I need your help friend, the fandom is at stake: can you do a quick recap of why shipping isn't activism? And I don't mean just in terms of antis, but also the anti-backlash where people defend their ships by trying to prove they're actually progressive (which would still imply you need to prove your ship is not harmful before shipping it). Fans may have good intentions and mean no harm, but social justice is not achieved through fantasy.
what a good question. let me see if I can do this justice with a good answer.
First off: letâs define âshippingâ as âdesiring two characters to have romantic and/or sexual interactions and using social media or fanworks to share this desire with others.â  So: specifically looking at shipping as a social activity here, because I hope we can all agree that âshipping itâ - simply wishing for two characters to have some kind of interaction in your head - is not activism because itâs thoughts, which on their own nobody else knows about and thus canât have an impact.
Shipping as activism is mainly talked about in the context of being âqueer/LGBT representationâ, and everything else is treated as secondary.*  So Iâll be talking about this primarily from that POV.
shipping is not activism because shipping doesnât do two important things that activism does:Â
shipping does not generate or act as mainstream representation
shipping does not increase awareness or change social values
and thatâs okay. Shipping doesnât need to do these things because shipping takes place in a microcosm. Fandom is but a tiny, tiny fraction of internet and social activity as a whole. No matter how âprogressiveâ we collectively are, only in the rarest cases will we make a meaningful impact on society as a whole.
Shipping serves a different, but no less important purpose, which Iâll get into below.
Thatâs the short version. the long version is below.
Shipping is not activism because:Â
Shipping is a fandom-specific activity and fandom doesnât make much of a social impact. We get talked about a lot by the creators because weâre the people most likely to have contact with them and provide feedback on their content; we have an impact on creators in that sense.  But apart from coming to cons and talking on social media, when we get mainstream attention itâs almost always to talk about how weird we are. Also, we donât cause social change. We can fan over something that already exists, but we canât cause a show with better representation to be created.
Meaningful, mainstream representation of LGBT/queer relationships come from mainstream media, and fandom is not the main force acting on mainstream media productions.  Remember when korrasami became canon in the last few minutes of the last episode of Korra because the creators knew about the shippers? Congratulations: youâre looking at an outlier that took a lot of very specific circumstances and luck to have happen. And most importantly: it wasnât done to please the shippers. Shippers may have given them the idea, but it was done because canon korrasami would create visible bisexual/LGBT representation. It was possible because the show was only airing online, to a smaller audience, and because of the herculean efforts of LGBT/queer activists over the last century to get our collective visibility and acceptability as high as it is (and yes, we have a long way to go, but weâre miles past where we were even 10 years ago.)
Current fandom seems to carry the belief that if we just ship hard enough and loud enough, the creators of an ongoing mainstream media will reward us by making our favorite ship canon.** The reality is we rarely, if ever, make a meaningful impact on the direction that canon takes. Weâre a small, small part of the consumer base - a loud one, but small! Â Weâre often not the aimed-at demographic, either, so pleasing us is the last thing the execs trying to make a buck are thinking about. The material weâre fanning over is already old news to producers; short canons are usually already finished by the time we receive it, and longer ones are at least a season ahead in production time. (If we do make an impact, we wonât see it for at least a year or more.) Â Shows must meet decency standards, and LGBT/queer relationships are still seen as higher-rated than their cishet counterparts. Â Executives care about what will sell ad space or toys more than what fandom wants.
The fact of the matter is we have the cause and effect backwards.
Ships being âgood representationâ is a function of increased mainstream media representation of marginalized identities, not the other way around.  When media was entirely full of characters who were white cis men, we shipped white cis men. And as media slowly stops having nothing but white cis men, weâre ⌠still shipping white cis men a lot, because thereâs still a lot of them and thereâs still a societal bias that tells us that white cis men are the most important/interesting people (and simultaneously, because they are unmarked, we canât accidentally fall into stereotype pits while fanning them), but weâre shipping more and more non-white, non-cis, non-male characters too.Â
Real social activism leads to increased media representation - like the reclaiming of the word âqueerâ in the late 80â˛s/early 90â˛s leading to a TV show called âQueer as Folkâ and featuring gay characters. And increased media representation leads to more marginalized characters for fandom to ship.
While transformative fandom does, to an extent, change things from canon to represent ourselves more - or just to suit our fancy! - canon always reigns supreme and is the most widespread version of the characters. Â Canon becoming more diverse will always have more of an effect on fandom than fandom being diverse/having diverse content will ever have on canon.
The desire to see ships become canon is not primarily motivated by generating healthy representation of marginalized identities.  Fans have been wanting their favorite ships to become canon since the Stone Ages.  The Harry Potter fandom wars were all about what was most canon: Harry/Hermione, Hermione/Ron, or Harry/Ginny.  Notably: Draco/Harry is not one of the pairings I list, because nobody thought there was the remotest chance that Draco/Harry would ever become canon.  Itâs only recently that LGBT/queer rep in particular has been making a meaningful appearance in mainstream media, and suddenly slash ships have entered the âwill it be canon!?â fray. And some mlm fans feel they have more ârightâ to canon because mlm ships are LGBT/queer rep.
Hereâs the thing: if this was really about representation, then weâd all be celebrating if any mlm pairing became canon. No matter which pairing is âmore progressiveâ, any LGBT/queer canon representation is better than none. But (surprise!) itâs not; the âqueer rep!â battle cry is just an additional cannonball in the arsenal of ongoing ship wars.*** And I venture to say that most mlm shippers engaged in a ship war would rather see an unrelated het pairing become canon than their rival mlm ship.
Shipping is not, and never has been, primarily about creating healthy marginalized representation. Â Donât get me wrong: transformative fandom is heavily LGBT/queer/mentally ill/disabled/otherwise underrepresented, and we often create transformative fanworks that bring our identities into the story. Thatâs awesome self-fulfillment, and it can really bless and excite fellow fans who see fandom content that makes them feel more welcomed and recognized. Â However.
Generating marginalized representation isnât the primary motive for shipping. We ship out of love. We see the dynamics between two characters and think âoh, thatâs hotâ or âIâd like to see more of thatâ. We ship for fun. We ship because we think two characters would look good together. We ship because we imagine ourselves as one character and have a crush on the other. We ship things for many, many reasons, many I havenât mentioned here, maybe as many reasons as there are people in fandom doing shippy things. Â And to that end, Iâm sure that some people do decide what to ship purely because they believe it represents minority groups that need representation - but it would be too much to say thatâs the main reason people ship things.
Shipping doesnât need to be about creating healthy marginalized representation because:
Fiction is not reality; a person can ship the ârightâ ships and still be a bigot IRL. and visa versa. Because we interact with fiction and reality in different ways, there are people who really love mlm ships but still think gay marriage is icky. On the other hand, a person can be the loudest activist for LGBT/queer causes in real life and only ship het ships in fandom, just because the dynamics of het ships pings their fancy more.
Shipping as activism preaches to the choir. Shipping being a fandom-specific activity, and many of us being oppressed ourselves, shipping the ârightâ ship to increase awareness in the microcosm of fandom isnât really accomplishing anything. Most of us are ourselves LGBT/queer, or friends with people who are LGBT/queer. Most of us are aware of how much pain the lack of representation in mainstream media brings on.  And most of us are sensitive to the fact that weâre not the only oppressed person in fandom space and are willing to learn more about how we can help other oppressed people.
If I could sum up the problems of current fandom, itâs that we assume that nobody else is #woke (even though most of us are sufferers). In that sense, shipping the ârightâ ship doesnât bring more awareness; it acts as a signal to others that you have awareness, and hopefully protects you from being erased or harassed as an ignorant asshole (âcishetâ).
Shipping isnât activism, but it does something else great: it lets marginalized fans express and indulge themselves in any way that pleases them. Â - fandom is primarily made of underrepresented minorities, so shipping is a way that we express ourselves and relate to one another - whether those ships are âprogressiveâ or not. So, so many of us deal with social stigma or harassment or hate in our real lives; we consume media to get away from that, and we indulge in fandom to get away from that. Â Most of us are, just by existing and demanding space in the world, activists for the rights of the marginalized and oppressed. Fandom is a space for us to play with each other and connect over something fun and pleasant, and those fun and pleasant things donât have to be activist things. Weâre allowed to take a break.
The importance of activism and representation is to benefit the marginalized and oppressed, letting us be recognized and less stigmatized, and deconstructing the social and political structures that work against us leading fulfilling lives.  When we use shipping the ârightâ ship as a bludgeon to attack one another, we are literally defeating the purpose of our own causes. Weâre stigmatizing each other for our fandom interests. And weâre certainly not deconstructing any social structures that harm us!
In conclusion: The way we can be most activist in transformative fandom is, no joke, to care more about the fact that almost everyone else here is marginalized too than that one anotherâs ships arenât marginalized enough.
*In talking about ships as representation we generally start with âthis ship is queer/LGBTâ and then use all other axes of oppression to prove which ship is âmore progressiveâ, i.e. - F1nnPoe and Ky1ux are both mlm, but F1nnPoe is more pure because itâs a black man and a Latino man as opposed to two white men. (Occasionally race will also be talked of as the primary point of value, depending on the fandom.)
**On a side note, this whole paragraph is also why itâs unlikely that fandom being ugly will ever cause a show to be cancelled or a pairing will get changed in canon because some fans were nastier than others. Weâre like bugs with stingers: scary and painful but ultimately not that impactful (unless youâre allergic, I guess, but forget that part of the metaphor).Â
***This is part of where the âI have to prove my ship is wholesome/their ship is evilâ stuff comes from: âprovingâ to creators that your ship is the âbetterâ queer representation because it either covers more marginalized bases or is âmore pureâ, making it less objectionable for mainstream representation. (the joke is that bigots donât care how pure an LGBT/queer ship is: theyâre gonna still think itâs awful because itâs LGBT/queer.)
PS - I donât think this answer really addresses why arguing about purity of ships is a bad plan, but this is already so long that Iâll address that somewhere else I think.