“the fandom has decided - ” “everyone agrees that - ” “we all know that this is the only right way to - ”

Academically speaking, I still find the whole “anti-shipper” movement to be fascinating from a sociological perspective.

You have what amounts to a extremist purity cult whose beliefs align nearly precisely with those of Conservative American Christianity in terms of sexual purity politics (admittedly with some additional flourishes that I’ve watched develop in real time), but is mostly composed of minority members whose sexual-and-gender identities are opposed and oppressed by Conservative American Christianity.  Additionally, their tactics also mirror religious pro-censorship groups (such as Warriors For Innocence), but their rhetoric is entirely secularized and derived from leftist theory.

Did they arrive at this structure via convergent evolution?  Via socially dominant concepts in the greater socio-cultural space that they occupy?  I doubt it was by direct emulation but the possibility does exist on some levels.

I’m literally doing my sociology research paper on them right now.

Ooh? Go on.

It’s a qualitative study looking at the ways that Tumblr antis define the word “pedophilia”. It’s pretty interesting stuff because the definitions are so unique to Tumblr anti culture. I’ll have to go through my coding more thoroughly, but I think I’ve broken them down into four categories:

1. Legality based arguments where they’re very stuck on the idea of Age of Majority. Usually these people believe that it’s pedophilia if an 18 year old dates a 17 year old because they view age 18 as a hard and fast line from childhood to adulthood.

2. Psychological-readiness based arguments are a lot more subjective. These people often use arguments about differing life stages as a reason to call something pedophilia. Some even bust out that “peoples brains don’t fully age until 25” factoid. For this group, age gaps are a real no-go, even if both partners are legally consenting adults. The acceptablity of age gaps varied.

3. Physical appearance based arguments are focused against people who like young looking or young acting characters, even if those characters are adults. These people define pedophilia as an attraction to the perception of youth. This belief is strongly correlated with anti-DD/LG posting.

4. I’m having trouble naming the fourth category. It’s based around an argument of sneaky pedophilia or maybe an uncovering of the fan creators hidden desires? These antis argue that aging up characters past canon ages and shipping them is pedophilia because they believe that the shipper REALLY wanted to ship the child but didn’t because they were worried it wasn’t socially acceptable. In this instance, the character is portrayed as an adult by fandom and there is nothing childish in their appearance or mannerism. Because the character was depicted as a child in canon, however, the anti believes that the character must always be depicted that way in fandom and that only tricky pedophiles would be interested in exploring that character’s future.

Similarly, I noticed a newer trend of calling adult ships between people who canonically knew each other as children/teens to be called pedophilia or at the very least jailbaity, predatory behaviour. This is particularly true when the characters are a couple years apart. The idea there is that, if they knew each other as children, they’d never be able to see each other as adults. So if they have sex as adults, they’re mentally thinking of the child version of their partner and are therefore a pedophile. I wonder if this is a projection of the beliefs from #4. Perhaps it is the antis who, once introduced to a child/teen, are never able to see them as anything but a child and therefore they believe that everyone else must feel the same? That’s only a guess. I only saw this one a handful of times and it was all pretty recently, so I didn’t include it in the data for my paper. It does seem to indicate a level of escalation in these definitions though. I’ll have to check in again at a later date and see if it sticks around.

I’ve seen all of those as well, and I’d be fascinated to see your results when you’re published.

As for names for the fourth category, can I suggest Canonical Stasis arguments?  As in, “the characters are forever frozen at the ages that they are presented”.

This is fascinating.

Infuriating as always, but fascinating.

My hypothesis is that many people have grown up in these American Christian purity culture and they are in the process of rejecting that religion. They reject the ideas that are bigoted against themselves first, then maybe they reject the overtly religious ideas. But they still believe that a purity structure is how society should function. They dont question the structure of their culture because it is invisible to them. It is background and feels like it should be universal.

I think it is a cultural thing, and many people dont even realise it.

I think that that hypothesis is quite likely, and I’d like to bring in another area which might have interesting parallels for research: the New Atheist community.

Take a quick look around the New Atheist youtube and reddit space, and you’ll quickly notice that while New Atheist may have dropped the Conservative American Christian justifications and trappings, many (if not most) of their moral codes and biases amount to almost exactly the same thing. Take a look at how New Atheists view the “Old Testament God” in particular – it’s basically cribbed wholesale from the classic anti-semitic narrative peddled by American Fundamentalists.

And of course, many New Atheist communities have basically recreated Christian sexual mores, as well. And while it’s tempting to write that off as just flat sexism, women within the New Atheist also seem to basically be recreating American Fundamentalist sexual purity codes.

I think that if you want to take this research to the next stage, it might be worth analyzing the patterns you see in minority groups from specifically non- Conservative American Christian backgrounds. If current or former Jews and Muslims and Hindus on Tumblr are also a demographically proportionate part of the “anti-shipping” movement, then I think that would strongly support the convergent evolution hypothesis. But on the other hand, if the “anti-shipping” movement is not only conversationally dominated by former Fundamentalist American Christians, but also disproportionately composed of them, then that would strongly support the hypothesis that the similarities between the two groups are due to “anti-shippers” still being influenced by their American Christian heritage.

I’ve actually drawn that same comparison myself in the past regarding New Atheists.  (And been driven out of New Atheist spaces due to being ethnically and culturally Jewish and questioning the Culturally Christian aspects of it)

THIS. I saw a post the other day that literally said if you do it to a fictional character, you’ll do it in real life.

No. Just NO.

I’m so glad someone put it into words.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a legend, and he’s absolutely right.

And I really feel like there are parts of fandom that don’t get or don’t believe this, and I think that’s troubling.  I’ve seen arguments that people shouldn’t have dark fantasies, or that bad impulses in themselves make a bad person.  I’ve seen so much shaming over thoughts.

And if you get to a point where it’s bad to have dark thoughts and it’s bad to wonder what something would be like and it’s bad to put yourself in the shoes of anyone who isn’t “pure”, if fiction is no longer a realm where you can confront and explore, but an ongoing test of moral purity… well, maybe not everyone’s brain works like mine, but I feel like that takes away something incredibly important to being human.

Purity culture is gonna kill art if y’all let it.

Fiction is a safe place to explore whatever fucked up or dark desire that you have. You can write the most vile and fucked up shit in fiction and it be absolutely nothing you desire in real life. You can write about a serial killer who gets away with it. You can write about someone who goes on moral crusades to purge the world of all evils and still be the protagonist. You can write anything in fiction because that’s what it is meant for. 

It isn’t meant to be a social commentary unless you create it to be. 

It isn’t meant to be educational unless you create it to be. 

Sometimes a story can be just that, a story. Entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. 

Not everything has to be deep, or have meaning, etc. unless the creator wants it to be and a lot of the purity types end up forcing something to have deep meaning or social commentary where it isn’t meant to.  Is this inherently bad? No, but these people don’t just say “But this is my interpretation of it.” they go as far as trying to force that interpretation onto everyone else, including the creator, as a means of saying “See? It means that they promote/condone xyz so they’re bad and shitty people who should spend the rest of their life in jail with/are the same as people who’ve actually committed acts of violence against other people.” 

THANK. YOU.

@ all the people in the notes saying “yes except u can’t write about (list of immoral things they don’t want to see in fiction)” congrats on missing the point so spectacularly I’m not sure I could create better performance art if I tried

Lookin’ at you, Tumblr.

Grow up. Not everything is made to your demands, the people who make the decisions don’t care, and you’re only hurting people.

Reminder

Telling 👏 someone 👏 to 👏 die 👏 because 👏 you 👏 don’t 👏 like 👏 what 👏 they 👏 ship 👏 is 👏 not 👏 okay 👏