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do you/followers have any tips for unlearning anti rhetoric? was never an anti myself (i’ve honestly retreated into the proshipping ‘closet’ over time, unfortunately) but after years online the constant hatred has worn me down and i’ve experienced myself internalizing antis’ views in a way that really really sucks ): mostly what i’m scared about is the fact that i want to talk about these things but i’m terrified of harassment.

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noa-ciharu:

blackheart-biohazards:

My personal best tip is to separate yourself from the people and places you think will harass you.

Start a new, proship-aligned online identity, block anyone you think might run into and recognize you immediately, and just start posting and making friends!

Our followers may have some more tips for you for unlearning the actual anti rhetoric.

Anon I’ve been in your shoes when I was around 18. Never been an anti but that doesn’t mean you can’t have internalized anti/puritant views on specific issues you’re unaware of. That’s actually very common experience, even with people who are for ship and let ship

Whenever you feel like shipping something is immoral or “if I like AxB, what does that say about me?” just step away from all emotions related things and ask yourself – how precisely does shipping this make me a bad person? (It doesn’t) How precisely am I “romanticizing” xyz when my reactions to xyz in fiction and irl couldn’t be more different? (It’s fiction, not how to xyz guide not morality guide). Who precisely am I hurting and how?

And soon you’ll start realizing that those questions around morality begin falling apart once you objectively observe the situation.

When I started shipping one ship that was toxic on steroids, I had similar internalized antis views. ‘I can’t like this, it’s wrong on so many levels’. Then I had fortunate, or actually misfortune, that someone close to me irl was in extremely toxic relationship. It lasted for several months and was pretty ugly. To cut story short – I can to realization that shipping unhealthy dynamics in fiction didn’t cloud my judgment one bit. Same tropes I liked seeing in fanfics I despised and deeply reprimanded irl (such as jealousy or stalking). So it helped me realize that liking xyz in fiction or shipping AxB no matter how wrapped speaks absolutely nothing about my morals or views on life/relationships

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marshemillow:

blackheart-biohazards:

blackheart-biohazards:

“fictional children can’t consent”

I’m sorry I am still mad about this. Watching antis act like fictional characters on the page have some kind of free will, or rights that need to be protected is baffling and alarming.

No characters are capable consent.

I can’t even describe how twisted it is that someone would think that the rights of a fictional character not to be trumped the rights of an author to write about characters being harmed.

And I say this as fictionkin and a fictive.

Writing doesn’t create experience. Someone writing a bad thing doesn’t inflict that on a specific person.

Characters in the page aren’t real.

Fictionkin and fictives are real people who for whatever reason they ascribe to are fictional characters.

But they are not the character concepts themselves and while we can but UPSET by fiction that involves harm to our character concepts it does not inflict harm directly on us the real people.

Fictionkin/fictives and the characters they are represented by in fiction are separate.

Fictional characters can not consent to anything, and the idea of their consent is not important .

The rights of real people walking around in the real world are what matter.

Someone in the replies said they think antis don’t actually understand how harm works, and I think that’s spot-on. I realized this myself some time ago, where I think antis think that CSEM is illegal because it depicts abuse, rather than the truth, which is that it can’t be made without directly abusing a real person (nevermind the very legal existence of things like fake snuff movies, which antis seem to conveniently disregard).

The purity mindset means that if you can sanitize yourself from the concept of child sexual abuse, then nobody can be accused of inflicting it, but just look at any huge purity cult like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and you’ll realize just how blatantly untrue this is. One of the scariest moments in my deconversion from mormonism is that because I didn’t even know what sex really was until I was 17, I could have been easily abused at any time before that and I would have been none the wiser.

I’m extremely lucky to have never been a victim of CSA, but many other mormon children are not so lucky, and because sexual activity of any kind is considered a sin, even the kind that’s inflicted onto you without your consent, children end up carrying this huge burden around that they hide from adults out of shame, and if you’re a mormon your whole life, you’ll probably never understand sex the way someone on the outside might understand it, because even married people who can have sin-free sex will still not be taught how to do it safely, or really anything else. That means sexual abusers in purity cults can frequently get away with it scott-free, especially since mormon and JW communities are extremely tight-knit and sheltered from the “sinful” outside world.

That’s why even if all antis were good and didn’t send death threats to random people, I still can’t get behind their movement, because I’ve seen it before, and I promise it’s not something you or anyone else wants.

Being forbidden from talking about abuse even in a fictional context will always be a breeding ground for real abuse to take place, so excuse me if I’m not on board with censorship on the grounds of “romanticization”, as if that’s not up to interpretation anyway.

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beep-beep-im-asleep:

blackheart-biohazards:

To all of us who need to hear it today:

“they’re family” doesn’t mean it isn’t abuse.

“they never hit me” doesn’t mean it isn’t abuse.

You don’t have to like someone who violates your boundaries.

Being nice to you on occasion doesn’t negate their abuse.

Family shouldn’t criticize everything you do, bully you, or put you down and laugh.

Family shouldn’t take your things, or break them to hurt, upset or control you.

Family shouldn’t try to control you.

You don’t deserve to be yelled or screamed at.

You don’t deserve to be put down or insulted.

You don’t deserve to starve.

You don’t deserve to be hurt or punished.

You deserve love and good things in your life.

Love and good things are coming. You can make it.

I feel like the most important thing here is:

Being nice to you on occasion doesn’t negate their abuse.

“On occasion” doesn’t have a limit, either.

That doesn’t mean every slight misstep is abusive, if they are open to communication and show effort to fix things. That doesn’t mean every disagreement on what constitutes reasonable boundaries is abusive. It doesn’t mean “if your experience is ever less than idyllic then you are a victim.”

But it DOES mean that people can be capable of BOTH kindness AND abuse. It does mean that EVEN IF someone says or even shows they’re trying to improve, you’re allowed to have limits of what you’re willing to endure. You are not obligated to put up with toxic behaviors. There’s a difference between being patient with people out of love and sympathy as opposed to out of guilt and fear. Those things are also not mutually exclusive, and it’s important that you don’t let the prior blind you to the latter.

Someone can be great at hiding what a cruel person they are, or can be openly cruel, but those aren’t the only options. Someone can treat others genuinely well and still be horrible to you. Someone can be toxic for you even without intending to be, let alone with varying degrees of intention.

The same behaviors can be fine or mildly inconvenient to one person and deeply destructive to another. For example, if a sibling says, “Well, mom treats me the same way and it doesn’t bother me,” great, they’re not you. People have different needs.

This is so important to understand. Kindness doesn’t negate abuse. Even being an overall decent person doesn’t negate abuse. A doctor who saves and improves countless lives every year and gives to reputable charities frequently and treats their spouse and friends well could still be a bad parent who alternates between neglectful and overbearing with unrealistic expectations.

You don’t have to be able to justify that someone is “a bad person” to recognize they’re bad for YOU. Most abuse doesn’t come from grotesque monsters. It comes from people. And that’s part of what’s so scary.

Don’t fall into the habit of saying “well clearly they’re a decent person, so it must not be that bad” or “it must just be me.” That doesn’t matter. Your safety and health, including your mental and emotional health, matter. Protect yourself, no matter what the danger looks like from the outside.

I do not. Consider myself or want to be labeled with or even associated with the term proship but I feel like I’m being forced into it. My ship has a age gap (me as the younger party) that people would say is predatory and grooming but. He isn’t real. He can’t hurt me. And I feel no attraction to IRL people in any way– I never have so I will never attempt to replicate my ship. Yet I feel dirty and disgusting esp since I feel sexually toward him. What am I supposed to do? I don’t want to be bad. (This is a genuine good faith question and I hold no ill will toward you as a proshipper– I don’t feel like my friends would respond level headed so I just thought maybe you were safe. But please delete this and block me if you don’t want to answer. Thanks.)

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dead-dove-fanclub:

blackheart-biohazards:

Hi, friend. It sounds like you’re really struggling right now, and I’m sorry to hear that.

I’m also really sorry to hear that you don’t have friends that you can trust to talk about this with.

“Proship” can be a scary word to associate yourself with, due to the way that antis demonize and misuse it, and attack anyone who uses the term. I can’t blame you for not wanting to apply it to yourself. It is always okay to protect yourself from harassment, even if that means not using a word that might technically apply to you.

It sounds like you understand what proship is really all about: that you are in control of your fictional experience, what you write and what you consume. That fictional characters and acts can’t hurt you, and its normal and okay to enjoy things in fiction that you wouldn’t enjoy in real life.

You say you don’t want to be bad.

Anon, I promise you, you are not bad.

Your taste in fiction does not make you bad.

Sexual feelings in fiction are completely different than sexual feelings for a real, living person who is in real life. There are lots of ace people who are only attracted to people in fiction, and it does not change that they are ace.

Being attracted to a fictional murderer doesn’t make you bad. Wanting to ride a roller coaster doesn’t mean you want to jump off a cliff.

It sounds like you are struggling with a lot of feelings of guilt and shame. I want to reassure you that those feelings are misplaced. Your thoughts and fiction are not something that is shameful, or that you should feel guilty for.

You deserve both to feel safe, and to be happy.

My advice to you is to go ahead and indulge your fictional feelings. Create a separate blog or a side blog and keep it away from people that you think will harass you for it. Allow yourself to explore the fiction that you want to explore.

You are the one who knows your feelings best, anon. You know that liking this character and this fiction is not going to make you harm anyone in real life.

Please take care and stay safe. I hope to see you around, even if I don’t know its you.

I hope you don’t mind me adding my two cents…

Anon, I didn’t “want” to be pro-ship either. I have some fictional things that I enjoy that other people call me a bad person for liking. When I step back and take a look at my life and my choices, I see that I’m not a bad person, my actions make me a pretty good person.

So they’re wrong. They’re the ones harming people by demonizing harmless relaxation and entertainment activities, and they do it because of puritanism and the powerful cult-like anti mindset, which threatens to punish and shun anyone who doesn’t perform morality correctly.

You’re not bad. You’re not morally wrong. You’re not doing any real-life harm, you’re just enjoying some fiction. Your sexual feelings don’t make you bad, they don’t make you dirty– that’s the language of people who want to control you. Resist it. And be kind to yourself, the best you can.

Is it true that censoring potential triggers with asterisks, numbers and letters makes it more harder for people with reading disabilities to read and people will fill in the blanks and know what the word is anyways?

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trueishcolours:

blackheart-biohazards:

Yes, its absolutely true.

It also makes it harder or impossible for people who are triggered by those things to create strong filters online to keep from seeing them.

If you’re talking about rape, and you write it r*pe, then someone who has the word “rape” filtered will now SEE THAT POST that they were trying to avoid.

Censoring words that way is explicitly useful for GETTING AROUND FILTERS on sites that automatically filter those words. Censoring them is to avoid machine censorship so that the topics can be discussed, it is not to help people who don’t want to see them.

On a site like tumblr that doesn’t autocensor topics like that the best thing you can do is write them out fully so that people who are trying to filter them out can do so.

I didn’t realise that some people think *ing out words will make readers unable to know what the word is.

I suppose some people will have difficulty understanding words with *s in them, but then idk how these people are supposed to understand the rest of the post. Like if I said ‘do not interact if you romanticise r*pe,’ and a reader didn’t know what the word was, how would they understand my DNI? Or if you made a masterpost of ‘r*pe crisis resources,’ how would a person who didn’t know what the *ed word was understand the purpose of the resources?

The majority of people, of course, will get from context that these are rape crisis resources, even if they couldn’t parse the word r*pe. In which case they are now thinking about the concept of rape despite your *, which, if they’d blacklisted the word, is presumably what they wanted to avoid in the first place

Just…sorry for going off on your post to say probably very obvious things, @blackheart-biohazards, I can delete if you want, I’m just stuck on the idea that a) *s can stop the majority of people understanding words, and b) that this would be desirable or helpful.