Category: Articles

Behind The Curtain: An Apology and a Promise

November 22nd, 2021

TW: Transmisogyny and dysphoria, mostly.

Full disclosure: This is a version of a column that’s sat in my drafts for… probably two years or so now? Certainly the last draft is dated to at least six months ago. The reason I start there is because I can’t stress enough how this isn’t a reactionary post; it’s something that’s on my mind a lot, and that I struggle with how to word. Being autistic means that if I think too hard about wording something, it comes out stilted; if I don’t think about it enough, I fall back on a script and I usually say something I don’t intend to. Being too genuine, as well, usually opens one up to bullying and harassment, or even just unintentionally cruel comments.

But earlier today, I saw a mutual of mine say something that stuck with me. I’ll paraphrase it, since I’m fairly certain sending more attention her way is a bad idea, but essentially, in a reply thread, she said – almost casually – “I’ve never seen someone apologize for individual acts of transmisogyny, let alone participating in larger acts.” (She is transfem, in case that wasn’t clear.) Maybe I wouldn’t have stopped and heard that so clearly if I didn’t already have a growing friendship with her. Maybe I would have; like I said, this is something that’s on my mind a lot. I can’t possibly know.

But here’s the thing. I’ve been drafting apologies over and over again… and the reason I’ve always given up is ridiculous, really. I get embarrassed. I get squirmy. I get self-conscious. “Am I doing this for kudos, for attention, for a reward? For moral dessert?” It’s hard not to ask that, especially for someone like me who has Narcissistic Personality Disorder and gets accused of being manipulative all the time. It is silly, though, because it buys into the idea that standing up for trans women gets you… well, much! If that was the case, wouldn’t everybody be doing it? It’s like when people claim that accusing powerful men of sexual abuse is a surefire way to get million-dollar settlements. (Spoiler: it’s not.) And at the same time, it’s not. I care, so much, about standing up for what’s right. It’s a core part of my personality, enough that it’s affected the characters I identify with, the way I write, the choices I make about my own life – and enough, apparently, that when I’m wrong, it sticks with me longer than it should. And I’ve been wrong. A lot. Not always by accident, either. I’ve been cruel for the sake of being cruel, because when you’re at the nexus of so many intersections at once, it’s really hard to get out of the habit of assuming everybody’s out to get you, and that your only weapon is how hard you can hurt them back.

I talk a lot on social media, in my essays, etc. about how trans women have been a huge part of my life. But I need to be more honest about the fact that as much as they’ve been there for me, I was not there for them. Sure, I tried to be. I can’t be too hard on myself for the faulty decision-making of a manic-psychotic teenager. But I wasn’t, and I’m lucky that to my knowledge I haven’t lost any of them permanently, to suicide or murder – more lucky than I can ever possibly express. It’s easy to talk about how nobody’s perfect, but a lot harder to apologize. So – I am sorry. I am genuinely so sorry, because it’s taken me this long not just to be able to face the harm I’ve done, but to understand how much harm it was. I always knew; there was a reason I hated myself so much. But transitioning, finally getting to love myself properly, means that avoiding looking at myself in the mirror isn’t an option anymore. It’s a weird duality. The longer I convinced myself that I could live as a girl, after all, or that I could live in the middle ground of not transitioning but vaguely existing as Masculine, the more angry I got with those who – from my perspective – “had what I wanted”. Not all the harm is like that, either. Sometimes, of course, it’s not as simple or clear-cut as someone lashing out. Good intentions can be just as harmful; for example, the mess around Isabel Fall’s story is too much of a mess to ever be neatly untangled at this point, but the point is that someone was harmed.

I’m sure someone’s rolling their eyes and wondering why it took me so long to say anything – I mean, first off, see point one! But second of all, I try to sit back and listen. (Which sounds funny when it comes to how much I talk, but trust me, I only say about 20% of what’s in my head. Take that as you will.) Another phrase I remember, that stuck with me, was someone – another trans woman – saying that it was all well and good that people “felt bad about Isabel. But how are you going to make sure it doesn’t happen again?” And I had nothing. No response. Because I didn’t know how to make sure it didn’t. Trying to figure it out from the basis of that particular discourse alone hasn’t gotten me anything but a migraine and dissociation problems, but it’s still stuck with me. It’s not enough to take each separate controversy and go “This woman doesn’t deserve it – but the next one might!”. It’s about figuring out how to stop it from happening. And no matter my opinions on the story, or the handling of the story, or anything like that – the reason why there was such a strong response in its defense isn’t really about the story. It’s because every single transfem person has either directly experienced or seen first or secondhand the consequences of this kind of harassment. It’s an open wound that never has the chance to heal.

You’re not wrong, though. I’ve sort of – glossed over a lot and tried to let my actions do the talking. Which is a nice thought. I mean, ideally, my actions are doing a lot of talking. I have a lot of experience with unwanted and/or empty apologies; I’m nearly allergic to them at this point. Add to that the tension of how people of colour are often expected to apologize in specific ways to white people and my complicated relationship to the concept probably, well, makes sense. But taking in the real scale of the issue – that transmisogyny-exempt trans people have consistently not just left transfeminine people in the dust, but been eager and active participants in their abuse – it’s not really enough to shove my past faults in a box and try to be better while hiding the box in a corner.

So, yeah. I’ve been a fucking dick in the past. Some of it was carelessness, stuff that others might not even remember. Other parts were me buying into ideology that I no longer associate myself with. And others still were me having only part of a narrative and not taking the time to cool my heels and head and get the full picture. There are lines that I know I haven’t crossed, but at the same time, I’m not setting the bar that low. Non-toxic masculinity isn’t meant to be a version of masculinity that abdicates all responsibility. Toxic masculinity already does that. And honestly – I’m happiest with myself as a man when I’m aware of my own strength and power, not just as an “empowered” person or whatever other buzzword you use, but someone who can and has hurt people before, and who is making the choice and the effort to do otherwise.

And, uh, this is dedicated to a girl in a dorky shirt who kissed me in front of the lockers nearly 13 years ago. I should have treated you better, but I’m glad you’re with someone who does. You helped me during some of the darkest times of my life and I owe you more than stolen kisses and bittersweet memories. One day I’ll make it up to you.
Genrefvckery: The Smelling Fresh, Triumphant Diamonds in the Rough

October 28th, 2021

Back in late 2019, I went through a stint of stumbling across rarer songs on Spotify. I do this every now and again; it’s yielded surprisingly awesome results (including otherwise-popular musicians who just aren’t listened to through the platform, like Joerg Reiter). But nothing compares to The Smelling Fresh, a university bedroom recording project by Brian Yates and James Matthews that was quietly and independently released in 2012.

First, the original album. ‘Grounded Skies’ is a Moody Blues-esque opening track, showcasing Yates’ voice and lyrical prowess paired with Matthews’s guitar work. The mixing on the whole album is wonky; the louder bits have static buzz where it hits the limits of their microphones, the vocals could be a bit louder… and it is a testament to the skill on display that it does not matter. ‘Touch the Ceiling’ is just as grand, and actually the original track I stumbled on – a fairly relaxed verse leads into a killer chorus that seems tailor-made to get people singing along.

The influences on the album are clear, too; ‘Whoa Oh! She Go!’ is firmly in the arena of Blink-182, Bowling for Soup and early Sum 41 (and almost feels like it came through a time machine from 2005, in the best, most complimentary, most devotedly scene kid way possible). The reflective ‘Not the Same’, meanwhile, is heartbreaking and possibly Yates’s writing at its best – “It’s all the same/you told me you’ll never change/but I’m not the same/are you?” (Sobs into my T-shirt. It’s fine. I’m fine.) And the catchy ‘Daydreamer’ betrays some of their hidden but emerging jazz sensibilities underlying the pop-punk exterior, evoking both McFly and a little je ne sais quois. All through the album are the aches and worries of growing up and becoming “real” adults, both silly and serious, relationships and friendships, and even lifelong dreams – “I don’t wanna give up on my dreams at twenty-one,” is one of the most striking lines in Touch The Ceiling for its naked sincerity.

Of course, this is an album from 2012. The Smelling Fresh was a one-off, a small collaboration between friends. Brian Yates did some EDM work, but currently works in software in North Carolina; James Matthews works in New Jersey, both of them far from Penn State where they created the album. When I contacted them about the album, they were both surprised to hear that it was still circulating; Yates even said that he’d strained his vocal cords a bit.

So imagine my joy to hear, two years later, that They Fucking Did It.

Please enjoy the second The Smelling Fresh release, ‘Colors’.

If Grounded Skies was an amazing debut, Colors has – possibly through the sheer length of time between releases – completely avoided the sophomore curse. Every song on the EP takes the building blocks from Grounded Skies and builds upwards on it, leaning into aspects they shied away from on the first album. Where Grounded Skies suffered from quiet vocals and buzzing on higher/louder notes, Colors is crisp and clear; where Grounded Skies played lightly with but then veered from jazz influences, both the songs ‘Count On You’ and ‘The Smooth Interlude’ lean completely into it. In fact, ‘The Smooth Interlude’ is entirely instrumental, the kind of thing pop-punk/grunge outfits usually don’t have the guts to do until much later in their careers (or the skill to pull off, which TSF does in grand style!). The bouncy bridge in ‘Count On You’ is slick and cool, which sounds ridiculous to say about music, but it’s the best words coming to mind — and it’s well balanced out by the crunchier guitar and soaring riffs on ‘Colors’ and ‘Fade Away’.

The lyrics, however, are another level of awesome. As mentioned above, Yates and Matthews weren’t even in the same state; whether they made this through long-distance or got together in person to make the album, I don’t know, but the lyrics in the whole album are about the importance and value of long-term friendships, reminiscing on older times and rekindling things once thought lost. Especially together with the first album’s fear of the rapidly-approaching future, it’s hard not to feel the joy coming off of every song. ‘Laughing At Ourselves’ says, “We found our way through the storms with our lights on bright and never looking back… When we were younger we had no fear of the end, like the last song we sang of the summer,” and ‘Count on You’ follows it up with “this time I won’t take for granted, you’re still on my mind/we’ll make the most of the days we have left, all the precious time”.

I dearly hope — and almost expect, at least if anybody has any sense — that this second EP will be what gets The Smelling Fresh some radio play or at least some attention. If you don’t believe me, take a listen for yourself – and let’s raise a glass to one of the sweet successes of an otherwise-grisly two years. I’m hoping there’ll be a third album, but even if there isn’t, this is a hell of a triumphant return.

Stream The Smelling Fresh on Spotify today!
Behind the Curtain: Exclusion Trauma and M/M Spaces

October 5th, 2021
Content note: this article talks about “fujoshi discourse” and both criticisms and supports of m/m ship spaces, as well as getting into homophobia, transphobia, transmisogyny and racism, some mentions of pedophilia accusations, and sexual assault/rape. I’m not capable of talking about the original or cultural meaning of ‘fujoshi’ in the appropriate depth; rather, I’m using the term primarily in the sense taken on by Western fandom concerning ‘pro-fujo’ and ‘anti-fujo’ stances, and acknowledge that that’s a separate meaning.

I’ve been in fandom for… nearly fifteen years now, depending on how you count it. My first fandom — that is, that I did with other people – was Chronicles of Narnia, in a LARP-style roleplay with my closest friends in Grade 5 and 6 that quickly expanded to include the Pellinor books, Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings, The Last Unicorn, Edge Chronicles, and various other fantasy franchises that our sweet little autistic hearts had latched onto. My foray into the wider online world started with (excruciatingly bad) Harry Potter fanfiction; Naruto and Bleach followed soon after, but I found my feet in the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom around 2006-2007. For context, I’m 26 or so now, so I was very much a child in fandom. My interests have grown with me but stayed pretty consistent, with a few modifications here and there.

Why do I say all of this? Well, because it’s very odd seeing discussions about fandom sometimes, especially when the reliance on Old Fandom vs. New Fandom guides so many discussions. Today, most fandom discussions, including ones about the “fujoshi” community, are centered on and circulate around anti-shippers vs. pro-shippers; people who believe very strongly that there is such thing as a Bad or Evil Ship and shipping it makes you a bad person, and people who push back against that and believe that fiction is, well, fiction. For that debate, I’m squarely on the pro-ship side, but it is sometimes unnerving to realize that the entire origin of being anti-fujoshi in the first place has gotten erased.

That’s not to say that I’m particularly comfortable with the label of anti-fujo. There’s a few reasons for that, but the primary one is probably how it uses a specific label to criticize a Broad, Multifaceted Problem. The modern iteration also very strongly presumes that being “anti” means you’re willing to harass, suicide-bait, and/or dox people who don’t agree with you. Absolutely not. But this debate, like most shipping debates, had much gentler origins, and the nuance has been entirely destroyed.

So, why would anybody have a problem with m/m shippers? If you’re newer in fandom particularly, you might be kind of boggled by the idea. In response, I want to run through the actual points of the discourse, and debunk a lot of popular myths about people who are critical of m/m ship spaces.
1. It’s Not Really About The Shipping
Well, sometimes it is. It would be a full-on lie to pretend that there aren’t folks in fandom using anti-fujoshi talking points to defend or attack ships, and no other reason. But the reason I say this is because, between the Modern RadFem Anti-Fujoshi and pro-ship talking points pushing back on them, there’s a surprisingly prevalent idea that being uncomfortable with m/m shipping spaces necessarily means you despise everyone who ships m/m or think they shouldn’t ship it at all.

It couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, before the rise of the Anti-Shipper, these arguments were a lot more precise, and the ones that still apply today are specifically about the Shippers, Not The Ships. That is, I don’t have any particular investment in what you ship or even how you ship it (with some exceptions), but instead in how people in those spaces think about real queer men. The end goal should never be “stop engaging in the thing”. It’s no wonder that we’ve ended up there with how anti-ship arguments lean so heavily on it, but it’s a lot simpler than that: how you talk about those ships, as contrasted to real people, matters.

This is also relevant to the “fiction = reality” arguments, because realistically, someone who writes the filthiest, smuttiest gay porn in the universe can (and often will) be absolutely excellent to other queer men outside of the fictional borders, and some of the worst homophobia I’ve ever endured comes from people who wrote “appropriate, non-fetishized” m/m ships and/or took strong anti-fujoshi stances. The difficulty is that in very much the same way that anti-shippers in general prioritize the fiction over the real people, many pro-fujoshi posts focus on how there’s nothing wrong with what they’re writing and ignore how real people feel in the face of their arguments.

Which brings me to…

2. Real People Matter… And They Determine The Bigotry, Not You

I’ve been mentioning “pro-fujoshi” arguments prety vaguely so far, but it’s necessary to be specific. I’ve seen a number of posts making the very salient point that as long as you’re treating real people with respect, what you write doesn’t matter. That’s completely true – if you actually are. A lot of folks take it for granted that they must be treating real queer men totally fine, after all, they’re not homophobes… but then push back, hard, on being told when they’re being homophobic. It’s a side effect of the increasing focus on every other part of the acronym except the G; it’s increasingly normalized to say awful things about gay men because we’re the “most privileged” members of the community. Nor is this limited to the baby radfem circles that are so often also antis. I’ve seen multiple proshippers make arguments about “men vs. queer people” that are gutting, all the more so for the fact that they don’t seem to see the problem with it. And if I never see the phrase “cishet gay man” again, it will be too soon.

It’s hard, I know, to accept that you might have been hurting someone without realizing it. But the answer isn’t to insist that you can’t possibly be bigoted, especially since you’re often putting the onus on queer men to tell you otherwise, and we can’t be sure that you’ll respond well. Let’s be honest. Why is it so normalized for fandom to be a space for AFAB people? And is it really an improvement from “fandom is for women”? (Not really, no.) I, myself, am AFAB (assigned female at birth) but the pushback on men and masculinity affects me heavily, especially since I’ve been out and presenting myself as male online since I was 15. Multiple versions of fandom discourse do touch on this… but then attribute it to a divide between transformative and collective fandoms. Moreover, it’s talked about semi-constantly how collective fandom (the standard cishet gatekeeping of ‘girl gamers’, etc.) enforces its borders, but practically verboten to discuss how transformative fandom does the same thing. Either you are accepting without much consideration that people with penises just ‘naturally’ aren’t creative, or you have to ask why and how fandom became such a restrictive space. Nor does the argument about ‘carving out space for ourselves’ hold up against this. Fandom is important for women and trans men because we so rarely see ourselves represented accurately on the screen or in books… but are you claiming that AMAB queer people don’t have the same needs? And if you don’t want to be making that claim, what are you doing to make your corner of fandom less exclusionary?

The influence of radical feminism on anti-fujoshi stances has come up plenty, not least that TERFs/radfems often claim that trans men are just ‘deluded girls’ obsessed with gay men. (This is ridiculous, obviously, and I hate that I have to underline that I don’t agree with it, but such is the state of the world right now.) But significantly less discussed – to the point of deafening silence – is how many accounts with “No TERFs welcome!” will then immediately presume that their audience is female, and then maybe add in trans men as an afterthought. TERFs’ primary targets are trans women, but if you were listen only to fandom’s version of radical feminism, one might come away with the idea that the people most at risk from radical feminism are cis women and/or AFAB non-binary folks. There is an endless amount of discussion about how “women’s” interests are degraded and disregarded, and absolutely zero about how it is infinitely more dangerous for AMAB queer people to show interest in feminine hobbies. (Nor do I lump ‘AMAB’ together thoughtlessly; the young cis gay boy trying on drag when nobody’s looking and the closeted trans woman scrawling self-insert fanfiction on the inside of her notebook exist in the same spectrum, even if their ultimate identities and more specific experiences differ.) It’s also a little frightening that it never comes up even with the amount of transmasc and otherwise AFAB trans people in fandom. One of the barriers that most trans men have to deal with is the pressure to give up those hobbies in order to pass. From “Real men don’t have stickers on their laptop” to “real men don’t care about romance novels”, the restrictions on what “masculinity” should involve affect more than just AMAB queer folks – and this shows you that, despite the change in ratios, a lot of fandom discourse is still primarily propelled by cis women.

You may already be thinking “but I didn’t do any of that”. And that’s true, but the core point is that when gay men speak up about bigotry they face, it’s still too often dismissed – often by counter-accusations of ‘misogyny’, which has been used as an attack against queer men for decades. (I return to the anti-fujoshi RadFem stance of accusing trans men of being deluded girls with ‘internalized misogyny’; it trades on exactly the same thing as the idea that gay men all hate women, that bisexual men are rapists or sluts by nature, or that drag queens are ‘mocking women’ with their outfits.) You may not intend the hurt you cause, but you owe it to others to at least listen and account for it in your view of your own world.

3. Being Trans Doesn’t Automatically Help

Another common friction point is the idea of fujoshis/slash shippers/yaoi fans/etc. (at a certain point the words truly are interchangeable) all being cis women. Flat out: that is wrong. However, it’s not any more correct to pretend that all yaoi fangirls and slash shippers are transmasc. It’s certainly a common shared experience, but let’s be a little more realistic here. Even though the modern iterations of these fandoms are more aware of transmasc experience and use different pronouns for their attendees, the fandom spaces are still run, policed and oriented around cis femininity. This is sometimes true even when nobody in a space is cis. (Especially since ‘not-cis’ and ‘transmasc’ are not synonyms.) There’s no magic button that applies when coming out, learning about yourself, etc. that teaches you how to not be bigoted; the number of transphobic transmedicalists should tell that story quite well, or even just the continued public missteps of Caitlyn Jenner, who seems to think she doesn’t “count”. But if we can account for public figures like Kalvin Garrah, Buck Angel, Blaire White, and even the (less damaging but still controversial) Natalie Wynn having ideas and platforms that punish other trans people, why should someone’s transmasc identity immediately exempt them from criticism? Certainly a lot of the experiences I’ve had have come either from other AFAB trans folks, and people who most likely have some sort of resonance with the idea whether they come out or not.

Much like how the defense of ‘you’re just being misogynistic’ isn’t a useful one for cis women, I urge other trans folks to keep in mind that fandom wasn’t built for us. We’ve always been part of its making, we’ve helped shore up the foundations, but in return, all we get is token inclusion and afterthought mentions. It doesn’t mean that your identity doesn’t matter! (The anti approach of turning a broad discussion about fandom being cis women-oriented into direct misgendering of individuals has not helped.) But being a marginalized person existing in a space doesn’t take away the fact that the norms of a space can be immensely harmful for others. In fact, the fujoshi spaces that many other trans men talk about in glowing terms had a dreadful impact on my mental health – because it didn’t seem to matter how much I tried to do otherwise, every argument supporting fujin and m/m shippers was oriented on the right to write about the Other, and not for the Other to write his own stories. This manifested (and still manifests) in a lot of strange and awful forms, including an experience where I was screamed at for ‘not understanding the discrimination’ that m/m shippers experience for Liking It When Boys Fuck, and the fact that I am in fact one of those boys didn’t seem to make any impact. (And keep in mind, too, that I’m supposedly one of the people these spaces are ‘welcoming’ to. How are AMAB queer folks treated by the same reactions? Consider that.)

4. Okay, But What Did Slash Shippers Even Do?

This is a pretty reasonable question, actually. The switch from m/m shippers being the anti-SJWs to anti-fujin as the bigoted ones feels like it happened overnight. As a result, many of the arguments people use for the more dramatic oversteps are outdated – or feel outdated, and the new versions don’t get as much focus.

But when I say ‘outdated’, it also needs to be said that one of the most aggressive abusive experiences I ever got from a slash shipper (on the basis of slash shipping) was in late 2016. That isn’t decades ago. That’s five years ago. Yaoi paddles might be gone, but the attitudes are not that old. In fact, some of the loudest pro-shipper voices are people who brag about being in fandom for ten, twenty, thirty years… and very rarely is there any acknowledgement of the actual behaviour that was occurring. (Which is a huge reason why people dismiss discussion of it.)

So let’s set the record straight. When people show hesitance around yaoi/slash spaces, it’s not because we think you’re embarrassing. It’s because being a man in fandom for a very long time has meant invasive questions about our genitalia and how we have sex, microaggressive ‘jokes’ about how being shy or effeminate means we’re a bottom, suicide-baiting and mass harassment over even the mildest of discomfort, shippers who waxed poetic about their OTPs in between posts supporting Prop 8 and fearmongering about AIDS, shippers who posted on forums about disowning their queer children, forums dedicated to hatemail and violent bashing of both female characters who got in the way and anybody who shipped half of their ship with a woman at all, comments on queer and trans-focused fanfictions about how ‘X character is a boy’ and being called the r-word for thinking they could possibly be a trans girl, assertions about feminine gay men being pathetic, slutty or ’embarrassing’, and my experience of being labelled a pedophile and slandered as an abuser for explaining why I don’t like the seme/uke trope or omegaverse. Nor is our hesitance somehow bigoted or unnecessary when there are still shippers and ship events in 2021 who exclude genderbends or trans versions of characters so m/f ships don’t get “snuck in”, or react violently to asexual and aromantic headcanons of popularly gay characters because gay masculinity is so linked to sex. It’s part of the induction into fandom, now, to be aware of the anti-ship and pro-ship camps, even if someone is brand new and obviously wouldn’t have any context. I’m of the opinion that the horrific treatment of queer men should be part of that same induction, and that it is the responsibility of people already in those fandoms to address and make up for the bigotry.

5. The Bigotry of Anti-Fujoshi Doesn’t Make Up For Yours

Anti-fujoshi stances, at least the modern ones, are pretty invariably racist. There’s a lot of white folks in these conversations, and often they assign meanings to fujoshi/fudanshi that just… aren’t part of the deal, and are completely inaccurate to ‘fujoshi’s origin as a Japanese term.

The problem is, that doesn’t mean ‘pro-fujoshi’ arguments are inherently Anti-Racist. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I’m not Japanese, but it has disturbed me for a while how Japanese positions supporting fujin will get thousands of notes, but the equal amount of Japanese and otherwise Eastern positions expressing discomfort are left to languish. Realistically, even the idea that any one or small group of Japanese people can speak for the entire culture is racism in and of itself, and many people take the ‘fujoshi pass’ and run off without any further conceptualization or analysis. Additionally, especially since ‘fujoshi’ is essentially a synonym to slash, m/m, etc. shipping, it’s upsetting to see any and all conversation about racism in fandom spaces come down to this argument… and the everyday racism in fandom gets ignored as a result. At the end of the day, being ‘pro-fujoshi’ doesn’t stop anybody from assertions about Asian men having small dicks or being ‘auto-twinks’, nor does it do anything against how Black men, when they show up in slash ships at all, are aggressive tops or caretakers; not much else. (Star Wars fandom in particular has contributed heavily to the difficulty of these conversations.)

It’s also more than a little troubling how the racism of being ‘anti-fujoshi’ (whether someone is or not) can completely overwrite someone’s complaints. I’ve been called racist over this before, and while I’ve definitely grown to appreciate that there’s nuance to the term I wasn’t understanding at the time, it will never stop bothering me that my complaints included the oversexualization of a Latin American character, down to ‘ay papi’ jokes and calling him ‘a spicy Cuban boy’. The pro-fujoshi arguments so often orient so heavily around ‘anybody can do what they want without judgement’, and ignore that that has never been true. If you don’t fit certain analogues or ideas about how m/m shipping “should work”, you’re treated with much the same animosity as an anti-shipper, and even suggesting that more things should be an option, not fewer gets the same response. Countering stereotypes isn’t supposed to be about limiting people – it’s the exact opposite, where the freedom to write anything has to also include addressing the current norms and attitudes. (And the idea that it has to be blanket condemnation is also – bluntly – garbage. One of my most popular stories was a deliberate deconstruction of the ‘prison sex noncon’ trope and depicting it as the rape it is. If it was true that I was actually condemning this trope, I wouldn’t also have written stories with it played straight. (In fact, good deconstruction actually requires a love of and intricate knowledge of whatever you’re deconstructing.)

Ultimately, fandom should be a place where everyone gets to feel comfortable and heard. If we keep pushing the idea of it as an oasis, then we should be willing to try make it that way in reality; it seems like a rather mild thing, all things considered, to ask people to stop and remember that queer men in many varieties Exist before writing up arguments about using gay men as ‘blank slates’ to explore misogyny with. Again, I can’t stress enough how none of the things I’ve mentioned are even particularly about the stories in question. I’m not triggered and upset until I watch how people defend themselves against enemies real or imagined, and they accidentally let slip how they actually see me (or don’t) in the process. I refuse to believe that there’s no way to reclaim labels that have been used in derogatory ways without pushing and circulating the harmful ideas that made Old Fandom so unsafe for a lot of queer folks, and if anything, most of what I ask for is entrance; entrance into circles that consider that talking about their “gals” when they’ve got a transmasc friend there, or that thinking of all rapists as people with penises and vice versa, might be making real, existing people uncomfortable. I believe that very few people are doing this on purpose. I’d like to be proven right.
Behind the Curtain: Anti-Shipping is a Bad Faith Position

August 31st, 2021
TW: This column discusses harassment campaigns, radical feminism, suicide, death threats and indoctrination, as well as pedophilia in the context of false accusations.

Anti-shipping in fandom isn’t new. For as long as fandom has existed – our earliest sense of an organized fanclub for any book or franchise is the original Sherlock Holmes series — there have been people with strong opinions about pairings, romance, etc. Ship wars are practically synonymous with fandom at this point, whether it’s Ron/Hermione vs. Harry/Hermione vs. Draco/Hermione in Harry Potter, or all the way back in the 70s with Luke/Leia going to war against Han/Leia shippers. Anti-shipping at its most basic, then, is simply what it says on the tin; someone who is against a specific ship, sometimes to the point of getting angry or upset when it’s mentioned (odd but reasonable, since triggers are odd) or to harassing other shippers (not reasonable at all).

But if you’re not in fandom much, or you’re vestigial to it and have heard the term ‘anti’ here and there, you’re probably already frowning at this definition. Not only do people talk about antis as an actual threat, but antis themselves make posts claiming that “being an anti JUST means being against pedophiles/predators/etc.” Clearly it’s not just about ships anymore… and that’s, well, mostly true. Over the last ten years or so, as social justice ideology has trickled into the mainstream through sites like Tumblr, overall awareness of issues like BLM, Occupy and queer marriage equality, and other sources, anti-shipping has changed dramatically. Before about 2010, to be against a ship, a “hater” of a ship, etc. usually meant joining a forum specifically to bash on a female canon love interest, or hating a ship exclusively because it was gay and that was ‘weird’, etc. It was also something that was limited per fandom. One could be “anti” an FMA fandom ship and that only reflected on your specific shipping preferences for Fullmetal Alchemist. It still indicated a certain level of bad behaviour, but that bad behaviour still had a certain form.

The modern form of anti-shipping, by sharp contrast, isn’t just informed by social justice terminology; it’s informed by radical feminism, anti-sex politics, and Evangelical perspectives on things like pornography and transness, mixing with social justice buzzwords. Anti-shippers don’t just dislike specific ships; there’ll always be a moral or ethical reason attached, sometimes with some grounding, sometimes ludicrous and based on circumstantial evidence at best. Furthermore, the harassment that took one form in pre-2010 antishipping has evolved for a changing internet. More and more people have their identities attached to their work and their social media, which means now flaming someone isn’t just about rude comments on their work; it can extend to calling parents, calling workplaces, fabricating serious accusations and other actions with major, long-ranging consequences.

Take, for example, RoyEd from Fullmetal Alchemist. To be clear, disliking a ship is pretty normal for a fandom experience, especially a ship like RoyEd which has always been the juggernaut ship for the series. Prior to 2010, the complaints about the ship followed specific lines – “Roy is like his father”, “one/both of them are obviously straight”, “it’s not canon/Ed’s married to Winry/Roy is in love with Riza”, and the age gap was usually part of these complaints. [For those who don’t know the series, within canon, Edward is 15, and Roy is 29.] After 2010, however, these started to take a more personal bent. The shift from “this ship is gross because of the age difference” to “anybody who likes it is gross because of the age difference” to “people who like this must be sexual predators” is notable, and chilling, especially since it’s exactly what serves to justify the harassment going to the lengths it does. After all, what wouldn’t you do to stop a child predator? The change in language extends past that, too. Now it’s not just “porn of Edward Elric”; it’s “sexualizing a minor”. Nobody cared that much prior to 2010 or so, but now, well, it feels weird to try argue for sexualizing a minor.

This pattern repeats with ships over and over again, even when the “age gap” isn’t even worth worrying about, or even with fabricated supposed “family ties”. (Take Kaeya and Diluc in Genshin Impact, where antis insist that they’re brothers, despite that firmly not being the case.) But why am I laying this all out?
1. It Sounds Good On Paper
One of the most agonizing, challenging things to try explain to anybody is why this is bad. As someone who’s autistic and struggles with things like insincerity, I also have a horrible time wrapping my head around the idea that someone could lie, or be operating in bad faith. Everybody hates pedophiles. Everybody hates child predators. And so when a friend of yours starts talking about the pedophiles in fandoms writing gross, predatory ships, and how they’ll say anything to justify sexualizing minors? Of course you want to agree with them.

So let’s break down that statement.

“….the pedophiles**** in fandoms** writing* gross, predatory ships***, [who will] say anything***** to justify sexualizing minors…” This is, for what it’s worth, composed of several anti statements that I’ve seen, and is one of the less straight-up bad faith ones I’ve seen, somehow. But let’s start here.

*[Writing]. Writing, as in, creating fiction. None of this is happening to real people. Now, that said, there’s been a lot of conversation about representation, and appropriate ways of writing difficult topics. It’s not something to dismiss entirely out of hand… but nobody is being physically hurt here, not directly.

**[Fandoms] …Except, in addition, these aren’t people with published books. There’s a separate convo to have about published books that still ends up pretty similar, but this is another one to break down. Fandom generally means tagged on AO3, or otherwise warned in some way; you know what ship you’re walking into (it’s horrible etiquette otherwise and going to get you flamed one way or another), and the fic will be rated and tagged or be deliberately *un*warned and *un*rated, which is a warning in and of itself. Fanfiction and fanart do not have a lot of reach, so conversations about representation that start with multimillion dollar franchises like Star Wars can’t be used as a 1-for-1 with fanfiction. That doesn’t mean there’s no conversation. But you can’t just slip the word ‘fandom’ in there like it doesn’t matter.

***[Predatory ships] You’ll also sometimes see them just straight up say ‘child porn’ or something equally vile. There’s a lot to unpack here just from two words, though. Ships – as in, pairings of two characters – aren’t an inherent measure of positivity. They aren’t always intended to be healthy anyway. Additionally, ships by definition are so open to interpretation. No character is ever written the same way twice, and this is just as true of ships. Wars are fought between people who ship the same two characters over top/bottom dynamics (something which I have… my own opinions about, but a tradition is a tradition), and AUs – alternate universe fics – thrive on ever-so-slightly changing character dynamics. It’s incredibly difficult to find even one character trait that remains in a character through every fanfiction about them! This applies just as much to age as anything else. Even if people who say this are referring to pairings with significant age gaps or where one is a child in canon, there’s a good chance that a significant number of people writing that ship do not write it in that way. When they do, there’s an equally good chance that it’s deliberately predatory, deliberately unhealthy, much in the same way that Fight Club and Lolita are not about aspirational human beings with iron-clad ethics. The other corollary to this, of course, is…

****[Pedophiles] Pedophile is a term with some controversy around it these days, but used in this sense it means “attracted to children and/or child abuser”, so pretty much what you expect. And… there’s literally no reason to think so. Setting aside how there’s plenty of reasons to write about these topics anyway, until you ask about the content, there’s just as good a chance that this is about shipping two 16 year old characters as it is anything that would be pedophilic in real life. Overwatch fandom is plagued by antis who consider a 20-year or so age gap between adults problematic (and off the top of my head, the younger of them is in his late twenties…), and anime in general has to fend off a lot of arguments about ‘minor-coding’ concerning young, cute-looking characters who canonically could be anywhere between 13 and 300. It also gives away a certain single-mindedness on the definition of “predatory ship”. A year or so ago, a drawing of Kuzco and Pacha from The Emperor’s New Groove went viral and sparked a round of anti-ship discourse because of the age difference between the two (which is extremely unclear even within the movie!)… and it was pro-shippers (that is, non-antis broadly, more on that in a bit) bringing up that if anything, given the events of the movie, there should be more concern about Kuzco preying on Pacha. No matter the age of a young emperor, after all, he has more power in his pinky finger than a peasant like Pacha has in his whole body.

*****[who will say anything…] And this is where you get into the real double-faced nature of this, which has done a number on a lot of people I know. This whole statement is already manipulative, but this sets up that no matter what someone says in their defense, you’ll read it as an excuse. The reason this works is because you’ve already been told that they’re pedophiles and child abusers. After all, there’s no reason to hear out an abuser. But what if they’re not?

This is much like the catch-22 that people incarcerated in mental institutions go through. (Addressed out loud in movies like Girl, Interrupted and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, for their flaws.) When everything you yourself say is discounted because of your supposed status, and you’re given no way to clear your name, what on earth are you meant to do? This isn’t helped by the specific way that the #MeToo movement has unfolded. #MeToo is a powerful, important movement about believing victims of harassment… that has spent relatively little time on how accusations of sexual abuse and predatory natures have also been used to silence marginalized people. So when someone accuses you of abuse, you’re expected in many leftist circles to sit silently and accept it, whether it’s true or not. (And to add insult to injury, actual abusers have much more ability to shrug off those accusations. The horrible truth is that if you manage to actually ruin someone’s life with an abuse accusation, they probably didn’t do it.) And even if you’re not actively accused of abuse, who wants to be the person who looks like they’re defending pedophilia? It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re technically right. You have to trust that other people will spend the time to find that out.

2. Some of Them Mean It

Alright, then. Say you’re taking this to heart, and the next time you see one of these arguments, you call bullshit.

And now you have an upset, triggered teenager on your hands.

What gives?

I mentioned earlier that modern anti-shipping pulls a lot from radical feminism and Evangelical thought. It’s worth citing The Handmaid’s Tale here (again, even with its flaws!) since the rise of Gilead is explicitly noted to be a result of a coalition between second-wave feminists and the conservative right. There’s a scene with the main character’s mother burning pornography, and the entire structure of the Handmaids is about protecting women’s virtue. Radical feminism, including the branches of trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERFs), sex worker exclusionary radical feminism (SWERFs), and kink-critical radical feminism, has as one of its main purposes this idea of protecting womanhood – usually from men, always from an idea of sexual assault that is more fiction than fact. But the reason it works is precisely because of how omnipresent sexual assault is. Traumatized people suffering from often-untreated PTSD and other issues are desperate to be heard; desperate enough, in many cases, not to look too closely. This is doubly true for teenagers, who just don’t have the life experience to tell a good argument from a bad one yet, and who are in a stage of their life where every emotion, every feeling, is overwhelming and too much. Add into this trans teenagers who are battling dysphoria, discrimination and hopelessness at the future, and it’s an explosive mixture.

The result is, unfortunately, that many of these bad faith arguments are being repeated by people who believe them with their whole heart. It’s one thing to fend off accusations of pedophilia from people who have the same smugness as right-wingers trying to get some ironic dunk on you. It’s another when someone who you thought you’d agree with, who you want to agree with, seems to be genuinely upset and hurt, and all you can think of to do is tell them why they shouldn’t be. Which, well, of course that’s not going to work. There’s a reason why many people call radical feminism and modern anti-shipping a cult. Just like with any cult, there are people who stay because they’re scared, there are people pulling the strings, and then there are people who have drunk the kool-aid, not because they’re stupid or foolish, but because they were in search of something and don’t want to believe that their new purpose is poison. It’s even worse when it’s someone you know, which has happened to me a number of times.

I can’t tell anybody how to deal with these situations, except for this: just because somebody is very emotional about something does not make them correct. It means they are having very big feelings about it, and those feelings are true! But those feelings don’t lend them any more factual weight or authority over your life or opinions. I try to give people information where I can tell they have some wrong ideas, but largely, I try to disengage. No one processing triggers around this topic is going to be particularly able to process “I know you think I’m a pedophile, but Actually…” unless they’ve actively opened themselves up to it. The trick is, though, not to be taken in by it because someone’s crying now. Their stance isn’t any less harmful. They just aren’t cackling about how much they hate the people they’re hurting.

3. It’s Not Actually About Fandom

It’s so, so, so easy to dismiss all this as being fandom drama. If you’re not in fandom at all, why should you bother? Sarah Z’s recent video didn’t help this, either, nor have other takes on the situation from people far enough from it to have those stances. But one of the absolutely key things to understand about anti-shipping is that it’s not just about fandom. I’m citing the radical feminist underpinnings not to inflate the importance of ships, but to make this connection… because it is often then the same people fearmongering about kink at Pride (a complex topic, for sure, but not one that can be boiled down to ‘sex pests wear leather and normal safe people don’t’!) or harassing authors for published books on serious topics. It’s the same people, too, who mobilize against PornHub or OnlyFans for being supposed hubs of “sex trafficking” and cheer when sex workers are driven into the shadows.

Simply put, fandom is the entry point for this rhetoric. Much like how Gamergate and the alt-right used videogames and 4chan to get to young men, TERFs and radfems have happily used Tumblr and Twitter to disguise their talking points in “low-stakes” affairs like ships. This serves several purposes. One, nobody’s really going to think about it too hard. It’s fandom. It’s not that serious. Two, nobody outside of fandom will take you seriously. If you’re harassed or lose your job because of dumb fandom drama, it’s at least partially your own fault for engaging in “silly fandom stuff for children” – at least in many people’s eyes. And three, it gives them direct access to a receptive audience; marginalized people in fandom who feel shut out for other reasons. This has taken so many forms. Young queer transmascs frustrated at the state of m/m representation in fandom and the still omnipresent “yaoi” stereotyping end up in conversations with TERFs who talk to them seriously about fetishization. Perhaps they start with how it’s the sexual aspect that’s ‘really’ bad about all those Grown Women doing it, or how it’s taking space away from Them, The True Men; after a while, perhaps, the idea that maybe the trans men only “want” to be men because of the fetishized ideals and misogyny in fandom gets floated. If they hadn’t started with a real grievance, this wouldn’t work. But this is a trusted person, now. And now you have someone detransitioning or dropping their plans for transition because well, their Trusted Friend said they were just fetishizing men… and their misery and confusion worsens and makes them even more vulnerable to being used as a weapon. The same thing is happening with aces, especially after a long period of time in which TERFs had asexuals as a primary enemy. A young ace person in fandom expresses frustration at the focus on romance and sexuality in fandom, and a ‘concerned friend’ (who will never actually identify themselves as a TERF) comes to agree with them and talk about how all of these people making light of Serious Problems like Rape just don’t understand. Again, it begins with a genuine grievance, and once the trust is established, it goes from there.

The extra horror of this, which you’ve likely picked up on in part already, is how often this comes hand in hand with sexual and emotional abuse from the adults in question. Even when it doesn’t explicitly come with it, this sort of deceptive relationship between an adult and a teenager is far more serious and impactful than even the most well-illustrated piece of non-con artwork. Once someone’s geared for this type of rhetoric, though, it almost inevitably leaks into their other stances as well. You can’t consign pro and anti-shipping to “fandom discourse” and then fight for sex workers’ rights without acknowledging where this radicalization is happening.

4. It’s Very Targeted

Another thing that’s gotten played down by people like Lindsey Ellis and Sarah Z is the real targeting happening with anti-ship campaigns. Modern antishipping is cross-fandom, after all; while certain ships are the ‘du jour’ hatesink (KaeLuc has replaced BakuDeku for this, and BakuDeku unseated Shiro/Keith) what really unites antis? Anti-shipping rhetoric isn’t even consistent enough for that to be the unifying factor – in an amusing twist of events, certain VLD antis started going after Royai (Roy/Riza) in FMA because “Roy is Riza’s commanding officer, and therefore it’s predatory”… which was a rather nasty surprise for Royai shippers, who have a sizable contingent of antis themselves and spend a frustrating amount of time proudly proclaiming that they are the good, healthy alternative to RoyEd.

Nor is it as simple as antis being teenagers. Antis love to lean on the idea that they’re minors, but many of them are actually in their early to mid 20s, and simply just keep calling themselves minors while it’s convenient. When they’re called on it, they’ll often pivot to how they’re protecting minors. (And leave out how many minors are also the targets of their hate campaigns.) At least one major leftist account received a significant amount of backlash after claiming that “antishippers” were just aggrieved teenagers who wanted to be heard and then blocked everyone trying to correct them. (A perfect example, by the way, of how that initial argument I dissected kneecaps and silences any effort to counter it.)

But here’s the thing; the people who get harassed in this way over “bad content” are never allosexual/alloromantic, cisgender, heterosexual. They’re always queer of some variety, with VERY few exceptions. This perhaps doesn’t say too much on its own. Fandom on its own is pretty queer. Except, is it? There are plenty of horror stories about straight women who wrote m/m and then disowned their queer children, or supported real-life homophobia. An argument that claims that all fandom is queer doesn’t quite track with the history of fandom. It’s also true that – despite m/f ships being perfectly capable of being queer – they’re not largely the ones who receive harassment. When they do, it’s not oriented around pedophilia. This all starts to paint a pretty nasty picture. Perhaps this sounds forced, so let’s break it down a little. My biggest exposure to anti-shipping has been in two large fandoms – Fullmetal Alchemist and Voltron: Legendary Defender.

In the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom, the ships that received (and often still do) hate and accusations of pedophilia against creators were: Roy x Edward (m/m), Edward x Alphonse (m/m), and very occasionally Ed x Envy (m/m most commonly; it varies depending on writer) and Greed/Ling (m/m). The ships idolized in deliberate contrast by those harassers were Roy x Riza (m/f), Edward x Winry (m/f), Ed x Ling (m/f), and Ling x Ranfan (f/f).

In the Voltron: Legendary Defender fandom, the ships that receive(d) hate and accusations of pedophilia against creators were: Shiro x Keith (m/m), Shiro x Lance (m/m), Shiro x Pidge (usually m/f but frequently m/m as well) and less frequently, Keith x Allura (m/f), Shiro x Hunk (m/m) and Shiro x Allura (m/f). The idolized ships in contrast were Keith x Lance (m/m), Allura x Lance (m/f) and Pidge x Hunk (m/f; very occasionally m/m but not frequently for this ship).

Even from a casual glance, it’s clear that there’s at least some slant, in that there’s an awful lot more m/m ships on one side of the scale than the other. The intensity also varies massively depending on gender. Riza/Ed has some shippers, and those shippers still also deal with harassment and death threats; but Tumblr tags for those ships would largely have hate that got a bunch of ships at once, whereas RoyEd shippers repeatedly and constantly had to endure specially-drawn hate art in their tags. (Again, probably still do; it’s been a long time since I was on Tumblr.) I myself have a Riza/Alphonse fic, which has a near-identical age gap to RoyEd, but while the one or two RoyEd fics I’ve written have inevitably gotten one or two vile comments, my Riza/Alphonse fic has remained untouched. Some of this is absolutely attributable to popularity. But then you have to reckon with a historical truth: Gay men have been accused of pedophilia, specifically and noxiously, for decades. Lesbians, too, have to deal with this; but especially with the serophobia left over from the AIDS crisis, the idea of a “creepy old gay pedophile” lingers in the imagination. Once that’s mentioned, it’s hard to look at the spread of these ships in the same way.

Add into that the fact that even though there are definitely allocishet people in fandom… it is always queer people being harassed. The big smear campaigns that gain attention on Twitter and Tumblr are always targeting specific creators who are pretty openly queer, and by the time you get into fans of Hannibal going after openly gay Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller, it gets extremely notable. Yet there’s a lot done to try gloss over this little detail; when a proshipper made a “proship pin” featuring the pink triangle, there was a lot of discourse about how the pink triangle was a “Nazi symbol”, far less than there should have been about the use of it for decades in AIDS activism, and almost none on the right of the creator to reclaim the pink triangle. The fact that the people doing the harassing are also often queer isn’t as helpful as it should be. The existence of transphobic trans people and gay men who work for conversion therapy programs should make clear that it’s perfectly possible for us to work against our own interests. But there’s also a very specific transmisogynistic bent to this harassment. Especially once you look outside of fandom’s specific niches, it seems like a new transfem person is run off Twitter for “pedophilia” every week, whether it’s because she drew a dog in a diaper, has a private account where she likes age regression kink, or is dating someone a year or two younger than her. And just as notably, there are remarkably few openly transfem people on the antishipper side of things; when there are transfem antis, they seem to cheerfully go after other transfems and talk about ‘rooting out predators’ in their own community.

5. It Has A Body Count

I’ve used the term ‘proshipper’ a few times here, and while the meaning is probably fairly clear from context, it necessitates some explaining. ‘Proshipper’ was coined to replace the more aggressive and context-dependent term ‘anti-anti’ – it means, again, what it says on the tin. Pro shipping, pro shippers, pro the right of people to enjoy and cherish fiction as fiction. A number of antis have tried to claim that proshipper means ‘pedophile’ or ‘pedo apologist’ – unfortunately, this lie spreads more than I’d like it to. (Considering the lack of consequences for pedophiles, I think it’s cute that people think they need a codeword.) It doesn’t mean any such thing.

The other thing that shows up, though, is the idea of pro-shippers being ‘just as bad’. While I’m also interested in writing an article taking apart the idea of a singular pro-ship community, this also needs to be taken apart on its own. Yes, there are pro-shippers who harass people. I myself have been targeted by a smear campaign largely led by self-identified pro-shippers; I’ve also seen some pro-shippers go way too far in their responses to antis, including spamming them with porn or otherwise violating boundaries. I’m not disavowing these. But there are some notable differences, the first of which is that I have never heard of a death associated with these. I’m sure there’s been some close calls; and this is something which I am open to correction on. (The “I haven’t heard of” here is an important bit.) By contrast, there have been a number of confirmed deaths and near-deaths related to antishipping. A 15-year-old died by suicide a few months ago, confirmed by her mother; another account (who I’m not naming out of respect) went completely silent after posting about suicidal urges soon afterwards. These are only two, and I know there are significantly more. After the explosion of anti backlash against Tamsyn Muir for some old Homestuck fanfiction, I ended up in the hospital myself; this despite being well-acquainted with anti-shipping at the time. Again, this doesn’t mean that these incidents don’t have mirrors, or that the harassment of antishippers by proshippers isn’t bad. It’s a statement of scale – and one that makes sense. Proshippers largely talk about antishippers as annoying brats, or a thorn in their side; antishippers talk about proshippers as menaces and threats to children. It stands to reason that one group will stop long before a death, and the other won’t – even to the point of justifying the harassment after the death was confirmed. (I wish this wasn’t true.)

I’ve also never seen an anti-shipper step in to tell another anti-shipper to back off or stop, without that anti-shipper then being ejected from their circle and becoming the next target. In fact, any disagreement in anti circles often gets this treated. Pro-shippers have their own battles and fractures, but several times, I’ve watched a pro-shipper go too far – and other pro-shippers (or otherwise non-antis) step in to tell them off for crossing a line. A notable occasion of this was when an anti-shipper was fundraising for top surgery and a pro-shipper with a bad attitude made a point of saying “well, maybe we’d help you if you weren’t an anti”. The pro-shipper in question got a huge amount of backlash from their own community, and the anti-shipper – despite being an anti – got a significant amount of donations. Not every situation works out as nicely, but seeing it happen just a few times already influences how I see the two communities, even having been targeted by both.

So the anti-ship arguments may sound good – but even if you took to heart the idea that a written crime is equivalent to a real one (cf. Stranger than Fiction), that it is an ironclad predictor of a crime (cf. Minority Report), and/or that some ships “shouldn’t be shipped”, it’s difficult to justify the level of violence shown over what is at worst a red flag. It also puts a much darker light on things like directly tagging “known proshippers”, making lists of them, or warning zine applicants that they’ll be subject to “background checks”. If there wasn’t an ongoing history of these people being doxxed, mass-harassed or fired due to calls to their workplaces, it would already be sinister. As it is? It’s downright horrific.

6. So What Do I Do?

In this column, I’ve tried to dissect exactly why the anti-shipper position as given is bad-faith, and how certain lies or distortions of truth are used to get people on board with it. Heavily modified definitions of things like ‘pedophilia’, ‘predatory’, etc. are used in deliberately inflammatory statements that make you look like a bad person if you disagree. The strong emotions of marginalized and traumatized people are weaponized – sometimes by them, sometimes by people abusing and manipulating them – to make arguments look more convincing and distract from the logical issue into an emotional one. [Cf. “Don’t you care about CSA victims, you monster?”] The seriousness of the harassment is minimized as being fandom drama, while the arguments are uplifted as being more “broadly applicable” – which tricks people into applying radfem beliefs to the world outside of fandom, too. The marginalizations and demographics of proshippers are downplayed in favour of the privileges (they’re old, etc.) to erase the queerphobia present in the campaigns. And finally, the very real consequences of anti-shipping are ignored, written out or downplayed in favour of a narrative that makes pro-shippers look worse; usually by using real incidents out of context, leaving out the deaths and suicides caused by anti-ship rhetoric, and attaching things like garden-variety racism to a proship identity instead of… well, to whiteness.

Especially if you’re autistic like I am, this all sounds like a lot. It’s paranoia-inducing, that’s for sure. A lot of people decide to settle on a neutral position, thinking it’ll keep them safe or out of it (and sadly it rarely does); but I think it’s much simpler than that. If you believe that harassing people for fiction is bad, you’re a pro-shipper. Maybe you like a different word, maybe you don’t want to hang out with people who are way too invested in being pro-shippers; but the fact remains, if you don’t see the big deal? You will not be happy around antis. And that’s the main purpose for the label of pro-shipper; not to identify yourself with some existing ideology that is ever-shifting and largely in opposition to something else, but to tell anti-shippers, “I am not one of you”. Even if you’re a bit uncomfortable around some ships, but you’re quite happy to block and ignore, anti-shippers are not the friends you want. And once you’ve established that, you can choose your friends from pro-shippers however you choose. You’re not obligated to like or get along with everyone, or sign off on everybody’s decisions. You’re not even obligated to ship anything particularly spicy or problematic. All you have to do is look at the rhetoric used to justify harming others and decide, “No, not for me. Not today.”
The Case Against Puritanism: It’s Time To Give It Up And Let Teens Get Off

June 29th, 2021
Please note: If you’re not reading this column while sustaining the ability to both retain your sense of humour with your tongue in your cheek, and take it seriously, you won’t get much out of it. This column discusses underage sexuality, neo-puritan/anti-sex ideology, (briefly) pedophilia, transphobia and sexual assault.

Teens are horny. This is one of those truths that somehow, everyone knows, and yet, we frequently have to reassert in the face of people desperately trying to cling to the idea that teenagers are also children. Teenagers are innocent children until they’re eighteen; the number of teen pregnancies, mononucleosis and chlamydia epidemics in schools, free condom drawers in need of replenishing in nurse’s offices and eleventh-graders caught in the backs of movie theaters is, obviously, beside the point. Sometimes, the same people will in one breath talk about how “men can’t help themselves” if teenage girls are going to wear sexy clothes at school, and then wonder why teen girls would keep wearing sexy clothing if they’re So Innocent. Clearly it’s a mistake and they don’t know what they’re doing.

At the beginning of the 2010s, it felt like we were making some progress against this. ACT-UP’s efforts during the AIDS crisis are precisely why we have free condoms all over the place (and Planned Parenthood thanks them mightily). In Ontario, we had a school curriculum go through that would begin to teach kids the essentials of sex ed as early as Grade 3, lining up with research that shows that teaching kids about sex early actually helps them identify abuse to authorities, rather than opening them up to it, as conservative pundits claim. Then, in what was both a very sudden and a retrospectively-foreshadowed collapse, it all started sliding backwards again. Doug Ford’s election in Ontario rewound all that progress, and laws like SESTA/FOSTA in the USA have shut down hundreds of sites that previously made sex work, hookup culture and pornography/erotica safer, more accessible and easier to find. Notables include the personals section of Craigslist, Backpage, the ban of NSFW content on Tumblr, and even more and more rigid censors on sites like Pornhub, XVideos, and others.

Of course, to a lot of people, this doesn’t seem that important. Porn finds a way, and what’s so bad about making sure teens can’t get to it? Maybe they should wait until they’re eighteen to bang, or get to porn. There’s all of this stuff about porn giving teens unrealistic expectations. Look what happened with Fifty Shades of Grey, after all. And fanfiction teaches horrible ideas about sex – didn’t one fanfiction use car oil as lube? No, no, far better that they be kept away from sexual content until they’re Old Enough.

For a long while, I’ve combated this on other people’s terms. “Yes, but–” “Yes, I suppose–” “Have you considered–” And frankly, I’m tired of it. So, fuck it. Let teens get off. Stop trying so hard. And here’s why:
1. Sex Isn’t Bad For You
This one is huge, actually. So much of this is positioned on this idea that sex is bad for you. We control access to pornography the way we do anti-depressants and cigarettes! And, counterpoint: it’s not. You can get pregnant from sex. So, give teens condoms, and access to the morning-after pill, and access to abortion clinics. And you can get STDs. So – condoms! And medical access! And good lord, we really should have PeP and PreP everywhere, shouldn’t we?

The reason we don’t is because we don’t want them having sex at all. And even besides the fact that we have these tools and these items for safe sex on hand… We don’t give teenagers enough credit. Recently, there was a big to-do about kink at Pride parades, and how teenagers being “exposed to kink” was so terrible for them. All I could think about was how I did more kinky stuff as a teenager than I have as an adult. See, teenagers don’t want to get pregnant, or AIDs, or syphilis. If you have teens educated about how these things work, they’re smart enough to go “I don’t like that. I don’t want that.” So you know what they do? They have sex in every other way possible. There’s a reason there’s a trope about Christian schoolgirls doing anal. There’s also a trope about schoolgirls sucking dick, and let’s not get into how many teenagers stumble into their love of chastity and orgasm denial, or sadomasochism, or bondage — just because they were fooling around and knew they didn’t want to do the “Real Thing”.

Of course, once you start talking about kink, you’re talking about different dangers. I definitely did a few things as a teen where I’m glad nobody got hurt. But once again, the issue isn’t the sex. (And really, just telling me How to do the things would have solved stuff pretty quickly. Google was my friend on numerous occasions.) Sex is not inherently bad for you. It’s not addictive. It’s not toxic. It’s not corrosive. So why are we so worried about teens having sex with each other? Frankly, some of the things we do let teens do – go to school high on energy drinks, drive cars, double-ride bicycles and scooters, pull all-nighters to finish homework – have significantly worse long-term effects than getting a good orgasm in here and there.

2. Even If It Was, Sex Isn’t Porn

“Yes, but they’re not only having sex with each other,” is the obvious reply to the above. And you’re correct. Once you have sexually active teenagers, you have opportunistic adults. There’s a rising trend of teenagers identifying themselves as “AAMs” (adult-attracted minors), a term usually given to them by pedophiles who are only too happy to tell them it’s somehow exceptional or strange for them to be attracted to adults. For teens reading this, by the way, it is not. It’s completely normal, and anybody who tells you otherwise is being exceedingly creepy.

But certainly teenagers having sex with adults is dangerous; I also tend to lean the direction of saying that while casual hookups with adults (for older teens) lives in a grey zone of risk, relationships are where the true danger lies. If you’re getting your rocks off with a random grown-up, it’s at least anonymous – relationships and emotional investment are where the gaps in maturity and the vulnerability come in. (To be clear, this isn’t me espousing the first. Not worth it, kids, you don’t know where he’s been. Although you can say the same for a lot of teenagers.)

But here’s the thing. A lot of this paranoia ends up circulating around the Internet… which is where that differentiation suddenly becomes pretty important. The common response from adults in NSFW spaces on the internet is “no kids, ever, period, full stop” – which I fully understand! But it somewhat elides the actual issues and harm involved, and conflates harm w/ legal issues. Teenagers viewing and enjoying porn of adults is not and should not be viewed as a boundary issue, not when we’re talking about public accounts and sexual services; it’s a boundary issue when it turns into a relationship, because either the adult is doing it with eyes open (yikes) or the teen in question has lied about their age (YIKES). It’s also a huge issue when teens start sending pics of themselves, because unintentionally or otherwise, they’re creating child pornography; this is an issue legally – under US law, they can actually be prosecuted for this – and ethically, where the nature of circulating images means they’re likely to end up in a collection by dint of being underage, whether they “look it” or not. And finally, the issues with US law mean that – horrifically – more than once, adults have been prosecuted for “supplying pornography to a minor” even when that direct relationship didn’t really exist. So the over-protectiveness and the building of a fence around this spaces makes sense. It’s entirely logical, at least from that perspective.

The issue is that in doing so, a lot of the assumptions around teens and sexual urges get reinforced, and a flip happens where the teens are often portrayed as the predators for wanting access at all; reactions of “ew gross” or calling them freaks are far more common than they should be, and the fear of Being A Predator overrides the sense of relation that people might otherwise have. It’s entirely natural for teens to seek out pornography! Curiosity, sexual urges, you name it — there’s nothing wrong with it. The laws that punish people so strongly and unfairly for what in the past amounted to teens clicking the “yes, I am 18” button and cackling behind the screen are the issue, not teenagers being… teenagers.

And both the law and the people afraid of it forget a crucial point; while things like sexting and sharing nudes blur the line, for sure, pornography is not sex. If I watch porn with someone in it, I’m not having sex with that person. If I have a private conversation with them that turns sexual, then yes, that’s a different conversation. But I’m not fucking them by watching them in a porn video. Teenagers watching porn are watching porn. And honestly, if in the moral panic, you take away teenage access to pornography, you’re really just making it more likely for them to have unsafe and early sex. (For porn’s issues, I actually did figure out what condoms were and how they worked from a latex fetish video. So, you know.)

3. Who Else Gets Hurt?

Alright, so teens are horny, but they shouldn’t fuck adults. We can agree on that.

So can you tell a teenager from an adult by looking at them?

I’m sure somebody’s saying yes. You’re also definitely wrong. Trans men frequently look far younger than our age, for one; petite women are frequently taken as younger than their age, too. Black folks are read as older, Asian folks as younger, and teens with big chests are always read as adults first.

This isn’t, to be clear, a justification for adults seeking out teenagers for sex. The issue with that is a matter of emotional maturity, and the question of “why aren’t you having sex with adults”? The very fact that teenagers are physically indistinguishable from adults in their 20s is a point against, not for this; it scuppers the idea of there being any visual or identifiable thrill based on a “teenage” body.

What does happen, however, in that in the mad rush to stop teenagers from accessing pornography at any cost, an awful lot of people get caught in the blowback. Take the above example, with adult spaces cracking down on there being any under-18 presence in their spaces. It’s good that adult spaces are taking this seriously. It’s not so good when it starts taking the form of policing what people look like; more than once, sex workers have had to go to ridiculous lengths to prove that they are, in fact, over 18 and just small-framed, or even more ridiculously, have a penchant for things like lolita fashion. Or when fandom spaces begin requiring everyone to be over 18, even for events that are partially or exclusively SFW, out of the fear that someone Might Say Something Horny. Or, horrendously, when NSFW discords and social groups start requiring ID for adults to enter and remain within the discord – at risk of, apparently, being accused of being a minor lying about their age.

The last one is one I want to dwell on for a little while, in particular because SESTA/FOSTA has made the world so much less safe for sex workers – and the world’s never been particularly safe for sex work! It’s also not particularly safe for trans people (who, statistically, are also very likely to be sex workers or at least consider it) who already have to go through the everyday trials of our IDs not matching up with “us”. It’s one thing for places like OnlyFans to require ID; that’s reasonable, if frustrating. It’s quite another for online strangers to essentially blackmail people into sharing IDs with the threat of telling everyone they’re underage if they don’t feel comfortable doing so!

Nor is it effective – even slightly. The request for ID, every time I’ve run into it, has been couched within the language of “well, we have no other option”. It loses every bit of its power the moment you recall that teenagers have been using fake IDs to drink, fuck, drive and vote since the forties. And now we have Photoshop! It’s a shockingly short-sighted requirement, one that asks adults to doxx themselves and open themselves up to harassment, spam, misgendering, and other unwanted attention… purely so a teenager doesn’t talk about sex with adults. We’re not talking about a bathhouse; nor, in the vast majority of these cases, are we talking about sexting rooms. They’re NSFW chats, where people talk about their kinks, often in relation to fantasies and fiction. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of how “bad” that actually is. Should it be avoided? Sure. Is it worth endangering everyone else to avoid? Absolutely not. Let’s get some reality checking in here.

This is without getting into how quickly someone can be accused of being a pedophile for so much as following a minor by accident on NSFW Twitter, dating someone 17 when they’re 19, or other similar things that just do not deserve the kind of vitriol they get. Every time, the people who get hurt are not the people responsible for whatever imagined harm is coming to mind. And what is that harm, anyway. See point one! Sex is not a bad and evil thing. Sex is sex.

4. Let Teens Fuck And Fuck Up

A ton of this also comes back to an essential piece of parenting advice that, in an increasingly interconnected world, is something everyone ends up needing to hear: let people make their own mistakes. Obviously, scale matters. Information matters. Always try. Tell your friend their boyfriend is a bad dude. Tell the kid you found appealing to pedophiles that they’re playing with fire. Tell your little brother that he needs an antivirus if he’s gonna keep going to weird porn sites.

But at the end of the day, if we can relax and put in the safeguards necessary, it will be okay to let teens fuck up. There is no force on earth that’s going to stop someone adolescent from making bad decisions. That’s the entire point of being a teenager. Puberty dials up the impulse part of your brain without all of those brakes and hard lessons and “FUCKSHITNO” buttons that you get from experience. But the experience is necessary. Our job as adults isn’t to take away the experiences; it’s to turn the broken legs into skinned knees. If someone gets pregnant by mistake, it’s our job to give them options beyond having their life ruined; to have things like abortion and the morning after pill on offer, and to be someone they can talk to. If someone gets involved with someone too old for them, what’s better: them being too scared to tell anyone as the situation gets worse, or them being able to turn to a friend, a parent, anyone and saying, “I made a mistake”?

The more pressure we put on teenagers to consider sex a taboo thing, to make first times some sort of Sacred, Immutable Object and pornography something to hide and be ashamed of, the more we risk the next generation having all the same hang-ups that the rest of us do. There’s no reason we should continue the tradition of lying to girls that their first times should hurt, or letting teenagers circulate myths like Glee’s infamous hot-tub pregnancy because nobody will tell them the truth. But if we continue to buy into the idea that teenage sexuality is something to fear and hide and avoid, that’s exactly what we’ll do.

So: get over it. Stop thinking that acknowledging that fourteen-year-olds hump pillows and get horny when they make out makes you a pedophile. (For one, it’s an insult to how bad pedophilia is.) Fight to let teenagers access things like sex toys and vibrators along with all the free condoms. Focus on teaching teens the actual “dos and don’ts” of online, like not getting into relationships while lying about their age and not posting nudes of themselves, rather than trying to tell them that porn will rot their brains and then being shocked when they 1. find out you lied and 2. promptly stop listening to you. And stop worrying so damn hard about if a fifteen year old sees a pair of tits online. They were probably looking for them, they’re probably enjoying them greatly, and at the end of the day, panicking about it causes far more problems than it solves. The world will still turn. The human race will continue. (With gusto, probably.) And as a bonus, the inventor of Cornflakes will be spinning in his grave.

Category: Articles

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