greywash:

shipping-isnt-morality:

shinelikethunder:

nonbinarypastels:

so, thinking about the discourse regarding romanticizing Problematic things in fic—

when i read darkfic, i do not interpret the things happening in those stories as being romantic. i do not find these things appealing in the sense that they are things i would want to do in my life or have happen to me. no matter how explicitly detailed those stories are, i still do not find those stories to be an idealized version of life i want to strive towards having. i do not look at the things that happen in those stories and think “i want that, that’s something good to have” or at the characters and think “i want to be like that, that’s a good kind of person to be”.  

there is appeal to them as stories and they appeal to me in the sense that i find them entertaining and stimulating, but i do not at any point look at those works of fiction and find my perception at the idea of the same things happening in reality warped by that. i do not enjoy a graphic murder scene in a fic and then leave that story under the impression that murder is a good thing in real life. i do not get off to stories of bad things happening to people and then leave that story thinking it would be good for someone to do those things to me.

this is true even when the dark content in that fic is not condemned within the text. if there is no author’s note stating at the beginning of the story “the things that happen in this fic are bad”, no narrator coming in at the end to give a TED talk about morality, and no point in the middle where a character breaks down the wall, looks into the camera lens and explicity says “my behavior is bad and no one else should copy it” — if none of that happens, i still am able to understand that the content of that fic is not something i want to emulate, i still do not idealize it, i still do not want it to happen to me or to do it to anyone else.

if we define romanticization as “making something look more appealing than it actually is, making something be seen as an ideal” then i have never read a single darkfic — dead dove: do not eat or otherwise — that has romanticized a damn thing because

• can the content of those fics be considered romanticized if i don’t consider the content to be an ideal to strive toward?
• can it be considered romanticized if i don’t see the murder, the torture, the abuse as something that’s appealing outside of harmless titillating entertainment had in a safe environment?
• can it be considered romanticized if my perception of things in fiction does not affect my perception of those things in reality, if it does not make me thing those things are appealing in reality?
• can it be considered romanticized if the author does not consider it an ideal that’s appealing in real life and explicitly tags those fics with things like abuse, rape, etc, making it clear they’re aware of what is happening in the story?

in romanticization discourse, a lot of people are defining romanticization by fiction that features Bad Horrible No Good Things happening but not being explicitly condemned as being bad in the text.

there are two problems with this:

one is that something not being explicitly stated as being bad is not the same thing as that something being portrayed as being good or ideal

and two is that i don’t think the content of a fic has to be condemned within the text in order for us to realize that it’s not an ideal to aspire to because most of us already have a sense of ethics and morality which allow us to hold separate how we feel about things in fiction vs. how we feel about them in real life

• when bad things happen in fiction, do we really NEED to be told that they’re bad in explicit terms?
• when villains exist in fiction, do we really need for the hero to always win and for the villain to always be explicitly punished in the text in order to recognize that they are in fact a villain?
• when fics are tagged as containing abuse or rape or torture, do we really need an additional note that says “not only does this contain abuse, but abuse is bad in case you didn’t already know”?
• when we read these fictions which are rated explicit and marked as being for adults only, do we really need to be treated like children who need to have our hands held throughout the story, reminded at every opportunity that what we’re reading is wrong and nasty and not to be emulated in real life?
• do we not have brains and the ability to think for ourselves? do we not have our own ethics? do we not have our own morality? are we not capable of understanding that just because a fictional character is harmed in a fictional story that it does not mean that harming people in real life and being harmed in return are good things without being reminded of it at every single turn?

i think that MUCH of what makes something romanticized in fiction is not actually the content itself but the perception of readers towards that content. it’s in whether or not they find the content of that fiction to be more appealing than it actually is – to be an ideal they want to have or to be in real lie – and whether they can tell that the content of the fiction contains bad or unhealthy or harmful behavior, whether they can make that judgment, whether the behavior is explicitly stated as being so or not. 

it’s in whether or not a reader has critical thinking skills, media literacy, education about what healthy (and unhealthy) relationships look like, education about what abuse looks like, an ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and an ability to know what stories are for them and what stories are not for them and a willingness to avoid the ones that aren’t. 

You know it’s interesting, my knee-jerk reflex was to go “but this is all casually conflating how something is depicted with the hypothetical effects it’s assumed to have on the audience.” Which, yes, technically, to some extent… but only because it’s grappling with the massive equivocation the Fandom Police have silently gotten away with on the level of language itself. The extent of it didn’t come into sharp focus until I found myself frustrated by this post, then realized the roots of the frustration lay much deeper down, not in the post itself but in the problems it’s tackling.

Because IDK about anyone else, but to my ear “this work is romanticizes XYZ” is mostly about the work itself. The attitude it takes towards its subject matter. The way it chooses to present XYZ. As a sentence, it functions the same as “this work bungles the science its plot is based on” or “this work fixates on X to the point of downplaying Y”–it’s a description of how the story’s constructed, not an action the story’s performing on its audience. That’s in contrast to a word like “normalizes,” which means much more than “this work treats XYZ as normal”–it’s a claim of harmful action, an accusation of pressuring and bamboozling people into accepting XYZ as normal, or contributing to wider societal processes that do the same.

No matter how enthusiastically a story presents murder as normal, it can’t be accurately described as “normalizing murder” if not a single person walks away from it with their attitude towards murder the slightest bit changed. OTOH, I don’t think it’d be controversial to describe a show like Hannibal as (deliberately, gleefully) romanticizing murder and cannibalism. And that’s a description that applies totally independently of whether it gave any of its viewers an IRL hankering for human liver to go with their fava beans and Chianti. In fact, Hannibal is a classic counterexample in these arguments because its treatment of horror and taboo is so glammed-up, so unapologetically romantic, without any perceptible effect on audiences’ disapproval of real-life serial killers who gruesomely mutilate and then eat their victims.

But of course that’s the exact distinction antis want to obliterate. And even though I’ve been salty for ages about how indiscriminately they fling around “romanticizes,” “normalizes,” “trivializes,” “fetishizes,” “condones,” “promotes,” “perpetuates,” etc, as though they’re just interchangeable buzzwords that all mean “gotcha,” I hadn’t really contemplated whether that tactic might start obliterating the distinctions between those words for their audience as well. But of course it does. Even for those attuned to the shades of meaning, because after a certain threshold of well-poisoning it’s hard to be sure what anyone else is talking about when they use them.

Incidentally, my reference point for a fandom plagued with ludicrously romanticized, apparently genuine misconceptions about stalking and abuse has always been Phantom of the Opera. Not the fact that people ship the thing–I also see the appeal of shipping the thing! But the fact that traditionally, the mainstream position has been to furiously defend it as Super Duper Great, Happily Ever After, Passionate True Love, against anyone who dares allude to the trainwreck potential of all that murder, deception, controlling behavior, obsession, extortion, emotional terrorism, etc. IDK what the place is like these days, but at the point I was there, it had never not been a cesspit of apologism that extended well into distorted IRL beliefs. In other words, the exact bogeyman antis point at to scare us all into submission.

The thing is… looking back on it, what made it so horrifying wasn’t the worry that it would actively teach that stuff to impressionable teenagers. It was what it revealed about the views a staggeringly huge number of people already held about stalking and romance. Color me dubious about one schlocky Andrew Lloyd Webber musical’s ability to insert those views fully formed into a teenage girl’s head and persuade her of their legitimacy. The musical activated them, sure, and the fandom validated them to a truly disturbing degree, but there’s not exactly a shortage of other places for impressionable young’uns to pick that stuff up. Nuking the entire fandom and the source material from the face of the earth wouldn’t have done a solitary scrap of good for anyone’s understanding of abusive relationships. Just left a lot of teenagers stuck learning the same tripe from romcoms and bodice-rippers, minus the thought-provoking darkfic and the forums where they’d be exposed to counterarguments every time the same old ship wank started up again.

“Nuking the entire fandom and the source material from the face of the earth wouldn’t have done a solitary scrap of good for anyone’s understanding of abusive relationships.”

Wow, there’s my entire view on why anti-shipping isn’t activism in one sentence.

So, originally I wrote this whole essay in tags, but it was… too many tags, basically, and then also I wanted to add a link, so—

First off: yes, all of this.

Second: a thing I think about a lot with purity wankers is that a lot of people are actually kind of terrible at knowing what they find distressing. I’m a huge proponent of cognitive behavioral therapy/CBT, because a lot of what you do in CBT is learn how to self-interrogate your own thoughts and their emotional consequences. This is not something you are born knowing how to do. I think people feel like it is? Like it should be? I mean, it’s your own head, of course you know what’s going on in it—buuuuuuuuut… do you? If you just feel amorphously shitty a lot of the time, I’m going to go out on a limb and gently propose that maybe, actually, you don’t. And I think a lot of the purity wank brigade just feels amorphously shitty a lot of the time.

What I observe happen a lot of the time with purity wankers is that they think: “I feel amorphously shitty, and I am sitting next to this ‘problematic ship.’ I understand, intellectually, why this ship is problematic, and so the existence of this ship is a thing I can fix by doxxing and harassing the people responsible for it. Then I will feel better/less threatened/safer.”

I’m not a mental health professional, but I feel like anyone who has ever done CBT can recognize this as an ABC chart gone terribly awry. To summarize that link, an ABC chart (or an ABCD chart—more on this in a sec) has three components: an activating event or situation, a belief that results from that event, and the consequential feelings or behaviors that follow the belief. When you do CBT, you make a lot of these charts, and you usually fill them out backwards, because it’s really easy to draw erroneous conclusions when you start from the A.

So the purity wank ABC chart gone horribly wrong looks kind of like:

• Activating situation: There is a ‘problematic ship’ next to me.
• Belief: This problematic ship next to me threatens and imperils humans.
  
• Consequence: I feel threatened and imperiled.

But what’s actually happening looks more like this:

• Consequence: I feel threatened and imperiled.
• Belief: I believe that the ship next to me threatens and imperils humans, because I can see it, and I feel threatened and imperiled. I feel threatened and imperiled because this story reminds me that I am (e.g.) a young person in a terrifying world in which people, including young people, are in fact often sexually victimized, and over which I feel like I have very little control. I was myself sexually victimized a few years ago and I was unable to prevent my own abuse/stop my own abuse/bring the person who sexually victimized me to justice.
• Activating event: This story that I have encountered in a fannish context has reminded me of my own abuse.

So when you reverse this chart so it actually shows things in the order that things happen inside your brain, it looks like this:

• Activating event: This story that I have encountered in a fannish context has reminded me of my own abuse.

• Belief: I believe that the ship next to me threatens and imperils humans, because I can see it, and I feel threatened and imperiled. I
  feel threatened and imperiled because this story reminds me that I am (e.g.) a young person in a
  terrifying world in which people, including young people, are in fact
  often sexually victimized, and over which I feel like I have very little
  control. I was myself sexually victimized a few years ago and I was
  unable to prevent my own abuse/stop my own abuse/bring the person who
  sexually victimized me to justice.

• Consequence: I feel threatened and imperiled.

Hmm, but that… doesn’t seem like it makes sense anymore, does it? I just said that “I
feel threatened and imperiled because this story reminds me that I am (e.g.) a young person in a
terrifying world in which people, including young people, are in fact
often sexually victimized, and over which I feel like I have very little
control,” right after I was trying to say that I feel threatened and imperiled because of this story. Let me edit it a little:

• Activating event: This story that I have encountered in a fannish context has reminded me of my own abuse.
  
• Belief: This story reminds me that I am (e.g.) a young person in a
  terrifying world in which people, including young people, are in fact
  often sexually victimized, and over which I feel like I have very little
  control. I was myself sexually victimized a few years ago and I was
  unable to prevent my own abuse/stop my own abuse/bring the person who
  sexually victimized me to justice. I feel responsible for my own abuse, and for the abuse that this terrifying world inflicts on other people, especially other young people, and I need to fix this problem, of a terrifying world that inflicts abuse on young people.
• Consequence: I feel threatened and imperiled. Imma dox some bitches so they stop posting <insert ‘problematic ship’ here> stories on the internet.

Okay. And here is the real power of the ABC chart: an ABC chart relies on the assumption that the shit going down in your head is not necessarily rational, or proportionate, or productive. The last thing you do when you make an ABC chart is that you add a “D” column, dispute with evidence.

• Activating event: This story that I have encountered in a fannish context has reminded me of my own abuse.
  
• Belief: This story reminds me that I am (e.g.) a young person in a
  terrifying world in which people, including young people, are in fact
  often sexually victimized, and over which I feel like I have very little
  control. I was myself sexually victimized a few years ago and I was
  unable to prevent my own abuse/stop my own abuse/bring the person who
  sexually victimized me to justice. I feel responsible for my own abuse, and for the abuse that this terrifying world inflicts on other people, especially other young people, and I need to fix this problem, of a terrifying world that inflicts abuse on young people.
• Consequence: I feel threatened and imperiled. Imma dox some bitches so they stop posting <insert ‘problematic ship’ here> stories on the internet.
• Dispute with evidence: a) I am not responsible for my own abuse. I was an actual literal child, and the person who is responsible for my abuse was my abuser. b) I cannot, personally, myself, fix the problem of young people being sexually victimized. It’s too big a problem for one person to sort it out; I’m expecting too much of myself and even if I weren’t, I don’t (as a young person in a terrifying world over which I have very little control) actually have the tools available to do that, all on my lonesome. c) Does doxxing some bitches so they stop posting <insert ‘problematic ship’ here> stories on the internet actually stop me from feeling threatened and imperiled? [this might require several more iterations of the ABC chart to sort out, but what this hypothetical purity wanker who sounds absolutely nothing like an actual young person would probably realize is: taking on a personal crusade of doxxing some bitches on the internet so they stop posting ‘problematic’ content almost certainly makes them feel more threatened and more imperiled, because it underscores both the vastness of the problem ‘stop the sexual victimization of young people’ and the fact that doxxing bitches on the internet changes fuck all about this individual person’s actual history of abuse, and the ways that abuse continues to live with them.]

When you do CBT with a therapist, your therapist talks to you a lot about what you write down and what distortions in your thinking start to surface as particular issues for you. There are a lot to pull apart in this example: overestimating the probability of disaster [that one’s on my personal greatest hits list, too], exaggerating the importance of something small (a story on the internet) in a massive-scope problem (the sexual victimization of young people), a nontrivial amount of all-or-nothing thinking, a lot of self-blame, taking something personally that’s really not… I could go on. If I’d ever told my therapist I was about to start doxxing bitches on the internet because their stories reminded me of my own sexual abuse, I can guarantee you that she would want to talk to me about my sexual abuse, and the ways that that continues to live inside my head. Not about these bitches I was about to dox on the internet.

My point here is this: purity wankers perceive a problem—usually, but not exclusively, sexual abuse, and especially the sexual abuse of children—and they’re not wrong. That is a problem. And they’re also not wrong about the emotional responses that they have to that problem. Emotions can’t really be wrong. The problem is that they distort where the problem originates, and they distort their own responsibility for fixing it, and they distort how to appropriately cope with it as a problem, and I really do genuinely think that a lot of that has to do with never having learned how to interrogate their own thinking and feeling machines and ask for debugging output. That’s what CBT is: it’s a way of saying, oh, gosh!! My idiot thinking and feeling machine is making me feel like shit!! THAT’S not what it’s supposed to do! How do I fix it, so I don’t feel like shit??? Because the answer is definitely not doxxing bitches on the internet.

TL;DR Purity wankers actually maybe do need therapy, but not because ‘all y’all need therapy’ is a sick burn. They need therapy because they are having trouble identifying and addressing their own emotional needs and goals, and unable to identify where the boundaries are between the things that are distressing them and the things that remind them of the things that distress them, or that happen to be present when they feel distressed.