I just read this super sad post about this girl who’s asexual and married and everyone is basically telling her that she doesn’t deserve her husband/she’s just a prude/she should just do it anyway.
So I want to tell you all right now that if people tell you this, or if they tell you you’ll never have a relationship, it is BULLSHIT.
My husband is asexual and I’m not. He’s sex repulsed, we don’t have sex, we never have.
And it doesn’t matter to me. You know what does? He does. His mental health and wellbeing matter to me. Because he is my best friend and he’s one of the smartest, kindest, funniest people I’ve ever met. And he’s had people tel him that he’s broken and it makes me SO ANGRY because they are WRONG.
Being different doesnt mean you’re broken.
If you don’t like sex/don’t want it/etc. Do not let anyone tell you that you’re inferior because you’re not.
Do not let anyone convice you that you’ll never have a relationship because they’re wrong(if you want one).
You are not broken, and it will be okay.
This made me feel really good. Remember this, for all my ace spectrum friends out there
I hope you don’t mind me reblogging your tags but these are my feelings EXACTLY
I’m always a little nervous that I’m not “good enough” for a “real relationship” because sex isn’t on the table. So yeah, these stories are reassuring
The amount of pressure from society to have sex is incredible. We’re told it’s linked to relationship health and if you’re not willing to do every damn thing you’re labeled a prude. It’s incredibly disheartening, especially considering how one’s libido can change over the years even if you’re not ace. Nice to see a supportive piece from a partner.
OK, kids, buckle up it’s story time.
When I got married, I hadn’t had sex yet. Waiting until marriage was important to me, so that’s what I did. My wedding night was the first time I had sex.
It sucked.
I figured, ok, this is new for both of us, it’s probably going to take some practice.
A year later? It still sucked We tried a lot of different stuff. A lot of different stuff.
It sucked so bad, we even bought a copy of “Sex for Dummies”.
(it didn’t help)
I started working late so I didn’t go to bed at the same time as my husband. Every time he would travel for work, I’d be grateful that I didn’t have to go through the awkwardness of avoiding his advances when I went to bed.
He didn’t think it was healthy for a newlywed couple to have sex less than once a week. So we scheduled it. Repeat, scheduled intimacy. I thought I was putting on a brave face and doing what I needed to do to maintain a good relationship.
Because I had no idea that asexuality was a thing.
I talked to my husband, told him I didn’t like sex. He didn’t understand. I lost track of how many times I said: “It’s not that I don’t want to have sex with you. I don’t want to have sex with anyone.”
So it was established, Amber doesn’t like sex.
But we still did it. Because I wanted my husband to be happy. Sometimes halfway through, I’d start crying.
And he’d always be supportive, and apologize.
After he finished.
So when I found out about asexuality, and told him how I felt, he suggested I go to a doctor. Because obviously there was something wrong with me.
So I went to a doctor.
(surprise, surprise, I’m perfectly healthy)
Then I told my mom. When she suggested meds to improve my sex drive, I broke down in tears. I told her there was nothing wrong with me. And my mom has been 100% supportive of my orientation ever since. When people ask if I’m a lesbian, she teaches them about asexuality.
But anyway back to my journey of self-discovery
So I tell my husband, I’m asexual, I don’t want to have sex. You are not asexual, you do want to have sex. One of us is going to be miserable in this relationship, and I’m tired of it being me. I love you too much to make you miserable for the rest of your life, but I love myself too much to be miserable for the rest of my life. We might have to face the fact that we’re not right for each other.
So his immediate response is “no, I can change, I’ll do anything, divorce is not an option, etc”
But I can’t exactly ask him to stop wanting to have sex. Because that’s not how allosexual people work. And he can’t seduce me into wanting to have sex, because that’s not how asexual people work.
Anyway. He cries, I cry, we decide on marriage counseling to help our comunication.
Because we’d been married for almost 6 years by this point, and had been together for 3 years before that, and we still can’t really talk about what we want (or don’t want) in regards to sex.
So we go to counselling for 6 weeks. The first 3 sessions individually, and the last 3 together. During the together sessions, the therapist would prompt us with a question, and we’d talk to each other, being completely honest about things.
During (what turned out to be) our last session, I’d finally had enough. I’d had enough of being embarrassed about what anyone else would think. Enough of the gender roles I was being forced into. Enough of paying someone to watch me talk to my husband. Enough of pretending to salvage a relationship that I had been increasingly avoiding over the past 2 years, and I said:
“Josh, I love you. We have communication problems, but we’ve been together almost ten years and I’m willing to work through those if you think we can make it work. But I am never having sex with you again.”
(At this point, the therapist who’d been trying to get us to communicate put down her notebook and said, ok I think we’re done.)
Then and only then, did he agree to file for divorce.
—————–
I say all that to say this:
Don’t you dare fucking tell me that asexual representation doesn’t matter. I would have six years of my life back if I had known.
And if you’re in a relationship, talk to each other oh my God. About everything. What dream you had last night. That song from scout camp that randomly gets stuck in your head. The reason you don’t like sweet potato. That embarrassing thing you did in third grade that still makes you mad when you think about it. If you and your partner can share these tiny, intimate details, talking about sex is no big deal. And it takes practice, so practice.
————–
On a happy note, now, 3 years after the divorce, I am in a happy, stable relationship with another ace. And if you happen to ask my mom how I’m doing, she’ll tell you “I’ve never seen my baby girl happier.”
It gets better. But it’s up to you to make it that way.
@theonetheonlyjordanelizabeth please read this ❤️ I may be sex repulsed but I know that I love you and thats what matters ✨
I know this is already really long and really informative, but I also wanted to add a partner’s perspective. I too, have an ace fiancee. I knew about it before our relationship. I didn’t know it was a thing until I met her, and that was huge to me because I learned something new and also came to understand an old friend a little better.
I, on the other hand, am not ace. I am at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. I am pansexual, and she has a hard time I think coming to terms with the fact that I don’t want to make her have sex.
Like, ‘Really?’ you might ask me. Like really is my only reply. I have loved her for a long time now, and being we met over Tumblr and we knew one another before the relationship, sex isn’t a big deal in our relationship. and I can think of at least ten of my friends who would feel the same way right now.
ASEXUALITY IS A REAL THING, LOVING, SWEET ACE RELATIONSHIPS ARE REAL! Just because your partner wants sex doesn’t make you broken. Just because you don’t want sex doesn’t mean you should have to force yourself to do so.
Just be honest with one another, love one another. If a relationship can’t survive a healthy, honest conversation, then it wasn’t a very strong relationship to begin with.
TL;DR People who can’t see past sex as a ‘core’ in a relationship with someone ace/sex repulsed is an asshole.
Alright, I hope nobody minds but I’m going to answer this one straight (no jokes, no satire). I’m just not in the mood to come up with an entire comedy routine for this. Partly because I’m tired, and partly because this inane talking point is the one that pisses me off the most, out of all them.
I’ll give you a little introduction about myself. I was born in the Dominican Republic. I spent the first 7 years of my life there and I went back there every summer until I was a teen. If you don’t know, it’s an extremely poor country. Not as poor as Haiti, but pretty far away economically from the United States (which is where I live now), Canada, Western Europe, and chances are from any country from which people will most likely be reading this from.
I did not grow up poor. My parents were middle class (by Dominican standards). My grandparents owned a chicken farm.
I knew plenty of poor people. No matter where you go in the Dominican Republic, they are everywhere. Looking back on my childhood, whenever I went to a friend’s house (it was much more like a shack with a tin roof, than a “house”) and if I so happened to catch them while they were eating, I have absolutely no recollection of ever seeing meat on the table.
You know the kind of foods that I always saw? I saw things like rice, potatoes, corn, yucca (root vegetable like potatoes), beans, lentils, peas, breads, and fruits on the table.
I would never venture to say that they were 100% vegan, because obviously I doubt they were. But I’ll bet every last cent that that I have that at the very least 85% of the food they ate (and everybody in their socioeconomic status) was plant-based. Do you know why? Because it’s the cheapest.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out. From an agricultural standpoint, the lower you eat on the food chain, the less time and resources go towards the finished product, then the less the finished product is going to cost. If you are growing crops to feed animals and then feeding animals to people, then that’s a lot more time and resources going towards the finished “product”. If you are growing crops to feed people directly, then that’s obviously less time and resource intensive (which makes it less costly).
As countries get richer, the more animal products they consume. That’s what’s going on in China right now.
You most likely being born and raised in the United States and most likely never step foot out of the country and seen how poor people (you know the people that you are so concerned about) eat in other nations. I can assure you they are not dining on hamburgers, hot dogs, bacon, chicken mcnuggets, etc…..
You also, most likely being born and raised in the United States, think the real free market price cost of a hamburger is 99 cents. It’s not even close. The massive subsidies that the government gets, through my taxes, artificially lowers the price of meat and dairy to a much more manageable cost to the consumer.
Now for a person, such as yourself who absolutely hates elitism like you claim you do, can you tell me anything more disgustingly elitist than somebody else having to pick up the tab for your taste preference? Please enlighten me why I, and others, have to pay for something that I find disgustingly cruel, but because people like yourself, and millions of others don’t want to pay the full price for a steak? I’m dying to know the answer to this.
If the American public had to pay the REAL free market price cost of meat and dairy, your god-damn head would spin. American culture would be completely different than what you see it today. It would be a more economically honest society.
As far as vegan homeless shelters and vegan food pantries, I doubt there are any. But do you honestly think because there aren’t any (which there might be for all I know), that somehow means plant foods are more elitist than animal based foods?????
The reason why they probably don’t exist is because the people who run these operations, while I’m sure being extremely kind-hearted and philanthropic people, they most likely were born and raised in the United States, and have developed the indoctrinated belief that a “meal” is not a “meal” unless there is a piece of animal flesh on the table. Just because they believe that, it sure as hell doesn’t make it so.
The idea of serving solely plant-based foods will inherently be cheaper for the same reasons I’ve gone over. More than likely, the idea is just simply not in their radar, like most people.
To give you an idea of what’s possible. Here is a prison that went vegetariansolely because of it being cheaper. It had nothing to do with ethics, the environment, etc… Pure dollars and cents. Here is a prison in California where half the inmates were served vegan food. That half had remarkably lower incidences of violence and much better fellowship (which goes to show you that there is more to this issue than just dollars and cents).
Do you want to know what people such as yourself who bring up this absurd talking point should be shouting from the rooftops about? You should DEMAND that every last red cent of the government subsidies that are going to the meat and dairy industry go towards plant-based foods that are already cheap.
So, you would take every cent that goes to meat and dairy, and give it people that produce rice, potatoes, beans, lentils, peas, etc…. You know what that will do? It will massively reduce the price of these already insanely cheap foods. So if you were to go to the store and you’d normally see cans of beans being sold at the current price for about 80-90 cents a can, would know only cost 20-30 cents a can. You can do this with cheap fruits as well. Bananas are a very inexpensive fruit, Slash the already cheap price by at least half with the subsidy, then all of a sudden everybody can eat fruit.
This means practically ANYBODY could afford healthy, vitamin and nutrient dense foods (much more so than meat and dairy) no matter where on the economic ladder you are. This means the food pantries and homeless shelters can stock up on MORE food for less money, which means more people get to eat.
Do you know why this will never happen?
1) People are completely ignorant about the government subsidies that go to the meat and dairy industry, and more than likely have no interest in learning about these things, because out of sight, out of mind.
2) (This is the big reason). I DON’T WANT TO GIVE UP MY SHIT!!!! I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO PAY $10 FOR A HAMBURGER!!!! WHY IS LIFE IS SO CRUEL!!!!!!! I’M THE VICTIM!!!!
Whenever somebody brings up poverty, when they are asked to “go vegan”. It is the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard. Do you know why people say this? Because other people say it. They just simply regurgitate the same things other people say without thinking about what they are saying for more than a half a second before they vomit it out of their mouths.
No thinking about how the agricultural process works, no thinking about the subsidies, no thinking about what the poorest people in the world eat….people just simply talking out of their asses.
It’s just people who are confronted with something that makes them uncomfortable and instead of thinking about why they are getting so defensive about their beliefs, they just flail miserably just hoping to land a punch, so they’ll say anything.
The onslaught of bullshit that comes out of people’s mouths when confronted with this issue is never-ending. You have people who will be using a computer with electricity and internet connection writing about the INUIT TRIBE, as if that has anything to do with them. Just take a look at my blog to see how many people think they’re like lions, or how much people suddenly give a shit about a plant’s life, or any of the mindless things that comes out of people’s mouths when it comes to this issue. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just read it.
How come I never hear this kind of stuff about the poor when you’ve got celebrity chefs who display and present food to the public as a form of entertainment? Here are all these starving people, and we have game shows about food. It’s weird…..I never hear a peep about poor people when this comes up.
How come whenever there is a hot dog eating contest, I never hear about this????? Don’t you think that it’s kind of sadistic to have a contest to see who can be the most wasteful and shove as much shit down their throat as possible when there are people starving? Hmm….crickets…
How come I never hear about anyone commenting on a culture that treats food like nothing more than a test of one’s gluttony or are barbecues a place to pray for those that don’t have any food? It’s been a while since I’ve been to one….Maybe it’s changed since last I’ve gone.
How come I never hear about how wasteful it is to lose countless amounts of food and calories through the crops that are grown only to get a microscopic amount of food and calories back from the animals that society eats for a taste preference all the meanwhile people are starving?
How come I never hear about the poor people in impoverished nations who are starving, meanwhile others in that same nation are growing crops not to feed them, but to feed farm animals that would peacefully not exist in the first place, if it wasn’t for the people’s demand of meat and dairy?
It’s weird….I never hear about these things. But tell somebody to eat solely plants, and then all of a sudden you are hearing about poor people and about people who live in the arctic.
Let’s just for arguments sake say that eating things like beans, lentils, rice, etc,…was more elitist and unaffordable to the poor. I hope I pointed out how much bullshit this is, but let’s just play devil’s advocate here for teensy second.
We live in a world where Anthony Bourdain has over 1.5 million people following him on Twitter. I’m going to take a stab in the dark and say these people don’t eat in soup kitchens. What’s their excuse?
We live in a world where people will spend $30 a pound for fillet mignon. I know this because I actually used to work in a meat department for a supermarket. I did it for four years. I know how much your average person spends on things like meat and dairy, and it’s a HELL of a lot more than what I spend on groceries.
I have to ask……what’s their excuse? Let me guess….they are going to tell me something about poor people existing somewhere in some time in some space in some part of the world.
DEMAND makes the world we live in, not supply. The world’s marketplace is what we demand it to be. No one is asking a person who is eating at a soup kitchen to vote with their dollar, because they don’t have the dollar to vote with. They are living on charity (not that there is anything wrong with that by any means). Instead we are asking for people who can vote with their dollar to change the world.
The more people demand something, the more the paradigm shifts. The more the paradigm shits, the more peaceful of a world we can live in for everybody (just a clue…..the human species is not the only one that exists).
Right now, we have a world that reflects the demand of people to have Burger King, Mcdonalds,Arbys, Hardees, Wendy’s, Popeyes, steakhouses, etc in just about every civilized corner„(the list goes on and on). I know one thing is for certain. This world the people demanded does not exist because starving people demanded it.
And as far as the road-kill being easier to find in the American Mid-west, by all means….have at it. What I wouldn’t give for a meat-eater put his money where his mouth is and act like the carnivore that he claims to be, and eat up a free meal like that. The animal was killed by accident. It wasn’t done on purpose. They are dead anyway. Go ahead and eat them. Just make sure to take a video of you eating the road kill so I can see how many other “genetic” meat-eating humans would be hungry at that site.
And as far as the over-population of deer, did you ever think that maybe humans are overpopulated? Did you ever think that the deer has every right to exist on land that they were previously able to roam freely in but now has become part of the infrastructure of mankind because for some reason they think birth control is the work of the devil, so they keep on popping out kids like a god-damn pez dispenser?
I don’t think I’ve ever met a single hunter who uses the overpopulation talking point as nothing more than an excuse to get off on killing something. I have yet to see a photo of a hunter with a sad look on their face after they killed an animal because “overpopulation” made them do it, not because they wanted to. Show me a photo of that. I’d love to see it.
At the end of the day, this has nothing to do with poor people, or the inuit tribe, or our ancestors did it, or lions do it, or protein, or any other bullshit that I’ve heard a million times. It’s simply a childishly global epidemic case of I-don’t-want-to-itis.
If anybody ever gets posed this kind of bullshit talking point, feel free to send them to this post or you can send them to my vegan privilege post or the most recent one I did as response to this. You can copy and paste and plagiarize me if you want. I don’t care.
God DAMN dude I don’t think that anon will EVER recover from that
I got fucking tears in my eyes from reading that. Best post on tumblr. Thanks man. DAMN.
Fucking incredible.
Did y’all miss the part where op cited fucking Sheriff Joe Arpaio for the assertion that veganism is cheaper for prisons, and the second prison story says nothing like veganism reducing violence (even though the source article has the same biased slant as op)? Wtf is wrong with you that you’d take a human rights violating, racist piece of shit like Arpaio as an expert on economic veganism, or that you think a shady as hell private prison contractor (link, their rap sheet is literally the first Google search result for their name lmao) pressuring inmates into a vegan diet as part of a package deal with “bible studies, job training and anger management” is any kind of vegan success story? Look up “self-selecting sample” and “confounding factors,” maybe. Not to mention take 2 seconds to think about the ethics of pressing dietary choices on a literally captive audience as a price of entry for other perks.
Like, there are actually good arguments to be made for the economics of vegetarianism (link). There are also complexities and injustices involved, such as driving up prices for staple foods in poorer regions (link). None of these problems and arguments are going to be properly addressed, however, if vegan advocates are going to be so dishonest and morally bankrupt that they’re going to outright lie about basic scientific methodology and lick the asses of corrupt private prison contractors like Maranatha and outright criminals like Arpaio.
If JJ had confirmed Finn as Force sensitive and sent him to
Ach-To along with Rey it would have made Rian’s need to sideline Finn
that much harder to follow through with. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have
found a way, I have no illusions at all about Rian Johnson on this
matter, but what I *said* was that JJ made it easy for him.
L.J.: Oh please. You said in your earlier ask (link), and I quote: “Because it’s what JJ, the man you all put
your faith in, set him up for. Look at the end of TFA, there’s nothing
else there for Finn.” You didn’t just say JJ made it easy for RJ to sideline Finn, you said it was what JJ set up. Maybe you didn’t phrase it the way you meant, but you can’t blame me for your bad wording. Besides, you’re confirming yet again in your new series of asks that Finn being sidelined is simply what JJ set him up for, so stop trying to run from that.
And what pray tell is the clear and obvious path forward for
Finn at the end of TFA? Rey is the obvious primary Jedi, she was always
meant as the primary Jedi. At best JJ meant for Finn to play second
fiddle to her. What would likely have happened if JJ had continued the
story? Rey would have been half trained or more at the beginning of VIII
if we have any kind of significant time skip, clearly again marking her
as the primary person to drive the Jedi part of the story forward.
L.J.: So you’re just going to uncritically follow fandom’s assumption that the Jedi is necessarily the main character? Because there’s no way JJ would twist the formula even a little in the THIRD trilogy of the series? It’s fine if you yourself lack imagination, but don’t assume your own narrow vision is the only possible way to proceed.
As for possible ways forward for Finn, oh idk, maybe the difficulty of adjusting to relative freedom and individuality after a lifetime of regimented existence? His process of physical recovery from injuries? Making an actual choice whether he’s going to join the Resistance? Conflict about killing Stormtroopers? Setting up a Stormtrooper rebellion, which RJ actually went as far as to set up before leaving on the cutting room floor? The arduous process of deprogramming? His possible Force sensitivity, how it might differ from traditional Jedi powers, and what that means for the lore?
Wow, it’s almost like there was a lot to do there and you’re the one insisting that being a Jedi is the only way for him to be relevant!
Any training of Finn at this point would definitely have left
him a secondary character in that story. And what would Finn have been
doing in the interim? The ending of TFA gives no clear answer to that.
It lands his unconscious ass with a bunch of people he has never joined
at all. He might have been willing to stand against Kylo for himself and
for Rey, but it never lets him make a decision to join fight against
the FO in a larger sense.
L.J.: You’re identifying a lot of interesting directions Finn’s story could have gone in a better Episode VIII. Kudos.
Even if JJ never intended for Finn to have the Force or become
part of the Jedi related plot then he could have had him awake at Rey’s
departure and made it clear that he was joining the Resistance. Even
such little a thing would have made Finn’s path ahead clearer. But JJ
couldn’t even be bothered with doing that little for Finn. That kind of
lack of concern for a character’s story highly indicates that said
character was never that important anyway to the overall story.
L.J.: Those would only be oversight and neglect if JJ could have expected that the person to come after him would ignore everything he did, and, according to Daisy, throw out most of the outlines JJ prepared for VIII and IX. You assume that JJ shouldn’t have trusted RJ and should have set more things in stone for Finn. In hindsight that would have been far better, but putting his faith in a director who shouldn’t have been trusted is not the same thing as not caring about Finn’s character.
This is why I called Finn A Leia. You need to learn some Star
Wars history. The first Star Wars movie was not at all advertised as
only Luke’s story and while with modern day glasses Leia’s role may look
insignificant, it was a leap for 1977. And it was advertised as Luke’s
and Leia’s story. The Farmboy and the Princess. Everyone expected Leia
to play as large or an even larger part in the next movie once it became
clear that a sequel was being made. Instead that was Han, Leia no
longer mattered
L.J.: So sexism is a potent force in media much like racism is. For that exact reason, I am in NO WAY guaranteeing that JJ will necessarily treat Finn right. I actually agreed with you on that conclusion, but the arguments you make in support of that point are so egregiously bad that you’re actually undermining yourself.
Maybe it would be more accurate to call Finn A Padmé. Padmé
drives the plot in TPM, Anakin being dragged behind in what feels like a
subplot. That changes in the next two movies with Padmé becoming an
entirely insignificant character, only there to get involved with
Anakin, have Luke and Leia, and then die.
Yes I’ve read your Finn and Rey are Padmé and Anakin reborn
metas, they do not fill me with confidence for IX. Padmé was always
secondary to Anakin no matter how much she drove the plot in TPM. In
fact, given the set up in the PT, Padmé is so much more clearly
Palpatine’s foil than any of the others, but the movie keeps emphasizing
Anakin’s relationship with Obi-Wan as being the counterpoint, Padmé is
now only there as angst potential for Anakin and broodmare.
The only difference is that we always knew that the PT was going
to be Anakin’s story, but still many fans were shocked at how
insignificant Padmé’s role and character became. And given how TFA ends
I fear that that is what JJ always intended for Finn, that this was why
he felt comfortable casting a Black man. KK would still have hated it
because having any character of color that central even for one movie
galls her so I don’t see it as inconsistent with her fighting John’s
casting.
L.J.: I think Padmé is a better comparison so far as TPM/TFA goes, but again–Padmé’s and Finn’s arcs were different in their respective first movies, though their interactions with Anakin/Rey have many similarities. Padmé was much more active in driving the plot than Anakin was and this holds true even in AotC, but she was not shown to be developing as a character and overcoming internal conflicts the way Finn was even in TLJ, clumsily as it was done.
For like the third time, I’m not saying Finn can’t still be sidelined, I’m saying there is nothing inevitable from Finn’s story in TFA or even TLJ that says he will be as distantly secondary/tertiary as Leia or Padmé. I’m saying it would be bad and inconsistent writing if it happens that way, not to mention a huge loss of potential.
And neither John, nor Daisy, nor it seems anyone but JJ and
possibly KK and the story group, knew or will ever know what JJ
intended. At this point I don’t think it was anything much for Finn. My
conclusion is that everyone hates Rian so much at this point they
completely forget how complicit JJ is in this, how much he set of for
the possibility of this happening. And look up his Sam concept, Finn is a
Han type character, roguish smuggler guy, before he becomes a
Stormtrooper.
L.J.: In a medium as collaborative as film people do talk, though, and that gives clues. The people who worked on TFA or the novelization with him, such as Alan, Daisy, and Simon, may not have read JJ’s mind or have gotten his full plans, but they do know the discussions they had at the time and had enough clues to suspect–and what’s more, publicly say–that JJ’s intentions were not fully followed through.
As for your point of all those people objecting to how things
were handled in TLJ, you might want to notice that their points of
objections concern the WHITE characters. Rey, Luke, Leia, these are the
ones whom they are incensed about. Not Finn. Mark being the only one who
stands out even a little by supporting John so openly, but even he
speaks far more about the white characters and their mistreatment than
Finn’s. In fact, I can’t recall him even mentioning Finn directly.
L.J.: Most of them were about the white characters, but Alan Dean Foster directly mentioned Finn as well (link). Yes, he did say Finn was very underdeveloped, but he also directly contradicts your point that Finn’s story had nowhere to go at the end of TFA. In fact, you contradict it yourself. Also my larger point is that RJ directly contradicted existing characters and the setup in TFA to the extent that people who worked with JJ voiced their disagreement, something that extends to Finn as well.
John Boyega himself talked about this underdevelopment and potential of Finn as a feature and not a bug, saying that he prefers characters who have room to develop. Since you know about the earlier concept of Sam, you also no doubt know that Sam was originally much more powered-up and single-handedly solves a lot of problems himself. While that may well have worked better with a Black character, I can see John’s point as well.
If Finn’s potential remains untapped in IX then yeah, fuck JJ and I’m fully prepared for that possibility myself. But no one, including you, can tell me that I and many others simply dreamed up his centrality or his potential in TFA.
Beyond that, Anon seems to forget that JJ wasn’t the only writer. Michael Arndt and Lawrence Kasdan were also writers, and unlike Johnson who claimed he had UNLIMITED POWER, JJ talked about in detail how many other chefs were in the kitchen and we don’t know how many things were changed in re shoots. I’m not going to pretend to have a crystal ball and know everything, but regardless of the lightsaber bait and switch elements that screamed re-shoot plot holes, Finn’s story still clearly left him as the male lead.
TFA ends more like The Empire Strikes with Rey leaving to train and Finn suffering with the events of the movie.
And what really bothers me about Anon is how they keep talking about SW history and comparing Finn to Leia. If anyone is the Leia, it’s Poe. Finn is closer to the young Obi-Wan role in the prequels mixed with the Han Solo in the originals. At worst Finn is the deuteragonist like Han Solo, at best he’s the co-protagonist like Obi-Wan.
I might not work for lucasfilm, but I understand story structure and what would make a compelling story.
Here’s a short list of where Finn’s story could go in IX.
Finn orchestrating a stormtrooper to not only save his old comrades, but provide an army that the Resistance desperately needs.
Finn finding out he has ties to the Mandalorians or just joining the Mandalorians and convincing them to help fight the FO because Mandalorians hate the Empire more than the Republic.
Finn trying to find HIS family.
Finn finding out he has family in the FO and wanting to save them.
Finn using his 20 years of knowledge of the FO to become one of the Resistances most valuable soldier.
Finn going off on his own to rally outer rim worlds to fight against the FO.
Finn training with Rey in the ways of the force to battle Kylo and the KOR.
If people don’t have they’re own imagination, they’re fine to listen to Reddit. If JJ just dubs Finn, yeah fuck him, and I’ll go to The Mandalorian with Jon Favreau, but let’s wait and see for fucks sake.
God fucking cannot can someone get their ip and fucking report them because their child is in serious danger. In not even kidding. Someone get this persons ip and get them arrested. Now.
QUIT LIKING MY POST AND FUCKING REBLOG IT I DONT CARE WHAT THE HELL YOUR THEME IS OR WHO YOU ARE
OUMA HIMSELF COULD REBLOG THIS AND I WOULD GIVE LESS THAN A SHIT. THIS ISNT ABOUT ANY KIND OF DISCOURSE ANYMORE. THIS IS ABOUT THE SURVIVAL OF A GODDAMN CHILD. I DONT CARE WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO TO GET THIS PERSON ARRESTED. IF TOU GIVE THEM AN IP GRABBER AND TELL ME THE IP YOU BETTER BET YOUR BITCH ASS I WILL REPORT THEM. I DONT CARE HOW, JUST SAVE THIS CHILD. STOP LIKING, STOP SCROLLING PAST, RE-FUCKING-BLOG BECAUSE A CHILDS LIFE IS ON THE LINE. SPREAD THIS SHIT LIKE ITS THE NEXT FUCKING PLAGUE. I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE SERIOUS IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. THIS IS URGENT.
Might aswell add this on since this dumbass was dumb enough to let us see who they follow
The ones with scribbles over them have porn as their pfp. Anyways here’s awhile bunch of CP blogs to report to the FBI! Pervegan is back as Pervegan2 btw
The doors to the turbolift opened to the sound of the Emperor’s cackles. “Tied onto a string indeed,” he muttered to himself. Piett glared at Darth Vader as they crossed paths.
“Do you know why I keep such a rabid cur in such a place of power?” asked the Emperor softly, the doors having barely closed behind Piett. “A cur’s weakness, properly manipulated, can be a powerful tool.”
Darth knelt at the foot of the stairs where the Emperor day on his throne. “My master.”
“Lord Vader.” Palpatine rose from his throne. “When I found you, I saw… power. Unlimited… power. And beyond that… something truly special.”
Palpatine’s yellow eyes regarded Vader’s black mask. “The potential of your conception… a child of the Force. A dark lord of the Sith, a power rival to none, the strongest weapon in the galaxy.”
The Emperor slowly shook his hooded head. “Now… I’m afraid I was mistaken… about a great many things.”
“That is impossible,” said Darth. “I have dedicated everything to your service.”
The Emperor sneered. “Take off that pitiful little mask.”
There was a pause, then Darth reached up and unhooked the mask from his suit. With a click, it came free. Dark brown hair tumbled from it, framing a face with a long scar running across a striking blue eye. Darth’s lip trembled with a tranquil fury that threatened tears, but the tears did not come. They were hidden behind his furious, handsome eyes.
“Yes…” Palpatine murmured softly. “The face of Anakin Starkiller. You have the heart of a Jedi… and the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
“I destroyed Obi-Wan Kenobi!” protested Darth. “I waited eagerly for the moment when I could strike him down!”
“And look at you now!” Palpatine snarled. “The deed threw your mind into confusion! You were defeated by a common smuggler and a boy who had never used the Force! The Death Star was destroyed, and Yoda lives! You… have… failed!”
Darth lunged at his master, but sparks flew and knocked him back. Indigo lightning leapt from Palpatine’s fingers as the Emperor struck and struck again, sending electricity pulsing through Darth’s muscular body with every burst. Palpatine’s teeth were bared as his eyes blazed with fury. Darth screamed and moaned until Palpatine ceased, standing with his fingers hanging in the aftermath of the outburst. Smoke curled from Darth’s armor.
“As long as the Jedi remain in the galaxy,” said Palpatine, “hope lives. Virtue lives. Freedom lives. Goodness… lives. I thought you would be the one to crush it once and for all.”
The Emperor sat in his throne. “Unfortunately, you are no Sith.” He shook his head. “You’re only a child… in a mask.”
In the turbolift, far from Palpatine’s prying eyes, Darth stared at his helmet. Fury boiled inside him.
“It’s all Palpatine’s fault!” he shouted. He threw his helmet against the wall. “He’s holding me back!”
Darth kicked his helmet viciously, denting it. His brown locks hung in front of his angry reddened eye as he breathed hard, chest heaving.
The turbolift doors opened and Darth Vader stormed out, leaving his helmet on the floor. “Prepare my ship.”
Luke stopped. Standing there in the fog was a short, green creature in robes with his back turned, gazing at the swamp.
Luke’s eyes widened. It was Yoda.
The Jedi Master Ben’s voice had told him about. The Jedi Master who had ushered in an era of peace in the Republic, before the Empire seized control.
Trembling, Luke approached the Jedi.
Yoda turned and looked up. He stared at Luke, his green brow furrowed with surprise.
Luke pulled out his lightsaber and extended it to the Jedi.
Yoda stared at it and took it in his tiny green hands.
Yoda looked down at the saber, marvelling at it. His green eyes widened. He had not seen the weapon of a Jedi in almost nineteen years.
Yoda chucked the saber into the bog and hobbled away.
Luke stood aghast. He looked between Yoda and the bog, then walked over and picked up the lightsaber. He shooed away the scaly bat-birds that were investigating it.
Luke dashed after Yoda, who was giggling to himself as he hopped along on his stick.
Yoda was incredibly fast for a little old gremlin. He hopped in his boat and paddled across the swamp.
Luke groaned. How could he follow him?
Luke saw a vine hanging over the swamp. He closed his eyes and pulled it to him with the Force, using it to swing across the muddy pond.
He dashed after Yoda, who was holding a spear over the water. Yoda speared a giant worm out of the swamp and pulled out the spear. He looked Luke dead in the eye and began slurping up the worm headfirst. The worm disappeared further and further into Yoda’s belly and still he slurped. It continued to emerge from the swamp as he slurped and slurped.
Just when Luke was wondering just how long the worm was, Yoda bit it off and sardonically held the bloody, wriggling stump out to Luke. Luke made a face of disgust and Yoda dropped the half-eaten snake back into the swamp. The bat-birds cawed across the bog.
Yoda galloped across the swamp, flipping and twirling in the air as he went. He squeezed under a root and disappeared into the tree.
Luke ran up to the tree. He cried out as his boots splashed in soupy mud. He bent down over the entrance to the little hut. “Master Yoda!” he called.
“Go away!” shouted the Jedi master in a shrill, raspy voice.
“I won’t leave here,” Luke protested. “Ben sent me!”
“Hm? Ben? Know him I do not,” Yoda huffed. Luke could not see him. He appeared to be hiding crouched behind one of the earthen columns of his abode, sulking.
“Master Kenobi! Obi-Wan!” Luke yelled. “I’m Luke Skywalker! I’m here to be trained as a Jedi!”
“No more Jedi will I train,” Yoda replied. “Home you must go.”
“I’ve come all this way,” said Luke. “I’m from the Rebellion. Master Obi-Wan sent me. We need your help.”
“No more Jedi will I train,” Yoda repeated. “Came here to die I did. Away you must go.”
Luke turned and sat in the mud, brooding. He looked up. Artoo was completely drenched in mud, beeping.
“What is that sound?” asked Yoda.
Artoo beeped emphatically.
“R2?” inquired the Jedi. His pointy-eared head poked out from the entrance of his hut. “R2-D2?”
Artoo beeped.
“Doing here, what are you?” asked Yoda.
Artoo began to issue a stream of explanatory beeps.
Yoda’s ears drew back with alarm. “Wait,” he croaked. “Where is Obi-Wan?”
Han walked into the hangar. Leia was there, holding a blaster.
Han leaned against the wall. “What are you doing here?”
“Admiral asked me to guard the hangar,” said Leia. “People trying to desert. I’ve had to stun four people so far.” She patted her blaster.
Han sucked in his lip and nodded, trying to act casual. “Cool.” He started walking away, towards the Falcon.
“Can you believe there are people trying to desert?” asked Leia, walking with him. “It sickens me, how disloyal they are.”
“Oh yeah, just sickening,” Han agreed.
“I mean, after we destroyed the Death Star,” Leia rambled. “You’d think they’d have a little more hope. The admiral knows what he’s doing.”
“Uh-huh,” said Han, winding his way around the hangar, trying to give her the slip.
“I’m just glad you and Chewie aren’t deserters,” said Leia. “At first it seemed like you were, but now…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Han waved. “Happy to help.”
Leia became quiet. “My friend Holdo died in that attack run.”
“I’m sorry,” said Han, not knowing what else to say to get her off his back.
“She was full of hope,” Leia reminisced. “We were like sisters. She gave me this japor snippet from Alderaan. I have half and she has the other. Had.”
Leia pulled out the snippet and looked at it. Absently, she walked directly in front of Han, blocking his way into the Falcon.
“Would you mind going back to your business so I can go back to mine?” Han snapped.
“And what is your business?” asked Leia, raising an eyebrow. “What are you trying to do?”
Han stopped. “Well, I…”
“Boarding the Falcon,” said Leia, slowly realizing Han’s intentions, “with a packed bag.”
“Now gimme just a second to explain, your worsh–” Han started.
Leia aimed and fired. Blue rings shot into Han’s crotch and arced through his body. He grunted as he fell to the floor, stunned. His body sizzled as he lay unconscious.
Leia stood over him, glaring. “You’re just like the others,” she spat.
It still bothers me that Kylo Ren never used the Force against Finn. I mean, we’re talking about the guy who’s been shown doing this
and this
and this
also this
and so much more to his enemies and even people who just kind of annoyed him in the moment. The dude has oodles of Force power and is not at all shy about throwing it around. Other Force users are not immune, as shown with Rey who is even more powerful than he is.
So why, in his fight against Finn at the end of TFA, did Ren never even try to use the Force? Finn went running to an unconscious Rey after Ren knocked her out. Finn had even thrown his blaster aside, not that blasters work against Ren as Poe found out at the start of the movie. Why didn’t Ren throw Finn against a tree, too, or lift him into the air and choke him? That’s more like the guy’s usual MO.
Instead Ren not only dueled Finn but even resorted to punching him after disarming him, which had viewers commenting that his animosity against Finn seemed very raw and personal. It is true that Ren seems to have a personal beef against Finn (link), but again, the new Supreme Leader of the First Order has never been hesitant to use Force power against people regardless of how well he knew them or how strongly he felt about them. He revels in making people, from total strangers to hated rivals, helpless with his power. So why not Finn?
My hypothesis is that there’s another layer to Ren’s animosity against Finn beyond the usually-discussed ones of Finn defecting and making the opposite choices he did, and Ren’s hatred being the manifestation of his regrets. That’s a valid point and I have argued it myself (link), but what if there’s something more immediate and visceral going on?
Let’s go back to that moment in the village near the beginning of TFA, when Ren stared for a long moment at Finn before he turned away. He then unfreezes Poe’s blaster beam to strike a pole Finn was standing near, startling him and showering him with sparks.
This is an amazing theory that would add a whole new layer to the lore. It fits perfectly with what we saw in TFA. The only time (iirc) in TLJ Finn was in a Force scene was when Rey moved the boulders. She wasn’t using it on him, of course. He was able to run through it though. 🤔
Thank you! And speaking of that scene, this part where the rocks are moving out of Finn’s way is odd when I look at it now:
Some have said Finn was using the Force to move them out of his way, and others have said Rey cleared them herself. While I love the former theory, I don’t think the movement of the rocks fits either version of events.
For one thing, Force telekinesis has never looked like that as far as I know. Even extremely powerful Force users like Yoda or Kylo Ren have had to reach out, both with the Force and physically, and concentrate in order to move heavy objects.
It’s true Snoke was able to move Rey around quite a bit without hand-reaching, and Kylo Ren had to move Anakin’s lightsaber without reaching out because he was disguising his intentions. But when the effort became strenuous and stealth was no longer needed, as when Kylo Ren strove with Rey for control of the lightsaber, he was right back to physical reaching.
So if this was Finn moving the rocks, then he was doing something unprecedented as a Force user, particularly a first-time user moving heavy objects. He’s putting in less effort and focus than experienced Jedi Masters and moving the rocks practically unconsciously.
Now while I would love this to be true, the movement of the rocks also doesn’t look right for a Force push. Force-pushed or pulled objects tend to move with velocity matching their mass. So a small object like a lightsaber can zip through the air with a Force push or pull, while large and heavy objects pushed or pulled against gravity move more ponderously. These rocks around Finn fly like small objects rather than the large and heavy ones they are. It’s been pointed out that they move in tandem with Finn’s own movements–again, not how Force push has been shown to work at all.
For the same reasons it doesn’t look like Rey was moving the rocks either. On the first point, focus, her concentration was on holding the rocks in the air in a floaty way, not throwing them around in a pushy way. Her hand stayed in the same position throughout until she dropped it on seeing Finn and the Resistance, and she didn’t show the kind of physical movement that would indicate she was clearing away only part of the rocks for Finn and the others. The second point of velocity holds as true for her as it does for Finn–the rocks move too quickly compared to their mass, even setting aside the difficulty of doing this while she’s focused on keeping most of them in the air.
And in fact, when Rey does break concentration and lower her hand the Force telekinesis effect is gone and the rocks all fall, showing that she did in fact need the focus aided by hand movement to keep them in the air. The emotion on her face, the little sob as she starts toward Finn, the way she walks like she’s dreaming oh my heart
So a fully plausible interpretation of this scene is that neither Finn nor Rey was moving the rocks, at least not consciously. Know what the movement of the rocks is consistent with, though? If they were being repelled by something–like a Force-resistant field around Finn, maybe? That would explain why it didn’t take any effort or concentration on Finn’s part, and why the rocks were moving in time to Finn and away from him.
Reylows are still chugging that “hate Poe” juice hard, I see.
This is literally the first result when you search for Episode IX. It’s right there in the Poe tag for fans looking for content about him, too. You should block this user if you don’t want to see their scintillating contribution to the tags.
And no, LF is not going to spoil a major character’s death in a comic lmaoooo the comic excerpt was about Poe growing beyond being just a pilot. The scene this narration leads into is literally a discussion between Leia and Poe about being a pilot and being a leader.
But saying Poe is not a main character and will die is not a new thing for this user and those who agree with them:
Redemptive… death. Redemptive death. So let me get this straight, it’s not the mass murderer and torturer who needs redemption and/or death, it’s his victim who needs to die, redeeming himself for unspecified crimes. It’s just more of the “Poe is an extremist and just as bad/worse than Kylo” nonsense, the kind of bullshit RJ was on.
Inconveniently for the people riding the Dameron death train, here’s something from K. Kennedy herself:
Future stories beyond Episode IX with… Poe. And even if Kennedy is on the way out, as I personally hope, there’s the fact that JJ Abrams–you know, the guy directing IX?–nixed the character’s death in TFA so he could get Oscar on board. As one does.
Idk what it is these fans have against Poe–he’s not a main character, he’s the real bad guy, he’s gonna die–but all they do is make themselves look more ridiculous and desperate with every nonsensical “argument.”
tumblr: when people include racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. ideas in their stories it has real life consequences
also tumblr: but ships are never problematic, what’s with all these “antis”? it’s just fictional and can’t affect anything
Just Anti Things: I honestly don’t see any difference between popular mass media and someone’s obscure fanfic
this….isn’t a new argument. we’ve had it before. many times. representation matters, people can also ship what they want. those don’t contradict each other.
Here’s the thing:
Fiction does not equal reality, nor does fiction have a 1:1 influence on reality.
However, good fiction — even (and in some ways especially) speculative and genre fiction — REFLECTS reality.
An example could be film noir, which experienced a boom during and directly after World War II because its gloomy moods, jaded protagonists, and disillusioned view of the world mirrored that of wartime and postwar America. Another could be the influx of ‘fuck the system’ films like “Bonnie and Clyde” or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” during the countercultral 60s and 70s (granted, this was also partially due to the lifting of the Hays Code and the end of the Hollywood Blacklist). Yet another could be the theory that zombie and vampire films experience surges in popularity depending on who’s president (according to the theory, zombies are rightists as seen by leftists and vampires are leftists as seen by rightists). Every piece of fiction, ultimately, is in at least some small way a product of its time and its creator. Even the most out-there fantasies or the grittiest thrillers have universal archetypes at their core. When someone sets out to write a story, they are at the core of it either writing about their own experience, or writing about some aspect of the human condition that fascinates them. (Which is where “problematic” content comes in, because let’s be real: many, many aspects of the human condition aren’t pretty.)
So, the anti-anti/pro-fiction belief is as follows:
1: Fiction is not reality. Writing about something does not mean that you condone it IRL. 2: Fiction does not directly influence reality in a ‘monkey see, monkey do’ sense. Someone who had no plans to commit an atrocious act isn’t suddenly going to start making those plans because they read in a novel about said act being committed. Furthermore, someone who is psychologically able to distinguish reality from unreality, and morally able to distinguish an acceptable action from an unacceptable one, isn’t going to start condoning atrocious acts committed by other real-life people because they read about them in a novel. 3: Fiction does reflect reality. Representation matters because everyone deserves to see their own reality reflected in the stories they consume — and, for the general betterment of society, everyone needs to see other people’s realities reflected in the stories they consume, because the old adage about not judging someone’s life until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes holds true. Furthermore, if stories are being produced that are sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/ableist — especially if it’s a recurring trope — that needs to be addressed because it reflects the sexism/racism/homophobia/transphobia/ableism present in culture at large; for example, the “Bury Your Gays” trope, which originated with restrictions present in the Hays Code, draws such backlash because LGBTQ+ audience members want fiction to reflect that our culture has grown in acceptance of LGBTQ+ people since the Hays Code era.
TL;DR: “People should be allowed to write and read what they want because fiction isn’t reality” and “Representation matters because fiction should reflect ALL realities,” are not mutually exclusive ideas, and, in fact, both are important to understand in order to criticize media responsibly.
I suppose I shouldn’t be suprised that this is what ended up happening to the post, but I think it’s good opportunity to point out something
for like 90, 95% of cases, “antis” (wish there was a better term) and antiantis actually agree
I literally agree with everything the person above said.
Most antis are NOT saying you shouldnt be allowed to reflect reality. For some reason, antianti’s understanding of anti’s position is almost always this strawman
People aren’t saying you can’t show murder, or pedophilia, or racist things
We’re just saying you shouldn’t be condoning them, or romanticizing them. That’s it. Whether that’s in fiction or fanfiction or in posts online.
Point 2 is something I really agree with! That’s why “video games make people violent” is wrong.
But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about a monkey see monkey do kind of thing.
“Furthermore, if stories are being produced that are sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/ableist— especially if it’s a recurring trope—that needs to be addressed.“ This is all I’m saying. This is literally the whole “anti” argument.
It’s frustrating that most people reblogging this post now will probably never see my clarifications, but I hope a few people will.
Also this is exactly why “anti” and “antianti” are such bad terms. Anti WHAT? The long but more accurate terms would be “believes even fan fiction and shipping can spread problematic ideas” and “believes fan fiction and shipping don’t have that kind of power.”
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.
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.
In specific:
Unsurprisingly, I have a few problems with your response, starting with how you’ve just accused me of being eager to tell you who you are, when in fact you’re the person that was in a hurry to attach a label to me while simultaneously misrepresenting and misunderstanding what I’ve said about authoritarianism. And a quick side-note: I referred to you as an anti-shipper and you’ve just said that you’re an anti-shipper in saying “I mean sorry we don’t match the cartoon idea of us you have in your head” so it doesn’t sound like I’m being presumptive at describing you as an anti. You just identified as one.
One thing I see I didn’t clarify properly before is that there’s a difference between calling someone a harasser and an authoritarian, but you’ve interpreted me talking about groups exhibiting authoritarian behaviors as being indicative that all such people are harassers. If you’ll reference my previous post you’ll see that I was very clearly talking about how people who consider themselves antis but do not engage in harassment are still siding with a group of people who harass people, because it’s those antis that go inventing claims of pedophilia and harassing people off of social media that you have to worry about.
That said, let’s get to the points you’ve made. Yes, if you aren’t aware that anti-shipping is a hotbed of authoritarianism then I am telling you that you are wrong about fandom spaces you’ve been active in for years. This is me, telling you that you’re wrong.
Next, let’s talk about what the actual point of describing how authoritarian antis are, because this shit comes up in my communities all the time in the form of exclusionists and truscum. In short, your community has a lot of dirty laundry and right now it’s been strewn about the floor for everyone to see. Or, in simpler terms, there is so much harassment leveled by antis at shippers that there’s no way that you can claim that they’re edge cases, they represent the community.
That’s something that is usually really useful in determining whether or not a community is inherently authoritarian, because in communities that don’t embrace it, or even better are outright anti-authoritarian, when someone behaves poorly the rest of the community calls that person in and helps them learn that what they’re doing is wrong. In authoritarian communities, the behavior is either condoned or supported, with only very weak attempts, if any, to put a stop to it. And that goes whether we’re talking about harassment, abuse, or straight up violence.
So, you’ve got three options. Deal with the problem people in your own community and reclaim it, break away as I mentioned before, or get used to being lumped in with people who do terrible things. Take the word authoritarianism out of it if you want, it’s not really important for this part of the framework, but to be honest I left out the ‘deal with your problem’ part of it because I anticipated that you’d reject that because you’d probably reject the notion that your community has problems. And yes, if there was a concerted effort by healthy anti-shippers, people who identified themselves by the way they find some aspects of shipping distasteful but in no way needed to enforce that view on shippers, you’d get a new reputation and would be able to distance yourself from being associated with abusive and authoritarian antis.
But the fact of the matter is that you’re still supporting a fundamentally authoritarian community. And you’re even inventing excuses for it, ways to explain away the criticism without actually addressing it.
In general:
Okay, now for all of the cleanup:
Yes, having anti-abortion beliefs makes you an authoritarian. You cannot hold anti-abortion beliefs without choosing in some part to support an authoritarian stance, in which someone chooses to police other people to change their behavior in order to bring it into line with a group norm based on purity and adherence to a central authority, whether that’s the ideology or a leader. Just like you cannot be selectively progressive and call yourself progressive, you can’t be anti-authoritarian and yet not support bodily autonomy. If you choose to oppose bodily autonomy, even in spirit, you are choosing authoritarianism, because the idea that our bodies are our own is core to not just anti-authoritarian principles, but also most legal systems and a great deal of everything human beings have ever based our morality on.
No, there’s no one authoritarian inventory. It’s been studied extensively for decades and a lot of people have come up with different scales and inventories to describe it, so your experience taking one right-wing authoritarianism inventory does not describe the whole of what authoritarianism means. My preference, and I’m hoping this is the one that you found, is the Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale invented by Bob Altemeyer, a professor at the University of Manitoba who studied authoritarianism in great detail. If you haven’t read his book The Authoritarians, it’s a great start. I recommend immediately following it up with the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD. That should make the link between emotional immaturity and authoritarianism absolutely clear, something that Altemeyer only hints at in The Authoritarians, when he addresses the need for security in such groups.
I am impressed at the level of sophistry that takes ‘left-wing people often times don’t identify as Democrats because Democrats have done some terrible things’ and then suggest that means I’m saying that reformers and non-Democrats who attempt to join and reform the party are somehow responsible for regressive social policies they had no hand in building. Because, and let me quote you exactly here, “people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist,” is somehow responsible for things like the prison-industrial boom created by the Clinton Administration in the early 90s. I do hope you can see that this point is ridiculous because not only are Democratic Socialists not the same thing as Democrats, Democractic Socialists like Ocasio-Cortez, or the Justice Democrats that came out of supporting Bernie Sanders, who join with the Democratic Party to reform it are specifically choosing to fight the very same corruption I talked about.
No, I’m not defining authoritarianism as all bigotry and evil. The fact that you feel the need to simplify everything I’ve said to that point kinda suggests that you can’t engage with the material. I’ve repeatedly, in that 101 post I linked to you before and elsewhere on my blog, have addressed the complicated nature of authoritarianism, the way it does harm, it’s role as a cognitive flaw in our species that arises naturally, it’s relationship with emotional maturity, and the fundamental need for security that authoritarianism tries to fill…and the best you can come up with is to look at all that and say that I’m basically saying that authoritarianism = evil.
Hell, one of my core fucking points is that authoritarianism isn’t evil, it’s a trait that a lot of us embody that we can unlearn and that we have to fight to help others unlearn before they go past the point where they’re never going to give it up!
In closing:
I don’t like how simplistic your attitudes are on pretty much all of this. Whether we’re talking about the way you want to sidestep discussion of the problems that antis create, the way that you clearly don’t grasp authoritarianism or how it relates to political science, or just the way that you’re throwing cheap rhetorical tricks at me in an attempt to make your point, it does not sound like you’re arguing in good faith. At all.
I mean, you honestly just tried to turn something I said inside out and tell me that it somehow suggested that I cared more about labels than someone’s actions.
Well, your actions tell me that you can’t argue your way out of a wet paper bag or you’d be presenting substantive and valid points instead of misinterpretations and misdirects.
Post-script:
I noticed you’ve got an ‘anti-anti bs’ tag. Where’s your ‘anti bs’ tag?
If you stand opposed to people in the anti community that harass people, it seems like you might want to point that out when you see it and educate people on how to avoid it and prevent it. Or maybe take any stance on it aside from ignoring it.
Maybe you haven’t ignored it. I don’t know in detail, as I don’t follow your blog. But you want to tag stuff as being ‘anti-anti bs’ because presumably you think that people who oppose antis often say bullshit things. I’m pretty sure harassment and abuse is worse than bullshit, so why no tag there?
Me: *repeatedly states that there are antis who are harassers, trolls, and abusers, and explains that it won’t help to vacate the anti label in favor of them*
You: OMG YOU’RE DENYING THAT ANTIS HAVE PROBLEMS!!! DEAL WITH IT!!
At this point there doesn’t seem to be much relationship between what I said and what you’ve replied to. I do know there is a problem. I have acknowledged it. All I’ve told you is that there are authoritarian antis and non-authoritarian antis, much like there are authoritarian shippers and non-authoritarian shippers. It’s ironic that the ask at the top of this thread was literally about shippers harassing Black antis to drive them out of fandom, but I don’t go from there to say reylo is inherently authoritarian or whatever. It means there are reylos who behave badly, including in authoritarian ways.
Sure, maybe you’re not as hardcore as other people, but the ideology
you’re talking about is still ultimately authoritarian in nature.
Um? The only “ideology” I’ve described is this:
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.
This is authoritarian, despite not meeting any of the criteria you’ve described? If anything the only authoritarian parts seem to be the parts I’ve said I don’t subscribe to. This is another part where what you’ve said to me doesn’t seem to have any bearing on what I actually wrote. If you want to tell me I can’t argue/am not arguing in good faith, it’s a good idea to look like you actually know what my arguments are.
As for having an #anti reylo bs tag: There’s that inconvenient part where I and other antis have in fact discussed harassment and misogyny among antis (link, link). When disgusting shithole antis on Instagram stole and posted a picture of a shipper’s minor child, I knew about the situation because antis on Tumblr talked about it and condemned it.
You seem to think I should make more regular posts about anti reylo bs, but do you really not know how these harassers operate? They act generally as anonymous mobs who send awful anons to shippers. In order to regularly track and document that I’d have to follow/regularly read reylo blogs, which is a big no both for my own well-being and because that’s like, stalking? Anti antis can do that, which is an upside to their fandom presence. (It’s almost like anti anti isn’t inherently a bad thing? I mean what else do you call people who are against all antis? Oh right, you’d rather pretend you’re not anti anyone and prefer to make your inaccurate and wrong arguments under a veneer of neutrality and intellectual rigor that you don’t actually possess. Okay.)
I referred to you as an anti-shipper and you’ve just said that you’re an
anti-shipper in saying “I mean sorry we don’t match the cartoon idea of
us you have in your head” so it doesn’t sound like I’m being
presumptive at describing you as an anti. You just identified as one.
Where…. did I say you were presumptive… for calling me an anti…? I said I am one and that you were presumptive for making blanket condemnations of a fandom community whose activities as a whole and whose “ideology” you don’t actually know outside of its worst elements. I’m taking you to task for using the label incorrectly, not for applying it to me. Again, reading what I actually said would help.
Because it evidently bears repetition, I know there are authoritarian antis who subscribe to authoritarian beliefs. My problem is with your saying that there are authoritarian and non-authoritarian shippers, but that there are no antis who are not authoritarian or at least do not give tacit support to authoritarianism by being an anti. (Would this be a correct summation?) I’ve explained to you at length why that’s an inaccurate and harmful stance that helps silence fans of color who discuss fandom racism, so if you actually care about that you can scroll up to read it.
Yes, having anti-abortion beliefs makes you an authoritarian. You cannot
hold anti-abortion beliefs without choosing in some part to support an
authoritarian stance, in which someone chooses to police other people to
change their behavior in order to bring it into line with a group norm
based on purity and adherence to a central authority, whether that’s the
ideology or a leader.
Except there are multiple ways to have anti-abortion beliefs and not all of them involve adherence to purity and authority. I’ve debated enough of them on a sideblog to know (link if you want to see it). Many anti-abortion people sincerely–and wrongly–believe that abortion is murder and infanticide. Others of course, perhaps most, simply use that argument as a veneer for the authoritarian motivations you mentioned. That doesn’t mean the former are giving tacit support to the latter’s worst actions or have similar psychological profiles as the latter. It’s like saying soccer fans tacitly support hooligans by being soccer fans.
If you haven’t read his book The Authoritarians, it’s a great start.
The funny thing is I was literally describing Altemeyer’s research from that very book, and though I read it in full a long time ago (10+ years) I’ve checked it briefly to see if I remember the main points correctly. Unless my memory seriously fails me it didn’t have anything about labeling single beliefs as “inherently” authoritarian or blaming all conservatives for being complicit in authoritarianism.
I do hope you can see that this point is ridiculous because not only are
Democratic Socialists not the same thing as Democrats, Democractic
Socialists like Ocasio-Cortez, or the Justice Democrats that came out of
supporting Bernie Sanders, who join with the Democratic Party to reform
it are specifically choosing to fight the very same corruption I talked
about.
This just in: Being a Democratic nominee for Congress, hell, campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for President, does not constitute identifying as a Democrat. If a would-be Democratic nominee for President is not a Democrat, who is? Joining the Democratic Party isn’t the same thing as identifying as a Democrat? Whut?
Also LOL at thinking being a Democratic Socialist is incompatible with the Democratic Party, whose members hold a broad range of beliefs from leftist to right of center. It’s almost like people can identify with a party affiliation while being critical of it and working to change it, so your original take was hilariously wrong and actions matter more than labels.
This is still argument in bad faith. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t need to continually misrepresent the things I’ve said in this very thread to try to make your argument sound better without saying anything substantive.
About Democrats, first you were arguing that I said that reformers are part of the problem and now you’re saying that acknowledging that some people have joined with the Democrats specifically to reform them means that they aren’t Democrats. You should really choose one of those and stick to it. I shouldn’t need to give you a poli sci 101 to help you avoid engaging in rhetorical tricks. Hammer and nail indeed. It’s been a while since I’ve engaged with someone so interested in dodging the topic.
Here’s the core problem: You don’t want to acknowledge that supporting an authoritarian ideology means giving tacit support to authoritarians, whether or not you yourself embody any of those behaviors. I responded because you claimed that I was calling all antis authoritarian harassers. While your original position was inaccurate, it was presented in good faith. My failure is that I didn’t consider how uncomfortable you might be about this issue and how that might make you dig in your heels and just deny the topic all together.
Yes, if you support anti-abortion, it doesn’t matter how sincere you are that you believe abortion to be murder and infanticide, it’s still supporting an ideology that is at it’s core authoritarian. Similarly, all you’re doing here is trying to argue that some anti-shippers aren’t authoritarian, when the community is as a whole dripping in that behavior.
Authoritarian groups always attempt to establish a social hierarchy and take control of any communities they’re a part of. And that’s exactly what’s happened with antis. Maybe at some point in the far distant past that wasn’t the case, but now they’re the ones that represent the anti community. It’s kinda like how, yes, Trump supporters are racist, even if they didn’t intend to be. You can’t support someone like Trump without also supporting racism and white supremacy, it doesn’t matter how sincere and wrong they are, they’re still supporting it.
And finally, I really hope your idea of confronting harassment or abuse in the anti community consists of more than a single post in a single tag if you want to claim that you and other anti-shippers like yourself aren’t authoritarian and actually stand opposed to such behaviors. It certainly isn’t due to confronting fandom racism, because last I checked people didn’t need to be an anti to do that, and confronting racism isn’t the same as antis.
You don’t have to confront it, but if you’re comfortable being bedfellows with the people that represent anti culture, you’re comfortable standing alongside authoritarians.
“By which I mean that my opposition to antis rests purely in their
authoritarianism.”
This is a pretty strong claim that needs actual evidence.
“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)”
If an anti doesn’t like a ship, but does nothing to force
someone else not to like it, how exactly are they behaving in an authoritarian
manner?
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.
This is poisoning the well. This is like
arguing all people who are pro-abortion are pro child murder.
“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. “
No, but your definition of authoritarian seems to include people just not
liking something, which doesn’t match any established definition of
authoritarian at all.
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.
Some antis do. Some just don’t like a
ship. That’s basically all it means to
be an anti – to not like something. Some folks will voice that displeasure and
some won’t.
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.
Based on who’s metric? This seems like a
personal statement rather than anything actually measurable.
“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.”
Eh, that goes for shipping in general.
Taking your predator example, pedophiles can begin grooming young fans
into perceiving such relationships to not be an issue from pro shipping.
“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.”
This doesn’t follow. It’s
like telling someone who is conservative to break with the Republican party
because the KKK supports them.
“Unsurprisingly, I have a few problems with your
response, starting with how you’ve just accused me of being eager to tell you
who you are, when in fact you’re the person that was in a hurry to attach a
label to me while simultaneously misrepresenting and misunderstanding
what I’ve said about authoritarianism. “
This is a turnabout fallacy.
“And a quick side-note: I referred to you as an
anti-shipper and you’ve just said that you’re an anti-shipper in saying “I mean
sorry we don’t match the cartoon idea of us you have in your head” so it
doesn’t sound like I’m being presumptive at describing you as an anti. You just
identified as one.”
It’s the authoritarian part that’s being argued, not the anti. At no point has lj-writes stated
otherwise. You’ve erected a strawman
here.
One thing I see I didn’t clarify properly
before is that there’s a difference between calling someone a harasser and an authoritarian,
but you’ve interpreted me talking about groups exhibiting authoritarian
behaviors as being indicative that all such people are harassers.
You’ve still not specified what you mean by that. You’ve declared that anti’s are
authoritarian, but never followed up with evidence for your claim.
“If
you’ll reference my previous post you’ll see that I was very clearly talking
about how people who consider themselves antis but do not engage in harassment
are still siding with a group of people who harass people, because it’s those
antis that go inventing claims of pedophilia and harassing people off of social
media that you have to worry about.”
People on the left that don’t engage in harassment often side morally with rioters. This does not make the left anarchists.
That
said, let’s get to the points you’ve made. Yes, if you aren’t aware that
anti-shipping is a hotbed of authoritarianism then I am telling you that you
are wrong about fandom spaces you’ve been active in for years. This is me,
telling you that you’re wrong.
Shipping IN GENERAL is. It’s been that way since shipping became a thing.
“Next, let’s talk about what the actual point
of describing how authoritarian antis are, because this shit comes up in my
communities all the time in the form of exclusionists and truscum. In short,
your community has a lot of dirty laundry and right now it’s been strewn about
the floor for everyone to see. Or, in simpler terms, there is so much
harassment leveled by antis at shippers that there’s no way that you can claim
that they’re edge cases, they represent the community.”
This is a gross generalization that has no metric backup. And even then it’s an argument that doesn’t
follow. It’s like arguing the African American community is represented by
criminals due to the high level of incarceration compared to the rest of the
population. It just doesn’t follow.
“That’s something that is usually really useful
in determining whether or not a community is inherently authoritarian, because
in communities that don’t embrace it, or even better are outright
anti-authoritarian, when someone behaves poorly the rest of the community calls
that person in and helps them learn that what they’re doing is wrong.”
This happens constantly.
There are Anti’s are pounding down on a group of cross taggers as we
speak.
“In authoritarian communities, the behavior is
either condoned or supported, with only very weak attempts, if any, to put a
stop to it. And that goes whether we’re talking about harassment, abuse, or
straight up violence.”
Given that you’re not actually in the anti-community I doubt you would know
what is or isn’t being done. But please,
if you have evidence for what you’re saying feel free.
“So, you’ve got three options. Deal with the
problem people in your own community and reclaim it, “
Gonna stop you there. THIS is
authoritarian.
“break away as I mentioned before, or get used
to being lumped in with people who do terrible things.”
Gonna finish by pointing out this is fallacious. You can also expect reasonable people to be
capable of not making grand generalizations.
Which is always at the heart of bigotry.
Take the word authoritarianism out of it if you
want, it’s not really important for this part of the framework, but to be
honest I left out the ‘deal with your problem’ part of it because I anticipated
that you’d reject that because you’d probably reject the notion that your
community has problems.
Every community has problems. As human
beings people are tend to err. It
happens. Lj-writes never claimed anti’s were squeaky clean.
And
yes, if there was a concerted effort by healthy anti-shippers, people who
identified themselves by the way they find some aspects of shipping distasteful
but in no way needed to enforce that view on shippers, you’d get a new
reputation and would be able to distance yourself from being associated with
abusive and authoritarian antis.
Or people could realize that making grand generalizations are dumb. But here we are.
But
the fact of the matter is that you’re still supporting a fundamentally
authoritarian community. And you’re even inventing excuses for it, ways to
explain away the criticism without actually addressing it.
You’ve STILL failed to back this up with anything.
Yes,
having anti-abortion beliefs makes you an authoritarian. You cannot hold
anti-abortion beliefs without choosing in some part to support an authoritarian
stance, in which someone chooses to police other people to change their
behavior in order to bring it into line with a group norm based on purity and
adherence to a central authority, whether that’s the ideology or a leader.
False. One can hold anti abortion views,
but only apply it to themselves and their lives. It happens rather often.
Just
like you cannot be selectively progressive and call yourself progressive, you
can’t be anti-authoritarian and yet not support bodily autonomy.
You actually can. It happens all the
time. You might get called out by people
who are “More progressive” but the key to progressivism is progress at the end
of the day. Not everyone is going to
want to move as fast as others.
“I
noticed you’ve got an ‘anti-anti bs’ tag. Where’s your ‘anti bs’ tag?”
Why would she need it in your case? What
even is that question?
Authoritarian
groups always attempt to establish a social hierarchy and take control of any
communities they’re a part of. And that’s exactly what’s happened with antis.
Again. Where?
Shoot, Lj-writes initial
post ISN’T EVEN IN THE GENERAL STAR WARS TAG.
So she’s not taking control of literally anything or policing anyone. She’s voicing her opinion on tumblr. So what is this really? What are you looking to accomplish here?
About Democrats, first you were arguing that I said that reformers are part of the problem
You said people who identify as Democrats are part of the problem, and I pointed out that people who identify as Democrats include reformers.
and now you’re saying that acknowledging that some people have joined
with the Democrats specifically to reform them means that they aren’t
Democrats.
Are you referring to this part?
This just in: Being a Democratic nominee for Congress, hell, campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for President, does not constitute identifying as a Democrat.
I’m guessing the sarcasm didn’t stick, because “This just in” is a common retort made in an attempt to point out that the part that comes after it, which is often a rephrase of what the interlocutor said, is ridiculous and makes no sense. The parts that came after this quoted portion were rhetorical questions also meant to point out that your position–that Democratic candidates for office somehow do not identify as Democrats–makes no sense.
You should really choose one of those and stick to it.
I did. It’s fine if you don’t fully understand sarcasm and I would have adjusted for that had I known, but I was not being inconsistent here–you mistakenly perceived me as being so.
You don’t want to acknowledge that supporting an authoritarian ideology
means giving tacit support to authoritarians, whether or not you
yourself embody any of those behaviors.
I have asked you over and over how I support an authoritarian ideology and you have not answered me, other than repeating that a) anti-shippers are inherently authoritarian and b) just using the label anti is therefore authoritarian regardless of what I actually do or what I actually believe. It seems to me you’re the one who’s uncomfortable engaging with the subject, not me, since you refuse to look at the reality beyond your preconceived ideas.
The parts about abortion are just you repeating your points over and over without engaging with anything I’ll said, so I’ll just skip over it.
Similarly, all you’re doing here is trying to argue that some
anti-shippers aren’t authoritarian, when the community is as a whole
dripping in that behavior.
My argument from the first has only been that you don’t know the community “as a whole,” something you consistently refuse to acknowledge while you insist that you know and can define the community while not even really being in fandom. But then again you have abundantly proven that you don’t know authoritarianism either, so pretending to know more than you do isn’t a new thing for you evidently.
It’s kinda like how, yes, Trump supporters are racist, even if they
didn’t intend to be. You can’t support someone like Trump without also
supporting racism and white supremacy, it doesn’t matter how sincere and
wrong they are, they’re still supporting it.
This is particularly funny because, in the anti Reylo section of the SW fandom at least, the so-called antis are predominantly fans of color who are fed up with the anti-Finnrey and anti-Finn rhetoric from Reylos and engage in discourse about it, not harassment. It feels really great that a white woman is coming in to compare us to Trump supporters. (This is sarcasm, by the way.)
And finally, I really hope your idea of confronting harassment or
abuse in the anti community consists of more than a single post in a
single tag if you want to claim that you and other anti-shippers like
yourself aren’t authoritarian and actually stand opposed to such
behaviors.
I actually gave you two links and described one other incident, and there have been other incidents such as me criticizing an anti for stealing reylo art to mock the artist’s skill, yelling at and blocking an anti for comparing reylos to Nazis (y’know, kind of like how you think the mostly fans of color in the anti Reylo community are comparable to Trump supporters bahaha), and pointing out that mocking a Reylo shipper for her age is misogynistic. Sorry I can’t produce the requisite number of posts, tagged for your convenience and to your exact specifications, to prove my fandom activities are valid and non-authoritarian. (This has also been sarcasm.)
It certainly isn’t due to confronting fandom racism, because last I
checked people didn’t need to be an anti to do that, and confronting
racism isn’t the same as antis.
Again, you don’t even know what anti Reylos do–because a large chunk of named anti Reylo activity is exactly that, confronting racism that disproportionately comes from the Reylo fandom– and as such I don’t give your opinion any credence until you’ve actually educated yourself.
I’ll add this last part as a screenshot to keep a unified thread:
I think you mean one of the first asks I fielded about this conversation? Because the post you mentioned is an ask, not a reblog (link). Like, I’ve already said that the anti community is problematic why are you pulling it out like it’s a giant gotcha 😂 It’s almost like stretching a terms like “pedophile apologist” and “authoritarian” beyond all recognition is bad or something. (This is a sarcastic dig at you.) If you’re in the mood to defend golbat, maybe also check out the post where they told Black women fans, including N.K. Jemisin, that they were ignorant about the evils of racism and should read less fanfic and more history (link). Not to mention their infamous “antis are very colonialist” post lmao.
Since korrasera has made her desire clear not to participate in this conversation anymore, I’ll answer her points by reblogging from myself and finish up.
No, I said that the Democratic party has done a
lot of bad things so a lot of people on the left-wing don’t identify as
one because they don’t want to be associated with those things.
Convenient how you left out the part where you said:
It’s because identifying as a Democrat means
participating in the system Democrats have built … In this same fashion, identifying with a community
that’s become defined by it’s authoritarian ideology means supporting
that ideology, even weakly.
And I have pointed out that people who do
identify as Democrats, by say, running for political office as
Democrats, can push back against bad things Democrats have done and try
to make changes. So that pretty much undercuts your whole comparison.
You still haven’t answered how reformers who run for office don’t
identify as Democrats, likely because you can’t.
Yeah, so I linked you to my thread on what
authoritarianism is, and described how authoritarians police shippers
and fanfic writers to attack them as the enemy, but apparently that
wasn’t worth reading.
I did, actually, but there’s a whole prior issue
that’s unresolved before that, i.e. you don’t know what people who are
called anti Reylos actually do and believe, and are insisting the
version in your head is right no matter how poorly it fits the reality.
By this point this issue has been pointed out to you so many times I
have to assume you’re either avoiding it or physically/mentally
incapable of reading and understanding it. Remember how authoritarianism
is a cognitive flaw that compromises a person’s ability to engage with
reality? I wouldn’t call you an authoritarian, because unlike you I
don’t throw a very specific term around will-nilly, but you might want
to think about your own possible cognitive biases.
So, in other words, antis that are anti Reylo are people of color and so can’t be criticized if they harass someone.
That’s
a pretty mind-boggling strawman, and doesn’t even make sense in the
context of your own comparison. It’s interesting that your mind
immediately went to harassers and abusers when I mentioned fan spaces
dominated by fans of color, when the entire discussion is about antis
who DON’T harass anyone and what their moral responsibilities are. You
made that clear with your own Trump comparison:
It’s kinda like how, yes, Trump supporters are racist, even if they didn’t intend to be.
You were talking about Trump supporters who are not consciously racist,
and therefore the comparison has to be to fans who do not harass people
and how they, according to you, are complicit in authoritarianism. But
the moment I pointed out you are yet another white fan trying to dictate
the terms on which fans of colors can exist in fandom, you panicked and
undermined your own premise by changing the scope of the argument from
non-harassers to harassers. It’s also interesting how that mental shift
happened as soon as I mentioned fans of color.
The Trump
supporter comparison, in addition to being all kinds of offensive,
doesn’t even fit because antis who harass people and those who don’t do
not share a belief, at least not the belief that motivates and justifies
harassment. I have pointed this out from the first, but you have dodged
the issue over and over and over again–because it doesn’t fit your
frame™, I guess.
And since I do not believe that anyone
deserves to be harassed, your using Black Reylos as a shield is yet
another sad strawman (straw shield?).
…I already pointed out how bullshit your two
links were. Again, are you in the habit of not reading what someone
writes before you respond to it, or is this kneejerk reaction new for
you?
You’ve worked your way up from calling it a
single post to admitting I gave you two links, congratunations! But no,
your entire “objection” rested on the grounds that I wasn’t writing
enough posts in the right tags. You said, and I quote:
And finally, I really hope your idea of
confronting harassment or abuse in the anti community consists of more
than a single post in a single tag if you want to claim that you and
other anti-shippers like yourself aren’t authoritarian and actually
stand opposed to such behaviors.
Again, congrats for
making the mental leap from one to two, but I have now linked or
described about six incidents to you and it’s still not enough. Because
not only must I confront and call out harassment by antis, I must do it
in the right amounts (which you have not specified), in an unspecified
right way, and do it in tags that you decree.
At this point
the goalpost isn’t just moving, it’s flying. Also I hope you realize how
demanding and controlling you come across, saying antis (those who do
not harass people, since it evidently bears clarification) have to blog
in exactly the way you want–desires that you have not even made
specific enough to be followed–in order not to be like Trump
supporters.
Yes, because it’s so relevant to make a semantic argument that I used the term reblogged when you were responding to an ask.
Clarifying
questions are dead now, evidently. This is actually sort of relevant
to an earlier point, though, that the worst antis operate anonymously
and that makes their activities hard to regulate or call out. If there
were a post to reblog that person would, as a general matter, be
operating under their own online identity and it would be much easier to
have a coherent community and mutually police that community. It’s also
why having regular anti callout posts is not feasible, because the
worst anti Reylo behavior is actually housed on Reylo blogs and it’s not
possible to have a community with an army of greyfaces in sunglasses,
but if you didn’t read it the first time why would you read the second
time lmao.
And. That. Doesn’t. Refute. My. Point. At. All.
Who said it did? Calm the fuck down.
Someone was sending you an ask to call
golbatgender a lesbophobe and a pedophile apologist and you don’t
believe that they’re indicative of the problems in the community.
I… I literally said it was. I said:
Like, I’ve already said that the anti community is problematic why are you pulling it out like it’s a giant gotcha 😂
I repeatedly said the anti community has problems, and you repeatedly
insist I didn’t. At this level of denial it goes beyond intellectual
dishonesty into lying. Who are you lying to, though, me or yourself? I
have a feeling it’s the latter more than the former to protect your own
mental constructs, because obviously it won’t work on me.
And I went and read those posts you linked to by
golbatgender. Have you read them? Because I’m pretty sure you haven’t if
this is your interpretation.
Numbers aren’t your
strong suit, I’m guessing? Because there was only one link in that post,
and the screenshotted extract was from that same linked post. I mean
I’m as forgetful and careless as anyone but the way you can’t seem to
keep basic facts straight, together with the way you blatantly ignore
like half the things other people are saying on this thread, doesn’t
give me a high level of confidence in your ability to engage with
reality outside of the version in your own head.
The first one is you describing an exerpt of one
of their posts as ‘cringe’ because they’re pointing out that moral
content policies are used by oppressors to attack marginalized
people…which is a pretty reasonable conclusion. And you then argue that
pointing this out is racism.
No, I’m pointing out
that telling Black women that they are ignorant of the evils of racism
and should be reading history instead of fanfic is a cringeworthy case
of whitesplaining. And yes, golbatgender’s argument still in fact
pertains to the Black women on the thread, since diversehighfantasy
mentioned prohibiting racist fanfic and Ms. Jemisin was in favor of
flagging and content warnings, all of which golbatgender is against. By
implication they also seem to be responding to the OP and saying that
no, Black people shouldn’t be creating their own racism-free archives because that’s banning stories based on content and that can never go well.
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.
Which is the same position that golbatgender then
supported and clarified to say that it was already the case. Racism was
already a tag on AO3 and it was very obvious to anyone who read the
thread (again, did you?) that golbatgender was responding to the people
asking why racist fanfic shouldn’t just be banned completely.
……This
is your idea of reading? Because what golbatgender actually said was
that there are tags but racism can’t be an archive warning, nor would
flagging work, both ideas that diversehighfantasy and Ms. Jemisin
advocated. And again, banning based on content is an idea that
diversehighfantasy mentioned (and which Ms. Jemisin did not say no to,
since it’s really on a continuum especially in combination with
flagging), so the cringey whitesplaining of racism to Black women in the
last paragraph still applies.
I’m not the one who screwed up here and you are, once again, showing
that you’d rewrite reality to fit the frame in your head.
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.
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.
In specific:
Unsurprisingly, I have a few problems with your response, starting with how you’ve just accused me of being eager to tell you who you are, when in fact you’re the person that was in a hurry to attach a label to me while simultaneously misrepresenting and misunderstanding what I’ve said about authoritarianism. And a quick side-note: I referred to you as an anti-shipper and you’ve just said that you’re an anti-shipper in saying “I mean sorry we don’t match the cartoon idea of us you have in your head” so it doesn’t sound like I’m being presumptive at describing you as an anti. You just identified as one.
One thing I see I didn’t clarify properly before is that there’s a difference between calling someone a harasser and an authoritarian, but you’ve interpreted me talking about groups exhibiting authoritarian behaviors as being indicative that all such people are harassers. If you’ll reference my previous post you’ll see that I was very clearly talking about how people who consider themselves antis but do not engage in harassment are still siding with a group of people who harass people, because it’s those antis that go inventing claims of pedophilia and harassing people off of social media that you have to worry about.
That said, let’s get to the points you’ve made. Yes, if you aren’t aware that anti-shipping is a hotbed of authoritarianism then I am telling you that you are wrong about fandom spaces you’ve been active in for years. This is me, telling you that you’re wrong.
Next, let’s talk about what the actual point of describing how authoritarian antis are, because this shit comes up in my communities all the time in the form of exclusionists and truscum. In short, your community has a lot of dirty laundry and right now it’s been strewn about the floor for everyone to see. Or, in simpler terms, there is so much harassment leveled by antis at shippers that there’s no way that you can claim that they’re edge cases, they represent the community.
That’s something that is usually really useful in determining whether or not a community is inherently authoritarian, because in communities that don’t embrace it, or even better are outright anti-authoritarian, when someone behaves poorly the rest of the community calls that person in and helps them learn that what they’re doing is wrong. In authoritarian communities, the behavior is either condoned or supported, with only very weak attempts, if any, to put a stop to it. And that goes whether we’re talking about harassment, abuse, or straight up violence.
So, you’ve got three options. Deal with the problem people in your own community and reclaim it, break away as I mentioned before, or get used to being lumped in with people who do terrible things. Take the word authoritarianism out of it if you want, it’s not really important for this part of the framework, but to be honest I left out the ‘deal with your problem’ part of it because I anticipated that you’d reject that because you’d probably reject the notion that your community has problems. And yes, if there was a concerted effort by healthy anti-shippers, people who identified themselves by the way they find some aspects of shipping distasteful but in no way needed to enforce that view on shippers, you’d get a new reputation and would be able to distance yourself from being associated with abusive and authoritarian antis.
But the fact of the matter is that you’re still supporting a fundamentally authoritarian community. And you’re even inventing excuses for it, ways to explain away the criticism without actually addressing it.
In general:
Okay, now for all of the cleanup:
Yes, having anti-abortion beliefs makes you an authoritarian. You cannot hold anti-abortion beliefs without choosing in some part to support an authoritarian stance, in which someone chooses to police other people to change their behavior in order to bring it into line with a group norm based on purity and adherence to a central authority, whether that’s the ideology or a leader. Just like you cannot be selectively progressive and call yourself progressive, you can’t be anti-authoritarian and yet not support bodily autonomy. If you choose to oppose bodily autonomy, even in spirit, you are choosing authoritarianism, because the idea that our bodies are our own is core to not just anti-authoritarian principles, but also most legal systems and a great deal of everything human beings have ever based our morality on.
No, there’s no one authoritarian inventory. It’s been studied extensively for decades and a lot of people have come up with different scales and inventories to describe it, so your experience taking one right-wing authoritarianism inventory does not describe the whole of what authoritarianism means. My preference, and I’m hoping this is the one that you found, is the Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale invented by Bob Altemeyer, a professor at the University of Manitoba who studied authoritarianism in great detail. If you haven’t read his book The Authoritarians, it’s a great start. I recommend immediately following it up with the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD. That should make the link between emotional immaturity and authoritarianism absolutely clear, something that Altemeyer only hints at in The Authoritarians, when he addresses the need for security in such groups.
I am impressed at the level of sophistry that takes ‘left-wing people often times don’t identify as Democrats because Democrats have done some terrible things’ and then suggest that means I’m saying that reformers and non-Democrats who attempt to join and reform the party are somehow responsible for regressive social policies they had no hand in building. Because, and let me quote you exactly here, “people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist,” is somehow responsible for things like the prison-industrial boom created by the Clinton Administration in the early 90s. I do hope you can see that this point is ridiculous because not only are Democratic Socialists not the same thing as Democrats, Democractic Socialists like Ocasio-Cortez, or the Justice Democrats that came out of supporting Bernie Sanders, who join with the Democratic Party to reform it are specifically choosing to fight the very same corruption I talked about.
No, I’m not defining authoritarianism as all bigotry and evil. The fact that you feel the need to simplify everything I’ve said to that point kinda suggests that you can’t engage with the material. I’ve repeatedly, in that 101 post I linked to you before and elsewhere on my blog, have addressed the complicated nature of authoritarianism, the way it does harm, it’s role as a cognitive flaw in our species that arises naturally, it’s relationship with emotional maturity, and the fundamental need for security that authoritarianism tries to fill…and the best you can come up with is to look at all that and say that I’m basically saying that authoritarianism = evil.
Hell, one of my core fucking points is that authoritarianism isn’t evil, it’s a trait that a lot of us embody that we can unlearn and that we have to fight to help others unlearn before they go past the point where they’re never going to give it up!
In closing:
I don’t like how simplistic your attitudes are on pretty much all of this. Whether we’re talking about the way you want to sidestep discussion of the problems that antis create, the way that you clearly don’t grasp authoritarianism or how it relates to political science, or just the way that you’re throwing cheap rhetorical tricks at me in an attempt to make your point, it does not sound like you’re arguing in good faith. At all.
I mean, you honestly just tried to turn something I said inside out and tell me that it somehow suggested that I cared more about labels than someone’s actions.
Well, your actions tell me that you can’t argue your way out of a wet paper bag or you’d be presenting substantive and valid points instead of misinterpretations and misdirects.
Post-script:
I noticed you’ve got an ‘anti-anti bs’ tag. Where’s your ‘anti bs’ tag?
If you stand opposed to people in the anti community that harass people, it seems like you might want to point that out when you see it and educate people on how to avoid it and prevent it. Or maybe take any stance on it aside from ignoring it.
Maybe you haven’t ignored it. I don’t know in detail, as I don’t follow your blog. But you want to tag stuff as being ‘anti-anti bs’ because presumably you think that people who oppose antis often say bullshit things. I’m pretty sure harassment and abuse is worse than bullshit, so why no tag there?
Me: *repeatedly states that there are antis who are harassers, trolls, and abusers, and explains that it won’t help to vacate the anti label in favor of them*
You: OMG YOU’RE DENYING THAT ANTIS HAVE PROBLEMS!!! DEAL WITH IT!!
At this point there doesn’t seem to be much relationship between what I said and what you’ve replied to. I do know there is a problem. I have acknowledged it. All I’ve told you is that there are authoritarian antis and non-authoritarian antis, much like there are authoritarian shippers and non-authoritarian shippers. It’s ironic that the ask at the top of this thread was literally about shippers harassing Black antis to drive them out of fandom, but I don’t go from there to say reylo is inherently authoritarian or whatever. It means there are reylos who behave badly, including in authoritarian ways.
Sure, maybe you’re not as hardcore as other people, but the ideology
you’re talking about is still ultimately authoritarian in nature.
Um? The only “ideology” I’ve described is this:
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.
This is authoritarian, despite not meeting any of the criteria you’ve described? If anything the only authoritarian parts seem to be the parts I’ve said I don’t subscribe to. This is another part where what you’ve said to me doesn’t seem to have any bearing on what I actually wrote. If you want to tell me I can’t argue/am not arguing in good faith, it’s a good idea to look like you actually know what my arguments are.
As for having an #anti reylo bs tag: There’s that inconvenient part where I and other antis have in fact discussed harassment and misogyny among antis (link, link). When disgusting shithole antis on Instagram stole and posted a picture of a shipper’s minor child, I knew about the situation because antis on Tumblr talked about it and condemned it.
You seem to think I should make more regular posts about anti reylo bs, but do you really not know how these harassers operate? They act generally as anonymous mobs who send awful anons to shippers. In order to regularly track and document that I’d have to follow/regularly read reylo blogs, which is a big no both for my own well-being and because that’s like, stalking? Anti antis can do that, which is an upside to their fandom presence. (It’s almost like anti anti isn’t inherently a bad thing? I mean what else do you call people who are against all antis? Oh right, you’d rather pretend you’re not anti anyone and prefer to make your inaccurate and wrong arguments under a veneer of neutrality and intellectual rigor that you don’t actually possess. Okay.)
I referred to you as an anti-shipper and you’ve just said that you’re an
anti-shipper in saying “I mean sorry we don’t match the cartoon idea of
us you have in your head” so it doesn’t sound like I’m being
presumptive at describing you as an anti. You just identified as one.
Where…. did I say you were presumptive… for calling me an anti…? I said I am one and that you were presumptive for making blanket condemnations of a fandom community whose activities as a whole and whose “ideology” you don’t actually know outside of its worst elements. I’m taking you to task for using the label incorrectly, not for applying it to me. Again, reading what I actually said would help.
Because it evidently bears repetition, I know there are authoritarian antis who subscribe to authoritarian beliefs. My problem is with your saying that there are authoritarian and non-authoritarian shippers, but that there are no antis who are not authoritarian or at least do not give tacit support to authoritarianism by being an anti. (Would this be a correct summation?) I’ve explained to you at length why that’s an inaccurate and harmful stance that helps silence fans of color who discuss fandom racism, so if you actually care about that you can scroll up to read it.
Yes, having anti-abortion beliefs makes you an authoritarian. You cannot
hold anti-abortion beliefs without choosing in some part to support an
authoritarian stance, in which someone chooses to police other people to
change their behavior in order to bring it into line with a group norm
based on purity and adherence to a central authority, whether that’s the
ideology or a leader.
Except there are multiple ways to have anti-abortion beliefs and not all of them involve adherence to purity and authority. I’ve debated enough of them on a sideblog to know (link if you want to see it). Many anti-abortion people sincerely–and wrongly–believe that abortion is murder and infanticide. Others of course, perhaps most, simply use that argument as a veneer for the authoritarian motivations you mentioned. That doesn’t mean the former are giving tacit support to the latter’s worst actions or have similar psychological profiles as the latter. It’s like saying soccer fans tacitly support hooligans by being soccer fans.
If you haven’t read his book The Authoritarians, it’s a great start.
The funny thing is I was literally describing Altemeyer’s research from that very book, and though I read it in full a long time ago (10+ years) I’ve checked it briefly to see if I remember the main points correctly. Unless my memory seriously fails me it didn’t have anything about labeling single beliefs as “inherently” authoritarian or blaming all conservatives for being complicit in authoritarianism.
I do hope you can see that this point is ridiculous because not only are
Democratic Socialists not the same thing as Democrats, Democractic
Socialists like Ocasio-Cortez, or the Justice Democrats that came out of
supporting Bernie Sanders, who join with the Democratic Party to reform
it are specifically choosing to fight the very same corruption I talked
about.
This just in: Being a Democratic nominee for Congress, hell, campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for President, does not constitute identifying as a Democrat. If a would-be Democratic nominee for President is not a Democrat, who is? Joining the Democratic Party isn’t the same thing as identifying as a Democrat? Whut?
Also LOL at thinking being a Democratic Socialist is incompatible with the Democratic Party, whose members hold a broad range of beliefs from leftist to right of center. It’s almost like people can identify with a party affiliation while being critical of it and working to change it, so your original take was hilariously wrong and actions matter more than labels.
This is still argument in bad faith. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t need to continually misrepresent the things I’ve said in this very thread to try to make your argument sound better without saying anything substantive.
About Democrats, first you were arguing that I said that reformers are part of the problem and now you’re saying that acknowledging that some people have joined with the Democrats specifically to reform them means that they aren’t Democrats. You should really choose one of those and stick to it. I shouldn’t need to give you a poli sci 101 to help you avoid engaging in rhetorical tricks. Hammer and nail indeed. It’s been a while since I’ve engaged with someone so interested in dodging the topic.
Here’s the core problem: You don’t want to acknowledge that supporting an authoritarian ideology means giving tacit support to authoritarians, whether or not you yourself embody any of those behaviors. I responded because you claimed that I was calling all antis authoritarian harassers. While your original position was inaccurate, it was presented in good faith. My failure is that I didn’t consider how uncomfortable you might be about this issue and how that might make you dig in your heels and just deny the topic all together.
Yes, if you support anti-abortion, it doesn’t matter how sincere you are that you believe abortion to be murder and infanticide, it’s still supporting an ideology that is at it’s core authoritarian. Similarly, all you’re doing here is trying to argue that some anti-shippers aren’t authoritarian, when the community is as a whole dripping in that behavior.
Authoritarian groups always attempt to establish a social hierarchy and take control of any communities they’re a part of. And that’s exactly what’s happened with antis. Maybe at some point in the far distant past that wasn’t the case, but now they’re the ones that represent the anti community. It’s kinda like how, yes, Trump supporters are racist, even if they didn’t intend to be. You can’t support someone like Trump without also supporting racism and white supremacy, it doesn’t matter how sincere and wrong they are, they’re still supporting it.
And finally, I really hope your idea of confronting harassment or abuse in the anti community consists of more than a single post in a single tag if you want to claim that you and other anti-shippers like yourself aren’t authoritarian and actually stand opposed to such behaviors. It certainly isn’t due to confronting fandom racism, because last I checked people didn’t need to be an anti to do that, and confronting racism isn’t the same as antis.
You don’t have to confront it, but if you’re comfortable being bedfellows with the people that represent anti culture, you’re comfortable standing alongside authoritarians.
“By which I mean that my opposition to antis rests purely in their
authoritarianism.”
This is a pretty strong claim that needs actual evidence.
“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)”
If an anti doesn’t like a ship, but does nothing to force
someone else not to like it, how exactly are they behaving in an authoritarian
manner?
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.
This is poisoning the well. This is like
arguing all people who are pro-abortion are pro child murder.
“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. “
No, but your definition of authoritarian seems to include people just not
liking something, which doesn’t match any established definition of
authoritarian at all.
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.
Some antis do. Some just don’t like a
ship. That’s basically all it means to
be an anti – to not like something. Some folks will voice that displeasure and
some won’t.
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.
Based on who’s metric? This seems like a
personal statement rather than anything actually measurable.
“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.”
Eh, that goes for shipping in general.
Taking your predator example, pedophiles can begin grooming young fans
into perceiving such relationships to not be an issue from pro shipping.
“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.”
This doesn’t follow. It’s
like telling someone who is conservative to break with the Republican party
because the KKK supports them.
“Unsurprisingly, I have a few problems with your
response, starting with how you’ve just accused me of being eager to tell you
who you are, when in fact you’re the person that was in a hurry to attach a
label to me while simultaneously misrepresenting and misunderstanding
what I’ve said about authoritarianism. “
This is a turnabout fallacy.
“And a quick side-note: I referred to you as an
anti-shipper and you’ve just said that you’re an anti-shipper in saying “I mean
sorry we don’t match the cartoon idea of us you have in your head” so it
doesn’t sound like I’m being presumptive at describing you as an anti. You just
identified as one.”
It’s the authoritarian part that’s being argued, not the anti. At no point has lj-writes stated
otherwise. You’ve erected a strawman
here.
One thing I see I didn’t clarify properly
before is that there’s a difference between calling someone a harasser and an authoritarian,
but you’ve interpreted me talking about groups exhibiting authoritarian
behaviors as being indicative that all such people are harassers.
You’ve still not specified what you mean by that. You’ve declared that anti’s are
authoritarian, but never followed up with evidence for your claim.
“If
you’ll reference my previous post you’ll see that I was very clearly talking
about how people who consider themselves antis but do not engage in harassment
are still siding with a group of people who harass people, because it’s those
antis that go inventing claims of pedophilia and harassing people off of social
media that you have to worry about.”
People on the left that don’t engage in harassment often side morally with rioters. This does not make the left anarchists.
That
said, let’s get to the points you’ve made. Yes, if you aren’t aware that
anti-shipping is a hotbed of authoritarianism then I am telling you that you
are wrong about fandom spaces you’ve been active in for years. This is me,
telling you that you’re wrong.
Shipping IN GENERAL is. It’s been that way since shipping became a thing.
“Next, let’s talk about what the actual point
of describing how authoritarian antis are, because this shit comes up in my
communities all the time in the form of exclusionists and truscum. In short,
your community has a lot of dirty laundry and right now it’s been strewn about
the floor for everyone to see. Or, in simpler terms, there is so much
harassment leveled by antis at shippers that there’s no way that you can claim
that they’re edge cases, they represent the community.”
This is a gross generalization that has no metric backup. And even then it’s an argument that doesn’t
follow. It’s like arguing the African American community is represented by
criminals due to the high level of incarceration compared to the rest of the
population. It just doesn’t follow.
“That’s something that is usually really useful
in determining whether or not a community is inherently authoritarian, because
in communities that don’t embrace it, or even better are outright
anti-authoritarian, when someone behaves poorly the rest of the community calls
that person in and helps them learn that what they’re doing is wrong.”
This happens constantly.
There are Anti’s are pounding down on a group of cross taggers as we
speak.
“In authoritarian communities, the behavior is
either condoned or supported, with only very weak attempts, if any, to put a
stop to it. And that goes whether we’re talking about harassment, abuse, or
straight up violence.”
Given that you’re not actually in the anti-community I doubt you would know
what is or isn’t being done. But please,
if you have evidence for what you’re saying feel free.
“So, you’ve got three options. Deal with the
problem people in your own community and reclaim it, “
Gonna stop you there. THIS is
authoritarian.
“break away as I mentioned before, or get used
to being lumped in with people who do terrible things.”
Gonna finish by pointing out this is fallacious. You can also expect reasonable people to be
capable of not making grand generalizations.
Which is always at the heart of bigotry.
Take the word authoritarianism out of it if you
want, it’s not really important for this part of the framework, but to be
honest I left out the ‘deal with your problem’ part of it because I anticipated
that you’d reject that because you’d probably reject the notion that your
community has problems.
Every community has problems. As human
beings people are tend to err. It
happens. Lj-writes never claimed anti’s were squeaky clean.
And
yes, if there was a concerted effort by healthy anti-shippers, people who
identified themselves by the way they find some aspects of shipping distasteful
but in no way needed to enforce that view on shippers, you’d get a new
reputation and would be able to distance yourself from being associated with
abusive and authoritarian antis.
Or people could realize that making grand generalizations are dumb. But here we are.
But
the fact of the matter is that you’re still supporting a fundamentally
authoritarian community. And you’re even inventing excuses for it, ways to
explain away the criticism without actually addressing it.
You’ve STILL failed to back this up with anything.
Yes,
having anti-abortion beliefs makes you an authoritarian. You cannot hold
anti-abortion beliefs without choosing in some part to support an authoritarian
stance, in which someone chooses to police other people to change their
behavior in order to bring it into line with a group norm based on purity and
adherence to a central authority, whether that’s the ideology or a leader.
False. One can hold anti abortion views,
but only apply it to themselves and their lives. It happens rather often.
Just
like you cannot be selectively progressive and call yourself progressive, you
can’t be anti-authoritarian and yet not support bodily autonomy.
You actually can. It happens all the
time. You might get called out by people
who are “More progressive” but the key to progressivism is progress at the end
of the day. Not everyone is going to
want to move as fast as others.
“I
noticed you’ve got an ‘anti-anti bs’ tag. Where’s your ‘anti bs’ tag?”
Why would she need it in your case? What
even is that question?
Authoritarian
groups always attempt to establish a social hierarchy and take control of any
communities they’re a part of. And that’s exactly what’s happened with antis.
Again. Where?
Shoot, Lj-writes initial
post ISN’T EVEN IN THE GENERAL STAR WARS TAG.
So she’s not taking control of literally anything or policing anyone. She’s voicing her opinion on tumblr. So what is this really? What are you looking to accomplish here?
About Democrats, first you were arguing that I said that reformers are part of the problem
You said people who identify as Democrats are part of the problem, and I pointed out that people who identify as Democrats include reformers.
and now you’re saying that acknowledging that some people have joined
with the Democrats specifically to reform them means that they aren’t
Democrats.
Are you referring to this part?
This just in: Being a Democratic nominee for Congress, hell, campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for President, does not constitute identifying as a Democrat.
I’m guessing the sarcasm didn’t stick, because “This just in” is a common retort made in an attempt to point out that the part that comes after it, which is often a rephrase of what the interlocutor said, is ridiculous and makes no sense. The parts that came after this quoted portion were rhetorical questions also meant to point out that your position–that Democratic candidates for office somehow do not identify as Democrats–makes no sense.
You should really choose one of those and stick to it.
I did. It’s fine if you don’t fully understand sarcasm and I would have adjusted for that had I known, but I was not being inconsistent here–you mistakenly perceived me as being so.
You don’t want to acknowledge that supporting an authoritarian ideology
means giving tacit support to authoritarians, whether or not you
yourself embody any of those behaviors.
I have asked you over and over how I support an authoritarian ideology and you have not answered me, other than repeating that a) anti-shippers are inherently authoritarian and b) just using the label anti is therefore authoritarian regardless of what I actually do or what I actually believe. It seems to me you’re the one who’s uncomfortable engaging with the subject, not me, since you refuse to look at the reality beyond your preconceived ideas.
The parts about abortion are just you repeating your points over and over without engaging with anything I’ll said, so I’ll just skip over it.
Similarly, all you’re doing here is trying to argue that some
anti-shippers aren’t authoritarian, when the community is as a whole
dripping in that behavior.
My argument from the first has only been that you don’t know the community “as a whole,” something you consistently refuse to acknowledge while you insist that you know and can define the community while not even really being in fandom. But then again you have abundantly proven that you don’t know authoritarianism either, so pretending to know more than you do isn’t a new thing for you evidently.
It’s kinda like how, yes, Trump supporters are racist, even if they
didn’t intend to be. You can’t support someone like Trump without also
supporting racism and white supremacy, it doesn’t matter how sincere and
wrong they are, they’re still supporting it.
This is particularly funny because, in the anti Reylo section of the SW fandom at least, the so-called antis are predominantly fans of color who are fed up with the anti-Finnrey and anti-Finn rhetoric from Reylos and engage in discourse about it, not harassment. It feels really great that a white woman is coming in to compare us to Trump supporters. (This is sarcasm, by the way.)
And finally, I really hope your idea of confronting harassment or
abuse in the anti community consists of more than a single post in a
single tag if you want to claim that you and other anti-shippers like
yourself aren’t authoritarian and actually stand opposed to such
behaviors.
I actually gave you two links and described one other incident, and there have been other incidents such as me criticizing an anti for stealing reylo art to mock the artist’s skill, yelling at and blocking an anti for comparing reylos to Nazis (y’know, kind of like how you think the mostly fans of color in the anti Reylo community are comparable to Trump supporters bahaha), and pointing out that mocking a Reylo shipper for her age is misogynistic. Sorry I can’t produce the requisite number of posts, tagged for your convenience and to your exact specifications, to prove my fandom activities are valid and non-authoritarian. (This has also been sarcasm.)
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.
It certainly isn’t due to confronting fandom racism, because last I
checked people didn’t need to be an anti to do that, and confronting
racism isn’t the same as antis.
Again, you don’t even know what anti Reylos do–because a large chunk of named anti Reylo activity is exactly that, confronting racism that disproportionately comes from the Reylo fandom– and as such I don’t give your opinion any credence until you’ve actually educated yourself.
I’ll add this last part as a screenshot to keep a unified thread:
I think you mean one of the first asks I fielded about this conversation? Because the post you mentioned is an ask, not a reblog (link). Like, I’ve already said that the anti community is problematic why are you pulling it out like it’s a giant gotcha 😂 It’s almost like stretching a terms like “pedophile apologist” and “authoritarian” beyond all recognition is bad or something. (This is a sarcastic dig at you.) If you’re in the mood to defend golbat, maybe also check out the post where they told Black women fans, including N.K. Jemisin, that they were ignorant about the evils of racism and should read less fanfic and more history (link). Not to mention their infamous “antis are very colonialist” post lmao.
L.J.'s Obsessions 