what it does to people who read them.  Sometimes that label gets thrown at anti-racism advocates and others who are demonstrably NOT like antis in either tactics or rationality, so it helps to stop and look at who’s getting called what and why and is it actually true or not.

[idealistic-realism00]

It also makes it difficult to call attention to real instances of predators in a fandom, speaking from experience.  As a mother with a daughter of an age where she has a certain amount of allowed screen time each day and is now participating more in certain fandoms, I’ve had more than a few issues with adults who are in fandoms where the target audience is children crossing certain lines or giving off some red flags.  My daughter is still young enough that we make screen time a thing I do with her to some extent, so I know which sites she’s on and who she’s talking with to some degree that isn’t too invasive, and I’ve spoken with her about safety online (never give your personal information out online, don’t share photos openly where people can use reverse image search to track you to other social media accounts, keep your personal accounts like FB set to private so only the people you choose to add as friends can see your content, etc.).  All the same, I’ve seen adults draw explicit material of characters in children’s fandoms and share it publically with no tags, warnings, etc., in the areas that are for the more general all-ages content without warnings. Some have even dared to tag my daughter in the content so she will see it and when questioned by me claimed they didn’t mean to tag her (I’ve taught her to block those adults who tag her for those kinds of pictures and who ask her certain kinds of very personal questions).  

Unfortunately, drawing attention to the issue of adults sharing explicit content with my daughter (she’s only just turned elven) or in the general areas rather than the ones designated for that type of NSFW content has earned me accusations of being an “anti” more times than I can count.  One need only drop that term and they can expect others to come to their defense against the mean anti that is persecuting them for their porn and their kinks. I am a licensed psychologist and I’m close to becoming a psychiatrist.  I’ve worked as an expert in forensic psychology and even given testimony in courts after interviewing people whose alleged offenses run the gamut.  Somewhere, in all of that, I’ve interviewed my share of accused paedophiles.  So, when I teach my daughter to be careful online and how to safely navigate fandom I do it with a background of some professional experience but also some of my own personal experience as someone who started young on fandom during the 90s and did encounter some attempted grooming from unsafe adults without my realising.  When I voice my concerns about certain adults behaving in a way that raises red flags with my daughter, I’m not overreacting.  My instincts as a mother and a psychologist are at the fore and unfortunately it’s becoming very easy for child predators to cry “anti!” to conceal their inappropriate behaviours with underage minors online.

It has come to the point where friends of mine cannot point out that posting child porn is still quite illegal (for good reason as children cannot provide informed consent and child porn is sexual exploitation of a minor) without being accused of being a bully or an anti.  Even discussions of age gaps in a relationship have become conflated so that someone in their 30s dating someone in their 50s is looked at through the same critical lens as someone 16 years of age dating a man in his 50s.  The focus is on the age gap itself and the pervasive idea that the issue is just that age gaps of any kind are wrong, rather than on the issue of cognitive development.  Cognitive development is why an adult in their 30s dating another adult in their 50s is not problematic in-and-of-itself; in the case of both individuals, they are able to use their judgment on whether or not they want to enter into a consensual relationship because the adult in their 30s has reached a point of fully matured cognitive development, in the same way, the adult in their 50s will have. The gap in age might lead to certain differences in the kinds of lived experiences they will have had but those are things that someone who has reached a mature stage in their cognitive development will be more equipped to navigate and apply their judgment towards. 

However, the brains of teenagers on into approximately their mid-twenties (which is why a 21-year-old woman involved with a man in his 50s can still be subjected to psychological grooming, regardless of the fact she’s “of age” and why older men who exclusively prefer younger women are often scrutinized in most feminist discourse) are still in a state of development; specifically, the prefrontal cortex that factors in our executive functions is still not fully matured. As the prefrontal cortex plays a major role in our decision making, it is often referred to as our sober second thought.  Teenagers are not impulsive simply because they lack life experience or emotional/psychological maturity and even the most mature teenager who has experienced “adult” things will not have a fully developed prefrontal cortex which is why age is not just a number, it is an important marker for our cognitive development.  This is just a basic bit of neuropsychology and while I don’t expect everyone to know the ins and outs of cognitive development in adolescents, I would expect most people to recognise the difference between “all age gaps are problematic” and “certain age gaps in real life between a minor and an adult are illegal because they are psychologically and developmentally damaging to the minor.” 

I also think it’s important that we acknowledge that sometimes where there is smoke, there is an actual fire and it’s not just the usual purity politics of reactionary antis (some of whom, in my experience, are quite young themselves –between their teens and early 20s– and are still at their own stage of development where black-and-white thinking is more common and to be expected).  Certain fandoms or ships might be attracting a very specific type of person who sees an opportunity to insert themselves into a space populated by young fen.  There are also people suffering from arrested development, who may be struggling with certain maladaptive coping responses to stressors in their life or trauma (which is a whole other issue and why “I can do this because it helps me cope,” logic is honestly a bit more complicated than the discourse on sites like Tumblr would have you to think, mainly because not every coping mechanism is healthy and in many cases, a mental health professional will use guided steps to help people make an eventual transition from their maladaptive coping habits to healthier coping mechanisms; sometimes this does involve a guided exploration of the maladaptive fantasies or coping practices via journaling or other creative outlets but we would never encourage clients to share those in a public format where they present them as potentially helpful, cathartic, empowering, or healthy fantasies for other people to latch onto or where those personal coping mechanisms would be subject to public scrutiny and criticism that might trigger our clients, endanger their mental healthy, and set them back in their journey towards remission and/or reinforce their maladaptive coping further), and so on.   

Trigger warning for the discussion that follows, as I go more explicitly into firsthand accounts of predatory behaviour I have witnessed firsthand in fandom spaces.

I’ve been in fandoms where there have been very clear danger signs that went unacknowledged until they became blatant and, in many cases, it was even too late and very real harm had been done before anyone was willing to admit the fandom was attracting the wrong audience for the wrong reasons.  There have been instances where the young people in the fandom have openly come forward and revealed that there were men AND women (I’ll be honest, too often women are perpetrators as much as men and they’re given a disconcerting amount of lee-way under the guise of feminism and sexual empowerment to the effect that not enough people are willing to acknowledge the fact that women can be predators or that we’re far more willing to be tolerant or dismissive of them as a society) pulling them into private chats and asking them to describe their sexual fantasies involving their favourite characters with offers to roleplay those scenarios with them and those young people were simply told to be quiet and discouraged from “going against their fandom.”  

There was an occasion where a woman had to be asked to stop sharing explicit imagery with her underage followers and tag her porn appropriately and she went on a rant about “purity culture,” how warnings and tags were for pearl-clutchers, how it was healthy for minors to see the porn she posted and she was merely treating them like adults rather than infantilising them, and she and her followers went on a campaign to bully the person asking (a young man whom, contrary to their accusations, was not an anti, did not support a “rival ship,” or want the actress for himself given he was open about being gay) until he left the site —solely because he asked her to start using NSFW warnings and tagging her porn.  Importantly, he did not ask her to stop sharing porn, only to warn for it out of consideration for the large number of underage followers she had gathered.  There was also an instance where adult shippers of a teenager/adult ship bullied another minor “for being a creepy sexual predator” because he posted a video asking the actress who played the teenage character in their ship if she would go to his prom with him, largely because they shipped the actress who played the teenage character with the older male actor who played the character they shipped her with and frequently harassed anyone she seemed to be dating or who could “get in the way” of their real-life shipping (the actress in question had to make her social media accounts private for a time because of these adult shippers). 

In this same fandom that had a ship involving a seventeen-year-old girl and a man who was middle-aged the adults who had joined the teenagers in that fandom were also openly discussing the age of consent laws to determine the youngest age that they felt an adult could “legally” date someone in their teens “for reference”(whatever that was supposed to mean), how they even encouraged or allowed their daughters to date older men because of better security and more “maturity,” until finally one of them openly came out to state she was a paedophile who looked for underage child porn for gratification.  When it seemed that admission was one step too far and other parts of the fandom were reconsidering what the adults in the ship were doing with the underage shippers, the adults proceeded to close ranks, bully any of the young fen who were upset and came forward to speak up about how the adults in their fandom often made them uncomfortable, and launched a “defense campaign” where they were caught trying to encourage people to anonymously submit messages to the blogger who admitted to being a paedophile and looking at child porn claiming to be survivors of CSA who supported her “right to enjoy child porn as a harmless kink.”  

For the young fen who enjoyed the ship, the adults who came into their fandom space made it unsafe and uncomfortable for them to enjoy a ship that for them was all mostly a bit of harmless adolescent fantasy.  They, like so many young people before them, fancied the older male character and saw the teenage character as closest to them in age so pairing them was a matter of being able to relate and use the teenage character as their proxy.  The toxicity of the adults who took over their ship also led to it being irrevocably associated with paedophiles to this day, so now young shippers of the ship are easy targets for bullying and accusations of the same when for them the ship carries very different connotations.  From the beginning, there were plenty of warning signs that some of the adults were attracted to the ship for reasons that were disingenuous or maladaptive; some used the ship as a means to gain access to some of the young people who shipped it, while others were projecting heavily onto the teenage character for reasons that were unhealthy and led to them losing sight of reality to the extent they were harassing minors, doxxing people, etc. This isn’t the first occasion I’ve been in a fandom where predators insert themselves to gain access to the underage fen that the fandom is popular with.

So, my take-away from all of this is that older fen do need to educate themselves more on how to identify grooming when it is taking place, what red flags to look out for, and how to respond appropriately in such a way that something is actually done.  Because the call-out posts, while certainly capable of drawing attention, more often than not just result in actual predators going back underground and being more cautious.  Particularly now that we have more instances where people are making call out posts to accuse people of being paedophiles when that’s not the case and they either have a personal grudge against the individual, are participating in a bit of mob mentality without any real evidence to go by (such as was the case with x-kit guy), dislike a character someone may have posted about, or a ship it’s much easier for actual predators to disguise their motives and play the victim.  I think it prudent for people to learn the procedures depending on their origin of country (I’m in the UK for instance) for reporting suspected online predators.  Instead of making a lot of noise, the most effective defense is to silently monitor the situation and contact the appropriate authorities (even reporting suspected offenders to sites like Tumblr merely results in the person having their blog, along with any evidence, removed rather than any official investigation being opened so they can always just rejoin under a different name and try again) if any substantial evidence emerges that what you suspect is going on.  

Importantly, most child predators are savvy and very cautious and the issue with some of these purity culture antis online has given them an ability to avoid detection simply by appealing to the idea that the accusations are just more of the same purity politics by angry antis.  I’ve also noticed them adopting some of the language used against antis with a few dog-whistled peppered in that might serve as a way to identify them.  Often their focus as an “anti anti” seems to be specifically on people against “underage content” and you’ll find them borrowing from some of the arguments used by MAPS that can seem almost harmless on the surface, such as: “Age really is just a state of mind!” (No, it isn’t, age is an indicator of the stage in our cognitive development that our minds are at) “We need to stop policing children’s sexuality and let them be attracted to who they’re attracted to!” (Allowing children the room to safely explore their sexuality, ask questions, and fantasise is not the same thing as exploiting their sexual development to groom them for sex with someone of age) “I treat children as if they were adults because I don’t believe in talking down to them, so if they want to talk with me about sex I’m going to talk to them as I would any person my age,” (There is a difference between having an open, honest, and informative conversation with children that is at the level they are at in their cognitive development and treating children as if they were on the same cognitive level as a mature adult) “The age of consent laws vary!” (Yes they do, but they only determine the point in age where an adolescent is believed to be capable of consenting to have sex with another adolescent, which is why even in places where the age of consent is set as young as 13, an adult who has sex with a 13-year-old can still commonly expect to be charged with statutory rape; that is because age of consent does not apply to adults with minors, rather the age of majority laws determine the minimum age, typically set at 18, that a teenager can have sex or enter into a relationship with an adult without the law getting involved), etc.

There definitely is a need for nuanced reasoning here because while do certainly agree that purity culture antis are an issue for so many reasons (not least because their appropriation of tactics originally developed by activists of colour specifically to address issues of racial injustice has made it more difficult for people like me and the person who replied above to even speak critically about issues of racism we face in fandom or more broadly online), I also think we need to be able to discern when there is a valid cause for concern and a legitimate threat and not be too quick to dismiss every complaint as the result of “anti-culture” at work.  As I said, the only real way to effectively do that is to make a concerted effort to educate ourselves and learn how to recognise the red-flags and how best respond when we see them (which, for the record, I do not believe is either public call-outs that drive potential predators back into the shadows or by filing site reports to have their blogs removed), including how we can reach out to the young people we feel may be in danger in such a way that it does not alienate them, shame them, or endanger them further. 

[freetofic-replies]

You make some really good points about the gray areas in what ‘predatory’ looks like. Sometimes yellow flags go unnoticed because we’re too busy looking for red flags. And though I think that what a person likes in fiction is not a red or yellow flag unto itself, fictional tastes can be a warning flag in conjunction with behavioral signs of being a predator.

And as you say: predators can and do use the ‘purity culture is stifling me!’ argument to defend themselves or deflect criticism of predatory behavior. And on the flip side, predators can and do take part in ‘anti culture’, claiming to fight predators, while using their influence to get inappropriate up close and personal with the teenagers whose trust they gain by being ‘an anti’. Either way, it’s predators who benefit from all this polarization.

Further exacerbating all of this is the lack of adult-specific fandom communities, or social media sites where NSFW content can be flagged as such without the site hiding it from *everyone* (not just underage minors). This is one of my biggest complaints about modern, commercialized viral sharing social media sites.

All that said, can I ask a couple of questions to clarify some of the experiences you’ve described? I want to make sure I know what I should be looking out for.

am I correctly understanding that *artists* - not second-hand reposters - of nsfw art have posted explicitly sexual nsfw art & specifically tagged your daughter to make sure she sees it?

and either way: did they know your daughter was underage when they tagged her?

I’m asking b/c I’ve personally witnessed many instances of explicit nsfw art being shown to underage minors by reposters to ‘warn’ minors about the creator of the explicit nsfw, but either reposters or the original artist: if they know your daughter was 11 years old & still tagged her, it’s a new low of horrible.

Do you happen to know if any of the people who have tagged your daughter when sharing explicit nsfw art themselves underage (peer-to-peer sharing rather than adult-to-minor)? I’m just curious b/c that’s a different flavor of ‘something is wrong here’.

On the subject of cp/csem [tw child porn / cp / child sexual exploitation material / csem ]:

to quote you: “[your] friends can’t say posting child porn is still quite illegal (for good reason as children cannot provide informed consent and child porn is sexual exploitation of a minor) without being accused of being a bully or an anti.”

I’d really, really like to know what your friends are calling ‘child porn’. because I have to be honest: when I see the word ‘child porn’ in fandom, the large majority of the time it’s being used to refer to fanworks - fanart or fanfic in particular - which don’t involve real children in any conceivable way.

If your friends are referring to CSEM rather than fanworks that involve only fictional characters being drawn or written about, could you let me know who’s trying to shut them down by calling them ‘antis’ or ‘bullies’? I want to make sure they’re exposed & excised from any communities I interact with - especially because there’s been 4 incidents this year (2020) ALONE of people who claim to be ‘anti-pedophilia’ sharing CSEM in the context of ‘callout posts’.

It’s so unbelievably important that people who are fandom are educating one another on how to handle CSEM material they come across so they don’t (a) contribute to the harm of the minor appearing in the CSEM, (b) don’t unwittingly spread CSEM further, and (c) don’t get ensnared in a justice system that will penalize them inappropriately when they’ve made a genuine error in judgement.

thank you either way!

[betterbemeta]

The weird nazi apologists keep finding my post through witchblr, you folk have got to get your act together– not everyone who reblogs nice crystals and european folklore is your friend.

[freedom-of-fanfic]

for people who are interested in pagan/occult practices: here’s a good article about why there’s such a fascism problem in those spaces and how to fight back.

The Pagan and Occult Fascist Connection and How to Fix It 

[freetofic-replies]

Got this ask just now [tw: racist asshole incoming]

Anonymous said:

you should shut the fuck up about paganism, european paganism belongs to europeans the same way shinto belongs to the japanese, vodun belongs to west africa, and so on. european paganism is ultimately an ancestral cult that revolves around reincarnation. why does that chap your ass so badly bitch? die in a fucking fire

Considering the context, I only have one thing to say:

NOT ALL EUROPEANS ARE WHITE

Now get tf out of here

[user87262893]

Radfem on this site: *posts some meaningful insight into womanhood or patriarchal systems or sex based oppression*

People on this site:

Radfems: so you disagree?

People on this site: …..

Radfems: well….?

People on this site:

[freedom-of-fanfic]

so, uh … this is a problem

if OP is a TERF it’s probably best to assume that any post they make is spreading transphobic TERF ideology & rhetoric (even if you can’t tell for sure yourself)

so how about instead:

DON’T REBLOG TERF CONTENT and ALSO  DON’T ‘STEAL’ TERF CONTENT TO SPREAD IT ON THEIR FUCKING BEHALF EITHER

this is how TERF bullshit gets spread so far and wide on tumblr, dammit

PS ‘meaningful insight into womanhood’ = ‘womanhood is [secondary sex characteristics of females and mystical feminine sisterhood that doesn’t exist]’ DOn’T BELIEVE ANDOR’S TRANSPHOBIA

Keep reading

[feotakahari]

The really weird part is that the OP of this post is a gender abolitionist. If you believe that the concept of womanhood shouldn’t exist at all, then how would you agree with an “insight into womanhood”?

[freetofic-replies]

Ok I’m actually gonna address this really fast before a radfem jumps in with a pile of horseshit

‘Gender abolition’, aka ‘gender critical’, is a radfem dogwhistle term that guides its adherents to transphobia.

In OP’s case, ‘womanhood’ refers to anyone declared female at birth and ONLY ppl declared female at birth (aka erasing trans and non-binary ppl of any kind).

When ‘gender critical’ radfems say things like ‘gender doesn’t exist’ or ‘abolish gender’, they really mean ‘get rid of the concept of ‘gender’ because biological sex* is the only thing that actually matters’.

(*not that biological sex is all that clear-cut, but TERFs don’t let that get in the way.)

[freetofic-replies]

From @queenofplumes , a radfem.

actually, I’m using the actual definition of ‘dog whistle’. From the Oxford Dictionary:

dog whistle: ‘a subtly aimed political message which is intended for, and can only be understood by, a particular group.’

Here, the term ‘gender critical’ has a laymen meaning and a secret, secondary meaning for those ‘in the know’ (ie radfems/radfem sympathizers).

Laymen meaning: analytically critical of the social construction of binary gender.

Radfem meaning: gender doesn’t actually exist: only biological sex does.

I said nothing about white supremacy: that’s all on you. if you think the fact that you have dogwhistle terminology ties you to white supremacy, well … ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[furiosafemale]

“Social construction of binary gender” is still off.

The idea that there is inherently anything about being a man or woman that is outside of our physical bodies or reproductive function (which is what we call gender) is a fallacy. That’s called your personality , and if it cannot be said about men in the west the same as men in the east, its not a man thing, it’s a east vs west thing.

But globally, males oppress females and it’s for the explicit purpose of controlling our reproductive capacity. Gender ideology facilitates that.

If you feel the need to respond to me, please engage with what I have said above and not a straw man that your create in your head of me, please and thank you.

[freetofic-replies]

“Social construction of binary gender” is still off. 

we know binary gender is a social construct, not a biological inevitability, because many societies throughout human history have/had three or more culturally integrated genders. (White Imperialist Christian cultures’ effort to stomp said societies out nonwithstanding.)

The idea that there is inherently anything about being a man or woman that is outside of our physical bodies or reproductive function (which is what we call gender) is a fallacy. That’s called your personality

that’s what we call sex, actually (the dual-peak standard deviation model that indicates the ‘average’ human body’s chromosomal makeup, hormone production levels, and reproductive organs.) (and plenty of ppl have biology that falls outside those ‘average’ characteristics.)

it’s a fallacy to conflate biological sex and gender. A person’s gender is influenced not just by their biological sex; they’re also influenced by the sex assigned them at birth, their physical, emotional, social, and mental development, their personality, their life experience, and the cultural soup that all of this personal development takes place in.

Some people know from an early age that their perception of themselves doesn’t match up with their assigned sex; some people don’t, only realizing it later; some people never feel uncomfortable with their assigned sex. and whatever gender these people identify themselves as - whether they realize they are transgender, and/or nonbinary, or agender, or cis but gender nonconforming, or something else - they deserve respect & acceptance.

and if it cannot be said about men in the west the same as men in the east, its not a man thing, it’s a east vs west thing.

’the east’ is so, SOOOO sosososo loaded with racist connotations. yikes. just. y i k e s

to address the root of this, though …

why not both? 

seriously, though. consider: the definition of ‘embodying manhood’ in one part of the world (let’s call this ‘culture A’) may be different from the definition of ‘embodying manhood’ in another part of the world (’culture B’). therefore cis men from Culture A may behave differently from cis men from Culture B because of different cultural expectations. it’s no less culturally ‘male’ just because it’s different.

But globally, males oppress females and it’s for the explicit purpose of controlling our reproductive capacity.

no doubt, people who are perceived as capable of childbearing* suffer from specific, unique kinds of abuse, and that should not be ignored. But considering centuries - millennia - of social buildup and baggage around gender roles/gender performance, I think the oppression exercised by patriarchal cultures is a little more comprehensive than reproductive roles only. (Toxic masculinity, for instance, does incalculable harm to people of all genders by teaching (perceived) men to severely impair their emotional range & reliance.)

(and that’s even without addressing all the complications created by skin color, ethnicity, queerness, neurodiversity, physical &/or mental disabilities, economic status, etc, which are equally important.)

*not everyone with a uterus is capable of childbearing. not everyone who was born with a uterus still has one, and not everyone who ‘looks like’ they have a uterus has one/ever had one.

Gender ideology facilitates that.

gender exists; it is not an ideology.

addressing that reality is a strength, not a weakness, of modern intersectional feminism.

[furiosafemale]

I feel like you admit that gender is one’s perception of themselves and yet can’t see that this is immeasurable, subjective and culturally inconsistent.

Sex, however, which you agree should not be conflated with gender, is our physical bodies and is the observation of how humans develop and procreate, which aside from a small percentage of individuals who have atypical sexual development and sometimes lifelong medical conditions (who we call intersex, and is not the same as being trans, though understandably there would be overlap), falls into a binary of XX and XY. There is no third chromosome, and the only way to make a new human is to fuse the two gametes formed by healthy human adults, which is directly related to the aforementioned chromosomes. These are observations, and globally consistent for all humans. Unlike gender, which is different everywhere and my entire argument is that gender is everyone’s relationship to these observed realities of our physical bodies.

It’s like you’re not disagreeing me “it’s a little more comprehensive than reproductive roles only”, but then derailing with gender roles and gender performance, which frankly stem from the differences in the sexes in the first place. The fact that some people don’t feel comfortable with these roles and don’t adhere to the standards of how their sex should behave, which is dictated by culture, is what I would argue is being gender non-conforming, but still stems from the foundation of our existence as a sexually dimorphic species.

Radical feminism looks for the root of misogyny, the reason for female oppression and this history of male supremacy -and not this BS of who was just *percieved* as male, because for a long time it was very important to create heirs to inherent your property , which requires your reproductive sex to do so. In a lot of cases, women who adopted a male identity, did so at great personal risk and because it was the only way for them to exercise personal freedom in a world that said they couldn’t do as they wanted as a woman.

Apparently recognizing that there is a difference in western and eastern culture makes me racist… when I’m on the east coast of my own country and can tell you that there’s a difference between here and the west coast.

Gender is about as real as money, it has meaning and power because we all collectively agree that it does. Our experiences with it our very real, however the decisions to enshrine gender (which we agree is people’s personal feelings about themselves) into law in ways that supercedes and overrides the protected class of sex is in my opinion rather dangerous and flawed and opens up vulnerable populations to abuse.

My ideology has led me to the conclusion that reproductive freedom is a human right and should be protected, and that the class of humans that is capable of becoming pregnant, which we refer to as female, has had this right challenged and taken away on multiple levels. Solving this issue would undoubtedly have a trickling effect for all gender non-conforming people as it would include the ability for one to choose whether or not they actually use their reproductive function and not have that questioned.

[freetofic-replies]

To keep it brief: I think that your search for the universal root of misogyny has led you to oversimplify or outright ignore the reality that culture, race, ethnicity, life experience, geography, upbringing, personality, sexual orientation, self-conceptualizaripn, and more ALSO play significant roles in one’s experience of sex- and gender-based oppression (or lack thereof).

Misogyny takes many forms in many different cultures. To try to distill those forms to one universal ‘underlying’ misogyny is fallacious.

Additionally, focusing solely/almost solely on misogyny as the only/primarily significant form of oppression women &/or perceived women experience re-marginalizes & decenters women at intersections of oppression, such as Black women. (Black women - some radfems themselves - have been pointing this out to radfem communities since the 70’s.)

Sometimes you just have to let humanity be complicated. Not doing that does us all a disservice - especially those on more than one axis of oppression.

[user87262893]

Radfem on this site: *posts some meaningful insight into womanhood or patriarchal systems or sex based oppression*

People on this site:

Radfems: so you disagree?

People on this site: …..

Radfems: well….?

People on this site:

[freedom-of-fanfic]

so, uh … this is a problem

if OP is a TERF it’s probably best to assume that any post they make is spreading transphobic TERF ideology & rhetoric (even if you can’t tell for sure yourself)

so how about instead:

DON’T REBLOG TERF CONTENT and ALSO  DON’T ‘STEAL’ TERF CONTENT TO SPREAD IT ON THEIR FUCKING BEHALF EITHER

this is how TERF bullshit gets spread so far and wide on tumblr, dammit

PS ‘meaningful insight into womanhood’ = ‘womanhood is [secondary sex characteristics of females and mystical feminine sisterhood that doesn’t exist]’ DOn’T BELIEVE ANDOR’S TRANSPHOBIA

Keep reading

[feotakahari]

The really weird part is that the OP of this post is a gender abolitionist. If you believe that the concept of womanhood shouldn’t exist at all, then how would you agree with an “insight into womanhood”?

[freetofic-replies]

Ok I’m actually gonna address this really fast before a radfem jumps in with a pile of horseshit

‘Gender abolition’, aka ‘gender critical’, is a radfem dogwhistle term that guides its adherents to transphobia.

In OP’s case, ‘womanhood’ refers to anyone declared female at birth and ONLY ppl declared female at birth (aka erasing trans and non-binary ppl of any kind).

When ‘gender critical’ radfems say things like ‘gender doesn’t exist’ or ‘abolish gender’, they really mean ‘get rid of the concept of ‘gender’ because biological sex* is the only thing that actually matters’.

(*not that biological sex is all that clear-cut, but TERFs don’t let that get in the way.)

[freetofic-replies]

From @queenofplumes , a radfem.

actually, I’m using the actual definition of ‘dog whistle’. From the Oxford Dictionary:

dog whistle: ‘a subtly aimed political message which is intended for, and can only be understood by, a particular group.’

Here, the term ‘gender critical’ has a laymen meaning and a secret, secondary meaning for those ‘in the know’ (ie radfems/radfem sympathizers).

Laymen meaning: analytically critical of the social construction of binary gender.

Radfem meaning: gender doesn’t actually exist: only biological sex does.

I said nothing about white supremacy: that’s all on you. if you think the fact that you have dogwhistle terminology ties you to white supremacy, well … ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[furiosafemale]

“Social construction of binary gender” is still off.

The idea that there is inherently anything about being a man or woman that is outside of our physical bodies or reproductive function (which is what we call gender) is a fallacy. That’s called your personality , and if it cannot be said about men in the west the same as men in the east, its not a man thing, it’s a east vs west thing.

But globally, males oppress females and it’s for the explicit purpose of controlling our reproductive capacity. Gender ideology facilitates that.

If you feel the need to respond to me, please engage with what I have said above and not a straw man that your create in your head of me, please and thank you.

[freetofic-replies]

“Social construction of binary gender” is still off. 

we know binary gender is a social construct, not a biological inevitability, because many societies throughout human history have/had three or more culturally integrated genders. (White Imperialist Christian cultures’ effort to stomp said societies out nonwithstanding.)

The idea that there is inherently anything about being a man or woman that is outside of our physical bodies or reproductive function (which is what we call gender) is a fallacy. That’s called your personality

that’s what we call sex, actually (the dual-peak standard deviation model that indicates the ‘average’ human body’s chromosomal makeup, hormone production levels, and reproductive organs.) (and plenty of ppl have biology that falls outside those ‘average’ characteristics.)

it’s a fallacy to conflate biological sex and gender. A person’s gender is influenced not just by their biological sex; they’re also influenced by the sex assigned them at birth, their physical, emotional, social, and mental development, their personality, their life experience, and the cultural soup that all of this personal development takes place in.

Some people know from an early age that their perception of themselves doesn’t match up with their assigned sex; some people don’t, only realizing it later; some people never feel uncomfortable with their assigned sex. and whatever gender these people identify themselves as - whether they realize they are transgender, and/or nonbinary, or agender, or cis but gender nonconforming, or something else - they deserve respect & acceptance.

and if it cannot be said about men in the west the same as men in the east, its not a man thing, it’s a east vs west thing.

’the east’ is so, SOOOO sosososo loaded with racist connotations. yikes. just. y i k e s

to address the root of this, though ...

why not both? 

seriously, though. consider: the definition of ‘embodying manhood’ in one part of the world (let’s call this ‘culture A’) may be different from the definition of ‘embodying manhood’ in another part of the world (’culture B’). therefore cis men from Culture A may behave differently from cis men from Culture B because of different cultural expectations. it’s no less culturally ‘male’ just because it’s different.

But globally, males oppress females and it’s for the explicit purpose of controlling our reproductive capacity.

no doubt, people who are perceived as capable of childbearing* suffer from specific, unique kinds of abuse, and that should not be ignored. But considering centuries - millennia - of social buildup and baggage around gender roles/gender performance, I think the oppression exercised by patriarchal cultures is a little more comprehensive than reproductive roles only. (Toxic masculinity, for instance, does incalculable harm to people of all genders by teaching (perceived) men to severely impair their emotional range & reliance.)

(and that’s even without addressing all the complications created by skin color, ethnicity, queerness, neurodiversity, physical &/or mental disabilities, economic status, etc, which are equally important.)

*not everyone with a uterus is capable of childbearing. not everyone who was born with a uterus still has one, and not everyone who ‘looks like’ they have a uterus has one/ever had one.

Gender ideology facilitates that.

gender exists; it is not an ideology.

addressing that reality is a strength, not a weakness, of modern intersectional feminism.

[user87262893]

Radfem on this site: *posts some meaningful insight into womanhood or patriarchal systems or sex based oppression*

People on this site:

Radfems: so you disagree?

People on this site: …..

Radfems: well….?

People on this site:

[freedom-of-fanfic]

so, uh … this is a problem

if OP is a TERF it’s probably best to assume that any post they make is spreading transphobic TERF ideology & rhetoric (even if you can’t tell for sure yourself)

so how about instead:

DON’T REBLOG TERF CONTENT and ALSO  DON’T ‘STEAL’ TERF CONTENT TO SPREAD IT ON THEIR FUCKING BEHALF EITHER

this is how TERF bullshit gets spread so far and wide on tumblr, dammit

PS ‘meaningful insight into womanhood’ = ‘womanhood is [secondary sex characteristics of females and mystical feminine sisterhood that doesn’t exist]’ DOn’T BELIEVE ANDOR’S TRANSPHOBIA

Keep reading

[feotakahari]

The really weird part is that the OP of this post is a gender abolitionist. If you believe that the concept of womanhood shouldn’t exist at all, then how would you agree with an “insight into womanhood”?

[freetofic-replies]

Ok I’m actually gonna address this really fast before a radfem jumps in with a pile of horseshit

‘Gender abolition’, aka ‘gender critical’, is a radfem dogwhistle term that guides its adherents to transphobia.

In OP’s case, ‘womanhood’ refers to anyone declared female at birth and ONLY ppl declared female at birth (aka erasing trans and non-binary ppl of any kind).

When ‘gender critical’ radfems say things like ‘gender doesn’t exist’ or ‘abolish gender’, they really mean ‘get rid of the concept of ‘gender’ because biological sex* is the only thing that actually matters’.

(*not that biological sex is all that clear-cut, but TERFs don’t let that get in the way.)

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From @queenofplumes , a radfem.

actually, I’m using the actual definition of ‘dog whistle’. From the Oxford Dictionary:

dog whistle: ‘a subtly aimed political message which is intended for, and can only be understood by, a particular group.’

Here, the term ‘gender critical’ has a laymen meaning and a secret, secondary meaning for those ‘in the know’ (ie radfems/radfem sympathizers).

Laymen meaning: analytically critical of the social construction of binary gender.

Radfem meaning: gender doesn’t actually exist: only biological sex does.

I said nothing about white supremacy: that’s all on you. if you think the fact that you have dogwhistle terminology ties you to white supremacy, well ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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@eloarei

Yes, ‘don’t believe andor’s transphobia’ was an FF12 Ref 💕 (the politics of that game are top-notch)