korrasera:

To preface this, I’m not actually shipper or an anti-anti. By which I mean that my opposition to antis rests purely in their authoritarianism. But otherwise? I don’t have any skin in that game. I think reylo is a little gross myself, but shippers are free to do what they do. The closest I’ve gotten to caring is that I think Kara and Lena should be canon on Supergirl and I cried tears of joy when Korra and Asami became canon.

And unfortunately, you’re incorrect about antis. I mean, I would love it if the picture you were painting was accurate, that some antis are authoritarian while others are not, but the fact of the matter is that being an anti-shipper means that you’re subscribing to an authoritarian stance in regards to fandom. Sure, maybe you’re not as hardcore as other people, but the ideology you’re talking about is still ultimately authoritarian in nature. I wrote a short 101 on authoritarianism when an anon criticized me talking about authoritarian exclusionists that hate aces in the LGBTQ+ community because they didn’t understand authoritarianism either. (source)

As for your abortion debate example, a better way to put it would be this. Not all people who are anti-choice support murdering people who seek abortions or doctors who provide abortions. But! All people who are anti-choice stand opposed to bodily autonomy and think that all pregnant people, almost all of whom are women, should not have the right to control their own bodies. That’s an inherently authoritarian and an inherently violent ideology, regardless of the number of them willing to assault and murder people in the name of their cause. The only real caveat I have is that anti-abortion might just be born out of a different kind of authoritarianism, as in the US it’s strongly indicative of religious conservative Christian attitudes and that community is authoritarian as all get out.

In other words, you don’t have to provide shelter and material support to someone who does evil if you actively enable evil by embracing authoritarianism. Since anti-choice advocacy gets people killed and intentionally tries to strip rights from people, that counts.

Antis, on the other hand, just subscribe to an ideology that polices fandom looking for people who are not sufficiently pure, using disgust in the place of reasoning to judge someone as being evil or morally wrong. It would be nice if those of you who just didn’t like a ship were the core of your community, but that’s not what an anti is, at least not anymore. They’re people who harass shippers, drive them off of social media, and use claims of pedophilia and child grooming to do it. A lot of people have pointed out how anti attacks on shippers actually make it more difficult for us to stop predators who go after children because not only has it meant creating false reports that law enforcement officials have to take action on, but the community has themselves sheltered predators because they know how to manipulate authoritarian power structures in order to facilitate their grooming behaviors.

Why do you think so many people identify as left-wing in US politics without identifying as Democrat? It’s because identifying as a Democrat means participating in the system Democrats have built, much of which has been built on regressive social policies that aren’t much better than what Republicans offer. In this same fashion, identifying with a community that’s become defined by it’s authoritarian ideology means supporting that ideology, even weakly.

Yes, I stack rank antis near the bottom of the list of authoritarian groups that I personally care about fighting, but it’s still not healthy. If you want to be healthy then I’d encourage those of you who don’t subscribe to those views to come up with a new term to describe yourselves and break your community away from that ideology so you aren’t in tacit support of them.

For someone who’s not in fandom you sure are eager to tell me I’m wrong about fandom spaces I’ve been active in for years. You also seem to think you know what my “ideology” is when it’s nothing like what you describe. I’m actually closer to you–I think the ship is gross but that people are free to ship what they like. I don’t want to censor people or stop them from creating content, and I certainly don’t want to be anyone’s thought police. I have a hard enough time managing my own thoughts.

I do talk about things like bigotry and misogyny in fandom, commenting on and criticizing publicly available content generally without even interacting with the creators. That’s what the bulk of anti activity consists of, at least among people who came to be known as antis through a combination of tagging convention, identification by detractors, convenience, and self-identification.

I mean sorry we don’t match the cartoon idea of us you have in your head, I guess, but when reality and your own conceptions don’t match maybe it’s the latter that should be adjusted rather than the former. And that’s a cool take, telling us that we should cede our fan space and label to the worst elements among us, effectively saying we need to get out so the trolls and harassers can take over. All this from someone who has admitted to not being much involved in the spaces I’m talking about.

And if we did as you suggest and relabeled ourselves “crits” or something else, do you really think the caricature of us that lumps us in with harassing trolls will stop? I highly doubt it, considering that the reason Black women who talk about fandom racism get called fascists and racists isn’t because of a fandom label. They get treated like that because they’re Black women who talk openly about racism. Falsely labeling them as inherently authoritarian abusers helps, of course, so thanks for that.

lj-writes:

Saaaaaame. And they justify it by deliberately conflating all antis with a subset of awful harassers, ignoring the fact that antis who operate under their own names are by and large people who just don’t like a fucking fictional ship and engage in discourse about it. I have literally seen anti-antis like @korrasera (whose take on other subjects I respect) say all antis are by definition authoritarian harassers. Way to ignore the fact that, in reality, the word is also used to describe people who do no such thing. It’s like saying all anti-abortion people are killers or complicit in sheltering killers. I fucking hate the anti-abortion movement and am well aware that there is a strong authoritarian streak in the movement. A number of them are in fact bullies, harassers, and terrorists. That doesn’t mean anti-abortion thought is inherently authoritarian or violent, just goddamned stupid and sexist.

All people who are anti-choice stand opposed to bodily autonomy and think
that all pregnant people, almost all of whom are women, should not have
the right to control their own bodies. That’s an inherently
authoritarian and an inherently violent ideology,

Having anti-abortion beliefs correlates with authorian personalities, certainly, but that by itself doesn’t make someone an authoritarian personality, or rather by itself doesn’t determine their score on the right-wing authoritarian scale. You seem to be sliding over the definition of “authoritarian” to encompass all bigotry and evil, which is unhelpful and imprecise. Authoritarianism is a scale, with high scores having predictive value for certain behaviors such as intellectual/moral inconsistency and aggression on behalf of leaders. It’s not a test of good and evil people. (I just took it myself and the people bragging in the comments about their low scores were… something.)

And did you seriously say people who identify as Democrats in the U.S. are supporting the Democratic Party’s worst policies? I mean I guess that means people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist who became the Democratic nominee for her district, is participating in the Democratic system and therefore is complicit. Never mind that leftists like her who run in Democratic primaries are trying to change the party and take it over from the centrists and right-wingers. It almost looks like a label is more important to you than actual actions.