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#my general stance re: responding to antis is 'can i use this as an opportunity to inform and help others'
not-poignant · 2 years
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I really want to write my own story but I am so afraid of antis. Todays people are horrible and they compare fiction with reality.... I am really scared they would find my story and start to send me death threats since my story is really REALLY dark. What should an author do if this happens? I know ignorance is a bliss but I don't think that I would be able to ignore it for so long. Sorry for my ask and thank you, Pia.
Hi anon,
There's a few things going on here.
Firstly, have you noticed that you speak in some absolutes that just aren't true? Saying 'Today's people are horrible' is just...not true. While it's definitely true that antis exist, the vast majority - the absolute vast majority - of readers and folks who interact with stories out there, aren't antis, and don't think fiction is the same as reality.
If you're telling yourself things like 'today's people are horrible' you're not giving yourself a chance to tell yourself things like 'there will be people who want to read this' and 'most people just won't read this if they don't feel like it' and 'most people do understand the difference between fiction and reality.' It's really hard to encourage yourself to share what you're writing if you imagine the world to be more falsely mean-spirited than it is.
Secondly, I don't know why your fic is so dark (i.e. I don't know if it's like a 'regular' amount of dark that's found in dark fics on AO3), there are ways to mitigate the anti response. Write under an account name that's not associated with any of your social media accounts. Make a separate email address and a separate account, and then make sure you set your fic to comment moderation.
You may still get flak from antis, but no one else will see it, and you aren't in any other way contactable on your main platforms, and you can just focus on approving the comments that support the fic. Most antis starve without internet oxygen, i.e. they go elsewhere after a while of trying to spew invective if no one else can see it. (Antis try to start shit with me via anon way more often than anyone truly knows, but once their asks get immediately deleted (and they get blocked), they almost always vanish after the first ask).
You can write it and not publish it, or choose to wait until AO3 introduces the ability to block users (this is eventually coming) so that you can block anyone who harasses you.
If you do get death threats, and you're really worried about it, then I can't tell you to 'write the fic anyway.' Antis have definitely stopped some people from writing fic, and caused others to sadly delete their fics (please always orphan, folks!), and I can't like, tell you to not be affected by things like that since obviously people are, because targeted bullying is harmful and it sucks. I don't know what kind of person you are, or whether you'd need professional or friend support to get through that, etc.
I'm pretty much teflon when it comes to antis, because I know the science re: fiction and media and reality (esp. when it comes to violence and sexualised violence). But not everyone is the same. And if you're someone who really believes that all of today's people are horrible, or doesn't believe that people will find your fic who like it (and honestly with some of the most extreme fics I've stumbled across, there are still people who kudos and comment on the fic if they find it well-written / it speaks to them), you might not be in a good space to encounter a minority of people who are horrible, it might feed into the untrue / irrational absolutism that all of today's people are horrible, and like, that...would not be great.
But yeah either way I'd definitely suggest starting a new account not connected to your pre-existing social media or other AO3 account. It takes 5 seconds to make a new gmail account, and about 2 minutes to link it to your pre-existing gmail account so you can get emails from it there. This is what I did with my 'thespectaclesofthor' account - though for different reasons - I made an account that had, for maybe a year, zero connections to my not_poignant account.
You can even post a 'test fic' with some of the content you write and see what happens. If the response is too intense or you don't like it, you can actually turn comments off that fic and then antis have literally no way of contacting you in that context ever again.
Things are more complicated if you write a really dark / extreme fic attached to all of your main accounts and your public identity (let's face it, the folks writing '3 year old Mob gets raped and/or tortured by Reigen' are not normally doing it under any username that's connected to their real identity or their main Twitter/Tumblr accounts etc). The fact is, most antis do actually stop being little assholes after a while and find someone new to target, but some don't. I've been lucky so far that I'm not regularly harassed, but other people are.
And you have to ask yourself if you're writing the kind of fic that will make even people who aren't antis not like the fic. Like, if you're just torturing and murdering a cast of beloved characters, pretty much not many fans in the fandom are going to enjoy that (though some still probably will), especially if you're doing it from a spiteful place - and then you have to ask yourself what you want to get out of publishing it. I.e. Do you want to upset people? Do you want people to feel uncomfortable, awful, or miserable? Are you prepared for the kinds of comments those people leave? Because those folks aren't antis at all, but people speaking through an emotional response can leave very strongly worded, even cruel comments - some people will just try and immaturely inflict the hurt on you, that you gave to them - are you prepared for that too if that's the kind of extreme content you're writing? (The best response to something like that is 'you saw the tags and warnings! Maybe avoid fics like this in the future' - neutral, and a reminder that they're responsible for themselves.)
Anyway as you can see, different types of 'extreme' can create different responses. I have no idea what you're writing! Not all 'extreme content' is built the same. But tl;dr - a separate AO3 account and using it to 'test' the platform with the kind of content you want to write can be a good way of seeing how you respond to the experience. Always, always make sure you tag and warn appropriately - over-warn even - for extreme content, and it can help to place a disclaimer in the author's notes to additionally warn people that if they don't like what they read, it's on them.
I hope you find a way through that works for you, anon!
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disparition · 7 years
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When I was a kid I spent a lot of my summers at the Albert L. Shultz Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto. I went to a number of summer camp programs, with various degrees of religious and political content, about which I still have very conflicted feelings. But this was also just the place where our family would come to go swimming or use the gym. The JCC itself was a set of low one story buildings connected by semi-open walkways with lots of open space in between - the same structure and layout you see in any Californian public school or community center.  It was next to a cemetery, a park, and a footpath and a small area of nature surrounding Adobe Creek. In general this was a very mellow place where I never really felt unsafe in a deep way.
This, maybe, in spite of the intentions of those who taught there. The summer camp programs were a constant reminder of the hatred that was out there; games that pitted kids against each other, re-enactments of exoduses ancient and modern, sessions with Holocaust survivors. All of this affected me deeply but a combination of the semi-idyllic setting and my instinctive resistance to the feeling of being indoctrinated in something made it seem somehow distant, or theoretical.
I was never particularly religious to begin with and as I grew up, while I remained personally spiritual on some level, I became skeptical, even suspicious of many aspects of the Jewish community. The more I looked around and read the more I saw a rising and ugly nationalism within the Jewish world. And when I looked back on the summers spent at the JCC as a kid, some of the memories remained warm but in many other cases I felt like some of my suspicions about indoctrination were confirmed. What I began to feel was that programs like those I attended, and much of the Jewish media I was exposed to, were in some ways exaggerating the threat against us in order to bolster support for Israel and a strong ethno-nationalist mentality in general. A mentality of being alone in the world, superior but surrounded by enemies - a position from which people can be easily manipulated, especially by nationalist forces. By the time I was just entering the adult world, which was right around the time of the Second Intifada, I had become almost completely detached and distrustful of institutional Judaism in general, especially anything that seemed to promote Israeli nationalism or the idea of a strong tribe or a religious state.
Many years later, well after having moved to NYC, I came back to the Bay Area to visit and noticed that the old JCC had been renamed and moved to a new location. A large and kind of strange looking, almost fortress like structure near 101. I was with a friend at the time, who had recently worked in Israel, and he told me that some of the features of the complex were defensive architecture adopted from Israeli practices. At the time, I remember this reinforcing my view of the paranoia coming from that community.
Two days ago, like dozens of other JCC’s and Jewish schools all over the United States, it was evacuated due to bomb threats. This following on the heels of massive vandalizations of Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia.
It is tempting to respond to these events with the thought that those paranoid voices within the Jewish community was, all this time, correct. We are and always will be alone in a world populated by our enemies, we must be a strong tribe and support our strong state. This was, after all, the dominant response when the Nazis were defeated the first time around. I think it is a mistake.
As I grew in political and historical awareness over the past two decades, I saw increasing alignment between the Jewish community and the forces of political conservatism in the United States. And disturbingly, I noticed that many Jewish people my own age who had liberal or even progressive stances on most issues were suddenly more conservative, even hawkish when it came to Israel. Israel’s defensive (and offensive) needs meshed well with the geopolitical agenda of conservative and pro-corporate American politicians of both parties, and because of this a strange sort of alliance was formed between elements of the American right - who had for most of their history been anti-Semitic - and elements of the Jewish community. “Judeo-Christian” began to be thrown around by certain kinds of politicians almost as a dog whistle sort of term, and the manipulators of the religious right began to re-emphasize the spiritual importance of Israel in their own context.  
This alignment has resulted in massive amounts of taxpayer money spent supporting and arming Israel as well as on our own related military misadventures, and it has been a massive contributor towards the xenophobic attitudes against Muslims in the United States. And this has caused a related shift in our paranoia, with much of the media - mainstream, conservative, liberal, Jewish, or otherwise - portraying modern anti-Semitism as almost exclusively as a threat coming from the Muslim world, and often framed with an anti-immigrant context.
This kind of thinking has misled us, and as frightening as these recent events are, I hope we are waking up to that.
There is a very common pattern in history: a group of people, long oppressed, rises from their oppression by oppressing someone else using the exact same techniques and mentalities once used against them. This is a pattern we must resist.
We should not be wall builders, and we should not align ourselves with wall builders, in this country or in any other.
Patterns are everything to us. We repeat things until they become true and these become the building blocks of the human part to the world: nations, borders, genders, races, ideologies - all of these basic elements of the world around us that often seem inflexible, sometimes even concrete but which are, in the end, purely a manifestation of our collective minds - a layer of thought that sits on top of the natural world. It’s not possible to just abandon these patterns collectively, we need to work, together and as individuals, to evolve them into new ones.
This chaotic time, scary as it is, is an opportunity to create new patterns. That means looking at ideas like the nation state or national borders, looking at how our identities intermesh with those ideas, and reassessing the patterns, maybe even forming them into something new, defining and organizing ourselves in new ways.  I don’t claim to have some vast new plan for human organization, but I do know that we need to start moving away from modes of thinking that are dependent on defining the self against an excluded “other” and towards those that are inclusive of all the forms of love and creativity that make being human worthwhile.
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handandbanner · 7 years
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Seeing news of this incident last evening made me think of the work I have been involved in around racial trauma.  I feel hopeful around the fact that the profession I am associated is beginning to provide concrete ways of identifying and reporting trauma resulting from racist aggression/violence.  In part I’m hopeful because Social Work documents are recognized by the legal court system in Canada.  When I see an incident like this, I'm interested in quantifying the trauma experienced by the racialized observers in the room, the medical staff, the racialized children and all other children in the environment. In such cases I would like to see clarity on who is going to be liable for treatment costs, mental suffering and lost wages suffered as a result of racial trauma.  Ultimately the woman should be liable but perhaps tax payers would have to cover costs of making the woman liable.  This is a case of interpersonal racist aggression, but I would also like to see retroactively applicable laws that hold liable private and public institutions for damages resulting from systemic racism.  The good news is that we already have scientifically sound measurements for institutional racism.  In the next year I plan to stay involved and support efforts to include training on how to carry out this measurements  in social work curricula, so that any registered practitioner can apply the measurement tool to any institution if a client (individual, family or community group) reports experiences of institutional racism, and institutions in Canada or the government can be held retroactively liable for damages.  If you are a racialized Social Worker or an ally Social Worker and some of this totally doable work might interest you, feel free to contact me and I can connect you to the committee looking at curricula as well as our CASWE Race and Ethnicity Caucus. Also I can't help to think of how such efforts could be possible across human service professions. I imagine public health, and education.  The medical profession would be awesome but...  also I think we have key people in the legal field.  
Also seeing this very sad video made me think of how MLK said that the dominant race is not psychologically mobilized for racial justice (paraphrase).  Sadly I think that is still totally true (I would go further than psychologically and include morally, spiritually, intellectually, etc.).  It is a pretty severe inter-generational state. I’m sure no one I know would behave like the woman in the video. I have a spectrum of relationships experiences with the White people in my life. It is great to see those who have embarked on personal journeys and awakenings, but we are not comforted and our acknowledgement of such friends and individuals cannot eclipse our resolve and focus on the most vulnerable (and if that is what they desire in exchange for “allyship” they are worse than the aggressor). 
Experiences with allies and those who are not reformed by racial justice have however re-affirmed for me that the politics of persuasion is extremely limited.  Actually from early in my practice I never particularly believed in such politics.  I always though something was missing in for example, analysis of the CRM.  I never believed that abolition happened because enough White people became reformed and convinced of Black humanity. And I actually felt that having a false analysis of the CRM dis-empowered Black anti-racist activism.  There is a notion in community psychology under the topic of community organizing that is derived from Alinsky that discusses power as being derived from only two possible sources; money or people.  I was often bothered by this embarking into my own form of community organizing in my early twenties.   I suppose it is true in the context of the liberal capitalist democracy (and perhaps that is what he meant, it’s been a while since I browsed Rules for Radicals). But I remember thinking what of those of us who are not just low income minorities, but low-income minorities in communities such as mine where our numbers are so low that we cannot solely depend on mass mobilization to achieve empowerment.  And this is when I began to explore what I would later come to describe as creative power.  I have been able to effect change and increase agency through my creating and it is life giving.  But that too has its limitations for achieving racial justice.  It is easy for efforts to be framed and engaged by the racial other through a respectability lens.  So access to racial harmony becomes tied to personal personal character through personal achievements.  This is particularly problematic in a context where we’re making gains but still experiencing marginalization because sooner or later as I am learning now, when our capacity to create is interrupted by any number of factors, we as actors and those we serve experience increased vulnerability to racial aggression especially from the White people who we engaged in our creative activism.  Having said that I continue to hold on to creating as the most life-giving and empowering approach for me.  I value agency and self determination.  If feel fully human when I am not just responding to the agenda of the deprived.  But I am also open to being “well rounded” in my skill sets and avenues of resistance.   It has been good to learn the limitations of creative power in racial justice work.  It is with the understanding of tools and approaches having their limits that I am able to continue to explore what approaches may work for the moment.  The BLM movement caused me reconsider to some extent my stance on the politics of persuasion and mass movements.  One cannot deny the results for our moment, it is inspiring to see the capacity of predominantly marginalized women and youth to capture public sentiment and use it achieve some voice in public square.  It is humanizing to see Black stories told, even though they are stories of Black pain, it is humanizing to mourn in public.  But the reality for example of the current US administration also provides us with an opportunity to understand the limitations of mass protest.  Yes there was power in people and numbers but it has been limited power and vulnerable power.  The most marginalized of marginalized groups that lead in actions and labour are the last to benefit and benefit the least from their own activism.  This is the CRM all over again.  We needed it, we are thankful for it, but it is not enough.  
Somebody once told me that justice is not best carried out through the legal system and I agree because I have always known the legal system to to stacked against marginalized people.  In its current state the Law of the Land has been used as a tool for colonization.  But beyond it being desperate times I'm finally considering that maybe we can decolonize and reclaim the law?  I recently heard an example of this on the radio about how in "New Zealand" the Whanganui River was recently recognized to have the legal rights of a person as part of the decolonizing environmental activism of the Maori.  Maybe this "law" that is used against us to kill and kidnap our bodies was actually alongside everything else stolen and deformed.  So maybe codifying Racial Justice is a form of reclamation and using "law" as a protective tool.  I would like to see a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Racialized People in Canada to document past and ongoing racial injustice.  
Obviously the legal field is not my area of knowledge, perhaps there is already a way and precedence for the people in that clinic to be reimbursed as much as is possible for the emotional damages they have sustained in this woman’s rant. What I do know is that the experiences of those people sitting in that space matter.  Space must be created to quantify and document what it means for us to share space with toxic people who harm us.  How would a young Brown identifying child be triggered if this is their primary exposure to a White woman if they then have to move through spaces controlled by White women.  I learned about cognitive depletion as one of the identified forms of mental suffering resulting from race based aggression and micro-aggression. One of the confusing and disturbing effects of race-based trauma is when people who fill functional, proud and and confident begin to experience anxiety or stress that they are not sure how to integrate after having their power forcibly taken away after an incident.  We experience exhaustion from expressions of outrage and even expressing sorrow.  As we care for ourselves and invite our societies to care for us, we need to change the conversation towards the costs of living with the effects to exposure to these types of trauma.  
Personally, I continue to advocate for a diversity of tactics. I don’t pursue an illusion of a limitless and indestructible approach.   I also continue to promote the idea that we need each other and we must honor the various forms of action. For our moment l believe those of us who can must honor the work of our direct action movement folks by using the social power and space created to codify and institutionalize racial justice and also make use of our growing intellectual power to make this possible. History tells us that the grip we have on the media gaze will pass.  Those of us in a position to do so must also continue our efforts to create and build alternative liberation spaces with decreased vulnerability, influence and control of the oppressor. As it turns out and as history tells us, the morally bankrupt oppressor’s behavior can only be changed by just force. 
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runfreeandspeak · 7 years
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So it’s curious that Cyrus has seemingly completely changed her tune, distancing herself entirely from the culture she once appropriated. When asked about her musical influences, Cyrus told the Billboard interviewer: “I also love that Kendrick [Lamar] song [‘Humble’]: ‘Show me somethin’ natural like ass with some stretch marks,’ . . . I love that because it’s not, ‘Come sit on my dick, suck on my cock.’ I can’t listen to that anymore. That’s what pushed me out of the hip-hop scene a little. It was too much ‘Lamborghini, got my Rolex, got a girl on my cock’ — I am so not that.” This kind of thinking is exactly why Nicki Minaj almost snatched Cyrus’ ass off the MTV stage in 2015. Back then, she asked the infamous question, “Miley, what’s good?” Now I want to know the same thing. In 2013, also in Billboard, Cyrus appeared to have reinvented herself with a hip-hop persona almost overnight. Earlier that year, she uploaded a video of herself twerking to a dirty south rapper J.Dash’s song, “Wop.” This was our first official introduction to the new “ratchet” Miley, and with this transformation, she was convinced that she had abandoned her pop-star image, enough so that she started being referred to in mainstream media as as “The White Nicki Minaj.” Cyrus’ Billboard interview has people asking what happened to the girl who twerked her way into appropriating black culture not too long ago. But any slight chance of that comparison being valid disintegrated when Miley explained to the New York Times, “If you know Nicki Minaj is not too kind.” Cyrus even admitted to understanding why people, including Minaj, were possibly upset with her, because she’s a “white pop star,” but still she doubled down on the misunderstanding. When Minaj called out MTV for rewarding Cyrus for appropriating black culture and mocking the bodies of black women everywhere, rather than nominating Minaj, a black woman, Cyrus took an #allbodiesmatter stance. “There’s girls everywhere with this body type,” Cyrus told the New York Times, right before calling Nicki’s grievance just another “catfight.” It was Cyrus’s frightened response to the “angry black girl” trope, which included Minaj’s now-infamous question that some believe put an end to Miley’s “thug life.” In the most recent Billboard interview, Cyrus is really trying to put that image to bed — but she comes off as the typical colorblind white woman who still doesn’t seem to get how she’s been appropriating black culture over the last several years. She calls the fact that she was called out for using black women’s bodies as props “mind-boggling” and denies any wrongdoing in “taking advantage of black culture.” White People: I Want You To Understand Yourselves Better Your survival has never depended on your knowledge of white culture. In fact, it’s required your ignorance. theestablishment.co But her comments about Kendrick Lamar highlight the real issue with Cyrus wearing blackness like a costume. She has reduced rap culture to nothing more than Lambos, dicks, and Lamar. Her comments reek of respectability politics and seem heavily coded in racism, with her cherry-picking negative stereotypes from the genre she poached the first time she felt it was time to re-create herself. Throughout the entire article, she goes to great lengths to disassociate herself from behaviors that can be coded as “urban,” and her repeated usage of the word “roots” seems synonymous with “white.” She even boasts about how she was inspired to reach beyond what she calls “outspoken liberals” to “cultivate country fans and red staters” (a phrase that could also be read to mean Trump supporters). I know I shouldn’t be as mad as I am. But seeing Miley categorize all of her “hoodrat” shenanigans of the past few years as a “phase” is exactly why people of color constantly fight to protect their culture. Cyrus has been waiting for the perfect moment to retreat back to her country facade and the white privilege that comes with it. And it is black women who will suffer from this, who will be ridiculed for the aspects of their identity Cyrus borrowed for a profit, long after she’s shed the faux-extensions and taken out the gold grills to get back into the good graces of her white fan base. On Saturday, after being dragged up and down on social media and Black Twitter, Cyrus released an additional statement on Instagram: “I have always and will continue to love and celebrate hip hop as I’ve collaborated with some of the very best!” She continued: “At this point in my life I am expanding personally/musically and gravitating more towards uplifting, conscious rap! As I get older I understand the effect music has on the world & Seeing where we are today I feel the younger generation needs to hear positive powerful lyrics! I am proud to be an artist with out [sic] borders and thankful for the opportunity to explore so many different styles/sounds! I hope my words (sung or spoken) always encourage others to LOVE…. Laugh…. Live fully…. to be there for one another… to unify, and to fight for what’s right (human, animal, or environmental) Sending peace to all! Look forward to sharing my new tunes with you soon!” Though this statement may seem innocuous, asserting herself as more “evolved” for listening to “conscious” rap still alludes to parts of hip-hop culture being inferior if they do not follow respectability politics. It also doesn’t address her complete overhaul from cultural appropriation to country girl. Miley’s temporary gentrification of hip-hop music is nothing new. Miley’s temporary gentrification of hip-hop music is, of course, nothing new. She is not the first talent to toss their “urban” persona as soon as they reached new heights of popularity. I still remember when P!nk actually had fuchsia pink hair and spoke with a “blaccent” before she successfully transitioned into a more mainstream aesthetic. And not long after P!nk came Justin Timberlake, who transformed from a B-Boy grabbing on Janet Jackson’s titty to singing jingles for the Troll movie. Today we have Justin Bieber going through his rap renaissance, before likely abandoning that as well. Some — including Cyrus — may argue that this is all a part of artistic growth, but I wish these pop stars would skip the part of their career when they decide to exploit the genres that are already hard for aspiring black artists to break into. We know the only remedy is to keep on creating. To quote Miley Cyrus, in a time where authenticity matters, black artists know this: “We Can’t Stop.” Nicki MinajCultural AppropriationRacismMiley CyrusArts Creators 84 Follow Go to the profile of Jagger Blaec Jagger Blaec Tweet me @basicblaecgirl. In some circles they call me the #BlaecZoeBarnes.✨But mostly I'm just a story teller. Imaginary Love Child of Oprah&Sean Combs. Follow The Establishment The Establishment The conversation is much more interesting when everyone has a voice. Media funded and run by women; new content daily. More from The Establishment To Everyone Who’s Just Barely Holding It Together Go to the profile of Hanna Brooks Olsen Hanna Brooks Olsen 1.4K Also tagged Miley Cyrus The Funniest (and Most Confusing?) Anti-Trump Ad of the 2016 Campaign Go to the profile of Ted Scheinman Ted Scheinman 14 More from The Establishment Heineken’s Ad Is A Terrifying Sham — And I’ve Lived It Many Times Over Go to the profile of Ruchika Tulshyan Ruchika Tulshyan 115 RESPONSES The author has chosen not to show responses on this story. You can still respond by clicking the response bubble.
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