Ė ą¼ ā¶āļ½”Ė the proship post Ė ą¼ ā¶āļ½”Ė
buckle up. this one's long. it's supposed to be.
I'm a proshipper. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. But because antis love to treat that word like a moral failing and because I believe in actually being able to back up my positions, here is the full, cited, thorough version of why I hold this stanceāand why the arguments against it consistently fall apart under scrutiny.
Read it. Reblog it. Argue with it in good faith or don't engage at all.
what proshipping actually is
Let me start here because antis love to strawman this.
Proshipping is the position that fiction is not reality, that engaging with dark, taboo, or morally complex themes in creative work does not constitute real-world harm, and that people should not be harassed, doxxed, or driven off platforms for the content of their fictional creative output.
That's it. It's a media literacy position. It is notādespite what antis insistāan endorsement of real-world harm, abuse, exploitation, or illegal activity. The conflation of fiction with reality is the entire foundation of anti rhetoric, and it is a foundation that does not hold up when you actually look at the research.
"fiction causes real-world harm"ādoes it?
This is the central claim. If it falls, the rest of the anti argument collapses with it. So let's look at it.
The relationship between media consumption and real-world behavior is one of the most studied questions in social science. And the honest answer, which researchers themselves acknowledge, is: it's complicated, contested, and the effects are far smaller and more conditional than anti rhetoric implies.
A 2007 review in Psychiatric Times by Christopher Ferguson found that claims of scholarly consensus on media violence causing real-world harm are falseāsurveys of researchers who actually study media show that only a minority believe media violence meaningfully contributes to societal violence. The stronger claims (that 10ā30% of societal violence is caused by media) have been described by scholars as significant overstatements, with effect sizes in studies often being small, methodologically contested, and heavily dependent on pre-existing individual risk factors rather than content alone. Ferguson's work also highlights that newer theoretical modelsāSelf-Determination Theory and Mood Management Theoryāsuggest viewers actively select media to meet their own goals, and that behavior is driven by those goals and existing psychological states, not primarily by content.
Even the studies that do find a correlation between media violence and aggression acknowledge the effect size is modestāroughly a 0.20 to 0.30 correlationāand that this is not the same as causation. Correlation of that size, across a population already saturated with violent media, does not translate to "this content made this person do this thing." It reflects a complex web of individual factors, environment, mental health, social support, and pre-existing tendencies in which media is one minor variable among many.
A Psychology Today essay by Jonathan Gottschall cuts to the point well: fifty years of determined searching for clear real-world consequences of fictional violence has not produced the smoking gun anti censorship advocates want. We live in a media environment saturated with violence, dark themes, morally repugnant characters, and taboo contentāand the evidence that this is producing a population of people who act out what they consume is, at best, weak and contested.
The catharsis theoryāthe idea that consuming dark content releases rather than encourages harmful impulsesāhas also been part of this debate for decades. While it hasn't been proven definitively either, the point is that the relationship between fiction and behavior is not the simple one-way causal pipeline antis present it as.
the jaws problemāor, be careful what you blame fiction for
Here is one of the most cited examples in this debate, and I want to be precise about it because the popular narrative is significantly more complicated than it's presented.
The conventional wisdom is that Jaws (1975) caused widespread shark killingsāthat Spielberg's film so terrified the public that fishermen went out and decimated shark populations, and that this represents a clear case of fiction causing real-world harm.
Steven Spielberg himself has expressed regret about this, stating in a 2022 BBC interview that he fears sharks are "mad at him" for what happened to their populations after 1975. Peter Benchley, the author of the source novel, spent the rest of his life in shark conservation and publicly wished he'd never written the book.
That's the emotional narrative. Now here's what the evidence actually says.
Conservation writer and shark researcher Paul Cox, chief executive of the Shark Trust, told The Guardian that blaming shark population decline on Jaws is "giving the film far too much credit." He stated clearly: "The cases of shark population decline are very clearly fisheries overfishing."
The site Shark Files, examining what they call "The Jaws Myth," makes this case in detail. Of approximately 100 million sharks killed annually by human activity, the vast majority are killed by the shark fin trade (at least 73 million deaths driven by economic demand for shark-fin soup, primarily in markets where Jaws has little to no cultural penetration), industrial bycatch from fishing trawlers, and unregulated long-line fishing operations in the Pacificānone of which have any discernible connection to Jaws or public perception of sharks as villains.
The piece also makes an important historical point: fear of sharks did not begin with Jaws. Newspaper archives from the 1950s and before are full of "killer shark" and "monster shark" coverage. The idea that Spielberg created fear of sharks from nothing denies decades of pre-existing sensationalism.
This matters for the proship argument because the Jaws example is often deployed as proof that fiction straightforwardly causes real harm. The actual picture is: the primary drivers of harm were economic and industrial, operating independently of the film's cultural impact. The fish and seafood industry does not kill sharks because people are afraid of them from a movie. It kills them because there is money in it.
When you look at the Jaws case carefully, what you find is a messy overlap of cultural fear, pre-existing attitudes, economic incentives, and industrial practicesāand attributing the majority of the harm to the film requires ignoring the much larger, much more structural causes. This is, incidentally, exactly what happens when antis attribute real-world harm to fiction: they point at the visible, emotionally resonant cultural artifact and ignore the actual drivers.
attraction ā action: the paraphilia research
This is where anti rhetoric does the most damage, and where the research is most unambiguous.
The anti position implies that people who consume or create content depicting taboo sexual themes are either acting out urges, normalizing harm, or on a pipeline toward real offending behavior. This claim is not supported by the evidence.
The DSM-5 itself makes a crucial distinction that anti rhetoric ignores entirely. It separates paraphilia (an atypical sexual interest) from paraphilic disorder (a paraphilia that causes distress or harm). The DSM-5 explicitly states: "A paraphilia is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for having a paraphilic disorder, and a paraphilia by itself does not necessarily justify or require clinical intervention." Having an unusual sexual interest is not the same as having a disorder. Having a disorder is not the same as offending.
A 2023 study by Vander Molen, Ronis, and Benoit published in Sexual Abuse (PMC: 10189825) examined the factors that distinguish individuals who act on paraphilic interests from those who don't. The key finding was that moral disengagementānot the interest itselfāwas the distinguishing factor in those who moved from interest to harmful behavior. People who have unusual attractions and maintain empathy, self-control, and moral reasoning tend not to act on them harmfully. The attraction alone does not predict behavior.
MedicineNet notes plainly: "While most people with paraphilia do not sexually offend, and sexual offending is not a mental illness, people who commit sexual offenses sometimes also have paraphilia." Not all paraphilias lead to harm. Not all offending is driven by paraphilia. The relationship is not the pipeline antis describe.
A 2016 peer-reviewed paper by Cantor and McPhail in Current Sexual Health Reports (published through Johns Hopkins) examined non-offending individuals with pedophilic attractionāpeople who experience attraction to minors but have not offended and do not access illegal material. Their conclusion: this population exists, is substantially larger than recognized, and the conflation of attraction with offending is a "common misperception." The existence of this population directly undermines the idea that having an attraction automatically leads to harm.
A 2021 qualitative study by Jones, Ć Ciardha, and Elliott in Sexual Abuse examined coping strategies among non-offending individuals with pedohebephilic interests using forum posts. What they found was a community of people actively working to remain offense-freeāusing strategies like perspective-taking, avoiding high-risk situations, and building social support. One of the most striking findings: societal messaging that pedophiles will inevitably offend was identified by participants as a destabilizing force. Telling people their attractions make them dangerous does not prevent harmāit may increase it by removing hope of non-offending identity.
This research has direct relevance to the content debate: if having an attraction does not automatically lead to acting on it, then consuming or creating fiction that depicts taboo themes is even further removed from real-world harm than antis claim. The pathway from "person with an unusual sexual interest" to "person who commits an offense" requires multiple intervening factorsāand fiction is not among the primary ones.
The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (2014) also noted that "not every offender's sexually deviant behavior is driven by a paraphilic sexual arousal pattern"āmeaning even among people who do offend, the causal link to paraphilic interest is not straightforward. In an analysis of 113 male sex offenders, only 58% had a paraphilic disorder. Real-world offending has complex, structural, and situational drivers that are not well-explained by pointing at what someone reads or writes.
the harassment is the real harm
I want to be clear about what anti behavior actually produces.
The anti community does not prevent harm. It does not protect children. What it produces is:
Doxxing. Real people having their addresses, workplaces, and identities exposed because of what they write.
Harassment campaigns. People being mass-reported, threatened, and driven off platforms.
Psychological harm to survivors. Many of the people antis target for writing dark fiction are **survivors** who process their experiences through creative work. The idea that survivors writing about their own trauma are "normalizing" harm is one of the most cruel inversions of logic in this entire discourse.
Chilling effects on marginalized creators. The antis' targets are disproportionately queer people, women, and other marginalized creators who have historically used fiction to explore experiences that mainstream culture refuses to depict. Dark fiction and taboo ships have always been spaces for people to work through things they can't talk about directly.
The research is clear that empathy, social support, and open channels for processing difficult attractions and experiences are protective factors against harmful behavior. What antis do is the opposite: they stigmatize, isolate, and punish. If their goal were actually child protection rather than moral posturing, they would engage with the actual research on prevention.
fiction has always done this
Let me close with something that should be obvious but apparently needs saying.
Literature has always explored the worst of human experience. Lolita. Crime and Punishment. American Psycho. The works of Marquis de Sade. Greek tragedy, which is full of incest, infanticide, and divine-mandated atrocity. Shakespeare, who gave us murderers, rapists, and monsters with more interiority and sympathy than the heroes. Horror. Dark romance. Gothic fiction stretching back centuries.
The purpose of fiction has never been to depict only what is morally acceptable. It has been to give human beings a safe space to confront what is notāto process fear, examine darkness, understand the psychology of harm without enacting it, and to feel things that reality won't safely allow.
When antis demand that fiction be scrubbed of dark content, they are not making a new argument. Every generation has had its moral panic about the corrupting influence of stories. None of them have been right. The medium changesānovels, films, video games, fanfictionāand the panic follows, and the evidence for the harm always fails to materialize in the way the panickers claim.
The research does not support the anti position. The history of censorship does not support it. The psychology of creative work does not support it.
Fiction is not reality. Processing is not endorsing. Creating is not becoming.
That's what proshipping means. That's why I hold this stance.
sources referenced in this post:
Ferguson, C. (2015). New Evidence Suggests Media Violence Effects May Be Minimal. Psychiatric Times.
Gottschall, J. (2013). Does Fictional Violence Lead to Real Violence? Psychology Today.
Vander Molen, L., Ronis, S., & Benoit, A. (2023). Paraphilic Interests Versus Behaviors. Sexual Abuse. PMC10189825.
Cantor, J. & McPhail, I. (2016). Non-Offending Pedophiles. Current Sexual Health Reports, 8(3), 121ā128. Johns Hopkins.
Jones, S., Ć Ciardha, C., & Elliott, I. (2021). Identifying the Coping Strategies of Nonoffending Pedophilic and Hebephilic Individuals. Sexual Abuse.
DSM-5. (2013). Paraphilic Disorders. American Psychiatric Association.
Holoyda, B. (2014). DSM-5 and Paraphilic Disorders. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 42(2).
Cox, P. (quoted in The Guardian). Shark Trust.
Shark Files. (2023). The Jaws Myth. thesharkfiles.com
Knowlton, N. & Benchley, W. (2014). Smithsonian Magazine.
Spielberg, S. (2022). BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs interview.
Please let me know if I've misscited anything. It's been years since I've typed of an academic-style post with sources.
