inglenookie

No need to vague. I'm not hostile.

Also - i didn't say it wasn't important. I specifically said otherwise:

My point is that broadly accusing transmascs of misogyny without backing, or due to discomfort with them personally expressing misogyny, is hurtful. After hearing similar rhetoric from people who loudly and openly hate us, it hurts to hear it from queer communities or other communities we consider safe.

While you may not have seen those kinds of claims. I've heard them made online and irl to me. But I've also had transmasc friends mention similar experiences, and heard transmasc people online talk about similar experiences.

No need to vague. I'm not hostile.

Also - i didn't say it wasn't important. I specifically said otherwise:

After so long of being yelled at or berated by my mother. Looked at with disgust for not shaving my legs and yelled at when I cut my hair, guilt tripped into wearing makeup, and being told any masculine dress was "not socially acceptable." All things that actively hurt gnc women as well as trans people. All things that are misogynistic to imply women have to do.

Every time I try to come out as trans: "I wish you weren't ashamed of your femininity, I'm so heartbroken that you hate women. You're only trying to become a man because you think women are inferior." Following it up with a "why can't you express yourself as you are and just be a gnc woman..." As if she didn't just mock me for those exact traits.

My mother, and by extension TERFs (as my mother is one), constantly imply that the only reason transmasculine people exist is because they are poor little girls who struggle with internalized misogyny. They need to embrace being the gnc women they truly are~ And the gnc women need to fix their internalized misogyny by being more feminine~

So imagine my frustration when the communities I assume to be safe for trans people (both irl and online) hit me with the "transmascs need to unpack their misogyny :/" "a surprising number of transmascs are misogynistic actually :/"

Everyone needs to unpack their misogyny dipshit. The fact that transmascs are singled out specifically leads me to conclude one (or both) of two things:

You have encountered a shitty transmasc person and have taken it upon yourself to decide that the entire transmasc community is like that. I'm not saying misogynistic transmascs don't exist, but if you see someone with a bigoted worldview and go "well this is indicative of the entire community" you are the problem.

You think transmascs are misogynistic for getting gender dysphoria around things that are feminine or conversely, they are misogynistic for getting euphoria around masculinity. This is just straight up punishing trans people for being true to themselves.

The rest of what you said feels, as well, like personal experience and not a widespread phenomenon. Which doesn't mean it's not important and tragic that it happened to you.

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

Since when is "priests getting shuffled around after raping kids and kids being told they're sinful because they had bodily reactions to being SAd" comparable to "Bobo the clown said my ship was cringe"

I'm not gonna answer this with The Aristocrats, as a I threatened, because I want to make a very serious point to this anon:

Purity culture isn't just religious abuse. It is most widely connected to religious abuse. Including actions in the Catholic Church and all fundamentalist Christianity. It's entire existence is about terrifying and indoctrinating people into being fearful of their own actions and bodies so that they feel certain that moving out from the "umbrella of safety" (to use a fundamentalist term) will result in them being harmed in ways they can't imagine. This is generally happening at the same time as they are being harmed by those who are supposed to be keeping them safe from all those terrible, worldly evils. Like speaking up when you're being abused. Believing you are not responsible for the actions of a rapist, and many, many other things that any person with an ounce of self-worth and good sense (two things not allowed in fundamentalist circles) knows are true in abuse situations.

But the point of the purity culture as identity in the above-mentioned circles is to teach people from birth that they aren't to have their own feelings, ideas, or instincts. They are only to follow the feelings, ideas, and instincts on the approved list in order to stay within the structures they know and feel safe in even as they feel very unsafe.

That being said:

Purity culture can also exist WITHOUT a religious structure while still being about controlling the thoughts, feelings, and actions of everyone within it. In terms of fandom, purity culture is groups of people stating that if you write something uncomfortable or gross or immoral, then YOU must be uncomfortable or gross or immoral and therefore, not worthy of the safety and moral superiority of the group.

Purity culture without religion teaches black and white thinking, encourages thought policing, and shames anyone who steps outside of a very narrow definition of good and bad by turning an entire group of people against them for being "bad".

Just like in religious circles.

Just like in the cult of fundamentalism.

Purity culture is a term taken by fundamentalists and turned into a whole way of life because the goal of fundamentalism is to make people too scared to leave. Purity culture in fandom does the same thing. It uses fear and threats of abandonment/harassment to control the way people act because a group of people decided they didn't like something, so they must try and wipe it out rather than simply ignore it.

I chose to ignore the details of this person attempting to discredit me in order to focus on their overall argument that I'm not allowed to use a phrase that they want to establish as having a single meaning and use. When, in truth, it's a phrase that identifies a set of ideas and behaviors that can function across many situations. In the same way that a cult can be religious or commercial, for example.

But it's important to also note what you said. That the phrasing of the what they see as my issue ("Bobo the clown...") is written in the most juvenile language to imply that the results of purity culture within fandom aren't serious or dangerous or traumatizing.

It absolutely does go beyond shipcourse. I was shamed for my sexuality. I was shamed for masturbation. I was shamed for having HARMLESS kinks by ANY standards (things literally like piss). I was shamed so hard and in such insidious ways as a form of thought control that I have extreme moral OCD to this day and despite having worked incredibly hard to unlearn it and let myself be my incredibly kinky self, I STILL sometimes have panic attacks or feel the urges to start "confessing" what I'm getting off to to my parents again.

This shit damages you. It's traumatic. It nearly cost the relationship I now have with my partner because my parents so strongly were convinced they knew my sexuality innately, inside and out, that they delayed my realization of my own pansexuality, my aspec identities, my abroness, etc, for several YEARS while I worried they were right and that I wouldn't be attracted to my partner anymore once she transitioned. They told me I was just straight and into her "male body" when I came out.

For the record, she is more beautiful every day she becomes more herself.

I felt dirty for having a body. My mom USED her suspicions of my sexual abuse pre-adoption to shame me for my piss kink, to call it abnormal and pathological. When I realized that SA had happened?

She backtracked so fast she tripped over herself, because me actually processing the real trauma and having a healthy relationship with my sexuality was more than she could handle.

I'm still unlearning just how deep that toxicity managed to seep into my psyche and healing with gentle hands the scars it left behind. I'm learning to love myself in ways I never realized I hated myself.

And I see these exact same patterns mirrored in shipcourse.

I see them mirrored in the moralization and demonization of depictions of sex that when fictional, harm no one. I see people making their discomfort the problem of survivors writing pieces that clearly are saying "this is bad" to anyone with critical thinking skills. I see children being called child predators for ageing characters up or down to self-ship. I see it in light and sexy erotica for people with cnc kinks being treated as dangerous pro-rape propaganda.

I see it in words on the page being held as equally horrible as what happened to me, when even if they were in fact actually harmful in any material way, it would be plancks to the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall galactic filament of harm that is actual harm to a single actual living child.

For reference, a planck length is the smallest theoretical unit in the universe. The Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall is a cluster of galaxies that is the single largest object in the known universe. The scales don't even compare. This isn't even ants to planets or booboos to broken bones. This is a momentary itch to total extinction of all existing life in this universe levels of scale, in the imaginary theoretical scenario where any part of a fanfic depicting the abuse I went through could be inherently harmful in any way.

Aside from misguided survivors, who I have enough empathy for to feel more neutral, I have nothing but the coldest void of hate for those that dare to compare the two. And worse, who then have the GALL to tell people talking about other forms of valid sexual trauma due to repression, shame, and abusive control, and tell them that THEY'RE in the wrong for noting the very real similarities and in cases IDENTICAL practices between cases of institutionalized thought control used to perpetrate sexual abuse in religion and secular thought control used to shape societal attitudes around and perpetrate sexual abuse in wider society?

Who do they think they are, to reduce it to "being told Bobo the clown is cringe" (never mind the multiple cases of minors and survivors being driven to attempts suicide, or any of the other number of serious harm done. never mind the actual predators sheltered by the anti community and rhe grooming done under the guise of "protecting the children" while sharing actual sexual materials with said children and spamming gore and death threats at and even doxxing others)?

How dare they try and minimize the very real harm done by secular purity culture and the way it shapes "protect the children" rhetoric and prevents children from receiving the age appropriate sexual education that has been proven time and time again to REDUCE sexual abuse and cause more perpetrators to be caught and kids to be saved?

How dare they further speak over and silence survivors talking about the methods by which a foundation is built on which to rest rape culture and prioritize the comfort of those who've never endured such a thing over the healing and safety of survivors?

How. Dare they.

Hell would seem a kind fate for that kind of person if I believed in such a place.

But my principles inform me to say: I hope anon can learn just how wrong they are about everything. I hope they spend the rest of their life working to help the people they're truly hurting with their quippy one-liners that bely deep underlying attitudes that are working to support and uphold societal, structural real world harm.

Though the petty part of me can't help but hope that the harm they've done or allowed to be done drives them to work ever harder, chasing unattainable absolution withheld only by their own guilt, as the haunting reality of what they've participated in nips at their heels like venom-fanged hellhounds.

I know, that's not very anarchist or reform/rehabilitation justice paradigm of me. I know that part is neither useful nor kind.

But as a survivor, please give me the grace of allowing me that anger at someone who won't even acknowledge the smallest parts of the hurt that was done to me, how it all compounded and twisted in on and corrupted all the other bits and festered inside until it broke open into a cacophony of rot and spores that I'm in intensive therapy to try and root out so I can start growing in all the places that were made infertile for me as an INFANT, where most other people have had all the years of their life to nurture and grow.

It's pointless to argue with a self-identified proshipper who says that proshipping simply means you're against censorship but who calls you an anti for being (e.g.) anti-racist and calling out patterns of erasure in fanworks even if you are also against censorship. Who then lumps you in with doxxers and sui-baiters even when you and none of your moots have ever done that.

It's likewise pointless to argue with a self-identified anti-shipper who says that anti-shipping simply means you have concerns about things like fictional underage erotica but who calls you a proshipper or a weirdo for not taking action against creators even if you also have concerns about fictional underage erotica (perhaps the same, perhaps different). Or who labels you a degenerate for "allowing" such content to persist.

Nah, friend. The proship side is that any criticism of media is either tantamount to censorship or evidence of some mental illness whereby you can't distinguish between fiction and reality. Neither of which are true. There is no nuance in the proship side (or the anti side).

If I say media representations of Black characters matter - how they're represented in fanworks or NOT represented (erased) - I'm accused of being an anti and using some pretext to come for your porn. C'mon now. Y'all are not that dense.