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it’s very, very American. While there are certainly antis who aren’t American, many of them are.

I have a lot of theories as to why this is, but a lot of them are covered in this post: anti-shipping as the cool new trend (while it’s mostly about the age bracket of anti-shippers as of June 2017 (this time last year), it’s an americentric post talking almost entirely about US phenomena).

tl;dr version? anti-shipping is:

the natural result of growing up both LGBT+/queer and marinated in American-flavored Puritan Christianity/purity culture 

with a side order of valuing safety over freedom 

b/c you’ve always had freedom of information 

but you’ve never known a sense of security 

thanks to lifelong internet access 

paired with post-9/11 paranoia.

add a dash of radical feminism/exclusionist thinking

never being taught how to think critically, and

zero education on sex of any kind, and

someone* added these tags to their reblog of this post, which, uh: this is literally the basic, standard fandom anti-shipper position on ships.

 Whether you call yourself an ‘anti’ or not, this is precisely what a fandom anti does: ‘throw down’ if they think someone’s ships are ‘abusive’, ‘pedophilia’, or ‘incest’ (generally with widely expanded definitions, hence the scare quotes).

it’s a pretty solid example of how this works, though:

tag op is 21: too young to remember a world before 9/11 happened or remember a world without internet access

tag op’s strong feelings about fictional ships suggests they flatten fiction and reality to equal levels of potential danger: classic black & white thinking structure that is strongly encouraged by American Protestant Christianity

tag op didn’t read this post with self-awareness and/or application of critical thought, much less click the link that the tl;dr list references

tag op feels justified in limiting other people’s freedom to use fictional ships to explore certain social/romantic/sexual dynamics, threatening to throw down over it.

this is because those social/romantic/sexual dynamics are not safe or healthy in real life.

even though ships are fictional, the safety of censorship is more important than freedom of expression or thought.

the concern is always about ships/sex fantasies: never violence/fantasies about harming others. this is the combined effect of purity culture and radical feminism in a society that glorifies and normalizes violence.

tag op will fight you for bad ships, because it is okay to fantasize about fighting people but not okay to fantasize about unhealthy fictional relationships

Anyway. 

I have a lot of sympathy for antis because I think their lives often set them up to favor censorship and abhor education-as-inoculation, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re being jerks to fellow fans on the basis of assuming things about the core of their person because of what they ship.

fandom policing of this sort is assumptive, presumptive, and deeply damaging, both to the victims of anti-shipper cyberbullying and the anti-shippers themselves, who are encouraged in this abusive cycle hellhole behavior by emotional manipulation and coercion.

(I want to end this with a joke about how American this is, but assholes are everywhere tbh. Americans are just especially susceptible to the thinking patterns established by fandom antis at this precise moment in history because of the factors listed above.)

The overt, performative denunciation of Bad Content has become the “shibboleth” for modern fandom, as managed by the increasing influence of antis. Why is that every time one of these posts come around people so inescapably feel the need to add “but of course I don’t condone the pedo stuff” to their reblogs? Do they have reason to assume that pedophiles are so universal and normative that any reasonable person would assume they were, unless they explicitly state otherwise? Of course not – it’s a passcode. A performance of cultural acceptability.

And as the anti movement is hugely American, that means that the passcodes and rituals are also firmly based in American culture. Why all the focus on who is and isn’t eighteen? That’s the age of legal adulthood in America. There’s no magical transition in America where you go to bed on the eve of your 18th birthday an infant and wake up the next day magically transformed into an adult, any more than this same metamorphosis occurs at 16 in the UK, or at 20 in Japan. Concepts like the age of adulthood are entirely arbitrary and culturally defined – but the only acceptable metric, among antis, is the American one.

All the other Unacceptables are equally foggy as soon as you step outside the USA boundaries. Are relationships between adopted siblings considered incest? What about non-blood related people raised in the same creche? Childhood friends? Step-siblings? Classmates? Second or twice-removed cousins? Ancestors or descendants? Different cultures don’t all answer these things the same ways (nor is there any reason that they should,) and that murkiness provides plenty of foothold to launch an attack from, when someone else is shipping in a way that Just Doesn’t Seem Right to you.

this post has had more than one addition from anti-shippers with various objections, and I’d like to make a few additions to address some things not clearly laid out above.

First of all: ‘anti’ is short for ‘anti-shipper’.

anti-shippers called themselves 'antis’ before anyone else did.

before anti-shippers nicknamed themselves 'antis’, fandom generally referred to people who shit-stirred over fictional ships they didn’t like as 'rabid shippers’ (b/c they usually loved a different, rival ship) or 'fandom police’ and called the shit-stirring 'fandom wank’.

Secondly: fandom anti-shippers focus most of their energy on policing FICTIONAL CONTENT - fanworks and fanwork creators in particular - by 'whatever means necessary’.

Anti-shippers contend that fanworks that depict harmful and/or illegal-irl content harm people, especially minors, in fandom by 'teaching them’ that harmful/illegal things are 'okay’ IRL (expressed as 'fiction affects reality’.) My primary issue with this argument: it contends that people who consume certain types of fiction make themselves susceptible to predators - and thus abuse they suffer is their own fault.

Anti-shippers believe this potential and indirect harm justifies violence towards fan creators - usually in the form of online harassment, death threats, noise mobs/spam, report spam, smear campaigns, and more.

Corallary to above: fandom anti-shipper definitions of 'harmful’ fictional content are extremely expansive and, apart from some room for mlm / wlw fiction, nearly indistinguishable from American right wing puritan definitions of 'harmful’.

To this end, fandom anti-shippers refer to any ship/ship dynamic they dislike as 'pedophilia’, 'incest’, or 'abuse’, regardless of accuracy, and modify the definitions of these loaded words at their convenience.

They also frequently smear anyone who argues with them as a 'pedophile’. (raise your hand if being called a pedophile over and over again for arguing that nobody deserves to be sent death threats for their fictional content makes you throw up in your mouth a little every time!)

Finally: fandom anti-shippers constantly dismiss and steamroll input from non-Western (particularly non-American) fans regarding anything they dislike in fandom, even if the creators/content aren’t Western/American.

The most egregious example of this is the redefinition of 'fujoshi’ - a reclaimed slur against Japanese women meaning 'a woman ruined for marriage [because she likes/creates BL content].’ Japanese BL (boy’s love, i.e. mlm) fans reclaimed this attack against them and call themselves 'fu/joshi/jin/danshi’, but English-speaking fandom anti-shippers started claiming “'fujoshi’ means 'a woman who’s gross b/c she 'fetishizes mlm’” - and they speak directly over any Japanese or Eastern Asian fan who tries to correct them.

other examples include: getting into arguments with fans over what constitutes statutory rape when the age of consent is different in different cultures*, claiming that first cousins getting married is 'incest’ even when the source culture has no issue with first cousins getting married, or arguing that various traditional romance practices unfamiliar to American/Western cultures are 'gross’ and therefore harmful/abusive.

*there’s nuanced arguments to be made about what’s the appropriate age of consent, etc, but let’s be real: we Americans are hardly in a position to judge or police other nations.

In conclusion: Besides the contentions I make in the OP about how anti-shipping culture is shaped by a very American crucible of thought, the imperialist behavior of anti-shippers:

the 'our moral standards are the Only REAL Moral Standards’ thing, and

the 'we know your own words better than you’ thing,