it is responsible, and the mark of a good audience, to critique problematic elements in the media we consume. For example, I love gothic lit – but a lot of it is incredibly sexist and racist. I can acknowledge that these elements are a problem and objectionable while still enjoying the piece for a multitude of other reasons. I can also say to myself “if I ever want to write my own gothic lit, here are some elements I should avoid.” Or, if I do want to tackle the issues of racism and sexism in my future gothic lit, then I can say “I will avoid writing in a way which implicitly or explicitly condones racism or sexism, while still emulating the praiseworthy elements of gothic lit.”
In essence, the fundamentals of intersectional media critique is this: “these elements of [x media] are problematic and we should rethink them in future media, both as audiences and as creators.” By rethinking these elements, I don’t mean utterly doing away with them, but rethinking how we approach them and how we read them.
We enter purity culture when our statement moves from “these elements of [x media] are problematic and we should rethink them in future media, both as audiences and as creators,” and becomes “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore anyone who consumes or creates [x media] is condoning everything about [x media].” The implication here is that, if one wants to be a good person, one should avoid [x media], because to do otherwise is to either implicitly or explicitly condone everything in [x media]. This type of attitude towards media is very common in conservative religious circles.
It moves fully into censorship when the statement moves from “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore anyone who consumes or creates [x media] is condoning everything about [x media]” and becomes “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore nobody can consume or create [x media] for any reason.” Those who break this rule are seen as evil and shunned. This type of attitude toward media is very common in fundamentalist circles.
A culture of censorship is the natural outcome of purity culture, because purity culture by its very nature seeks purity until even the whisper of objectionable content, in any context, is suppressed.
I would wager a guess that many people who are against anti culture are familiar with either these toxic conservative or fundamentalist attitudes towards media, and we are alarmed by their striking similarity with antis’ attitudes towards media. It is most certainly why I am against anti culture.
OH GOOD HEAVENS LOOKS LIKE IT IS TIME FOR ME TO MAKE THIS POST AGAIN:
If you think that the Galactic Empire is a 1:1 equivalent to Nazi Germany, and that liking Imperial characters is equivalent to being a fascist IRL and means someone deserves all the internet outrage you can muster –
you are carving out LITERALLY 50% of the branding of one of the most popular entertainment franchises in the world, and saying THIS IS FOR IRL FASCISTS ONLY NORMAL PEOPLE DON’T INTERACT
POP QUIZ WHAT IS MORE OBJECTIVELY HARMFUL:
thinking grand moff tarkin is rad
leaving 50% of the canon of one of the largest franchises in the world as a fandom wasteland for fascists to set up shop
Not to mention – Disney has been really inclusive with regards to Imperial characters in a way that makes me think they are purposefully trying to mark the Empire as not something they want IRL fascists to relate to so let’s just… appreciate that
POP QUIZ #2 WHICH FANDOM LOOKS SAFER AND MORE FUN:
star wars fandom where the Rebels are ours and the Empire belongs to actual, IRL fascists
star wars fandom where the Rebels are ours and the Empire is ALSO ours and actual IRL fascists have the 0% share in star wars fandom that they deserve
In lieu of the new tumblr settings, can I make yet another plea with those of you who read fics and consume art on tumblr to please reblog them?
Fics and art will die on a creator’s dash if they aren’t reblogged. It’s never been more true than now.
If you want to keep receiving content from creators, reblog the the content. If it’s something you enjoyed? Reblog it. It’s not hard. I am going to make a point to reblog everything I read from now on. (With the proper tags of course), as well as all the art that I see on my dash.
I cannot make it simpler. Posts WILL die unless they’re reblogged. No one will see your ‘like’. Your like is a bookmark for YOU to find it later. Your reblog means the world to a creator because it means you are willing to go the little extra distance and recommend this to your followers.
Don’t let creations die on the dash of those who created them.
Reblog to save a creation.
Reblog to keep a creator creating.
Reblog, please.
Ironically, Tumblr ate my last attempt at this post, so I’ll keep it sweet:
1. It makes content creators’ day when you interact with us, especially reblog.
2. Comments and tag blathering are really, really special to me, and I look at allllll my reblogs just in case someone said something interesting in the tags.
3. It works. @dresupi reblogged something of mine and I immediately got more notes.
Pre-internet era: You walk into a room and sit down at a table. Someone brings you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Perhaps you are a vegetarian, or gluten-free. Doesn’t matter; you get a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda.
Usenet era: You walk into a room and sit down to your turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Someone tells you that over at the University they are also serving BLTs, pizza, coffee, and beer.
Web 1.0 (aka The Great Schism): You walk into a room. The room is lined with 50 unmarked doors. Someone tells you, “We have enough food to feed you and a hundred more…but we’ve scattered it behind these fifty doors. Good luck!”
Web 2.0 (present): You walk into a room. Someone points at the buffet and says, “Enjoy!” You turn to see a 100-foot-long buffet table, piled high with every kind of food imaginable. To be fair, some of the food is durian, head cheese, and chilled monkey brains, but that’s cool, some people are into those…and trust me, they are even more psyched to be here than you are.
Tumblr (a hell pit): You try to serve yourself a baked potato. An angry child runs up and slaps the plate out of your hand. “NIGHTSHADE PLANTS ARE POISONOUS,” the child yells. You are hungry. The child gives you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a kick on the shin.
The fact that a potato is replaced with a different form of potato is what makes that last one so accurate.
you disliking something someone is doing doesn’t excuse you telling them to kill themselves
Incest and pedophilic ships harm people dumbass it’s not my personal preference.
who *in real life* do they harm
and even if they DO harm someone telling people to kill themselves is never okay
Did you just fucking ask how PEDOPHILLA harms people?? Are you shitting me?
oh my god, how does shipping a fictional thing harm real life people you fucking moron
Pedophilla triggers people who have trauma?? Oh my god?? Incest is the same?? Don’t act like fiction doesn’t effect reality??
So don’t read it if it triggers you.
Should war histories be banned for triggering veterans? Should movies portraying coca cola be banned because some girl was once beaten with a bottle of coke and get flashbacks when she sees people holding them?
I will never cease to be confused by “I have PTSD, therefore people must make it the case that i must never encounter things that trigger me, ever. OH BY THE WAY, I am going to devote large chunks of my online time to yelling at people who make the things that trigger me.”
??????
imaginary stories of the dynamics of underage fictional characters in an also fictional relationship isn’t pedophilia and the insistence of tumblr to call it such actually makes it hard for me to do my job as a social worker because i deal with real breathing living children who are being abused like i was
hey everyone. i’m back and i will start here. i took a break because well, teens on tumblr were telling me to kill myself because i disagree with them about things, mostly about… my own rapes! luckily i have a good support system. people who actually care about helping survivors.
story time yall massive trigger warning for everything below
i don’t want to say i was in a cult but. my family was part of a cult in the 80’s and 90’s. all my childhood and adolescence. this cult had a trade system. this cult had pedophiles. i mean real pedophiles. real ones. real ones doing real things to real kids. when i say pedophiles i mean adults who routinely and “for business” sexually assaulted prepubescent children, real prepubescent children, knowingly and for their own entertainment.
a young adult reading and producing harry x draco or, i don’t know what the kids like these days, naruto x sasuke, voltron whoever the heck fan content is not a pedophile. in fact, to call them a pedophile and to call such content pedophilia feels like a spit in my face
let me be really clear and direct at the risk of sharing some really personal things:
there were tapes of me and my siblings and the other children in our church. and photo albums. this was mostly in the 80’s and 90’s, remember so we did not have tumblr. we were real children being exploited and traumatized. this was pedophilia.
and now i hear all these young teens on tumblr insisting that fanart = pedophilia and the fanartists = pedos. you are wasting resources for your own personal gain and popularity and wokepoints on fictional people while i, having now become an adult, am a therapist, social worker and activist. i use my experience as essentially a child sex slave to help others recover and process and to help law enforcement when i feel that intervention is necessary to prevent someone from being harmed more
do you know how hard they would laugh if you tried to shove gay teen anime boys at them and call it pedophilia? do you know how hard some of them would cry and tell you to stop wasting their time? an officer i talk with regularly had to take months off because he was so shaken by one of the cases. shit like this affects all of us deeply.
a fan liking the way two characters mesh is no more pedophilia than a writer writing a murder scene is an actual murder.
and don’t use “grooming” as an excuse/weapon. you know what i was groomed with? uwu purity christ worship and sock puppets. stickers. care bears. know what i wish i had access to growing up? fanfics. or just sex scenes in movies. hell even teen nick shows about normal stuff like crushes. even just sex talks on sitcoms. SOMETHING to let me think about what was happening to me in a context outside of “this is what the lord made me for” and “we must be pure pure pure even if it means harming our own” something to help me think about real life through the lens of characters who might be very different or very similar to me
not once has an anti ever spoken to me as a human. they treat me like i’m “the wrong kind of survivor” because i’m not part of their crusade to suicide bait and call for the murder of perfect strangers because of imaginary things.
the worst part is that as a therapist who specializes in csa related ptsd….i have so many young kids thinking they are evil for wanting to fantasize about their assaults in contexts where they are in control. let me repeat, a lot of the survivors like to fantasize about what happened to them as an “au” where they were in control, or aged up, or even enjoying themselves. sounds pretty fucked up right? well that’s the brain for you. for a lot of us, it’s the only way to process some of it.
you do harm when you equate a drawing or a fiction to the actual violence we endured.
please. i am begging you. please stop. you aren’t helping. i can’t get people to take me seriously about csa as an issue when i talk about it online in professional settings. because they think i’m a crazy purity wank asshole when literally my job is to help others like me. please. please. please. we cant take it anymore. you have turned pedophilia into a scary buzzword to drag people with instead of a word to describe something real that we are trying to fight.
i already lost a friend to tumblr. you lot convinced her she was evil and perpetuating her own abuse because of a fucking voltron ship. you told her it was her own fault for being raped and that she was the same as her attacker. you know who you are and you’ll have to live with it forever. may whoever meets you in the afterlife have pity on your misguided souls. you’ll have a lot to answer for. all the people you told to die, to “piss yourself” (ableist as fuck).
please please please go outside and get a grip on reality. if you can’t, then stop pretending you care.
if you cared and if you really believed it was bad enough to wish death upon people you would be saying that people are murderers for drawing or writing about death because how would you be able to excuse death? murder is a huge problem all around a world. so why isn’t fiction featuring murder held to the same standard, as “normalizing” murder and “romanticizing” death and “triggering” people who have lost someone to murder or who have almost been murdered.
don’t you dare say death is better than being a survivor. don’t you fucking dare.
Seriously. Fuck anyone that has ever told someone to kill themselves. You’re seriously screwed up in the head if you do that.
If you want to live in a “Children of the Corn”-style bubble of innocence and purity, well, to me, that’s a startling approach to adolescence, but every generation’s got to find its own way to reject the one before, so: do as you will. But you can’t bring the bubble to the party, kids. Fandom, established media-style fandom, was by and for adults before some of your parents were born now. You don’t get to show up and demand that everyone suddenly change their ways because you’re a minor and you want to enjoy the benefits of adult creative activity without the bits that make you uncomfortable. If you think you’re old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised, then you also think you’re old enough to be working out your limits by experience, like everybody else, like I did when I was underage and lying about it online. If you’re not old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised and you’re doing it anyway, then that’s on your parents, not on fandom.
If you were only reading fic rated G on AO3, if you had the various safe modes on other media enabled, you would be encountering very little disturbing material, anyway (at least in the crude way people tend to define “disturbing” these days; some of the most frankly horrifying art I have ever engaged with would have been rated PG at most under present systems, but none of that kind of work ever seems to draw your protests). In the end, what you really want is to be able to seek out the edges of your little world, but be able to blame other people when you don’t like what you find. Sorry. Adolescence is when you get to stop expecting others to pad your world for you and start experiencing the actual consequences of the risks you take, including feeling appalled and revolted at what other people think and feel.
Now, ironically, fandom’s actually a fairly good place for such risk-taking, as, for the most part, you control whether you engage and you can choose the level of your engagement. You can leave a site, blacklist something, stop reading an author, walk away from your computer. Are there actual people (as opposed to works of art, which cannot engage with you unless you engage with them) who will take advantage of you in fandom? Of course there are. Unfortunately, such people are everywhere. They will be there however “innocent” and “wholesome” the environment appears to be, superficially. That’s evil for you. There are abusers in elementary school. There are abusers in scout troops. There are abusers in houses of worship. Shutting down adult creative activity because you happen to be in the vicinity isn’t going to change any of that. It may help you avoid some of those icky feelings that you get when you think about sex (and you live in a rape culture, those feelings are actually understandable, even if your coping techniques are terrible), but no one, except maybe your parents, has a moral imperative to help you avoid those.
In the end, you’re not my kid and you’re not my intended audience. I’m under no obligation to imagine only healthy, wholesome relationships between people for your benefit. Until you’re old enough to understand that the world is not exclusively made up of people whose responsibility it is to protect you from your own decisions, yes, you’re too young for established media fandom. Fandom shouldn’t be “friendly” to you.
So this whole minors-in-fandom seems to be the big hot button topic right now, and this post pretty much sums up everything I have to say about the issue. But after reading this post, I had an epiphany while cooking dinner. While I usually don’t jump into The Discourse myself, I needed to share my discovery. So a few years ago I read this excellent article “The Overprotected Kid” – if you haven’t read it, go do it. Now. Seriously. It’s ostensibly about “millennials” but it’s talking mostly about kids that were 5-15 at the time the article was written, i.e. kids who are 8-18ish now. So, basically, this entire white-knight age group of kid crusaders.
Basically, all of this boils down to a generational divide on how we were raised. Like, I could have told you that, but. Really. Basically every line in this article is solid gold, and completely explains the phenomenon we’re embroiled in right now. The article specifically talks about how playing in “dangerous” playgrounds helps children mature and learn how to safely take risks. Well, fandom has long been called a sandbox for a reason, and the parallels are so close it’s bizarre.
Like, navigating your way through fandom spaces that have explicit content or disturbing themes?
“The idea was that kids should face what to them seem like “really dangerous risks” and then conquer them alone. That, she said, is what builds self-confidence and courage.”
Or
“At the core of the safety obsession is a view of children that is the exact opposite of Lady Allen’s, “an idea that children are too fragile or unintelligent to assess the risk of any given situation,” argues Tim Gill, the author of No Fear, a critique of our risk-averse society. “Now our working assumption is that children cannot be trusted to find their way around tricky physical or social and emotional situations.”
Or
Even today, growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions. By engaging in risky play, children are effectively subjecting themselves to a form of exposure therapy, in which they force themselves to do the thing they’re afraid of in order to overcome their fear. But if they never go through that process, the fear can turn into a phobia.
Basically, the problem is this: the 14 and 15 and 16 year-olds on this sight have been, largely, helicopter-parented for every moment of every day of their lives. Many of them have never had to take care of themselves, or navigate difficult emotional situations without parental guidance. When I was a kid, the internet was the wild west, and parents universally told us that everyone on the internet was a pedophile who wanted to kill you, so you had to keep yourself safe. Now, kids always expect there to be a parent there to take care of their emotional needs, and when they go onto online spaces, the just assume that the nearest adult will fill in that role for them, whether that adult is interested or not.
Now, kids are out here saying shit like “i dont know how you dont know that as an adult its your responsibility to maintain a safe environment for children, just as much as it is their parents. for ex not swearing around kids or letting teenagers drink alcohol like every adult knows that.. “
I am not your mother. It’s not my responsibility to ensure that there isn’t underaged drinking. If I walk past a couple of teenagers drinking beers on the street, do you know what I’m going to do about it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, because I don’t care and I’m not their mother, and I’m not your mother either. I’ll watch my mouth if I notice that there’s a kid near me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t swear in public, even if there could be kids around me that I haven’t noticed.
This expectation, that every adult is there to monitor you and watch out for you, and if they aren’t willing to do that then they’re a bad person?
“in all my years as a parent, I’ve mostly met children who take it for granted that they are always being watched.”
Or how about this chilling factoid?
“When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.”
These are the kids on here shouting “I need an adult!” and then getting offended when no adult rushes in to take care. It’s baffling to me, honestly, but. I didn’t grow up this way. My parents taught me how to make good decisions, take care of myself, and navigate difficult situations, both in the “real” world AND online. I… don’t really know what to say to kids whose parents didn’t.
I’m not your mom. If I want kids, I’ll have my own. And I won’t raise them the way your parents raised you.
Those people who constantly reblog your stuff but you never really talk:
I do notice my regulars. You guys are the best.
“Regulars” makes me feel like a bar-tender…
Wiping down my dash at the end of an evening, I see your read-more, over-hear your rant in the tags, so I pour you a drink.
“…what’s troubling you, kid?”
It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday As the regular crowd tumbls by There’s an old fandom queen blogging next to me And her little gray tags catch my eye
She says tumblr I’m feeling like shit today can you send me some posts for a smile can we talk about slash, can you fill up my dash so I won’t have to think for a while
Laa dahdah didee dah La dahdah didee dah dadum
Fill up my dash, you’re my followers Fill it with pictures and fic Yeah we’re all in the mood for some memery And occasional pictures of dick
Now Jill is a centaur novelist And she writes of her girlfriend and wife She reblogs from Toni, who’s in My Little Pony, And probably will be for life.
As the staff implements wretched changes And we think of how aliens bone We are writing a lot about loneliess: It’s much better than writing alone.
AND sometimes we blog about politics
And sometimes we blog with a beer
And when I proudly boast that I’m older than most,
They say ‘gross, what are YOU doing here’.
… mentally singing this with the correct tune has given me feelings. I object.
i’m still amazed at an*tis’ failure to grasp the fact that the reason many people ship something is simply because it’s an ‘interesting dynamic’. Not because they see it as some sort of healthy and ideal state of existence for the characters.
reasons a dynamic may be interesting to a person:
the potential for differing character development which arises out of it
identifying with a certain character or their experience
the nature of their potential or canon interactions (e.g. love/hate, best friend banter, opposites attract)
it is uncommon/taboo and the characters are a useful vessel to explore the complexities of such a relationship
it appeals to their specific kinks and turns them on
reasons why it is okay for people to do this:
it’s fictional
it’s not real
no real people were harmed in the making of x fanwork
reasons why you don’t need to be on a high horse:
no one is going around saying bad things are actually good in real life
(and no, troll posts don’t count)
we don’t exist in a social vacuum
society has established what is right and what is wrong
all of us here are aware
you are not more enlightened than the rest
because you read x tumblr post that once stated the obvious
reasons why it’s okay for people to share x works on the internet:
the internet is a public forum
the internet is not a safe space
you are in charge of protecting yourself
with the tools provided by a limited system
works are tagged with warnings
if you know you don’t like something then don’t read it
baffling how much of this site is just conservative protestantism with a gay hat
you know what i’m in just enough of a bad mood that i’m ready to nail my grievances to the church door so let’s fucking go
black and white morality wherein anyone who doesn’t believe/think/live exactly as I do is a dirty sinner Problematic and probably a predatory monster
everyone is a sinnerProblematic but true believerspeople who activist the right way according to my worldview are still better than everyone else, and I will act in accordance to this belief in my own superiority to let everyone else know I’m better than them because I found Jesusam the most woke
casual and fucking omnipresent equations of womanhood with softness/goodness/purity/nurturing to remind every woman who isn’t/doesn’t want to be any of those things that they’re doing it wrong
aggressive desexualization (particularly of women’s sexuality, to the point where it may as well not exist at all) accompanied by pastels [not a criticism directed ace ppl having a right to sex-free content and spaces but specifically targeted at a wider problem resulting from the previous point]
YOU’RE VALID AND JESUS LOVES YOU and neither of these platitudes achieves a goddamn thing
historical context is for people who care about nuance and we don’t have time for either (see: black and white morality)
lots of slogans and quotes and nice little soundbites to memorize but does anybody actually study the source material with a critical eye to make their own informed analysis
the answer is no
I’ve been to bible study groups don’t @ me I know what the fuck I’m talking about
Good Christians™ Nice Gays™
don’t fraternize with/let themselves be influenced by non-Christians those terrible queers
all the media one consumes must be ideologically pure or it will surely harm the children
it is Our Sacred Duty to protect the children from Everything, thus ensuring their innocence/purity/etc until such time as they are idk probably 25 years old
literally just “think of the children” moral panic y’all can fuckin miss me with that
people who don’t conform to the dominant thinking WILL be excommunicated/driven from the social group, and any wrong treatment they suffer will be seen as a justified consequence of their wrong thinking
I Saw Goody Proctor With The Devil And She Had A Bad Steven Universe Headcanon
Thank you for breaking it down like that because so many of us have been saying it but to see a play by play breakdown comparison is just…Thank you.
yes to all of this but also the next time I change my blog header it’s going to be “I Saw Goody Proctor With The Devil And She Had A Bad Steven Universe Headcanon”
a paper mache bucket ... tumblr mirror 