#purity discourse

[chamerionwrites]

Listen. I’m not saying that people like this don’t exist. But I am saying that you’re the one who appears to believe in original sin, so maybe consider that the call is coming from inside the house:

[dragon-in-the-watery-bowl]

cada vez que te veo compartiendo el anti-discurso de pureza siento qué por fin alguien es cuerdo por acá en Tumblr (no es necesario responder a esto/srs) pero quiero decir que te admiro por eso

----

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

purity and cancel culture make people think artists who write, draw, sing or make things about subjects that are (rightfully) considered disturbing and socially unacceptable — as well as fans who like fictional things that are (rightfully) considered disturbing and socially unacceptable — are “red flags”, “predators”, “deserving of having their hard drives checked”, etc, when in reality people can like or make fictional things about subjects that are (rightfully) considered disturbing and socially unacceptable without condoning these things in real life.

artists who create (fictional) contents about triggering subjects aren’t automatically “predators who condone these terrible things in real life”. artists who create (fictional) contents about triggering subjects are just artists who create (fictional) contents about triggering subjects.

people who like (fictional) contents about triggering subjects aren’t automatically “predators who condone these terrible things in real life”. people who like (fictional) contents about triggering subjects are just normal people who like (fictional) contents about triggering subjects. for reasons that aren’t nobody’s business but their own.

(as long as they don’t act out these things in real life and hurt real people, they’re normal people like you and me, and 99.99% of people who like fucked up fictional things are normal people who don’t hurt anyone in real life.

if someone watched a fucked up movie and acted out the antagonist’s crimes in real life, then it still meant that this individual was already fucked up and a predator, and they would have done terrible things whether or not they watched a fucked up film; the art itself don’t make people do terrible things.)

art has never been restricted to only rainbow and sunshine and unicorns.

art is also about the depiction of macabre, things that are disgusting, unpleasant, violent and unacceptable. (as long as nobody in real life actually gets hurt.)

you can’t claim to “accept art and artists” and then say “but if you write fics about (X) or if you like this movie then you’re a red flag and are disgusting 🤢”

it’s absolutely okay if you personally hate these types of fictional works that revolve around triggering subjects that are (rightfully) disgusting and socially unacceptable, it’s okay because it just means these types of works are not for you (no one forces you to watch, read or listen to them), but it’s not okay if you start harassing artists who create or people who enjoy art you personally hate, just because you hate them and therefore you believe other people must hate them too or else they’re terrible people.

you are a terrible person if you harass anybody in real life over fictional things that aren’t real.

you are the one who aren’t able to separate fiction from reality.

[internally-weird]

some anti on tiktok: hey guys just so you know 🌺💞 is a proshit combo for mom x daughter, 🐺🍡 means adult x child and 🦷🧠 is cannibalism kink!!

other antis in the comments: omg thank you!! now i know who to block

proshippers who have never seen those combos in their lives: what

[hazbinbabbling4ever]

Today I was at the bookshop in their very sparse fantasy isle and I was imagining buying a new book as one of these people: "NooooOOOOoooo if I buy Zimmer Bradley I make p**o apologia, if I buy Neil G I do r**e apologia, if I buy China Mieville I do abuse apologia, if I buy t j Klune I do genocide apologia, if I buy Rowling I do transphobia apologia, if I buy Asimov I do spouse abuse apologia, if I buy Sarah J Maas I do zionism apologia, if I buy Lovecraft I do racism pologia, if I buy David Eddings I do child abuse apologia, if I buy ..." Like, honest to god, half of the people in that sparse isle have been revealed/deemed problematic in one way or the other. Who the fuck is left to read? The other half who is now by proxy morally pure? Nah because we can't have heroes. So... I don't read anything ever again? What's their solution here, exactly?

Celebrity gone wrong checklist

Please remember the following:

The wrongness has always been obvious. It was clear. The speaker has always noticed it. Since the celebrity was a baby.

The wrongness was there in everything the person did. In their beloved magnum opus. In their interviews. In their gaze. In their hair follicles.

Not noticing the wrongness from the very beginning is on you. You should have known. The speaker has always known. Must be suspicious. Always. No good celebrities. No good people. All suspect. Must maintain vigilence.

Anything the celebrity touched is poison. Must not touch the poison. Remove all poison from your life. Remove from shelves. Remove from playlists. Remove. Cleanse. Purify.

Hunt fools who claim they did not know. They knew. They saw. They chose not to. Hunt evil creatures who do not denounce the celebrity and their work instantly.

Any sign of the celebrity's existence noticed around others is proof of their evil and bad intent. Evil is contagious. A hesitation to destroy the celebrity's works and denounce their crimes is proof of support of their crime.

The impurity of past love for the celebrity or their work can be attoned for, but never entirely removed.

Never love. Never hope. Never be sincere in admiration. That is the only path towards being good and avoiding future impurity.

Evil prowls the world. Remain vigilant. Fight. Fight against sincere love and sincere admiration. Never be wrong. Never love evil. Always keep an eye out. Always make sure you see every sign of evil. Enjoy nothing, if you can. If enjoyment is necessary, enjoy little. Enjoy only the morally correct. Drop anything that anyone objects to ever.

Remain vigilant. Always. Vigilant.

[pastafossa]

"Oh, so he/she/they played THAT type of character, so they think this is ok-"

I am begging you to learn what the word 'acting' means, Susan.

[chamerionwrites]

“There's plenty of reason that empty-headed kitsch fits neatly in the authoritarian worldview. It's storytelling that imitates the gestures of emotion without actually engaging with real feeling. The Hallmark movie steers clear of the real passion or deeper emotion that tends to be the engine driving more artful fiction. Characters who have real feelings, after all, can prompt empathetic reactions in the audience, and empathy for others is the greatest single threat to the authoritarian mindset. And so schmaltz walks through the paces of 'love' without touching on any of the messy but compelling realities of it.”

Hallmark Movie tropes where a woman visits her rural hometown and fall in love with a random camo wearing musclebound white man because of the power of Christmas, and then leaves her successful city job, and cuck boyfriend to be said man's submissive wife is conservative and possibly even white nationalist propaganda.

In this essay I will...

[theweeklydiscourse]

I’m sick of people passing off patronizing and condescending commentary about how naive and impressionable women are as useful and educational. These people will base their analysis of fiction on sexist notions about how easily women are “tempted “ by malevolent villains and then act as if that’s some revolutionary take. They’ll unironically construe the narrative in a way that takes away all agency from the female heroine and frame her decisions as entirely the result of the villain’s manipulation.

They wring their hands about how dangerous it is for women to be exposed to these stories and moan about how terrible it is that hot villains appeal to the “baser instincts” and tempt female viewers further (Yes, I actually saw someone make this argument) It’s truly bizarre to see people agreeing with such patronizingly sexist rhetoric and saying things like “I miss the days when villain romances were cautionary tales and not encouraged.” As if women thirsting after attractive fictional villains is some epidemic that threatens society.

It’s especially irritating when women are the ones saying these things. They want to believe that they are a rare exception that, unlike those other brainless girls, can understand that liking hot villains will threaten their morals and lead them astray…OH THE HORROR!! Please save your dramatic preaching for the next purity conference and stop pretending that your sanctimonious commentary has any substance whatsoever.

[bingqiuhateabortion]

Don't you like how TGCF, the novel where MC's image is still considered "pure" and worthy of religious faith even after being brutally physically mutilated, martyred, tortured, but an ounce of self gratification, of expressing sexual desire would "taint" that image and cause him to lose power, where MC could only ever be happy after letting go of the "proper" ways of his cultivation method to live a fulfilling married life, gets praised for being the "pure" danmei novel because there is no explicit sexual scenes in it due to strict censorship on any sexual content in china that could lead to authors facing actual jail time, despite severe body horror and cruelty, basically everything crude you could come up with being depicted in the said book. How some dipshits actually are audacious enough to announce that they prefer the censored "untainted" version of hualian because it shows how "pure" their love is. Then say that they didn't like the extra's implications right after that... because eww!! Kinky.

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

"i think this is weird" and "this makes me uncomfortable" and "this shouldn't be allowed" are all very different statements that you need to be able to distinguish

[sparkling-pink-lemonade]

Saw a post of an anti saying that they are leaving AO3, as they are too uncomfortable to post their fics there now. The reason? They found out one of their long time readers was a proshipper, despite their fics having proship dni. And how "that includes silent readers too, I don't want you all looking at my content."

My brother in christ, you are posting on the fiction freedom site. The proshipping site. Dnis aren't god damn restraining orders. They are one tool in helping you display your boundaries. It's still on you to enforce your boundaries. You post something publicly, you forfeit your ability to regulate who can view your work. If you're obsessive enough, you can regulate who actually interacts with your work by stalking each person in the kudos list, comments, or bookmarks and then blocking snyone you don't like, but you do not get a say on who may silently read your posts. Not unless you private your work and only show it to specific people.

And if you don’t want proshippers to interact, get off the profic site.

[the--queen-of--hell]

I miss those times when you could ship whatever you wanted without being harassed for it, without being told you're a pedophile or a groomer, and without being told that you should kill yourself.

[autolenaphilia]

It's interesting how intellectually inconsistent the arguments against "problematic" kinks like fauxcest, CNC and ageplay is. Like the anti-kink people get very heated about those kinks for "fetishizing/romanticizing" abuse. And the thing is, that's true for bdsm in general. It relies on roleplaying power inequalties, which would be very abusive if they were real.

That was in fact the argument of the 70s radfems who created the type of anti-kink discourse that relies on exploiting feminist concerns about abuse. They were against all forms of bdsm, including among (cis) lesbians. They used the same arguments we see against fauxcest and CNC today, for what is normal bdsm play.

And the radfems kinda lost this battle of the feminist sex wars, probably because it alienated a lot of the cis women they were recruiting from. Nowadays queer people of all genders do a lot of bdsm and anti-bdsm views don't get a lot of airtime.

Nowadays you see this anti-bdsm rhetoric mostly among proud terfs who use it to prove their hardcore bonafides. (Although I've seen some tenderqueers who admit that they think all bdsm is problematic too.)

And i think that's because the anti-kink people have decided to do a strategic retreat on this question. The radfems took a too extreme stance and alienated people who they otherwise could have recruited. So they have gone for easier targets. Kinks which are seen as extreme compared to "normal" bdsm, like fauxcest and CNC. And they target individual transfems accused of being into or even just "defending" these kinks with callouts and mobbing instead of condemning all the cis gays and lesbians into bdsm.

This leads to intellectual inconsistency. It's fine to play with whips in the bedroom,but doing CNC play is evil. One type of roleplaying abusive relationships is fine, but the other is bad. It's obvious hypocrisy to broaden the appeal of the message.

And of course, their transmisogynistic bias is obvious and I and others have noted this before. And even if the anti-kink people weren't transmisogynistic bigots, they will naturally target us for their moralistic crusade out of opportunism. We transfems are easy targets for callouts on these subjects, because transmisogyny primes people to easily view us as perverted sexual predators and those doing the callouts tend to have tme privilege over us.

And as I said before, the 70s radfems anti-bdsm position and their transmisogyny were intertwined. Janice Raymond literally diagnosed trans women in "The Transsexual Empire" with sadomasochism, something she views as inherently pathological.

And of course their arguments are bullshit anyway. Like sure a lot of kink fetishizes abuse, but I don't see that as a reason to condemn the people doing it. I don't see why I should care if someone gets off on a rape fantasy or CNC roleplay, because it's Not Real. I don't care about fictional murders for the same reason. Most arguments to the contrary tend to rely on the arch-reactionary concept of sexual degeneracy: "if you do enough fauxcest and CNC it will warp your mind and you'll eventually rape your relatives for real, or inspire someone to do so." It ignores the material societal conditions that lead to abuse in the real world.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

what people think pro ship means: dangerous people who want to harm children in real life and/or think taboo subjects in real life are justified

what pro ship actually is about: the belief that people are allowed to enjoy fictional thing however they want, as long as it's fictional and no one in real life gets harmed or harassed in any way, and as long as they tag their trigger warnings properly.

most pro ship folks I've come across are just "hey, you like this fucked up thing that is fictional? okay, cool. you do you, man. I myself don't even like this thing that you like, but hey, it's not real. and I trust that you know the difference between fiction and reality, so you do you. if it ever gets too much for me, I will just block or mute you and move on with my life, but that doesn't mean I think you're a horrible person in real life because of the fictional thing you like, it just means I'd rather not see or engage with this thing that can make me uncomfortable. I still want you to have fun doing what you love, and I still think you're cool as fuck. love and respect, dude"

meanwhile most anti ship I've seen are like "omg you like this fictional thing where fictional children are harmed??! Red Flag Red Flag. put this gross piece of shit behind bars immediately!!!"

and I'm just ????? I don't normally engage in fandom wars, but I think, as long as you don't harass anyone in real life and as long as no one in real life is in danger or is harmed, how you enjoy fictional things is none of my business. and I'm not gonna make any "call out post" where I encourage my followers to harass you because you like fucked up fictional things that I personally don't like or believe is wrong either.

I mean, from personal experience, I was exposed against my will to thing I didn't want to see from anti's screenshot of fanart or fanfic where they encourage their followers to harass this person whose fanart or fanfic, that was screenshot and spread by them, was originally tagged properly with all the trigger warnings so that people who didn't want to see it wouldn't get exposed to it. until anti screenshot it and flaunted it around in the name of being morally superior while also, at the same time, advocated for the witch hunt against someone who just wanted to mind their own business. so... the irony. lol

fandoms used to be more peaceful before Fandom Police starts their witch hunting, but it's a good thing we can just block these people and keep on enjoying our blorbos however we want to enjoy them.

and I'll always encourage every artist to write whatever they want, draw whatever they want. don't let people who think they're "morally superior" tell you you can't make art this way or that way. my best advice would be to block and ignore and keep on creating what you want. they may be loud, but at the end of the day they're just noises and they're not worth your attention x

[queen-of-hawkins-why-ler]

“Mike Wheeler isn’t hot or a bad boy, he’s canonically an uncool loser with zero rizz” to YOU maybe, but Will Byers happens to find him very handsome and attractive and appealing and there’s nothing wrong with describing him that way from Will’s perspective?? Ppl throwing fits over this type of characterization in the name of preserving canon??? Or is it bc the idea of Mike and Will having sexual desires for each other would taint the pure, angelic, sanitized idealization of them u have in ur head??? 🧐🧐

[chamerionwrites]

This for the record is why*, to me, genre descriptions such as "cozy fantasy" "cozy mystery" or even "cozy horror" (?????) are an anti-recommendation that make me all but physically shudder and run screaming in the opposite direction.** It’s not that soothing/fluffy/formulaic/low-stakes/"escapist" fiction is inherently evil or that anyone who enjoys it is some kind of fascist-in-waiting (a point which the linked essay makes). It’s because the uncritical elevation of ""cozy"" art as the best and most moral kind does have a lot of conservative authoritarian undertones, and unfortunately a considerable chunk of people who describe fiction as cozy (see also "hopepunk") ARE engaging in that sort of moralizing as opposed to just using the word as a morally-neutral descriptor.

*also because the way in which people deploy "cozy" as a genre descriptor frequently smells very strongly of twee faux-progressive "idk why but cottagecore is for girls and dark academia is for boys" gender essentialism.

**The STRENGTH of this reaction is, self-admittedly, probably because I have personal baggage in this area.