Fandom has always had its fair share of Good White Christian Moms .....

[morgandawn]

Source: https://twitter.com/aroundab00t/status/1085922285704409089

"And, not unrelated, I also see a lot of Fake Woke purity policing popping up in the same breath. "You can't ship X because its Problematic" and "They aren't blood related but they're close to each other so its incest" and now "Multishipping is prompting infidelity!"  

Fandom has always had its fair share of Good White Christian Moms showing up to tell you whats Good and whats Bad. nearly fourteen years ago I got my first "Harry Potter is the Devils child and repent for writing HP fic or you're going to hell!" message on ff.net  

But I think its something to consider that its often the places where people 25, 35, 55+ are being pushed out that we're finding a lot of the tumblr woke bad hot takes. People without the life experience are coming together and deciding not to learn from fandom history,

Deciding not to look for the lexicon of language that has been there for years to describe and explain why they dont link a thing, and not to learn the commonly accepted practice of what to do when you find fanworks you dont enjoy  Instead of saying "I dont ship X bc its my notp" or abiding by "dont like, dont read." Spaces where that long fannish culture arent considered appear to become echo chambers where "we dont like X so now we need to come up with a justification for why" is the new normal,

And anyone who doesnt think the same way is Problematique™. And that Problematique™ content should disappear!!! Fiction impacts reality!!! If your content could hurt me it shouldnt exist!!!

Its easy to burn that torch when you've never been impacted by the loss of geocities, or by strikethrough, or heard stories from people who watched entire fanspaces burn overnight. Policing and witchhunting content bc it personally doesnt agree w you is always a factor of-

These purges. Think about tumblr, and how accurate their dragnet has been while trying to make a "safe" sfw space ......[snip]

All this to say, stop, consider what you're saying and why. If you have Strong Feelings about multishipping, maybe you're just a monoshipper. That doesnt make people who arent Bad or Wrong, and it doesnt mean you're lacking or Better either. You just have a preference, one that 

Is perfectly okay for other people not to share.  

Tl;dr: learn from the people who were in fannish spaces b4 you. Learn that its okay to just like or dislike things, & that your preferences dont have to be law or supported by "evidence". Curate your experience.
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 In one of the replies:

The root-cause of all this nonsense is that a good swath of the younger generation doesn't seem capable of seeing fandom for what it's always been -- an escapist place for *personal pleasure.* Instead, they see it as an *activist space & safe-space* rolled into one.  

 

Comments

tw child abuse, incl. sexual

[alexseanchai]

I mean, fandom is an activist space. That's sort of an inevitable consequence of a bunch of queer women congregating to engage in and value feminine-coded activities in a vocally queer way. For that reason among others, fandom being a safe space needs to be a fannish priority.

Here's the things, though.

1) Having an escapist place for personal pleasure, unrelated to activist anything, is an activist priority. Or anyway it should be a priority of any activist who wants to avoid burnout.

2) Safe for whom? Telling the child abuse survivor whose healing strategy is to read and write about fictional children in abusive situations, or the person who hasn't figured out how to not be attracted to prepubescents and who finds it ever so much easier to avoid acting on those desires with real children if they can read and write about fictional children in such abusive situations, or the entirely ordinary person who simply likes to make their faves cry (and who, by reading and writing about fictional children in abusive situations, makes it possible for the previous two types to do the same without needing to disclose why to internet strangers whose business it's not)—telling those people they can't read or write about fictional children in abusive situations because it's unethical or something...is not the world's most ethical way to handle this situation. No real children are being harmed. (Quite the opposite, re type two here!) If content creators tag and warn appropriately, then child abuse survivors whose healing strategy is to stay clear of reminders of the abuse will stay safe as long as they read the header before clicking the fic. Competing access needs are a thing, but totally barring one lot in order to protect another is not a good large-scale solution unless them as we're barring are actual Nazis, and everyone else can frankly butt out.

3) Fandom is vast. We contain multitudes.

[amedia]

You know, I had completely forgotten this until I read this post, but the Sock Puppeteer who tried to ruin Rat Patrol fandom was virulently anti-slash. It wasn't all that uncommon for people to dislike slash back then (late 90's/early oughty-oughts), and we also didn't talk about it in spaces that weren't age-restricted, so it didn't occur to me to mention it in the sock puppet account that I posted a while back. But it's an interesting parallel with the phenomenon described here. It wasn't just that she wasn't interested or didn't like it; IIRC, she and all her socks believed that it shouldn't exist at all.