I try to stay away from a lot of fandom discourse, but since I’ve been seeing this on my dash again and in tags, I feel the need to make a statement on this, particularly for any young fans who follow me that might get drawn into this mindset.
Stay away from purity culture. Warn your friends away from it too, if you see them starting to fall for it. It’s very easy to get drawn into it
Almost always, it starts with one of three roots, pedophilia, incest and/or abuse. Usually it’s pedophilia. Funnily enough, that’s also what congress usually uses to try to justify passing bills that undermine online privacy & security. Because it’s an easy, extreme target, and when people attempt to argue against it, it’s nice and easy to say “Oh so you like pedophilia” rather then actually engaging with their argument.
The logic goes like this, although there’s many forms of it.
- “Pedophilia is bad.” -> Obviously, you agree with this. You’re a reasonable person, and the idea that anyone would do something like that to a child is horrible. This is a normal human reaction.
- “Because pedophilia is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.” -> Here you might hesitate, but it adds up, doesn’t it? The thought of pedophilia in any context probably gives you a bad feeling, that makes you inclined to go along with this logic.
- “Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia is also bad.” -> Maybe you pause here, or maybe you don’t. But still, it adds up, it’s a very easy flow. After all, we’ve decided that that is Bad, so why would anyone Good want to create something like that?
- “Since people who create content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia are just as bad as people who engage in pedophilia in real life, it’s okay to harm them.” -> Here’s where you might pause again. The argument might not win you over entirely, you might not be willing to do harm yourself, but you may be a lot more willing to turn a blind eye to harm being done to someone. Or to consider it ‘justified’.
- The pattern now repeats for anything else that’s considered “morally impure”, and “pedophilia” is expanded and expanded, often to ridiculous points, such as merely shipping two underage characters. “Abuse” becomes any ship that the person pushing doesn’t like, for any reason. And so on and so forth.
This is the foundation of “anti” culture, and it’s important to be aware of it so you can catch this false equivocation. Fictional explorations of something, are not the same as the thing itself. Fictional explorations are fiction. The characters are not real people. There is no actual harm being done. Equating fake harm and real harm is a dangerous, slippery slope, which leads us to fundamentally flawed ideas of moral purity. It’s a form of controlling people & making them feel guilty for their very thoughts, rather than holding people accountable for their actions.
A very handy trick for when you encounter this sort of argument, is to replace whatever the selected purity term is with murder. After all, we can all agree that murder is bad, but at the same time, we understand that a murder in a book =/= a murder in real life.
Let’s see that argument again, shall we?
- “Murder is bad”
“Because murder is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.”
“Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of murder is also bad.”
“Since people who create fictional explorations of murder are just as bad as the people who commit murder in real life, it’s okay to harm them.”
Hopefully, it’s now easy to see why the above argument is fundamentally flawed.
Keep your eye out for purity culture in your fandom spaces, and when you see it, refuse to engage with it. Warn your friends if you see them falling into the same traps, although try to be kind about it; this is a very easy thought pattern to fall into. I don’t recommend trying to argue/debate anti’s. The attention only feeds them. Block them instead. Don’t let people control or shame you for what you create or consume, and don’t control or shame others for what they create or consume.
Also, as a note, let me be clear about something. If you are uncomfortable with any of the above discussed things, or anything in general in fiction (ie, underage ships, murder, incest, abuse, penguins, needles, etc), that’s perfectly fine (it’s also called a squick, for those that haven’t heard that term before). Absolutely control your fandom experience by blocking people, filtering tags, unfollowing, etc. However, just because you are uncomfortable with something, does not give you the right to control other people. Other people have no right to control what content you create or consume, and you have no right to do that to them either.
Okay?
“It’s a form of controlling people & making them feel guilty for their very thoughts, rather than holding people accountable for their actions. ”
“Fictional explorations of something, are not the same as the thing itself. Fictional explorations are fiction. The characters are not real people. There is no actual harm being done. Equating fake harm and real harm is a dangerous, slippery slope, which leads us to fundamentally flawed ideas of moral purity.”
Fictional characters are not real people.
If I kill off a character, I am not a murderer.
Also, creators are not obligated to explore so-called ‘problematic content’ in only certain ways. Creators are allowed to create things simply for the enjoyment of it and do not need to justify their reasons for it or use said creations as a proclamation of their real life views and morals, because those things are not synonymous.
Speaking as someone who has been mentally ill and lonely for most of my teenage and adult life, incels are not just mentally ill and lonely. Incels subscribe to a politics of sexual entitlement and resentment towards women specifically because they feel they have not received the patriarchal favors they believe they’re entitled to, and why they hurt and kill women who don’t provide it to them. It’s literally just “mass shooters are just mentally ill” bullshit done to another violent group of people ignoring the role fascist ideology and gender and sexual politics plays in producing them.
Also their ideology has nothing to do with not getting laid like be fucking serious. If getting laid was enough to cure men of misogyny it would literally not exist. No amount of sex or intimacy would ever help one of these freaks because it will never match up with what they think they deserve.
elphabaforpresidentofgallifrey:
we bullied the metaverse and NFT craze into irrelevance and we can do it again with AI. i believe in us.
God. The added irony of the nft craze happening at the same time when picrew was at the height of its popularity. you could pay several thousands for the prestige of owning one of many rangomly generated jpegs or you could costumize your very own little character for free on the internet with a costumizer that was made by a decent fucking artist
peter parker once said “it’s truth, justice, and stupidity that motivate me” and by god he was right