[ SECRET POST #6548 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6548 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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[Dungeons and Daddies]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 24 secrets from Secret Submission Post #936.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I feel there's a lot of things going on here. From the way you say it, it seems you are what we might call ideologically an anti (you believe depicting certain fictional content -- incest and pedophilia -- is beyond the pale and actively *causes harm* in the world) but you are behaviorally proship (your reaction to coming across people who create incest or pedophilic content, and possibly people who support the creation of such works, is to simply block and ignore). Ideology here is referring to your thoughts, feelings, personal beliefs, ideas, mental model of the world, etc. and behavior here is referring to concrete actions you take in the world.

You may not agree with this framing because, to you, both your ideology and behavior are consistent with being an anti. At the same time, however, it is clear that other people disagree and think that, if you are behaviorally proship and believe that blocking and moving on is the proper response to coming across people who write incest/underage, then you ARE a proshipper (this is why whenever you claim to be an anti, people ask about your behavior and on the basis of your behavior proclaim you proship). For the sake of clarity in this discussion, though, I would suggest just temporarily adopting this "ideologically anti" and "behaviorally proship" terminology so that we can distinguish these two things, even if you disagree with the framing.

I actually know a lot of people who are in your camp. However, most of them tend to identify as "neither anti nor proship" nowadays. I don't really think it makes a difference whether you identify as "anti" or "neither anti nor proship", though, because those people have the exact same problem you do -- conversations tend to go like this: "'Neither anti nor proship' -- what does that even mean??" "It means I morally judge people who write incest and pedophilic content but I don't go after them." "So you don't harass people. So... you're proship." "No. I am NOT proship. I do not agree with the proshipper position at all." "If you don't think it's okay to harass people over their ships, then you DO agree with the proship position! You are proship!" etc. etc. So it doesn't really matter how you identify, you're still going to get into the same problem.

To make a bit of progress on this circular debate, I think you may want to think a bit about WHY you don't harass people. Is it that you think writing/drawing incest and pedophilia is bad but it's just not THAT bad in the scheme of things? It's a mild bad, and so you're happy just letting people do it over there if they want, as long as you don't have to see it or interact with them? Is is that you think fiction can cause harms but overall, free speech is more important to protect than protecting people from the harms of fiction?

Is it that you WOULD harass people if it were more convenient and less time-consuming (i.e. the reason you don't harass people is because it's a lot of work and you don't have time)? For example, if an industrious fan in your fandom created a blocklist of everyone in the fandom who posted "p*do content" -- including accounts that only post that on a side account (i.e. it's not about having a quick way to avoid content you don't want to see show up unexpectedly on your dash; it's about never having to interact positively with someone you think is a "bad person") -- would you reblog it? Use it yourself? Quietly share it with others in your fandom? Call that fan out for harassing other fans?

Is it that you would harass people if it were cost-free to you personally? For example, if you and 80% of the fandom could successfully push out that one creepy writer who writes incest ships and everyone celebrated and considered it a job well done, would you participate in that campaign? Would you be happy it succeeded without a hitch?

The reason why I ask all these things is because for me, even someone who is a behavioral proship ("block and move on") type but also an ideological anti makes me very wary. They are loose cannons who I don't particularly want in my social spaces. I have no idea if they are people who 5-10 years ago WOULD have been the harassing anti, but the only reason they're not doing so NOW is because fandom wouldn't tolerate their shitty behavior. I have no idea if they're going to casually drop an opinion in front of me that if you've written an underage fic, you're a pedophile, which are fighting words (yes, I have written underage fic as an adult). I don't even know if the "behavioral proship" person actually IS a "blocks and moves on" type, or if they're the type who furtively tries to protect people from "pedophiles" and "abusers" by DMing people to warn them off artists who have drawn adult/child smut (VERY broadly construed; for example, drawing Sonic/Shadow smut is an example that I've seen people warn people off for) or incest ships, or who privately tries to get mods to ban such people from fandom exchanges, or will quietly try to get participants to boycott events run by mods who haven't banned those people from their events. I have no idea if the person who says they "block and move on" *really* only does that, or if they also take private actions that have the effect of ostracizing other fans -- I have no idea because I am just not privy to all of someone's actions, only their public behavior. So I have to be very careful and judge someone based on their ideological positions and their disposition.

Also, ultimately, my disagreement with "ideologically anti but behaviorally proship" people IS an ideological disagreement. The reason why I don't go after people who write incest or pedophilia is not because I am anti-harassment but because I don't think they have done anything wrong, and that matters. If I thought there were LITERAL pedophiles operating OUT IN THE OPEN in my fandom then heck yeah, I would push them out and work with other people to do so and warn people about them whenever I could. That's how *I* respond to actual pedophiles who show up in my spaces. Where antis and I disagree, though is whether "adults writing underage" is the same thing as "literal pedophiles operating out in the open in fandom." And it is very high-cost to level these accusations inaccurately.

To me, the anti ideology is not unrelated to the anti harassment behavior. In fact, they are EXTREMELY closely related. I would even say the anti ideology logically entails the necessity of the harassing behavior, depending on how literal the person is about their "incest = abuse; writing incest = abuse apologism" "writing children in sexual situations = sexualizing children = pedophilia" line of thinking. So I get very nervous when people say they think writing incest and underage is bad but that they just mind their own business and ignore people doing that. ...Why? Do you just not think pedophilia is a big deal? Or do you think people who do this aren't actually promoting pedophilia but doing some much more minor harm adjacent to that? Do you think writing incest and pedophilia IS a big deal but you also recognize that other people disagree so you're fine with just shutting up about it in mixed-company spaces? Do you think it is very bad and would gladly bully people out of fandom if you could find a contingent of people who agreed with you and helped you do that? These are all very different things, and I honestly can't tell from your secret which of these applies to you.

As people above also said, I would recommend thinking about why you feel compelled to publicly voice your moral stance on shipping incest and pedophilic ships if your main way of dealing with people with incest and pedophilic ships is just to ignore them. What is the purpose this is serving for you? Why feel the need to voice an opinion at all rather than just, well, block and move on? If you lived in the 2016 version of Tumblr, would you do more than just voice your opinion on these issues? There isn't really any "right" answer here -- I just think you need to be bluntly honest with yourself here about your motivations and what concretely your moral view is (both on the issue of fictional content/ships and also on harassment) and what are the consequences of that moral view, and whether that's being influenced by other social factors.