if this is inviting problems or not what you meant, completely feel free to ignore and don't worry about it. i guess i kind of just wanted to explain my perspective (as something who feels like fetish art shouldn't be a totally anything goes thing) bc i feel like a lotta people just kind of leap to being furious abt the subject instead of actually talking about their reasoning.
i do think having being 'an anti' as part of ur identity, or spending any amount of time seeking out and sending people hate, is terminally online behavior. but i do also think that, like any other piece of media or art, fiction and fetish doesn't exist in a vacuum outside of reality and is subject to the author's biases? this is just an example but being someone who's into hypnosis, it's insane seeing how much hypno porn there is that's just 'what if there was a sinister black guy >:0.' i think that kind of stuff, for example, only comes from having. biases or unhealthy beliefs about race. 'it's just a joke bro and that joke is rooted in ideas that im reinforcing' etc etc. even if you try very hard, it will affect how you treat people of color in real life. and, in a specific online group or community or something for example, having anything goes rules about really racist porn is going to push out people of color who would not like to always be seeing really racist porn. inaction is also a kind of action.
there's no such thing as thought crime but once you post something publically, that's not a thought anymore. i'm not gonna hunt down every piece of porn that's bigoted and write a complaint about each one because that's an insane waste of time. but i don't think it would be puritanical to have some things subject to context-based moderation
oh anon you silly salmon you, you really DID want my full opinion didnt you!!! okay! here. this got long so its under the cut, heres the tl;dr but if you want more nuance, i have a ton of shit to say
tl;dr- context aware moderation is still going to be subject to personal bias, fanfics do not reach a wide enough audience to have a genuine measurable effect on the way we treat people, i think raceplay is terrible but you physically cannot stop people from posting shitt you dont like, and i still think that being an anti makes you a loser, because YOU ARE LOSING OUT ON HAVING A FUN FANDOM EXPERIENCE because you are TOO BUSY WORRYING ABOUT WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING AND 'KEEPING OTHERS SAFE FROM DISCOMFORT' TO ACTUALLY MEANINGFULLY ENJOY YOURSELF AND YOU ARE PROBABLY MISERABLE BECAUSE YOU KEEP EXPOSING YOURSELF TO SHIT THAT MAKES YOU UNCOMFORTABLE. GET A BLOCK LIST..
okay! I think thats a fair point, and heres the thing. you can critique and raise concerns about someone's personal biases and views and how that can show in their work, and thats a very fair point! and for that i ask you.
where is the exact line in the sand where it stops being okay. because that line is different to EVERYONE. Context based moderation can be helpful and useful, but even if it IS context based, the person moderating will always be a PERSON who will bring their OWN BIASES when moderating.
lets use raceplay/the sinister black guy in hypnosis as an example. We have a team of mods on lets say AO3, and they personally have to read through absolutely every single work that gets posted to make sure its a 'good and clean and safe fic'. moderator number 1 reads a fic where they personally feel that black character A is being used in that tropish way that fetishizes their blackness, and flags it as 'problematic, do not post'. Moderator number 2 reads the same fic and doesnt see anything wrong with it, and flags it as 'safe kinky fun, post'.
and now you might say, oh! then put it up to a vote between a bunch of them. Disregarding how impractical it would be to run a website like that, what happens when everyone on the team unanimously says 'this fanfic is safe and fine for human consumption.' and then you read it and you go 'oh my god this is so racist how did this get by the moderators!!!' you will never be perfectly able to please everyone who sees that fic unless there is no black character in it to be interpreted as racist or not racist, which loops back around to being racist because the only way to 'win' the discourse war is not to play, or, more likely, not to try to offer deeper richer characters with marginalized identities for fear of getting it wrong.
moderation methods aside, i want to touch on your assertion about fiction affecting reality. it absolutely does, but not in the way that you are asserting. we have to remember we are talking about FANFICTION here, not mass media videogames or movies or books, we are talking about NICHE FANDOM MADE MEDIA, right? a racist caricature is extremely harmful and reinforces deep systemic biases that can do genuine damage to whole subsections and communities of people! but it only has that power if there are eyes on it. a racist fic on ao3 or a racist piece of art on tumblr only has as much power as the attention you give it, and if your goal in moderating raceplay off of a site is what it should be, which is making a safe and comfortable place in the fandom for people of colour, grabbing a screenshot of a horrible racist fic and going 'GUYS OH MY GOD OH MY GOD THIS FIC IS RACIST LOOK OH GOD IM GONNA BE SICK!' is only shoving it in their faces more, and putting a spotlight on it only invites trolls out of the woodwork to make more horrible shit for more malicious reasons, and ergo MAKES THE FANDOM LESS SAFE AND FUN FOR THEM. I AM CERTAIN THEY ARE WELL AWARE ABOUT THE EXISTANCE OF RACEPLAY, HAVE YOU CONSIDERED MAYBE FOR FIVE MINUTES THEY WANTED TO ENJOY MEDIA WITHOUT HAVING TO WORRY ABOUT THAT????
i don't like, condone, or think raceplay is okay, but ive been on the internet long enough to know that there is LITERALLY NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO KEEP PEOPLE FROM POSTING DISTASTEFUL SHIT. you can howl and beg and kick and cry and debate and callout and bully all you want. they will keep posting it. some of them will post it even louder and harder just to spite you. if someone came to you and went 'can you please not post pictures of your cat on your blog for posting pictures of your cat' youd probably post more pictures of your cat because youd think theyre clearly an idiot for coming to the place where you show pictures of your cat and asking you to stop. even with the most harmful kinks, the people that have them think that its perfectly fine and fun and dandy, and no carefully thought out rhetoric is going to change that. all you can do is ignore it, block the tags, block the writers, block whatever you need to to make the fandom fun for you, that is how you keep from being made upset!!!!
i just want you to consider if anti-ism is doing more good than it is harm. because ill tell you anon. from my perspective? its making fandom a whole lot less fun. people's own opinions will effect what they see as 'factually problematic', thats how human brains work. in your mind, anti-ism is a noble pursuit to make fandom safer for others. but thats the exact same thing going through the mind of some 15 year old purposely commenting on rapefics thinking theyre doing anything except making themselves uncomfortable for the sake of 'doing what's right'. and i KNOW THIS BECAUSE I WAS ONE OF YOU!!!!! i spent YEARs of my life agonizing over right and wrong and letting my moral ocd run rampant thinking i was being a good and diligent tumblrite for 'keeping the freaks away'. and you know what that did? it made me TERRIFIED TO TALK TO PEOPLE WHO WERE DIFFERENT THAN ME FOR FEAR OF GETTING IT WRONG. YOU CANNOT LIVE YOUR LIFE WEIGHING IF YOUR ACTIONS ONLINE OR IN FANDOM ARE GOOD OR BAD OR YOU WILL GET ABSOLUTELY FUCK ALL DONE AND MAKE EVERYONE AROUND YOU UNCOMFORTABLE. you NEED to focus on making the fandom safe for YOU, because the internet is not something you can ever have perfect control over. im asking you to focus on making your OWN experience peaceful, and encourage others to do the same. if literally everyone in a fandom did that, there would be less of a chance that a 'problematic' fic ever sees the light of day or makes anyone uncomfortable, because then nobody would be looking for it and putting a spotlight on it to make a fuss of it.
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