Shipping is a weird hobby with a long and interesting history. It is tempting to associate shipping with fandom, but I think it's more useful to think of it as a parallel to a separate but equally degenerate hobby: romance novels. Fandom has become mainstream because white middle-aged men are nerds now. Shipping has grown with fandom, but shipping is not mainstream and never will be.
Both shipping and romance novels were always and remain primarily a venue for straight adult women to express themselves. Both hobbies have similar problems with intersectionality, especially racism and homophobia. Both hobbies have important and complicated roles in queer culture, especially self-discovery and community-forming. (I really do think there are more straight people than queers up in here, though.) Both are mostly vanilla, but have always been and will always be kinky, too. You really can't talk about this topic without talking about kink. Both hobbies are mocked more than they are celebrated.
Anti-shipping is a, uh, phenomenon with a sad and short history. In less than ten years, radfems and conservatives have unbalanced the moral compasses of a ton of young nerds with their ahistorical, anti-kink nonsense. This trend of harassing real people over moralistic misunderstandings of fiction is recent and dangerous, and it's spread directly to "no kink at Pride" discourse and the harassment of indie creators. The useful parallel here is with Gamergate, whose participants also convinced themselves they were the ethical ones.
To an outsider, of course the anti-shippers look like the normal ones. Shipping is a weird thing to do. It's not exactly a noble, righteous hobby, like knitting hats for orphans -- and the anti-shippers very much want to be noble and righteous. And as I said, shipping has led to racism and other serious problems in its long history. But like any hobby, shipping has brought people together and been a fun and fulfilling activity. It has helped a lot of people express themselves, grow, and even come out of the closet.
There are elements of shipping that make me frustrated, upset, and even disgusted. But I have far more serious ethical objections to a lot of other weird, niche hobbies, like big-game hunting and cryptocurrency, and mainstream hobbies too, like golf and football. True crime is a way bigger part of our society (and economy), and in my opinion, more exploitative and unethical than any fanfic or fanart understood to be fictional. Often far more tasteless, too.
I know it's easy to be scared of kinky weirdos, but I truly don't believe shipping is particularly harmful. The rise of purity culture is.
