#korrasrsly

[korrasera]

I don't support gender abolition because it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of gender and identity. Not only is it not a goal that can be achieved, it's also one that stands in direct opposition to self-determination and gender liberation.

You cannot achieve gender liberation by getting everyone to express the same idea about gender.

[korrasera]

As someone who self harmed to cope, it was incredibly important to me that my family and counselors did, in fact, police my coping mechanisms. When they found out they helped me find better less destructive ways to cope, just like the survivors who retraumatise themselves should. As for fetishization, the misogyny argument willfully ignores how many homophobic stories about mlm are written by non mlm. Mlm asking fandom not to carelessly use them like that should not be controversial.

The fact that you gained a benefit from someone else policing your actions still doesn’t justify trying to control the actions of others.

Especially when we’re not talking about individuals but entire groups of people. Especially when we’re talking about coping mechanisms but this policing really gets applied to everything from ships people don’t like to writing LGBTQ+ fiction they don’t like.

Please don’t pretend that this is for the benefit of others. It’s just another way to control people because people that get swept up in moral panics feel like they need to control the actions of others in order to feel in control of their own lives.

And no, the misogyny argument doesn’t ignore anything homophobic in fandom. In fact, the way that it characterizes women who write stories that are about mlm and how these arguments inevitably come back to focus on just being about mlm fiction, claiming that it’s fetishizing and homophobic, just highlights that misogyny.

There’s no actual engagement here, there’s no actual analysis, it’s just the words homophobia and fetishisize being brought out to use them as weapons.

The entire concept of fujoshi as a term of scorn and derision is the result of antis in the US lying about the nature of such fanwork specifically in order to cow and intimidate women who engage in it.

EDIT: Fujoshi isn’t a term that was coined by antis. It comes from Japanese fan culture and was a reclaimed term that was originally coined to shame women but was later adopted by and reclaimed by those women. Fujoshi covers a segment of Japanese fandom that’s predominantly female and LGBTQ+. The way that antis use it comes from campaigns to use it like a slur that originated on 4chan, which should tell you something about the quality of argument being offered by antis when they happily use terms given to us by 4chan harassment campaigns.

This isn’t difficult to see, we’re talking about a very well known trend here.

[korrasera]

anti shippers are super dangerous. I've seen many adult and minor antis encourage other minors to get anti map blogs and go out searching to report real pedophiles to report and engage in discourse with, and tell them to get involved with talking about adult sex lives in gruesome ways for kink discourse, and adult antis linking "abuse" porn to minors to "laugh about". I am down right horrified as a csa survivor cause it sets off EVERY red flag for me.

Yeah, I don’t really think they understand that, in building the hierarchical social structure that they need to feel safe, they’re actually encouraging children to go see out content that they shouldn’t be.

It’s a really weird kind of indoctrination because it’s basically setting the stage for those kids to be groomed by predators. Instead of helping them learn, I don’t know, actual ethics and reasoning? The ability to recognize when someone is trying to manipulate or mislead them? By teaching younger antis to embrace bigotry and groupthink, they’re creating a community for young people that actively makes it harder for young people to recognize danger.

I place a high value on critical thinking skills and it’s one of the reasons I spend most of my effort on debunking shitty ideas, even if I’ve been slacking off on that for the last couple of weeks. I believe that even someone new to a topic is better armed if they know the kinds of strategies people will use to mislead them. I want people to question things. I want them to be skeptical of what they’re told and to be able to ask questions and investigate evidence.

So yeah, there’s a reason they’re pretty high on my shit list and it’s because of the danger they present to children.

That still gets to me. It’s totally amazing how they claim to be trying to protect children but actively make things more dangerous for them. What. The fuck.

[korrasera]

Different anon here re Lolita: I agree with you entirely that fiction which frames terrible things AS terrible is blameless. I've just been meaning to ask: is that the only kind that you're defending? I'm trying to get an honest handle on this 'anti' conversation. While I agree that fiction merely mirrors reality, I also think that a sympathetic/romanticized Lolita can reward and reinforce in that mirroring. The problem starts in reality, but the effect of rewarding that is not negligible?

The problem isn't that things that portray something as terrible are blameless, it's that the terrible/not terrible axis don't cross over with the blame/blameless axis here. And there is no rewarding effect.

When I was young I got into playing DnD and everything I read about it was that it was going to corrupt me. At the time I was still trying to be a practicing non-denominational Christian, and my tiny repressed heart was dead set on loving god and doing right. The problem is, I was also a really defiant child, so I did not take very well to being indoctrinated to believe something because an authority figure told me to do so. I needed proof. I needed argument.

This was at the tail end of the Satanic Panic, so I found countless examples of Christian literature that was meant to educate me about the perils of Dungeons and Dragons and roleplaying in general. I read everything I could and I even watched the film Mazes and Monsters, which is kinda exemplary of the sort of story that was always mentioned around that time. If it wasn't corrupting you spiritually then it was making you manifest some sort of mental illness you might secretly have and that was evil!

Only problem is, I was playing DnD every week getting experimental data on the slow corruption of myself and my friends as we pretended to be adventurers that beat up monsters for treasure. Everything that had been told to me was complete bullshit peddled by people who believed that fiction dictated reality and that if I pretended to be a wizard then I would think myself a wizard and I would rebel against god. I even had a friend, also a Christian, explain to me that the only biblical argument that had ever held any sway with him was essentially the same, the adages about how if you think about witchcraft then you practice witchcraft, if you look at a man's wife with lust then you've already committed adultery, etc.

I then later recognized the same pattern when I read 1984 in school and realized that George Orwell's idea of thoughtcrime was the same sort of control and manipulation I'd been subjected to from religious culture.

There is no such thing as thoughtcrime. Thoughtcrime is an idea created by people who want to control how you think. They do this by creating an environment where you cannot think certain thoughts without being exposed to fear, guilt, and shame, and because of this they exert control over you, and by extension, themselves. Because the only thing that drives them to require this conformity from you is their own fears. They need something to blame that fear on and this is what they choose.

It's not a shortcut for operant conditioning, it doesn't act as punishment or reinforcement. Fiction that's terrible to one person will be not terrible to another person, talking purely in terms of what you would find disgusting, and in neither case would it actually modify the person in question.

So, basically, fiction doesn't reward you. It doesn't reinforce that behavior. It lets you hold up a mirror so you can see yourself better. I don’t say mirroring to suggest that it’s encouraging you to behave in a certain way, I say that it’s a mirror in a psychological sense.It helps you see the corners and curves of your own sense of self.

Do you feel fear but also excitement when the hero is in trouble but recovers their vigor? Do you sweat a little when someone is challenged because they’re the kind of person that lies to everyone? Do you weep when you realize that you’re seeing yourself in the grieving parent, mourning for a lost child?

Do you get nervous every time you see a character pretend they know what they’re doing or talking because you realize that we all tend to talk out our asses from time to time and you don’t want to do that anymore?

A mirror.

This conversation has happened throughout history. You know what we called it before we called it anti-shipper harassment campaigns? We have a really simple term for it.

Moral panic.

People doing stupid things that hurt people while using morality as their defense against criticism. It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now.

[korrasera]

Exclusionism: A Refresher

In case anyone needs a reminder of my position:

Exclusionists are authoritarian bigots who attack vulnerable members of the LGBTQ+ community out of their collective sense of fear of those that are different from them.

When exclusionists argue that asexual people and aromantic people aren’t part of the LGBTQ+ community, they’re either completely ignorant or they are lying intentionally.

Asexual and aromantic people have been part of the LGBTQ+ community going back into at least the 60s and 70s.

Exclusionism is an authoritarian ideology. Exclusionists organize themselves around their in-group of fellow exclusionists and they attack the out-group they’ve identified, asexual and aromantic people.

Prior to the surge of anti-ace/aro bigotry, exclusionists attacked trans people by arguing that being different because of gender wasn’t the same as being different because of sexuality, so they called us invaders and tried to campaign (alongside TERFs, mind you) to push trans people out of the community.

Prior to the surge of anti-ace/aro bigotry, exclusionists attacked bisexual people by arguing that bisexual people are just straight people in a phase or with a fetish, so they called us invaders and tried to campaign to push bisexual people out of the community. 

Exclusionism is built on rape apologism. They argue that any and all sexual assault faced by asexual and aromantic people, who do face some of the higher rates of assault of any group in the LGBTQ+ community, is actually misplaced homophobia. They erase the experiences of survivors in the asexual and aromantic community and act as rape apologists when doing so.

Yes, this put exclusionists on the same spectrum of authoritarian ideologies that already contains TERFs, truscum, US right-wing conservatives, Christian dominionists, evangelical Christians, and yes, even nazis.

And as always, my final advice for anyone who doesn’t want to confront these facts and feels the need to defend exclusionism to me:

Deal with it.

[korrasera]

Two Points About the Anti Debate

One

Fiction is not very good at spreading ideas and as I’ve pointed out before it’s basically completely useless at training behavior. There’s a reason that when we spread around ideas we generally call it things like “non-fiction”, and “reporting”, and “scientific research”.

Our minds recognize that something is fictional and we have to work really hard to suspend that disbelief by creating internally consistent worlds that can trick us into feeling like we’re there. It just doesn’t have the punch to convince us to internalize an idea on its own, because it’s too busy trying to build the illusion that allows us to use it as entertainment.

And in the end, we still know it’s fake, even if we’re enjoying it. That means it has no real utility when it comes to teaching you behavior because your brain isn’t trying to accept it as an example of something real that you should actually mimic.

Actually, that last part might be a good way to show how fiction tends to evoke emotions rather than invoke them. Evocation is the idea that you are drawing something out of something else, bringing it to the surface. So a good piece of fiction can help you process your emotions by drawing them out. But it can’t really put those emotions into you.

And as a case in point, it’s a thing that narcissists can have a hard time connecting with stories that rely on evoking emotions about the social connections between people. Since they don’t see other people as fully human, they can’t empathize and so have none of the emotions that the film is trying to draw out of them.

But that’s also beside my point. What I’m saying is that you can’t watch a martial arts film and learn how to be a martial artist. Playing a FPS video game can’t turn you into a sniper. Fiction just doesn’t do a good job of indoctrinating people to any kind of behavior, it just doesn’t do that.

Two

I’ve already pointed out that the anti argument is ultimately about thoughtcrime. They don’t want people to be able to write (think) or draw (think) or talk about (think) thoughts that they see as being impure or unacceptable.

Which means that the real problem is that antis feel entitled to control the autonomy of another person. To them, it’s acceptable to force someone else to adopt their own attitudes about what is pure and what is impure. This denies someone the ability to make those assessments themselves and thus requires a fanwork creator to obey the norm that antis are trying to establish.

It’s never been about protecting children. The arguments are never just about the stuff find people squicky, or you wouldn’t see antis attacking gay ships just for being gay. It’s exactly what they mean when they talk about fetishizing, because there’s no way to invoke pedophilia to describe mlm fiction that features adults, written by adults, for adults, so they need to find another scare word to use.

Older generations that campaigned in the same way did the same thing. Swap out the targets but the goal remains the same.

You can’t let children see positive depictions of gay men or lesbians because it will normalize homosexuality.

You can’t show people positive depictions of interracial couples because it will normalize interracial relationships.

You can’t show people positive depictions of religions other than Christianity because it will normalize devil worship.

The important point is always the same thing: You must not let people think thoughts we do not want them to think. They cannot make these decisions for themselves and will be led astray. Therefore we must make these decisions for them and enforce our will over theirs.

I don’t rest my case, but I’m sure you get the point.

[korrasera]

Thoughtcrime: An Example

I received a message from anna-of-course this morning, prior to being blocked by them for discussing the ethics of their recent behavior.

In my post breaking down the problems with anna-of-course's issues with WWP, I speculated that the problem came down to anna-of-course reacting to discussions about WWP in a way that drove them to act as a gatekeeper and a bully, basically. (source)

Here's the message I received in response to that post:

I think this means I was correct in my assessment and that this situation was motivated by anna-of-course having a strong emotional reaction to the discussion surrounding WWP.

The ethical problem here is that having an emotional reaction to a topic that makes you uncomfortable is still no excuse for behaving in a way that's unethical.

If I have a strong emotional reaction to science fiction, to the point where it makes me extremely uncomfortable to learn that someone likes science fiction, attacking that person and engaging in call outs against that person for something that has nothing to do with me is unethical. And yet people can have a strong enough emotional reaction to things that bother them that they will behave in this way.

And as examples go, science fiction might sound like it's innocuous and doesn't hit the same buttons. But that's the thing about emotional reactions, they don't actually need to be rooted in something that is commonly seen as disgusting or deviant.

Off the top of my head on why one could react to scifi like this, for one thing, there's a lot of really racist and sexist science fiction. For another, some people in the US are raised in communities that punish intellectualism or an interest in fantasy and science fiction.

I picked science fiction because a) I wanted a random but neutral and easy to discuss example and b) being a fan of science fiction is something internal to the individual and has no bearing on anyone else, just like the topic I'm skirting around.

This is an example of someone letting their emotional reaction to a topic drive them to engage in call out culture and bullying. That's not healthy and you shouldn't do it, but more importantly you should learn to recognize it so you can both avoid doing it yourself an encourage people around you to not do it either.

This is one of the reasons that thoughtcrime is abhorrent. By arguing that people shouldn’t be allowed to think certain thoughts, people justify engaging in unethical behavior in order to try to punish people who think those thoughts. In this case it was someone who was happy to repeat lies without debunking them, because those lies would hurt someone that they thought was engaging in thoughtcrime.

Don’t be like antis. Do better.

[korrasera]

If I sound angry about authoritarian beliefs, it's because I am. I've been taken in by them before and I have formed my opinions about authoritarianism after trying to learn why I'd would ever agree with it. I have very personal reasons for not liking this stuff.

So here's an example.

Being taught to be afraid so that you can hate people is antithetical to my nature because I have internalized a set of beliefs cobbled together from comic books and fairy tales in order to keep myself alive. Beliefs like how we should try to help everyone and how people are precious and how there need not be conflict between people even if everyone we don't all need to be friends.

I used to have nightmares when I was a girl. Some films really scared me, films like Ghostbusters or Gremlins. And sometimes, combined with a brain that was rapidly learning how to disassociate to deal with emotional trauma, I would have really bad nightmares about the things I saw on TV. So I started making friends with them. I would daydream about myself and Gizmo being able to convince Stripe to stop hurting people and he'd see the truth of what we said and he'd join us and we'd go off and do something heroic. When I woke up screaming about Slimer one night, I did the same thing. We made friends and went off to fight other fights and save other people.

So waking up one day to realize I'd been treating someone like shit or being hateful because I was afraid? It was a little like realizing I was one of those monsters from my childhood nightmares, only I was real.

It almost happened to me again after I finally came out to myself as transgender. I almost wound up being a truscum.

As I was slowly constructing my own views of gender, cataloguing all of the information I was pouring through with an eight hour a day crash course on what being trans meant, I noticed there were people who were using really odd (to me) pronouns. People who were saying they didn't feel like I did. And instead of trying to understand why they'd say that, my brain immediately lept to the idea that they were being trendy.

You see, I was afflicted. I was the one in pain, the one in real pain! I was suffering. And here someone else was going to come along and claim to be like me, to elicit sympathy from other people like me, but they were doing it to feel more popular? Talk about offense. I had gotten to the point where I was really building up to this argument that you could appropriate trans people's identities, just like the way that porn had exploited us for our bodies.

But then I started paying attention. I read blogs where happy trans people used pronouns I didn't get and went through experiences I didn't have, but still had the same big questions to ask themselves about what being trans meant about who they were. So yeah, someone doesn't have dysphoria, but this part of their biography where being trans just made everything click? I got that. When I saw someone write a short description of why they used a set of nounself pronouns I'd never heard of before, I saw a person talking about the complexity of expressing themselves after a lifetime of being told they didn't exist.

My opinion slid to 'some transtrenders might suck but there are also plenty of young (chronological and figurative) trans people in that community' really quickly, until any attempt to hold onto the 'trendy' aspect just faded away. And no matter how I looked at it, I came back to the same basic idea, every single time:

They're transgender people and the only reason they get called transtrenders or tucutes is so people who are ignorant and afraid can sell us on the idea that they're acceptable targets. It's not the young trans people that are the problem, it's the fear and ignorance of transmedicalists that's the problem.

So yeah. That's my story about how I almost wound up becoming a truscum.

It sucked to realize I was letting fear turn me into a monster. I got better.