Policing and woobiefication: two sides of the same coin

[ljwrites]

TL; DR: It's fine to enjoy "immoral" fiction and you're both being assholes

Fandom policing and villain woobiefication/apologia seem to be polar opposites, but at heart they agree on one thing: That your morality is defined by the wholesomeness of the content you make and consume.

They just go from that premise to different conclusions, with the fandom police (1) saying that some content is immoral and must be censored, and possibly its creators bullied as well, while the woobiefiers and apologists defend by saying shit like negging is true love actually and war crimes are fine.

Below I'm focusing on the woobiefiers/apologists because hopefully it's already clear how wrong the fandom police are.

So maybe I can be a smidge sympathetic toward the woobiefiers because theirs may be a defensive reaction, not to mention an internalization of the harmful ideas that the fandom police hold. That doesn't make the woobiefiers' arguments any less harmful, however. The fandom police are wrong in equating depiction with endorsement, but that's no reason to jump into actual, like literal, non-fictional endorsement of shitty and even criminal behavior.

If you truly disagree with the fandom police's premise, then actually disagree, and don't validate the flawed and harmful premise by spinelessly seeking a loophole for yourself like "Yeah people who like immoral shit and deserve to be mistreated/shamed, but I'm nothing like those immoral people because [horrible validation of real-life immorality]."

Also don't kid yourself that everything you like is moral because you're a moral person and therefore everything you like must be pure and faultless. Maybe space Nazis do turn you on and that's... fine? You don't have to write millions of words of meta on why your fave could never be a Nazi because your genitals are as ideologically pure as the rest of you and could never react favorably to Nazis?

Maybe the character who turns you on is an abuser and war criminal, and you don't have to make torturous logic pretzels trying to justify everything from negging to mass murder? Like, it's fine to acknowledge your messes and how problematic you can be. It is perfectly all right to like problematic things, but in trying to explain away how problematic something is in an attempt to remain unproblematic in your own eyes, you are justifying things that hurt real people in real life and speaking over a hell lot of people's pain.

1. Just to be clear what I'm talking about, by fandom policing I mean the idea that content dealing with immoral actions normalizes immorality on real life, and that such immoral content should not be created or put out in public. This can lead to bullying and harassment of the creators of such content as well, in which case I'll call people who engage in such actions "fandom policing bullies." The people who engage in this behavior are more popularly known as "antis," but I agree it's a good idea to move away from that term for a number of reasons (Tumblr link, long).

Comments

[minoanmiss]

nod I took that statement as being intended to pull a curtain back: it's not that fandom policers are all fundamentalist Christians at all, but that they are participating in a concept that arose from (among other things) fundamentalist Christian ideas, and hopefully learning that will make those who don't want to promote fundamentalist Christianity rethink their adherence to the fandom policing concept.

[ljwrites]

It's kind of surreal to me that the same people who were told that they shouldn't exist because they don't fit a mold of heteronormativity, Christian normativity, etc., then turn around and become so censorious themselves. Maybe it's a way of regaining a sense of control, since they can't get rid of abuse and pedophilia in the real world but they can hound fanfic authors off the internet and pat themselves on the back while doing so.

[lb_lee]

I mean, also there's no hate like self-loathing turned outward. God knows I was an anti-slash boy probably in part because I was trying to avoid dealing with my own gayness! Might be similar at work.

(And I mean, I can even understand how it happens! There's one white supremacist dick-bag who is eye-candy to me, even though he's absolutely heinous. And I even caught myself starting to go down the route of thinking with my dick, and had to go, "Wait, no. He's NOT just in need of someone to hold his hand and have a conversation. He's a Nazi. Don't stick your metaphorical dick in Nazi." And I've had like a decade of practice coming to terms with my problematic naughtiness, and I STILL had to catch myself! I imagine it's a lot harder for someone younger and more earnest, who still deeply hopes they can create their socialist paradise in their heads and loins. Because if they can't even create it in themselves, WHAT HOPE IS THERE???)

--Rogan

[minoanmiss]

It's definitely that control thing. I saw a very good post about that recently... goes to rummage

[cloudsinvenice]

It reminds me of the way a lot of people's internet environmentalism is basically shaming disabled people for needing to use disposable plastics. They've been told repeatedly that straws are a minor part of the ocean plastics problem, but I suspect part of the reason they don't listen is that shaming someone online about the stuff they do is always easier than dealing with the huge structural problems that are keeping us all awake at night re: the environment. It's just more satisfying to tell someone off and get a quick hit of "I've done my bit!" than engage in the much more uncertain, frightening work of trying to persuade governments, which often feel remote, to shift huge corporations, which feel even more remote. The sheer wall of anti-women, anti-LGBTQ sentiment in the world at large is exhausting to even contemplate - but that one person in fandom doing a thing one disapproves of... they're reachable.