🔴if you're going to be anti, be anti harassment🟨

all three of these are actual kinks, or attractions that are often explored through kink — age-play, fauxcest, cnc, etc. — or fiction. consent does not matter in fiction, since, by clicking on that work, you have consented to see it and whatever kinks it includes. i fear this is not rocket science.

Fucked up things in fiction don't cause people to fall for grooming or to be groomers, isolation, coercion, and manipulation using pre-existing points of commonality and familiarity cause people to become victims, and groomers just end up doing the things they do because they were almost always planning to hurt someone in the first place, regardless of what media they consume. Fuck, a lot of the time predators actively go out of their way to indulge in only "morally pure" media and art, because it helps them mask predatory behavior to others. All it does to say that proshippers have a bigger grooming problem, is allow groomers in other communities to hurt others without people noticing. If the only signs of predation you're looking for, are people liking a fucked up concept in fiction, you are very likely to miss a lot of real predators and harm a lot of real victims of those predators who use that fictional space to cope and reprocess.

Blocking is fucking free!!!! I know it’s a novel concept!!!!

There are things that disgust me as an anti-censorship person myself and I just block it! You don’t need to go on some kind of moral crusade against people who do things that seem gross to you.

Also, OTHER PEOPLE’S TRAUMAS ARE THEIR OWN AS WELL. They can cope in their own way. All I can say is, grow the fuck up!

They will SCREAM pedo but be well into their 20’s and find no issue with being “oomfs” with 14 year olds. I remember this one kind of popular artist used to have 16+ in their bio but removed it after following a 14 year old (they are >19) - (this is just one instance but there have been more)

They demonize NSFW or adult only artists for what they draw while not seeing an issue with children being in the space in the first place??? Saying this cause I saw this 26 year old tiktoker a few months back, that blamed the adults and not the parents of the children for neglecting their kids? I don’t understand why she wants kids so bad in online fandom space, what does a tween have that someone in their 20’s doesn’t? How is “adults shouldn’t post such content” her main takeaway at her grown age? Lady you’re pushing 30 get a fucking grip

And I think antis don’t realize that it’s not that all adults are predators, but that people can lie about who they are. Have we learned NOTHING from internet safety???!

That 15 year old art moot that you often do art trades with could be a creep praying on you and having you feed into their sexual fantasies unknowingly. That 30 year old mutual? Could be a 12 year old using their moms id.

Both anti and pro for Christ’s sake CHECK THE AGES OF WHO YOU’RE TALKING TO. Never in a million years would I willingly talk to a 12 year old unless it is in a professional or familial setting, because what business do I have with one?

Also please please, minors stay safe. DO NOT post suggestive content or enter adult conversations even if it’s within a setting of “close friends”. Unless you know these people in real life you shouldn’t do that. You are putting yourself and your peers at risk for being taken advantage of (of course this isn’t to say the blame is on you in any way, but to not have any added risk of danger). If not for their / your safety at least be the example that others could follow. There is a reason children are not welcome, you lack both experience, knowledge and mental development to comprehend certain things to their fullest and make a nuanced or rational judgement. Even if you believe you are mature - you are not - you could be more self aware or observant but hormones still influence you and make you more prone to impulsivity and your prefrontal cortex is still not fully functional, impairing your decision making.

I encourage everyone to practice online safety, both adults and minors, stay safe!

i just saw an anti compare well known fandom artists (aka niche powerless people) to rich people 👍 if you need me im jumping off a cliff

This insane post I saw earlier today. Damn. I didn’t know that because I think people should be allowed to write what they want, it means I’m a pedo 😔

You claim to speak as a victim, but in your rush to condemn an entire community, you have become the very thing you claim to hate: a silencer. You are standing on a soapbox built from the lived trauma of others, using it to scream at people who use fiction to process, to vent, and to survive.

You state that "it’s not a thoughtcrime, it's an actual crime." This is a fundamental, dangerous delusion. A crime requires a victim: a living, breathing human being who has been harmed. Writing a story, drawing a picture, or engaging with problematic tropes does not harm a child. It does not facilitate grooming.

What does facilitate grooming is a culture of silence and the refusal to let survivors talk about the "ugly" parts of their history in the only ways they know how. By equating fiction with reality, you are trivializing real abuse. When you call a writer a pedophile for a headcanon, you are diluting a word that should be reserved for the monsters who actually hurt people. You aren't protecting children. You’re just playing a game of moral high-ground on the internet.

Many of the people you call "dead to you" are survivors of CSA, physical abuse, and domestic horror. We are people who were beaten by our parents, betrayed by our families, and left to drown—metaphorically and literally—while the adults in our lives looked the other way.

For many of us, proship or profiction spaces are the only places where we aren't forced to sanitize our trauma. We don't want to write healing stories where everything is fixed by a hug. Sometimes we need to explore the darkness, the power imbalances, and the complexities of the things that happened to us. When you tell us we are "just like the adults who looked away," you are gaslighting us. You are looking at a survivor who is using art to cope and telling them they are the abuser. That isn't activism, as I am an actual activist. It's cruelty.

Telling people to "drink propane" over fictional preferences is not the behavior of someone who cares about human life. It is the behavior of a bully hiding behind a badge of virtue. You are not guarding the community. You are creating a hostile environment where the only acceptable way to be a victim is to be quiet, pure, and perfectly aligned with your specific worldview.

this leads into a bigger conversation of government banning books with portrayals of lgbtq+ themes, racial injustice, revolutions and uprisings, and often times things of explicit sexual nature. look up book bans and tell me the themes of the top 10 worst ones, i assure you you’ll find portrayals of abuse, incest, rape, all the topics you’re uncomfortable with depicted in them.

why do you think the government doesn’t want you to read about these books and the contents portrayed in them?

pushing for the censorship of what type of fictional media can or cannot be created is a fascist ideal you need to actively fight against so you don’t stand on the opposite end of the so-called values and beliefs you say to promote.

fiction/fantasies are the only place where people are allowed to explore taboo and macabre in a safe and controlled environment that causes harm to no real world person.

many victims of abuse are often attracted to writing or reading these kind of stories because it is a safe, controlled way to process what has happened to them. authors also have all the power when they create these stories, something real victims of abuse in the real world aren’t beholden to at all.

It’s also a way for people who were not victims themselves to learn and get into the mindset of how this abuse could have occurred and why the victims couldn’t leave because in their distorted state of mind (which you are reading from) this is romantic. this is familiar. this is hard to leave behind or escape from.

when you engage with works like this, it facilitates compassion and understanding for victims without you having to actually gone through real life abuse. fiction creates a controlled environment where readers can confront uncomfortable realities without real-world consequences. this can make it easier to engage with topics people would otherwise avoid.

I would also prefer that you discard the obvious, such as WWII (more than fictional stories based on real events, the shipping of real people from the events) and overall stuff that could be in the fine line of glorifying hate speech and weird ideologies

With love, some random Oda Nobunaga/Mori Ranmaru shipper, idc if they died in like 15th century

(⁠ ⁠◜⁠‿⁠◝⁠ ⁠)⁠♡

Fiction amplifies reality. Jaws didn’t manifest a never before seen fear of sharks, it played on existing misconceptions and existing fears, and amplified them. The fear of sharks already existed. With or without Jaws we feared sharks, then a scary movie came out and those fears became amplified. 

But amplification isn’t exclusively bad. 

Nabokov’s Lolita, aka the most famous pedophilic story of all time and heavily censored for being “pornographic”, amplified our understanding of pedophilia, the kinds of people who commit it (charming, well educated, attractive people), and brought that conversation from hushed rooms to national attention.

Fifty Shades of Gray should have caused an uptick of relationship abuse and misuse of BDSM (and maybe it did), but it also caused a nationwide conversation on abuse, stalking, cult behavior, controlling relationships, and healthy BDSM. 

A lot of young girls first encountered female masturbation through Judy Blume’s Deenie (one of the ALA’s top 100 banned books of all time and a 40 year old woman writing about teen masturbation, a big tumblr no-no). Deenie’s impact was so important that it’s often cited as an invaluable validation for women and queer women who felt that their exploration was somehow immoral. There’s an entire book full of letters from readers to Blume about how important that book was to them. 

Take a scroll through some ‘top banned books’ lists and count to yourself how many of them were banned for specifically exploring sexual content in a liberating way. Or how many were banned for questioning the system.

Every single censorship movement and every single banned book has an army of people insisting that “fiction [only negatively] affects reality”. Books like Perks of Being a Wallflower for daring to talk about child sexual assault by a woman and depiction of a gay teenager. Or Speak for exploring the sexual assault and suicide attempts of a teenage girl. 

In reality, these books amplified reality and gave voices to the voiceless–those who felt purposefully stifled by society. Visually represented by this comic. 

I also remember my church talking about how “that’s why it’s banned! It teaches rebellion! It teaches you to question authority!” I nodded along and assumed that those were bad things.

And then I read the book. I read it and I realised something.

The thing that that book taught me the most? Was to wonder WHY a book had been banned. Because once I read it I realized it wasn’t JUST about questioning authority, it was about questioning a system that enforces ignorance and conformity. Something that requires censorship to begin, control, and spread.

I’ve had moments in my life where I saw a piece of media and cringed. Where I was sick just knowing it exists. There are books and shows that I feel strongly against and have had passing thoughts about how they should be banned.

And then I remember reading Farenheit 451. And I remember to ask, “why do I want to ban it?” and “Who does banning this benefit and who does it harm?” as well as “If this is banned, what comes next? What else can be classified this way but is vital to society and the vulnerable people in it?”

Because fiction? Is an important exploration of humanity, good and bad. And it might amplify what’s already there in a bad way sometimes, but it also shines a light on the dark places that we can actually do something about. And if you take away that light, it doesn’t make the bad things go away, it just makes bad people able to hide in the dark.

Fiction reflects reality, and reality reflects fiction. Glorifying things isn’t a good idea because that will absolutely attract the people who also glorify those things. It happens with popular things, it happens with published fiction. It happens with online stories. And if you keep saying “well it’s just fiction” you’re protecting those types of people.

Fiction that glorifies the worst of the world attracts the worst of the world. They will always search it out. To justify themselves and to brainwash others into believing their “side”.

If you define glorification as “I’ll know it when I see it” you’ve just opened a very convenient door for anyone to rip fiction spaces apart in the name of “glorification of problematic ideas”. 

Do you know who suffers the most when we tear down “bad” fiction because it “makes bad people”? Survivors. Always. Far out and away, survivors are always the first to be ripped apart. 

It’s why Speak is banned, it’s why Perks of Being a Wallflower is banned, it’s why Looking for Alaska is banned, it’s why during strikeout that the far and away biggest group affected was sexual assault survivors,  CSA survivors, and queer spaces. Always. That’s why I told you to look through the banned book list. All of it is “bad” fiction. But all of it empowers vulnerable groups. 

Listen, I’m with you, underage fic gives me the skeevies, but I also know the answer isn’t “no depictions of minors in sexual situations” because you cross out teens exploring sex healthily through fantasy, you cross out adults looking back on their teen experiences, you cross out most of YA lets be real. 

Then maybe instead we say “no depictions of minors in sexual situations WITH ADULTS” for one, a good deal of CS abusers are teens themselves, but whatever, let’s pretend that doesn’t exist, you’ve just really effectively silenced survivors (teens and adults) from looking at their experiences through text.

Okay okay, let’s say “no depictions of minors in sexual situations with adults EXCEPT FOR SURVIVORS” kay now in order to not be harassed, a survivor has to tell a stranger who wants to harass them (or worse lbr) that they are indeed a survivor. AND you’ve just made a scenario where you are HAPPY and RELIEVED to hear that someone was sexually assaulted. I cannot begin to describe to you the level of gross that is.

Okay… @saltherpgnerd, as a survivor myself? Who was groomed using various pieces of media? Shut up.

Fuck this noise. Fuck all of it. You. Don’t. Get. To. Choose. What. Changes. The. World. Your personal opinion on whether something is good or bad means NOTHING about whether or not it has a place in the world.

I was groomed using media that, today, I would definitely consider skeevy (which I’m not naming because I’m not having that argument today). I would absolutely not give it to a kid to watch or read these days, but I also would NEVER demand it be banned. 1. Because there are about a billion harmless pieces of media that could fall under the same umbrella that would end up gone as well. 2. The stuff itself wasn’t the issue, it was my abusers. The shows didn’t abuse me, they did. And 3. I HAVE SEEN WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY BANNING THINGS. It’s guaranteed to get out of hand.

I do not care what some evil asshole thinks about a piece of media or that they can pervert it to their purposes. The very idea that the entire world has to suffer the loss of information because of a group of sick fucks offends me more than any piece of problematic media ever could.

Banning and destroying things that “glorify” gross things will ALWAYS be subjective and thus will always lead to vital things being thrown away and hidden. This is just how it works and as long as people are people, it’s how it will always be. We’ve seen it over and over again and it has never once ended up actually doing anything good for anyone. Abusers still abuse, they just find other methods. Like was said above, works that teach people how to identify and avoid abuse will also get defined as glorifying that shit and will end up banned. I may hate some shows with everything in me, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to let them disappear forever, if only so that people don’t come up with the same idea later and call it new and then we have to do this all over again.

You know how I finally realized I was abused and started to heal? Seeing my own abuse depicted in fiction. In a story that many, many people would consider glorifying abuse. I might be in a much different place if I hadn’t had access to it. I may have never found my way out of that place if I hadn’t had a chance to rewatch the shit from when I was younger after having my realization.

Media teaches us about what we are and aren’t willing to tolerate in our lives. It exposes us to new ideas and gives us a safe space to evaluate them. It let’s people explore the best and worst parts of themselves without making it anyone else’s problem. Even the very worst media out there serves a purpose.

You don’t protect someone by never letting them know what can hurt them. You teach them to protect themselves by exposing them to what exists in a controlled environment so they’re prepared. If no one tells me that arsenic is poisonous that doesn’t mean that it can never harm me. It just means that I might end up in a situation where I consume it just because I don’t recognize it.

And you know what? If nothing else? Gross media gives us an easy way to identify gross people. If a male has an unironic love of Fight Club on a surface level, I stay the fuck away. A guy tells me he relates to Rick Sanchez? I run all the way away. Problematic media drawing in shitty people is a feature, not a bug.

Along with being validated in the media they consume, survivors can also write about characters going through trauma, and getting the comfort and recognition that yes, what they went through was horrible– that they can’t/don’t get from people in real life.

Writing therapy isn’t just limited to journaling, it can be projecting your trauma onto OCs, writing poetry about it, headcanoning it happening to your favorite character, along with many other things. 

All of these are therapist approved ways of dealing with trauma. It’s extremely accessible, because you don’t necessarily have to have a therapist to do it.

I work with old people, and am particularly affectionate with a few specific old ladies, and I had another resident imply I must be attracted to them bc I’m so affectionate with them. my manager considered that sexual harassment and told me I didn’t have to interact with the guy ever again.

of course an anti who constantly goes around calling every proshipper a pedo would say this LMAO

You're right! ^-^

I'm an adult with a job, and confident-ish in my own skin. When you tell me to kill myself, or hurl baseless accusations at me, I laugh it off.

But my 13 y/o self would not have done that. He'd have been really bothered by the way you would have treated him.

“I just want you to think through the implications!” says the person who flips the fuck out the moment you bring scientific research on what the implications are to the table.

I’m so sick of people going “waaaaaaah we just want to have a conversaaaaaation” when they don’t want to have a conversation, they just want a bigger soapbox to shout their ideas and denounce all others from.

You are free, in short, to keep yourself from consuming anything at all, for any reason, You’re not free to keep other people from consuming their own media. You’re not free to save someone else from consuming media that upsets *them*, much less from media that upsets *you*.

Both the writer and the consumer have to take responsibility.

Consumers need to take responsibility of the media they intake and not interact with things that have warnings for things they don’t like. That much is true.

But the writer also needs to take responsibility in their writing, too. Writing sensitive themes aren’t inherently bad, but how the writer portrays and uses those themes is what’s important, not just the mere existence of those themes in literature.

The entire argument is about whether those themes are romanticised/handled insensitively and how they have very real effects in real life. Writing sensitive themes isn’t inherently the writer condoning those themes, but you’d be surprised how many writers do condone those themes or take an unhealthy amount of joy in depicting those themes. 

Literature isn’t suddenly exempt from all consequence when we hold every other form of media to a moral standard. 

It’s not a call for censorship and no one’s allowed to explore dark themes in their writing, but a call for people who write those themes in an offensive way to take responsibility and deal with the consequences.

What are the appropriate consequences for artists who offensively depict sensitive themes? What appropriate consequences are visited on the creators of popular works that glamorize violence, like Joker, or eroticize sexual violence, like Game of Thrones?

What are the consequences of insensitive depiction? What provable harms come from fiction that insensitively depicts such things?

How do you tell which works are “romanticized” and “glamorized” and which are “sensitive” depictions? What are your criteria? Is it a test many different people could apply to a work of art and all come to the same conclusion on? Is it a test you could program a computer to apply?

If the focus is on how these themes are portrayed–that is, the approach each individual artist takes when portraying them–why are entire swathes of subject matter, like ships, condemned, and not the individual fanworks that take particular approaches to them?

What effect on whether or not a portrayal is viewed as “sensitive” or “acceptable” vs “harmful” and “glamorized” will the identity and experiences of the creator have?

How will you determine this relationship?

How will you account for the harm of coercive disclosure and/or erasure of those unwilling to publicly disclose sensitive areas of their lives and experiences, or unable to do so without significant personal harm? 

Do you think you would be able to determine who does and does not have the “right”, based on personal experience/ownership of events/identity/etc to create a particular portrayal without such disclosure? How will you be determining/testing this ability?

What does this determination do to the concept of “Death of the Author” and how it is applied to authorial intent vs results and outcomes?

How will you keep the concepts of “sensitive/appropriate” vs “romanticized/glamourized” from being used by those in social, cultural and/or political power to silence content that they do not like?

Have you researched how these concepts have been used to do exact that in the past? What cases can you give as examples? What measures will be taken in order to prevent the same thing from happening?

If you are relying on the difference between formal state sponsored censorship and mere social shunning/opprobrium, what research have you done into the effects of these forces on minority groups, particularly sexual and religious minority groups, and their artistic expressions? What measures will be taken to be certain that this case is different? How will those be implemented?

I think just having a disclaimer - “This is all fantasy and I DO NOT think any of this is healthy irl” - is enough in most cases, tbh. Which I see a lot of authors do. But while I’d like them to add disclaimers and such, I don’t know about making people face “consequences” for not doing so.

People who find themselves accused of having handled a subject insensitively (and the bar is low, like, “You wrote ship about children from canon being grown up and experiencing romance as adults, you’re glorifying pedophilia because you interpreted children as sexual”) are subjected to harassment campaigns, suicide baiting, being smeared to everyone who interacts with them as “a pedophile”, and being outed as LGBTQ+ (and “a pedophile”) to families and workplaces.

And look, I fell in the “conversation” trap on this website exactly once. Somebody clamoured to want to know, ‘seriously, because I just can’t see it!’ why anyone would have a different opinion. When stating mine, as thoughtfully and respectfully as I could, I got back: ‘you are a Terrible Person and People Like you are Terrible People and this is why…’ without responding to any of my points while gleefully putting words in my mouth.

People bothering other people about responsibility in storytelling in fandom rarely contact writers of mainstream fiction to do the same. Are they contacting the writers of Joker about ableism? Bryan Singer about killing off his only Black character in X-Men in a completely nonsensical way? Criminal Minds? Are they discussing Golding or Philip Roth? Saw movies and other torture porn? Seldom. Very seldom. It’s usually fic writers, a very marginalised group of storytellers they can harass.

Also, as we can see in JoKe Rowling’s case im Harper’s Bazaar it’s always people who have been criticised for spouting very harmful and scientifically false opinions who call for an ‘open debate’. Really, it’s code for 'I want to insult whomever I wish without criticism.’ Because nobody is stopping them, indeed, from voicing their opinions and insulting whomever they wish. What they are doing is either ignoring them or pushing back. Which is exactly what an open debate is for, but OK. People who know they will be criticised, or far more likely, otherwise won’t be listened to, especially on this site, 'only want to have a conversation’. Because that is what they are owed, they think. But they’re not. A conversation requires two willing participants and a willingness to listen on both sides. You can want to have a conversation all you want, but you can only request one. Nobody is owed a conversation, especially when there is a very good chance that the politedness demanded is not granted in turn. If it were only about getting to understand another’s viewpoint, you wouldn’t need a conversation. You could look these things up. But if you want an extra opportunity to talk and be listened to, you need a conversation. Especially if you want to abuse the other person to their face and then shame them for refusing to submit to that.