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mark_asphodel"Ideas are not bad. Bad happens in the execution."
I've believed that for fifteen long years now, since landing into BSSM fandom in 1998. I'm starting to wonder if this, like a lot of things that were acceptable in progressive/underground circles in '98, now marks me as a dinosaur.
See, back then-- when simply engaging in fanworks marked one as an outlaw-- a lot of fandom energy was spent on assuring one another that we weren't all deviants who did indeed deserve to be banhammered by society. It was OK for twenty-something het women to get aroused by guys making out. Wanting to see and write porn with technically underaged (in the US, anyway) anime characters didn't automatically make one a pedophile or hebephile or a threat to real flesh-and-blood children. And the biggest one of all was the rape issue. The original fandom heavies wrote oceans of text on rape fantasies and non-con fetishes and how moral it was to write non-con and what it all Meant.
And because fandom skewed older then, the tone was mostly more mature and ultimately pretty supportive, and the consensus leaned toward "No, having a fantasy about being ravished by pirates does not mean you want to be raped and does not mean you deserve to be raped. This is a place where we can explore these problematic things and find outlets for them and that's OK."
Now what I'm hearing a lot of, especially on tumblr, is this:
"I am offended by X. Do not write X, do not draw X, do not reblog or "like" it, because you're a bad person if you support X."
In other words, it's not about the execution. The very idea, the concept, is bad. That "genderswapped" artwork of Disney characters? Bad. Your fanfic written purely to satisfy your genderbend kink? Bad, bad, shame on you for trivializing trans issues in that way. Wait, I thought kink-shaming was the act of a bad fan? I guess that's all so 2008 now.
Or, even deeper, things springboarding off the fanwork itself are bad and liking them also makes you bad. If you "like" a cute picture of a plus-sized female Mountie cuddling a bear cub, you're contributing to oppression because the fanartist who popularized the Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles meme does bad things (OK, I can see that), white cops are agents of oppression (I thought we were supposed to support unconventional heroines?), and the real-life bear was euthanized (seems to be false).
Welp, again-- I may be a fandom relic, but I'm not going to be on-board with the idea that certain concepts are so inherently bad that no execution can make them acceptable, and the deep-diving to find something "problematic" about every aspect of every work is getting tiresome.
It's not going to drive me out of fandom, though. What it is going to do, what it's currently making me do, is to tune out of the dialogue about some of these issues. I've only got so much time and so much money and if enough about a particular cause and its adherents strike me as batshit, hostile, and against my own ideals for a civil society, I'm out of there.
I've believed that for fifteen long years now, since landing into BSSM fandom in 1998. I'm starting to wonder if this, like a lot of things that were acceptable in progressive/underground circles in '98, now marks me as a dinosaur.
See, back then-- when simply engaging in fanworks marked one as an outlaw-- a lot of fandom energy was spent on assuring one another that we weren't all deviants who did indeed deserve to be banhammered by society. It was OK for twenty-something het women to get aroused by guys making out. Wanting to see and write porn with technically underaged (in the US, anyway) anime characters didn't automatically make one a pedophile or hebephile or a threat to real flesh-and-blood children. And the biggest one of all was the rape issue. The original fandom heavies wrote oceans of text on rape fantasies and non-con fetishes and how moral it was to write non-con and what it all Meant.
And because fandom skewed older then, the tone was mostly more mature and ultimately pretty supportive, and the consensus leaned toward "No, having a fantasy about being ravished by pirates does not mean you want to be raped and does not mean you deserve to be raped. This is a place where we can explore these problematic things and find outlets for them and that's OK."
Now what I'm hearing a lot of, especially on tumblr, is this:
"I am offended by X. Do not write X, do not draw X, do not reblog or "like" it, because you're a bad person if you support X."
In other words, it's not about the execution. The very idea, the concept, is bad. That "genderswapped" artwork of Disney characters? Bad. Your fanfic written purely to satisfy your genderbend kink? Bad, bad, shame on you for trivializing trans issues in that way. Wait, I thought kink-shaming was the act of a bad fan? I guess that's all so 2008 now.
Or, even deeper, things springboarding off the fanwork itself are bad and liking them also makes you bad. If you "like" a cute picture of a plus-sized female Mountie cuddling a bear cub, you're contributing to oppression because the fanartist who popularized the Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles meme does bad things (OK, I can see that), white cops are agents of oppression (I thought we were supposed to support unconventional heroines?), and the real-life bear was euthanized (seems to be false).
Welp, again-- I may be a fandom relic, but I'm not going to be on-board with the idea that certain concepts are so inherently bad that no execution can make them acceptable, and the deep-diving to find something "problematic" about every aspect of every work is getting tiresome.
It's not going to drive me out of fandom, though. What it is going to do, what it's currently making me do, is to tune out of the dialogue about some of these issues. I've only got so much time and so much money and if enough about a particular cause and its adherents strike me as batshit, hostile, and against my own ideals for a civil society, I'm out of there.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-23 02:28 am (UTC)I think it's just really misleading to act like it's just one site being like this, or like it originated on tumblr
Outrage culture is all over the place, but the way things function on tumblr (which really came into its own circa 2012) demonstrates better than anywhere other social media platform I frequent the shift in tone, the same way that the current state of Salon magazine demonstrates progressive outrage journalism more than any other publication I read (I don't read the HuffPo).
Comment trains can be as hard to follow as reblog ones -- if I see a post with a pile of replies, from a glance, how am I going to know if it's all "yes, you go OP!" or "OP, get your head out of your ass"?
Aside from the LiveFyre system used by Slate magazine, which posts comments in reverse order even within a subthread, I've not seen any commenting platform that's as difficult to untangle as a tumblr "discussion." Not even LJ.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-24 12:58 pm (UTC)