A ridiculously privileged take to have. I am also going to be talking about other anti-censorship talking points I've seen outside of this post and outside of OP.
NOTE: I do not give a fuck about proship/antiship discourse. This is just about bigotry in anti-censorship spaces.
(I am not including much discussion on queerness here because queerness is generally more accepted by fandom and treated with a level of 'you must have queer characters OR ELSE' that other marginalised people don't get. That said, fandom are notorious for being weird about (and shitty towards) non-binary trans identities and ace and aro folk. Before you wanna get bitchy, I'm a nonbinary lesbian.)
My criticisms don't go for ALL anti-censorship people, a lot of you are normal non-bigoted people who don't tell marginalised people to STFU when they have criticisms - but I genuinely believe one of the reasons anti-censorship has taken off in fandom spaces is because it's a convenient shield from the criticism of marginalised people - mostly used against women, people of colour, and disabled people, but not always.
People are loudly anti-censorship ... until it comes to trying to get women, PoC and disabled people in fandom to shut the fuck up, that is.
Women and PoC often feel alienated in fandoms because they are expected to shut up about fandom racism whether by the fandomites themselves or in fanworks. So long as white fandom is enjoying themselves, the unworthy guests can be quiet and bring them refreshments whilst they enjoy their m/m smut.
Because fanworks have been deemed this special, 'uncriticisable' beacon of purity, there is no space for marginalised people to question the ways in which people write stories about them - or do or don't engage with characters like them. The only option, then, is to try and find your own people in fandom so you are buffeted with less of fandom bigotry. Making this ENTIRELY the problem of the marginalised people in question is basically saying you don't care about their comfort within fandom, and it is basically saying you don't care about non-queer-related bigotry. Which...a lot of you think that anyway, it's just you keep saying the quiet part out loud lately.
If anyone said they didn't want to write gay or trans characters as personal preference they'd be labelled a fucking homophobe or a transphobe immediately. I bet reading that, you even got a little bit angry. But it's okay to do it to other people, apparently. You can avoid stories by or about women or people of colour, you can avoid ever telling their stories as well - that's not bigotry, that's personal preference! - because why would they ever be important in a narrative when all 90% of you want to do is jack off to white men, the most important creatures in the universe? /sarcasm There’s nothing wrong with being a kinkster or a sexual being, but when it is constantly an excuse to not engage with things involving women at all then it’s like… misogynistic really. Because it means you view women nothing more than a barrier to The Good Part - the men.
You cannot put all of this shit down to personal preference. If you don't care about the stories of women or people of colour or disabled people, then that's a choice you've made, and every time fandomgoers try to explain this choice, it almost always comes down to them not being 'as interesting' as white men. And if that's how you think, then you have bigotry you need to unpack.
Fiction does not always bleed into reality (I won't pretend it never does) but one way in which fiction does bleed into reality to an extent is in the way it helps form people's opinions on marginalised folk. They have a right to criticise racism, misogyny and ableism in fandom. They don't have to shut up about it. Fandom is not a shield of accountability nor is it an excuse to not unpack your own bigotry.
Anti-censorship people on Tumblr, a good number of them, also have a habit of only ever reading white m/m smut but telling you to do the legwork of reading about real-life censorship. It very much reminds me of some of these same people who tell you to care more about real-life children but then who don't care about real-life children or tell CSA survivors to shut the fuck up and their trauma isn't valid if they so much as voice discomfort (apparently trauma is only valid if you're using it to harass people).
'If you don’t study history you are doomed to repeat it' is the comment reply on this post and that person IS RIGHT, they are right! - and a loud cry of anti-censorship types - but if the wider anti censorship crowd did study history, even a little bit, I think they wouldn't act like only queer content was ever censored. Most of their discussion centres around queer censorship and for some it's because all they care about is queer smut- they don't give a shit who else gets, or has been, silenced. That's another bothersome side point - queer content is only ever put down to sexual matters, and there is more to our voices than just sex even if it's the sex that is mostly targeted.
Women's voices have been censored (why do you think so many had to use a male pen name in the hopes of getting published?)
Here's a list of books written by Black authors that have been targeted for censorship -or outright banned - either now or at some point in the US
Some discussion on how some targeted-for-banning books are ones dealing with mental health and disability.
The same again with LGBTQ+ books. I'm putting this here since I feel it's important to highlight the censorship of queer books outside of the lens of fanfiction.
Anti-censorship folk need to stop using it as a cosy pillow fort to hide away from the reasonable criticism of marginalised people. Anti-censorship isn't just about protecting queer fanfic smut - it's about not silencing your marginalised friends, it's about letting them have a voice if they have something to say about the state of fandom or fanworks. Otherwise you are pro-censorship if you deem every single thing that comes out of a woman or person of colour's mouth as not worth listening to.
'Not everything is activism' is a horrifically white take and I don't care what OP's identity is, it still sounds like a very white take. So long as the most privileged or otherwise important in fandom are okay, then all is okay and no-one should question it. The same people who demand YOU to care about IRL stuff get to live their eternal escapist cosy fantasy reading their stories about white men all day long. They get to hide from the world and its horrors in a way that women and PoC don't.
In this post by another user who screenshotted this OP's post, there is a yet another problem with anti-censorship on Tumblr - and that is trying to call everything censorship, bullying, or harassment. You cannot call reasonable criticism of bigotry 'harassment' or 'bullying'. That's just straight-up tone policing.
I just hate the terminally fandom-brained and the way it protects them from any rightful criticism. Criticism does not equal censorship.
