What was I trying to accomplish with my anonymous Tumblr?
This article has been out for over a year, but I just heard of it via a youtube video by Princess Weekes (who I highly recommend you check out if you enjoy media analysis from someone who is clearly well-versed in fandom without feeling the need to establish themselves as some condescending authority studying us like creatures in a zoo, unlike some youtubers who post about fandom).
If you've been on tumblr for as long as I have (10+ years), you probably vividly remember the heyday of yourfaveisproblematic, and how that blog's popularity feels even today like one of the major catalysts for a lot of the purity policing on tumblr. In this article, the author of that blog--who was a teenager when it was active--talks about what motivated them at the time, how they feel about the blog now as an adult, how they see similar impulses being acted out across the internet today, and why they have never taken the blog down.
I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but here are a few key lines that really stuck out to me:
"In the years since, I’ve looked back on my blog with shame and regret — about my pettiness, my motivating rage, my hard-and-fast assumptions that people were either good or bad."
"I just wanted to see someone face consequences; no one who’d hurt me ever had."
"There’s something almost quaint about it all now: teenage me, teaching myself about social justice on Tumblr while also posturing as an authority on that very subject, thinking I was making a difference while engaging in a bit of schadenfreude."
"Looking back, I was more of a cop than a social justice warrior, as people on Tumblr had come to think of me."
These quotes remind me vividly of my own fall down the purity police pipeline, and my struggle to claw my way back out. Looking back, it's so easy to see how my pain and helplessness fueled a ruthlessness in my approach to social justice that was less about actually helping anyone and more about feeling like I wasn't so powerless.
Thinking of the friends I had at the time, many of whom I no longer associate with for related reasons, we were all traumatized or marginalized teenagers and twenty-somethings, newly awakened to the idea that the treatment we'd suffered for most of our lives was not in fact our fault and was due to systemic injustice and culturally accepted cruelty.
But we weren't healed enough, or distanced enough ourselves from the power structures causing or enabling that suffering, to think beyond wanting to flip the hierarchy. In a very real way, we weren't ready for the nuance required to give people grace and the opportunity to learn and grow. Despite having needed, and frankly still needing, those things ourselves.
I think we can learn a lot from Your Fave Is Problematic about the motivations and emotions behind purity culture, black and white thinking, and why neither is actually productive in reducing harm, easing suffering, or creating a kinder and more equitable world. And maybe, if we learn to recognize those impulses in ourselves, we can unpack them before they lead us to cause harm in the name of making ourselves feel less powerless.
