#the belief that the fictional media you consume is equivalent to your morals is how we get people saying if you read a book like lolita and | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

intersex-ionality · 4 years

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loved your post about the way cishet is being used to exclude and the way you reframe the language to expose it. i have this problem all the time with “purity culture” which feels like a very useful term to describe the conservatism on tumblr, but i know has also been co-opted to dismiss fans of color’s critiques of rascism. it’s hard for me to find the rephrasings— how do you it for that example? do you have any other thoughts about how to navigate terms that have been twisted?

Well, unfortunately, I have an extremely difficult time remembering similarly manipulated terms off the top of my head, but if you have an examples, I can certainly explain how I navigate them in particular.

In terms of purity culture, I don't have a word replacement for it installed since it is often phrased in slightly different ways that make it tedious to replace them all (purity culture, purity policing, neo puritanism, sex negativity, antishipping, etc).

But, if I could be bothered to set up unique word filter entries for all of the variants, I would probably settle on something like, "the belief that other people cannot be trusted to decide what art they consume or create without the authority and guidance of my higher power."

This would pretty clearly expose the hypocrisy of people trying to claim that fandom is racism free, but still make perfect sense in terms of the policing of queer, sexual, or romantic content.

For example, "if you're worried about shows that portray police as always morally righteous and that only police can be trusted to root out corruption in their ranks, you're just someone who believes others cannot be trusted to decide what art they consume or create without the authority of your higher power," pretty clearly shows the disconnect, where the speaker is suggesting that critical consideration of racism in media is equivalent to censorship.

By contrast consider, "it's amazing how many people have decided that the nonexistent emotions of fictional characters are so important that laws should be passed to protect them at the expense of real people's human rights, just because they believe that other people cannot be trusted to decide what art they consume or create without the authority and guidance of their higher power."

In this example phrase, the connection between one call for censorship is readily and easily connected to another call for censorship. There's no missing link that has been obfuscated by the use of seemingly innocent jargon.

I am considering doing a substitution for "identity politics," as well. Something like, "the belief that one of a person's identities supercedes all other considerations and identities, and must be acted on to the exclusion of other factors."

The expanded phrase would make it very hard to hide other connections behind it. In this way, someone saying, "capitalism is the only form of oppression, so anyone who thinks racism is its own thing is high on (the belief that one of a person's identities supercedes all other considerations and identities, and must be acted on to the exclusion of other factors)" is very clearly flawed. There's no connection. If anything, it exemplifies the fact that the speaker believes in the idpol of worker to the exclusion of race, exposing their hypocrisy.

However, saying, "demanding that all women vote for a woman who has a history of extreme racism, war mongering, and even sexism because of female-solidarity is just (the belief that one of a person's identities supercedes all other considerations and identities, and must be acted on to the exclusion of other factors)," makes perfect sense.

Of course, extremely long, phrase substitutions like this will fuck up the grammar of paragraphs, so I don't recommend them for people with reading difficulty.

But they do work as good "mental checks" to sniff out misuse and misleading language.

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bettsfic · 6 years

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a third stance on the moral dichotomy of fandom

i have one more thing to say, or i guess reiterate, on the topic of moral purity policing in fanfiction as perpetuated by minors, in a more rebloggable format than my previous asks. what i have to say is an incredibly unpopular opinion because it takes neither side of this dichotomized issue, and addresses, not the minors perpetuating the purity rhetoric, but the adults fighting against it.

first i’ll offer a run-down of the overall issue at hand:

side 1, or what i call “think of the CHILDREN”: there is a large sect of people in fandom right now, mostly teens and young adults as far as i can tell, who believe that taboo works (noncon and underage) should not be allowed to exist. if they are written, they should be flagged and subsequently taken down. these people seem to hold these beliefs for several reasons, the prevailing ones being “fiction affects reality” and “children might read it!!” this stance is the active one, the (literal) minority, the side trying to enact change upon an established and (legally) supported status quo. these people do not separate the art from the artist.

in practice, these beliefs are aggressive and toxic. we see them in rude or cruel anonymous asks urging writers to kill themselves. we see them in “only follow if” and “do not interact if” pages with lengthy bullet point lists of traits and behaviors that are Not Okay. we see them in yfip. we see them in anti tags. we see them in long, poorly researched and contextualized responses to well-meaning pro-”ship and let ship” posts. we see them in accusations of pedophilia for fics and ships that are not in fact pedophilic. we see them in phrases like “abuse apologists” and “problematic” and “romanticize” and “fetishize.”

despite the seeming growth of what i’ve been calling the Gen Z Puritanical Movement, what we see on tumblr is only a narrow view of a much wider issue spanning outside fandom and into the world of art itself. it stems from problems of decades past, McCarthyism, the Hays Code, the nuclear family, for example, and the subsequent counterculture movements against them. right now Gen X has all the power and prestige in the enormous world art, and being the children of Baby Boomers, they simultaneously believe you must always separate the art from the artist, while also widely disbelieving (or having had to learn) that inequality and disenfranchisement have any bearing in the success of art.

“the discourse” as we call it has its roots in every creative field and we are in midst of a revolution in the way we understand and interact with art. i believe, with any revolution, the answer is not in stalling it but negotiating with it, learning from it, interrogating it, and adapting.

side 2, which i’ll unpack below, is comprised mostly of what i would venture are Millennials, and fall somewhere between Gen Z purity and Gen X freedom. and as much as i want to discuss this gaping chasm of beliefs further, i’m specifically talking about the way transformative art is presently policed by side 1.

which brings us to the other side.

side 2, or what i call “i do what i WANT”: these people believe that a fan writer/artist should be able to write, post, and share with the public any creative work the mind can devise as long as it is warned/tagged properly, and all people who do not want to view their art should walk away and not interact. key phrases include “ship and let ship” and “don’t like, don’t read.” the prevailing root of this belief is that all art is valid and important, all art belongs, even when that art is devised entirely by the id. additionally, they believe they do not have to justify, defend, or explain their art in order for it to exist, and most importantly, it is every reader/viewer’s responsibility to understand the difference between fiction and reality. these people separate art from the artist.

in practice, these beliefs are poised to defend of the attacks from side 1. this is a reaction to a movement, an assertion of maintaining the status quo. we see posts speaking to an audience of side 1, pleading or at times demanding for them to learn not only the fraught history of fanworks but also the greater context of art and censorship. these posts are then reblogged by people with similar beliefs, attacked by side 1, and no one seems to really learn anything at all. the dichotomy is maintained. battles end as posts fall into obscurity, but the war rages on.

side 2 holds the status quo, the most common sense. it is the most educated perspective, upheld by the wiser and older parties of fandom, the transformative artists who have lived through strikethrough and boldthrough and have experienced the damaging consequences of the censorship and ideology of side 1. moreover, it is upheld by the actual people who built and run the archive on which our art rests. in this dichotomy, side 2 has all the power. side 2 is the majority.

here’s where i get to my incredibly unpopular opinion:

people in positions of power have no reason to meet aggression with more aggression except to re-establish and assert that power over the minority opinion. aggression does not sway the minority opinion; it only fuels it.

in other, more practical words, we are ADULTS sharing a public community space with CHILDREN, and some of those children have made it clear that they are angry.

why do we meet that anger with anger when we are older and wiser and have all the authority? if a child is having a violent tantrum, do you punch them in the face? no, you hold their wrists. you calm them down. you ask them what’s wrong. you try to parse out what happened and work together to make sure it doesn’t happen again. you can’t expect them to articulate that anger; you have to ask questions. you have to listen to them.

side 1 says that taboo works are wrong and bad and shameful. i personally disagree with that belief, but my curiosity lies in the extreme emotional reaction and value judgments behind it. and when enough people are angry about something, if a movement becomes wide enough, it means there is something else going on, some seed of truth happening somewhere -- a needle in a haystack, an invisible shard of glass on the kitchen floor -- that needs to be found. i’m not saying side 1 is right, but i am saying that there is something in that anger which might ring true, even if the toxic rhetoric they are spouting is not. i don’t know what that truth is, and the point of this post is not to find it, but to encourage us to seek bigger answers about this very big problem.

side 2, you might be saying, they’re not children, they’re teenagers and young adults. you might be saying, when i was their age, i knew to obey the etiquette of fandom. you might be saying, we are not equals, they should be learning from us. you might be saying, it’s their responsibility to know fiction from reality. you might be saying, none of this is my responsibility. you might be saying, this movement is getting bigger and scarier and it may become an actual threat to our art.

and you might be feeling: i have no interest in logically or morally defending the taboo nature my aesthetic interests. i know that they appeal to me, and i know i should not be tasked with or required to publicly explain myself. i should not have to assert that art is separate from the artist. i should not have to endure aggressive mobs of anons in my inbox. i should not be chased away by pitchforks held by my own community. i should not be accused of being a predator, rapist, abuse apologist, or pedophile.

and maybe you know that you are not any of those things, and to be accused of them is ridiculous and appalling, but maybe it still hurts to be called all of that which makes life so dangerous and cruel. maybe it always hurts to have your art misunderstood.

this brings me back to anger. all anger is devised of pain and fear. we get angry when we’re hurt and scared. when i see two angry sides of a wide divide, all i see is that fear and pain, and all i want is to lessen it.

on side 1, we have a group of young people whose only context is the present and whose only fear is the future. i put myself in the shoes of what it must be like to be a teenager in america in 2018, how different it is from when i was a teenager. teen stars on red carpet events in 2005 dressed in ugly cargo pants and sweatshirts. millie bobby brown at 13 was dressed like a supermodel at last year’s emmy’s. young people today have more and easier access to information pertaining to violence and sex, consume media steeped in those things, than they ever have. and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for parents to keep them from that interaction. side 2′s rhetoric around this is to wipe their hands free of it -- “your parents should monitor what you’re doing on the internet.” and they should, they absolutely should, but while technology has changed, teenage curiosity hasn’t. i clicked past every 18+ warning i’ve ever seen in my life, and that was my choice, and i handled the consequences.

but just for a second imagine being 14 again, and curiosity getting the best of you, and clicking on something in which your physical equivalent is being hurt and abused and eroticized. can you imagine not having any understanding of the greater context of what you’ve just read, in art or in life? wouldn’t you be scared too, to know those things exist? wouldn’t you be reluctant to listen to the explanation of them when you are young and afraid and suddenly aware that you can be hurt?

i am not encouraging writers to stop creating taboo fanworks. i think they have an important artistic purpose and function and place, and i value any mind that can conceive and face such darkness. but as someone who aims to understand as much as i possibly can about what it is to be human, to be alive today, i am inclined to consider the various interpretations of taboo art and its potential repercussions.

teenagers today are more aware and attuned to -- and have constant access to -- current events than any other generation before, but that does not mean they have learned or educated themselves on the historical context of these events in order to understand them fully. they don’t have a wide perspective, but they do have their moral compasses guided by the abhorrence of the constant human rights violations that occur on macro and micro scales every single day, and it’s those compasses that place value judgments on the content they consume in fandom, the place where they feel, i speculate, the most valued. the place they have the most power and sway. the only place, maybe, that their voice and fear and anger is ever heard, witnessed, responded to, taken seriously.

being a teenager today is a completely new and terrifying machine made of old parts. we, the adults in fandom, understand the parts but not the machine. how can all the same parts make something so different from us? who built this monster, and how to we destroy it? why is it attacking us when there are bigger and more important battles to fight? why doesn’t it go read a fucking book for once?

that brings us to side 2. if side 1 has the future, side 2 has the past. we see the toxic rhetoric of side 1 and we know what consequences can come of it because we’ve lived the worst of it. we have both the pain of the past and the fear of the future to handle, and neither are easy to cope with.

so what do we do? we either get angry and fight back, or disengage. sometimes i think the latter is the most toxic of all, because i believe it’s every artist’s responsibility to understand the work they’re doing and the greater context of that work, how it fits in their given lexicon of art. they should not be required to defend it or speak for it, but they should know it. inside and out, they should know their art and why they make it.

i also believe, if you know your art and why you make it, if you can separate yourself the artist from the art, why disengage from those who are repulsed but reaching out? it’s definitely my gut instinct to meet cruelty with anger and upsetness, but cruelty also piques my curiosity -- i want to know where the repulsion comes from. i want to ask questions. why are you offended by this art? how have you interpreted it? why are you afraid of it? how has its existence hurt you? if nothing else, it always gives me a broader understanding of my work and how it can be seen, which is invaluable feedback for any artist.

if there is any bridge at all to be built between this divide, i think it is in our ability to ask questions, listen to the answers, and use those answers, not to argue with or defend ourselves or to become upset by, but to ask more questions.

here are two ways this mentality has helped me --

in my old job (commercial finance real estate), i worked with upperclass middle-aged white men who got paid six figures a year to golf and cheat on their wives while i did all their paperwork. eventually i made a hobby of sitting in their offices and asking them questions, knowing they had authority over me, knowing our opinions differed. knowing i had no place to argue with them or leverage in telling them all the ways i felt they were wrong about politics and society at large. i pretended they were teaching me things, showing me the way of the world. i let them believe that, and i continued asking questions, forcing them to articulate aloud why they believed what they believed, hours and hours, slowly boxing them into corners from which they would eventually change their own minds.

in my current job (i’m a college instructor) i do something similar. i sit down with every single student one on one and i ask them questions about their political and social beliefs. often my students are 19, white, straight, affluent, conservative young adults who hold many of the same puritanical ideas as that of side 1 with less of the toxic rhetoric. at first, i was terrified to do this. it was different than my old job because suddenly i was the one with authority. i thought, what if i encounter racism? prejudice? sexism? what if they are fundamentally wrong on every level, and won’t listen to me, someone who knows the greater context of their opinions? what if i end up arguing with them? what if they don’t respect me? what if i can’t change their minds? and most importantly -- is it my responsibility to change their minds at all?

after the first semester, i realized how young they were, how much they still had left to grow, and learn, and live, and that my class would not be able to teach them everything they needed to know in order to strip away the prejudices and narrow-mindedness of their upbringings. i learned that all i could do was be a person in a position of authority listening to their beliefs and asking them tough questions no one has ever asked them. forcing them on the spot to articulate the beliefs they have not before had the opportunity to interrogate. i find i rarely agree with what they say, but i validate their right and ability to say it. to have a voice and space and responsibility in and to society. to think, itself. and most importantly to think through their ideals, which they cannot do if they are never given a chance to be heard, if they are never asked the questions whose answers will lead them to deeper and more meaningful insights.

i have never changed the mind of a single person by arguing, but i have changed several minds by asking.

we have an entire generation of terrified young people who are lashing out, and i do not want to hate them. i do not want to meet their rage and toxicity with fear, defensiveness, and dismissal. i want to sympathize and listen. i want to know more about why they feel how they feel, what the real root of it is, the seeds of truth behind the rhetoric. i want to understand. and mostly, i want to help fix all the broken and awful things in the greater sociopolitical sphere that have built this terrifying machine and dug our moral divide.

#tsatp #discourse #moral purity #ao3 #fanfiction

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gaast · 4 years

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There's always two sides of the argument on this. There's the "fictional characters are fictional" side that says that sexualizing a fictional minor is okay from a moral standpoint because they're not real minors. They extend their argument here to say "Do you think Agatha Christie condoned murder just because she wrote about it?" (An example, but it's always some false equivalence like this.)

The other side says "fictional characters are real," so sexualizing a fictional minor is as bad as doing it with a real one. They often cite (bogus) research suggesting that the media you consume influences your behavior. That they have bogus research to point to prevents them from making more interesting arguments, but they often have personal stakes in the matter, such as surviving CSA.

Both sides have their merits. Frankly, fictional characters aren't "real," per se. They're fake! They're not real kids! But art is a representation of reality. Not one that exists, but a viewpoint, constructed and frozen in time. It displays its creator's or creators' take on reality, and their advice for that reality or their beliefs about it. My point is that this argument, that "fictional characters are fictional, not real," rejects the premise of art and refuses the suspension of disbelief required from media consumers. It rejects the concept that art can say anything and only accepts it as pure entertainment, untethered from meaning or intention.

The other side, that "fictional characters are real," accepts art and how it works, but it takes it to a very strange conclusion. This argument tends to hold characters to incredibly rigid and lofty moral standards; it doesnt really allow for nuance. In a way, it rejects art as it accepts art. It believes that all art should be pure and happy (in the extremes of this argument). For the most part, people just go so far as to use the argument to shut down the people defending the sexualization of minors, though. And they do this for a lot of reasons, most of them usually valid, some of them usually just abusive.

The problem is that the war between these arguments ends up resting on the concept that "the media you consume influences your behavior in real life." The so-called "antis" of the "fiction is real" argument, again, cite bogus or anecdotal evidence that art can normalize CSA. The "anti-antis" (ugh) of the other side debunk those claims and tend to use "poor snowflake" rhetoric to shut down the anecdotes.

While I personally don't like "fanservice" and am always suspicious when creators sexualize minors without having a good reason to do so (cameras resting squarely on breasts just to show them is bad; a straight teen boy narrating a description of a female classmate's body and mentioning in-universe his thoughts on it at least makes sense), I don't think it actually creates abusers. On the other hand, I respect that survivors of CSA don't wanna see kids be sexualized. That's perfectly okay! What I don't understand is why these two groups are constantly at each other's throats in a constant crusade, one to eradicate that sexualization (and bully people who disagree), the other to... defend... sexualizing minors... (and bully people who disagree).

It should be sufficient, for each side, for someone to say, "I don't want to see this, and if you're okay with seeing this, I would rather you didn't talk to me."

Why there has to be a constant, embarrassing war over this, though, is beyond me. Apart from the concept that somehow, everything is personal on the Internet.

#im sure everyone has better ways they could use their time #long post

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