Oh my gosh @crazyfanatic97 do you remember last year when we were discussing the logistics of how one might go about turning a prom dress into a murder dress? Well now we know.
I had the lightning rod realization why The Discourse about fiction feels so alien to me
It’s because 99% of the arguments boil down to denying an individual’s agency
Fiction is one of the safest ways to exercise your right to choose – especially fanfic, which comes with an entire culture of tagging and content warning etiquette
If you go seeking fanfic on AO3, you can try new things with a fairly good understanding of what you’re getting yourself into
And if you get in over your head – you can close the window and walk away with no regrets
No real people were hurt in the production of words on a page – you aren’t sitting there thinking “gosh, I hope those people in this YouTube video survived that fall”
Fiction gives you the right to try on all kinds of ideas
Which is why I get so indignant when I see stuff like “XYZ content could be bad for some people, therefore it shouldn’t exist”
Or “what if minors clicked on porn for ABC fandom uwu”
The truth is, you have agency
My god, but you have agency
If you are old enough to be poking around these sites without parental supervision, you are old enough to start reading the warning labels on what you consume
And if that isn’t true for you? Then ask someone in your real life for help
(I have some pals who do ask me to screen fics for things that might trigger them)
But seriously, with fiction, you can choose what to access, and learn (in private) what you can handle
Don’t let anyone take your power
antis straight up don’t believe that people have agency. or at least, not agency enough to cancel out the other things that they believe have power over us.
they’re rooted in the same politics that gave us terfs/swerfs, aka radical feminism, which believes among other things that women can’t make free choices under patriarchy – like the choice to do sex work or engage in kink or any number of other things. the reasons women give for doing these things aren’t real reasons, the only reason they do them is because patriarchy has manipulated and brainwashed them into thinking these are acceptable things to do. it’s a “feminism” founded on the idea that most women (except the radfems themselves, of course) are not real agents.
hence the transphobia – because being a woman isn’t about how you feel, only about whether you were assigned in childhood to a particular sex-based second class
hence the biphobia – because bi is a “lesser” kind of gay, because it taints the true equality of gay relationships with imbalanced man/woman ones, which are always inherently coercive towards the woman because the man has all the power
hence the hate of kink, of stories with cruel or abusive themes, because if you like that sort of thing you can’t be trusted to know your own mind. at best you’re participating in your own oppression, mindlessly acting out the desires of a bunch of old white men circlejerking it to your humiliation. at worst, you’re a traitor who’s enabling and encouraging our pedophilic anti-woman overlords, the creators of all cruelty, without which we’d live in a lesbian separatist paradise with no war or suffering.
it can never be just because you find something valuable in reading about weird shit – the only people who could do that without gagging are oppresor menz or brainwashed women. (nb people don’t really fit in here, so they’re ignored.) try on ideas? but some of those ideas are Dangerous, Corrupting, Objectively Sick, and it’s our job to keep you away from them. there are some thoughts that are too awful to ever be admitted into your head, even for a moment, because they’ll change you.
i mean, this sounds like a stretch, but the more i read the more i see it all fit together. it might not be what people consciously believe, but it’s what created this radical exclusionary politics.
ironically, women believing that their only power is to control other women both arises from and perpetuates a toxic patriarchy.
it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.
example:
it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more
dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has
generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are
inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like
streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of
those spaces.
(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)
thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.
the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground – the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.
pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.
so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.
so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.
Empathy and universal design are for more than just people with disabilities.
Also, I love this quote: “it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.”
