Fandoms, proshippers, antis, censorship - a rant
what makes me angry about vocal antis is majorly the fact that they’re fighting against the wrong people and the wrong cause. I understand feeling disgusted and distrusting of proshippers and not liking certain fan works but these are not things and people that actually cause widespread harm.
I don’t think all antis are actually harassing people. I know that proshippers aren’t all saints. This isn’t even about that really, I’m talking about people most of us have minimised as just being “stupid kids”
And I know this discourse mostly happens online, but many of these “stupid kids” grow into adults, and some of these past “stupid kids” are now adults who have the power to bring that censorship or are going to be in power to cause unwanted change
For now it’s just a lot of hot air being made public, I realize that. I guess I just wanted to make a post about the future
I want to show an example of me previously saying “antis are fighting against the wrong people and cause” with this screenshots. They obviously don’t realize or understand what they’re posting, and compare kinky fantasies wrongly with things like racism or hate speech.
They think since both causes them to feel uncomfortable, it causes harm
However, sex positive psychologists agree that kinky fantasies about fake people and things that aren’t real, even if they’re gross, they don’t usually cause harm
Emotions, as valid as they are, they’re also not causing harm
But when someone engages with, as an example, underage fics and feels more and more tempted to do something inappropriate with someone who is under aged, then that’s obviously not a kink
it’s not just egregious to compare kinks with real world harm, it’s important to tell the difference for safety reasons too. After all, an abuser can just pretend to be against proshippers instead and this is something that happened
And these people - they don’t understand and don’t want to understand the difference. They’re anti-kink and think anything connected to sex or sexuality is shameful - which is a direct result of not just the reappearance of religious purity culture but also the results of fandom becoming mainstream
But fandoms are just too weird and too diverse to be mainstream. This resulted in more and more people not understanding that fanworks are posted for free, because someone wanted to, or because someone wanted to share their passion, not because they want people to engage with easily digestible content that’s made for clicks or that sells
Engagement is, of course, encouraged - but vocal antis aren’t “engaging”, they’re hating. It’s hate that binds them together
And so they will twist the meanings of words or twist what is actually happening IN fandoms to spread a moral panic. They often exaggerate and lie so that more people fall for their scheme
and unfortunately - it often works.
Victims who don’t know better end up believing that yeah, just finding someone’s fetish art accidentally or intentionally is grooming, purposely interacting with a correctly tagged piece of media they know can be triggering is grooming, it’s no longer the actions or behavior of a person who intentionally targets a child or otherwise vulnerable person to desensitize them to sex so they don’t realize they’re in a very inappropriate relationship
Historically and currently, censoring or banning “pedophilia” or “pedophiles” or cracking down on “abusers” has never actually benefitted anyone. Once we ban and censor any of it, it’ll be harder to even just talk about because we aren’t allowed to, harder to educate about because it’s forbidden and harder to go after because it gets harder to spot.
SESTA and FOSTA aimed to protect sex workers - but it resulted in most adult oriented websites having to cease operations, sex worker exploitation harder to combat and sex workers were more and more pushed into the shadows
the NCMEC looses its funding and was forced to take down their guides to recognize and stop child trafficking because it mentioned trans victims.
The porn ban on tumblr aimed to protect children by removing child sexual abuse material - and it resulted in queer blogs getting purged instead, trans people not being able to post their post surgery pictures, discussions of safe sex, women’s sexual health and STDs were purged, sex work was banned, porn bots were not banned, white pride was promoted, violence was promoted, and actual pedophiles were and pedophilia was, and, to an extend, still is promoted
When lgbtq-phobia started to rise in the US around the early 2020’s, republicans also purged “pornographic” books - which are written by, for or about POC, are about sexual health and education, are about accepting oneself or simply show queer relationships as normal.
And all of these things are still happening today. Censorship is a bomb that goes off - there’s no stopping it. Yet what vocal antis promote is the same authoritian regime that decides what is and isn’t harmful - and this despite claiming they’re not those kind of people. All because they’re uncomfortable that there are people who are unbothered about the ships people like unless they cause real world harm
The real world harms I’ve mentioned before can all be prevented with education - and this is something vocal antis aren’t interested in because it makes them uncomfortable, because it’s propaganda, because it nornalizes ___ and they argue in the same or similar ways as the current fascist regime in the US because that’s the environment they grew up in, this is the new normal, other people who raise alarm are just talking too much, they never want to go past their “factory settings”.
And no, I’m not calling them fascists, they’re likely also victims of being influenced by the wrong crowd - and also because they don’t know better. Some of them do grow out of this immature behavior eventually.
But it’s high time to finally end this discourse and fight against what’s really causing harm:
That is people with power, that is censorship, that is fascism, that’s people who get away with crimes - but not the tools they use to carry out their crimes.
It’s okay to feel disgusted at the end of the day. It’s okay to criticize. It’s okay to say “I don’t want proshippers to interact with me”. That’s not censorship either.
But criticism is not posting lies about people you don’t like, harassment is more than just unwanted interaction, it’s also the call to “make sure proshippers feel afraid and ashamed again” or to rally your friends into “mass reporting that bitch” and they’re someone who didn’t even know you existed in the first place
