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#censorship – @fred-erick-frankenstein on Tumblr
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Pardon, but your tie is not symmetrical.

@fred-erick-frankenstein / fred-erick-frankenstein.tumblr.com

Fred|27|he/him|bi|I'll never tag any of my posts as "q slur", "d slur" or any of that matter - unfollow me if you think IDENTITIES are a slur!|Instagram: @fred_erick_frankenstein|German|icon from a gif by @poirott
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cam1lla

“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

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maerossi

"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.

Thank you for this addition!

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Aaaah sadly, @meowmeowuchiha​, it never ends there.

This has happened multiple times before.

They start off saying ‘oh we just want to ban the gross pedo shit :)’, which a lot of people can agree with.

And then they ban the underage stuff which is specifically talking about trauma and recovery.

And then they ban the noncon stuff, regardless of how it’s depicted.

And then they ban consensual nonconsent.

And then they ban BDSM and the furries.

And then they ban all the explicit stuff, which often involves specifically targeting queer content. 

And the worst thing? IT DOESN’T WORK. It never works. It just makes triggering and explicit content harder to avoid, because now it’s floating about in the wild, like it is on Tumblr. I have encountered my specific triggers and squicks incalculably more times on Tumblr than AO3 because of this.

‘Slippery slope’ is a logical fallacy, but when you’ve seen it play out on Livejournal, FF.net, tumblr, and multiple other smaller sites, you get to know the warning signs.

[edited to remove the last paragraph re. the wannabe AO3 mod, as I don’t want to spread misinformation!]

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I have been reading a bit on the OTW elections and the whole Tiffany G thing, but most of all, I've been reading comments from people supporting Tiffany saying that she just wants to clear AO3 from all the CSAM (child sexual abuse material) content and I don't know who needs to hear this but:

If someone comes to a predominantly QUEER space (like AO3) and tells you that censorship is necessary to eradicate CSAM... it's not actually CSAM they want to eradicate...

I've seen this type of discourse about Pride and about queer literature and queer movies and queer communities. It's a tried and true technique of the right and conservative movements.

First, they say there is a DANGER to the community through CSAM and they conflate the actual threat of CSAM in the community (we all know someone who thinks that writing a love story between two characters who are 16 is CSAM...), and make you believe that censorship is the only way to PROTECT THE CHILDREN. And since most people are (rightly) mind-bogled at having to explain that of course they don't support CSAM content, they bow down and accept the censorship for the greater good, without anyone actually trying to have a conversation about what qualifies as CSAM (which needs to, you know, actually involve real children and not fictional characters who are 17 and losing their virginity with their crush in a Mature-rated story about high school football and first love based on the author's own experience of losing their virginity at 17 to their crush in high school).

Then, they tell you that there are other forms of DISTURBING CONTENT, and what they really mean is porn that THEY find disturbing, for ex, (and I kid you not, I have seen comments like that) porn featuring disabled characters, which they consider to encourage the exploitation of vulnerable individuals, or BDSM porn (which supposedly encourages violence and lack of consent), or rough porn, or any kind of porn that isn't two (preferably white and skinny) able-bodied people doing it missionary style while lovingly gazing in each other's eyes. SO TO PROTECT VIEWERS, that needs to be banned as well.

And then, they tell you that even that sanitized version of porn is still porn and that people under 18 or under 21 or under whatever age they consider too young to view anything sexual regardless of the fact that not all countries have the same law about the age of maturity, should be free to surf the site without having to *gasp* filter out properly tagged works. So TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN, every explicit content is censored.

And then finally, when all that is left is a sanitized, white-washed, ableist, puritan type of content featuring General-Audience approved gay works of two nice men or two nice women holding hands and chastely kissing each other on the lips... Well guess what? :) CHILDREN SHOULD NOT BE EXPOSED TO QUEER CONTENT SO WE NEED TO BAN THAT AS WELL, and since we've basically done purge after purge before and there are still a handful of people on the website, well surely they won't mind/care anymore, will they?

It's not just a slippery slope, it's something that has been done time and again, and that is why censorship on AO3 will never, never have a positive outcome.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

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Anonymous asked:

what did archive of our own do?

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fozmeadows

You… do realise that people tag works as containing rape/paedophilia/incest when the stories are explicitly about those things being bad, and not just because they’re writing dark themes for reasons that you personally disapprove of, right? That tags merely state the presence of a thing without explaining how it’s dealt with in the narrative, and that stories do not have to be morally instructional and perfect and pure in order to be allowed to exist? 

Like. You might as well walk into a bookshop and stamp BLOCKED FOR BADWRONG CONTENT on every book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, half of Shakespeare, every YA novel about rape recovery, every adult novel about rape recovery, every biography of someone who has suffered from rape, incest or paedophilia and been brave enough to write about it, every book of Greek, Egyptian and Norse myths, the fucking Bible - just a truly massive percentage of the entire global literary canon, because there is literally no way to remove each and every reference to these themes otherwise. 

Do you know why schools and libraries are pressured to ban books like I Know Why the Caged Bird SingsTo Kill a Mockingbird and Laurie Halse Andersen’s Speak? Because dumbass, scaremongering adults think that letting teens read about rape or racism or sexual violence or queerness or half a dozen other topics they think are Bad Things will lead to them down a path of Vice. 

What happens to characters in stories, no matter how graphic or awful, is not the same as that act occurring to a real human person in real life, nor does reading or writing such works indicate endorsement of those acts. This is why a story which features paedophilia, regardless of whether it’s written as overtly sexual content or as a damning condemnation of the act, is not the same as child pornography by any legal definition: because no actual children are harmed. Are you personally still allowed to be angry and disgusted about the public availability of the former type of stories, even in instances where the writers are themselves victims of child abuse trying to process their trauma? Yes! You’re under no moral obligation to like any kind of content! But are you correct in asserting that the creation of such stories is illegal and hurting somebody in exactly the same way that a real abuser hurting a real child would be? No! Because fictional characters are not real people, and whatever our motives for creating or engaging with a particular thing, monkey see = monkey approve is not how it fucking works.  

Have you ever watched an episode of CSI? Congratulations! By your own logic, you’re pro rape and murder. Ever watched an episode of Hannibal? Congratulations! By your own logic, you endorse cannibalism, Stockholm Syndrome and serial killing. Ever watched a historical drama where a young girl gets married to a much older man? Congratulations! By your own logic, you endorse child brides. And on, and on, and on.

I say again: you are allowed to be critical of particular works and/or the recurrence of certain themes across a particular medium. But arguing that an entire literary platform needs to end because some stories there contain Bad Things makes as much sense as banning the works of Octavia Butler or Sherman Alexie from school libraries because of their content. Which is - spoiler alert - a really bad idea.

UGH.

All of this. 

Puritanical culture is really fucking dangerous. By thinking you’re being ‘pure’ and ‘good’ and condemning all these things, you’re actually playing right into the hands of people who want to control media content by pretending shades of gray don’t exist. It’s not as simple as Thing Good or Thing Bad. It’s “Thing Complicated And Needs Critical Thought And Review.” 

Do not, in your quest for purity, lose your ability to think

I think people forget that AO3 is an archive as well, they aren’t particularly responsible for every piece of content produced there. It’s like boycotting twitter because someone there was posting about sensitive topics. That’s not how the internet works and it’s such an uninformed way of seeing things.

I also suggest, for people on the other side of this argument, to study a bit more history and look into censorship. I live in a country that spent a lot of time under dictatorship (I wasn’t alive myself at the time but my parents were) and I know enough about it to make it obvious that it’s a Goddamn Bad Idea You Dumbasses lol

People work through their personal bad experiences through literature, like the other people in this thread said. Sometimes people write things to raise awareness about a subject. Art isn’t pure or cute, it shouldn’t be forcefully cleansed. Making art uniform is supid and wouldn’t work when we’re plural multifaceted beings, These fanfics teach people about these subjects, when well written they can educate. I learned loads about consent reading fanfic. It’s more effective than long tumblr rambles about it, It allows you to put yourself in the shoes of victim or perpetrator. And that’s not a bad thing!

If reading about certain contents bother you just DON’T READ IT?? It’s that simple! You know why the tags exist? So people don’t have to read it if it triggers them or if they would rather not, A lot of you are spoiled and grew up on AO3 but trigger warnings weren’t even a thing when I started writing and I’m incredibly thankful for them now. I’m thankful for tags that keep me safe. And that’s what you’re ultimately fighting against. And pro censorship if you think someone is gonna sit there and review everyone’s fics to say whether or not they’re appropriate.

You’re spoiled and libraries have no such things to protect and shelter you. But AO3 does. It’s a desservice to writers seeing people who have no idea what they’re talking about accusing AO3 this way. It’s a goddamn disgrace. And I wish you would shut up for a damn second and allow art to be made, whether it pleases you or not.

[ID: four screenshot from fandom archive "Archive of our own", showing the number of results for the following search terms: "underage" (105351), "incest" (44954), "paedophilia" (1588) and "rape" (112288). /end ID].

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Tiktok is censoring Indigenous people, they're censoring black people, they are flagging videos of people with dark skin as "nudity." They consistently take down videos of indigenous people educating others on what happened at the residential schools, they put them under review, flag them, remove the likes, shadow ban them ect. I've been watching it happen the past few days and it's disgusting.

Like they said in their TikTok, send TikTok emails demanding change. Even if you never use TikTok use it now to help boost the voices of POC. Duet their tiktoks when they ask, share them, like and comment on educational videos so more people see them.

@one-time-i-dreamt PLEASE signal boost this of you can.

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Fiction doesn’t manifest brand new experiences out of thin air, fiction doesn’t infect people with never before thought about evil ideas. When we say ‘fiction affects reality’ we’re coming at it like those things never existed before that we interacted with ficiton. Assault, murder, death, queer romance, kink, whatever, and all other commonly censored topics existed before fiction had the audacity to immortalize them. 

Fiction amplifies reality. Jaws didn’t manifest a never before seen fear of sharks, it played on existing misconceptions and existing fears, and amplified them. The fear of sharks already existed. With or without Jaws we feared sharks, then a scary movie came out and those fears became amplified. 

But amplification isn’t exclusively bad

  • Nabokov’s Lolita, aka the most famous pedophilic story of all time and heavily censored for being “pornographic”, amplified our understanding of pedophilia, the kinds of people who commit it (charming, well educated, attractive people), and brought that conversation from hushed rooms to national attention.
  • Fifty Shades of Gray should have caused an uptick of relationship abuse and misuse of BDSM (and maybe it did), but it also caused a nationwide conversation on abuse, stalking, cult behavior, controlling relationships, and healthy BDSM. 
  • A lot of young girls first encountered female masturbation through Judy Blume’s Deenie (one of the ALA’s top 100 banned books of all time and a 40 year old woman writing about teen masturbation, a big tumblr no-no). Deenie’s impact was so important that it’s often cited as an invaluable validation for women and queer women who felt that their exploration was somehow immoral. There’s an entire book full of letters from readers to Blume about how important that book was to them. 

Take a scroll through some ‘top banned books’ lists and count to yourself how many of them were banned for specifically exploring sexual content in a liberating way. Or how many were banned for questioning the system.

Every single censorship movement and every single banned book has an army of people insisting that “fiction [only negatively] affects reality”. Books like Perks of Being a Wallflower for daring to talk about child sexual assault by a woman and depiction of a gay teenager. Or Speak for exploring the sexual assault and suicide attempts of a teenage girl. 

In reality, these books amplified reality and gave voices to the voiceless–those who felt purposefully stifled by society. Visually represented by this comic

Tl;dr: Fiction doesn’t change reality, fiction takes what’s already there and has the possibility of amplifying it–and of course you can pretend “bad fiction” only has “bad results”, but you have to be willing to silence the silenced while you support the people who aim to make fiction 1950s idyllic, oppressive silence. 

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phinarei

I remember being a young teen and watching The Famous Jett Jackson. There was an episode about Farenheit 451 being banned and the fight to be allowed to read it.

I also remember my church talking about how “that’s why it’s banned! It teaches rebellion! It teaches you to question authority!” I nodded along and assumed that those were bad things.

And then I read the book. I read it and I realised something.

The thing that that book taught me the most? Was to wonder WHY a book had been banned. Because once I read it I realized it wasn’t JUST about questioning authority, it was about questioning a system that enforces ignorance and conformity. Something that requires censorship to begin, control, and spread.

I’ve had moments in my life where I saw a piece of media and cringed. Where I was sick just knowing it exists. There are books and shows that I feel strongly against and have had passing thoughts about how they should be banned.

And then I remember reading Farenheit 451. And I remember to ask, “why do I want to ban it?” and “Who does banning this benefit and who does it harm?” as well as “If this is banned, what comes next? What else can be classified this way but is vital to society and the vulnerable people in it?”

Because fiction? Is an important exploration of humanity, good and bad. And it might amplify what’s already there in a bad way sometimes, but it also shines a light on the dark places that we can actually do something about. And if you take away that light, it doesn’t make the bad things go away, it just makes bad people able to hide in the dark.

There are any number of “objectionable” works that have changed society for the better. And we always need to ask ourselves, “is it banning this book I don’t like worth risking preventing someone else taking future generations to a better place because of it?” We don’t get to decide which piece of fiction does that because that isn’t how it works.

The problem is when fiction that glorifies bad things is put into the wrong hands. And frankly, if your fiction glorifies abuse or pedophilia, it’s going to attract those types. It’s done it time and time again. There’s victims out there who no one listens to.

Fiction reflects reality, and reality reflects fiction. Glorifying things isn’t a good idea because that will absolutely attract the people who also glorify those things. It happens with popular things, it happens with published fiction. It happens with online stories. And if you keep saying “well it’s just fiction” you’re protecting those types of people.

Fiction that glorifies the worst of the world attracts the worst of the world. They will always search it out. To justify themselves and to brainwash others into believing their “side”.

Just because it may not be the cause doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a hand in the crime.

Okay but what is glorification? Because Speak by Halse-Anderson was and is explicitly banned because it “glorifies” underage sex, swearing, suicide, and alcohol–It’s a book about a girl who gets sexually assaulted at a high school party. The “glorification of sex” is her being sexually assaulted. 

If you define glorification as “I’ll know it when I see it” you’ve just opened a very convenient door for anyone to rip fiction spaces apart in the name of “glorification of problematic ideas”. 

Do you know who suffers the most when we tear down “bad” fiction because it “makes bad people”? Survivors. Always. Far out and away, survivors are always the first to be ripped apart. 

It’s why Speak is banned, it’s why Perks of Being a Wallflower is banned, it’s why Looking for Alaska is banned, it’s why during strikeout that the far and away biggest group affected was sexual assault survivors,  CSA survivors, and queer spaces. Always. That’s why I told you to look through the banned book list. All of it is “bad” fiction. But all of it empowers vulnerable groups. 

Listen, I’m with you, underage fic gives me the skeevies, but I also know the answer isn’t “no depictions of minors in sexual situations” because you cross out teens exploring sex healthily through fantasy, you cross out adults looking back on their teen experiences, you cross out most of YA lets be real. 

Then maybe instead we say “no depictions of minors in sexual situations WITH ADULTS” for one, a good deal of CS abusers are teens themselves, but whatever, let’s pretend that doesn’t exist, you’ve just really effectively silenced survivors (teens and adults) from looking at their experiences through text.

Okay okay, let’s say “no depictions of minors in sexual situations with adults EXCEPT FOR SURVIVORS” kay now in order to not be harassed, a survivor has to tell a stranger who wants to harass them (or worse lbr) that they are indeed a survivor. AND you’ve just made a scenario where you are HAPPY and RELIEVED to hear that someone was sexually assaulted. I cannot begin to describe to you the level of gross that is.

I could go on and on, but you see how your “bad fiction is bad” it “glorifies”–like what do those words mean? What are you REALLY doing? There’s a reason that the ALA exists and why you aren’t going to tear them down with your paltry arguments. Please sit down and study some Library Science before you try to bible thump fandom into perfection.  

*deep breath*

Okay… @saltherpgnerd, as a survivor myself? Who was groomed using various pieces of media? Shut up.

Fuck this noise. Fuck all of it. You. Don’t. Get. To. Choose. What. Changes. The. World. Your personal opinion on whether something is good or bad means NOTHING about whether or not it has a place in the world.

I was groomed using media that, today, I would definitely consider skeevy (which I’m not naming because I’m not having that argument today). I would absolutely not give it to a kid to watch or read these days, but I also would NEVER demand it be banned. 1. Because there are about a billion harmless pieces of media that could fall under the same umbrella that would end up gone as well. 2. The stuff itself wasn’t the issue, it was my abusers. The shows didn’t abuse me, they did. And 3. I HAVE SEEN WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY BANNING THINGS. It’s guaranteed to get out of hand.

I do not care what some evil asshole thinks about a piece of media or that they can pervert it to their purposes. The very idea that the entire world has to suffer the loss of information because of a group of sick fucks offends me more than any piece of problematic media ever could.

Banning and destroying things that “glorify” gross things will ALWAYS be subjective and thus will always lead to vital things being thrown away and hidden. This is just how it works and as long as people are people, it’s how it will always be. We’ve seen it over and over again and it has never once ended up actually doing anything good for anyone. Abusers still abuse, they just find other methods. Like was said above, works that teach people how to identify and avoid abuse will also get defined as glorifying that shit and will end up banned. I may hate some shows with everything in me, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to let them disappear forever, if only so that people don’t come up with the same idea later and call it new and then we have to do this all over again.

You know how I finally realized I was abused and started to heal? Seeing my own abuse depicted in fiction. In a story that many, many people would consider glorifying abuse. I might be in a much different place if I hadn’t had access to it. I may have never found my way out of that place if I hadn’t had a chance to rewatch the shit from when I was younger after having my realization.

Media teaches us about what we are and aren’t willing to tolerate in our lives. It exposes us to new ideas and gives us a safe space to evaluate them. It let’s people explore the best and worst parts of themselves without making it anyone else’s problem. Even the very worst media out there serves a purpose.

You don’t protect someone by never letting them know what can hurt them. You teach them to protect themselves by exposing them to what exists in a controlled environment so they’re prepared. If no one tells me that arsenic is poisonous that doesn’t mean that it can never harm me. It just means that I might end up in a situation where I consume it just because I don’t recognize it.

And you know what? If nothing else? Gross media gives us an easy way to identify gross people. If a male has an unironic love of Fight Club on a surface level, I stay the fuck away. A guy tells me he relates to Rick Sanchez? I run all the way away. Problematic media drawing in shitty people is a feature, not a bug.

I’ll never say, “it’s just fiction,” becaise I feel all media should be consumed critically. But it shouldn’t be destroyed or banned. That way lies thought control and authoritarianism every time.

Hey buddy!! Fun fact: you don’t speak for all survivors. I’ve spoken to god damn TONS of survivors, including personal friends, who share my thoughts. Fuck off, stop trying to guilt trip me into being a fuckin weirdass proshipper.

Your experiences don’t change the experiences of others. I can personally say that due to my own trauma people making abuse look cute and good hurts me. It sickens me. I physically can’t stand it. Don’t you DARE fucking invalidate me. Fuck off.

It’s almost like it’s a very complex situation and we can’t bandaid solution anything. Survivors are on both sides and no side at all. That’s the point. That things are complex and there’s no easy answer, but the fiction has its place and very rarely is the hurt the fault of the fiction, but the culture surrounding the fiction and the silence surrounding the abuse in said culture.

The point is talking about it helps survivors, silence helps abusers.

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shsl-heck

This is going to sound weird at first but the debate about censorship is actually really reminiscent of discussions about the death penalty. Because we can argue all day over whether some people deserve to die, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter to me even if you could objectively prove someone deserves it because I don’t believe a government should be given the ability to decide who deserves death when that gives them the ability to execute any threat to their power.

Censorship is the same way. There are absolutely pieces of fiction I think are morally reprehensible, but I also know for a fact that if we allow censorship it will be used to quash any ideas that threaten the current power structure. So I really don’t care whether some fiction deserves to be banned because any attempt to regulate would just be a fucking nightmare and I don’t trust people to have that level of power.

There’s a lot to unpack in their reply, but I do see your point about the similarities of the death penalty and censorship. 

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Fiction doesn’t manifest brand new experiences out of thin air, fiction doesn’t infect people with never before thought about evil ideas. When we say ‘fiction affects reality’ we’re coming at it like those things never existed before that we interacted with ficiton. Assault, murder, death, queer romance, kink, whatever, and all other commonly censored topics existed before fiction had the audacity to immortalize them. 

Fiction amplifies reality. Jaws didn’t manifest a never before seen fear of sharks, it played on existing misconceptions and existing fears, and amplified them. The fear of sharks already existed. With or without Jaws we feared sharks, then a scary movie came out and those fears became amplified. 

But amplification isn’t exclusively bad

  • Nabokov’s Lolita, aka the most famous pedophilic story of all time and heavily censored for being “pornographic”, amplified our understanding of pedophilia, the kinds of people who commit it (charming, well educated, attractive people), and brought that conversation from hushed rooms to national attention.
  • Fifty Shades of Gray should have caused an uptick of relationship abuse and misuse of BDSM (and maybe it did), but it also caused a nationwide conversation on abuse, stalking, cult behavior, controlling relationships, and healthy BDSM. 
  • A lot of young girls first encountered female masturbation through Judy Blume’s Deenie (one of the ALA’s top 100 banned books of all time and a 40 year old woman writing about teen masturbation, a big tumblr no-no). Deenie’s impact was so important that it’s often cited as an invaluable validation for women and queer women who felt that their exploration was somehow immoral. There’s an entire book full of letters from readers to Blume about how important that book was to them. 

Take a scroll through some ‘top banned books’ lists and count to yourself how many of them were banned for specifically exploring sexual content in a liberating way. Or how many were banned for questioning the system.

Every single censorship movement and every single banned book has an army of people insisting that “fiction [only negatively] affects reality”. Books like Perks of Being a Wallflower for daring to talk about child sexual assault by a woman and depiction of a gay teenager. Or Speak for exploring the sexual assault and suicide attempts of a teenage girl. 

In reality, these books amplified reality and gave voices to the voiceless–those who felt purposefully stifled by society. Visually represented by this comic

Tl;dr: Fiction doesn’t change reality, fiction takes what’s already there and has the possibility of amplifying it–and of course you can pretend “bad fiction” only has “bad results”, but you have to be willing to silence the silenced while you support the people who aim to make fiction 1950s idyllic, oppressive silence. 

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phinarei

I remember being a young teen and watching The Famous Jett Jackson. There was an episode about Farenheit 451 being banned and the fight to be allowed to read it.

I also remember my church talking about how “that’s why it’s banned! It teaches rebellion! It teaches you to question authority!” I nodded along and assumed that those were bad things.

And then I read the book. I read it and I realised something.

The thing that that book taught me the most? Was to wonder WHY a book had been banned. Because once I read it I realized it wasn’t JUST about questioning authority, it was about questioning a system that enforces ignorance and conformity. Something that requires censorship to begin, control, and spread.

I’ve had moments in my life where I saw a piece of media and cringed. Where I was sick just knowing it exists. There are books and shows that I feel strongly against and have had passing thoughts about how they should be banned.

And then I remember reading Farenheit 451. And I remember to ask, “why do I want to ban it?” and “Who does banning this benefit and who does it harm?” as well as “If this is banned, what comes next? What else can be classified this way but is vital to society and the vulnerable people in it?”

Because fiction? Is an important exploration of humanity, good and bad. And it might amplify what’s already there in a bad way sometimes, but it also shines a light on the dark places that we can actually do something about. And if you take away that light, it doesn’t make the bad things go away, it just makes bad people able to hide in the dark.

There are any number of “objectionable” works that have changed society for the better. And we always need to ask ourselves, “is it banning this book I don’t like worth risking preventing someone else taking future generations to a better place because of it?” We don’t get to decide which piece of fiction does that because that isn’t how it works.

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ellym3lly

THE RESULTS FOR THE VOTE ON EU CENSORSHIP AND LINK TAX.

This it the breakdown of MEPs via their country of origin.

ORANGE is GOOD.

GREEN is BAD.

BLUE is abstain.

PLEASE SPREAD AND REBLOG SO THAT PEOPLE CAN SEE HOW THEIR COUNTRY PERFORMED - EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT IN THE EU. THIS IS NOT AN EASY THING TO FIND.

France and Romania did the worst. If you live in these countries, your representatives were all for destroying the internet. You will need to work twice as hard campaigning your reps when this goes back for a second discussion in September.

Congratulations Sweden, Poland, Netherlands, Lithunania and Estonia.

THIS IS NOT OVER.

The legislation goes back for a re-do in September before we’ll have to fight this battle again.

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