Ok, well don't say I didn't warn you.

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Title: Ok, well don't say I didn't warn you.
Creator: /u/Bokai
Date(s): June 2017
Medium: Reddit comment
Fandom: multifandom
Topic: Anti-shippers
External Links: Ok, well don't say I didn't warn you., Archived version; WebCite
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Ok, well don't say I didn't warn you. is an April 2017 essay by Bokai. It was posted to Reddit as a comment, where it has over 200 replies. It received 3 gold and was posted to /r/BestOf.

Some Topics Discussed

Context

The essay was posted in response to a post on /r/quityourbullshit, which is a subreddit "for texts, pictures or videos of people calling bullshit."[1] The post was a screencap of this thread of tumblr responses:

[freexcitizen]

There's no reason for anyone over the age of 21 to be having a conversation with anyone under the age of 18

[wild-blake-hickok]

"For the last time son, I wont talk to you."

[deadpool-for-equality]

"im sorry students, but this is the last time im gonna say ths. Stop trying to talk to me"

[electric-purpleboo]

"I'm afraid I can't hire you, I cannot speak to you."

[theothersideofthefarside]

"I would tell that kid to get off my lawn, but society isn't ready yet"

[gotitforcheap]

"my new born baby just said it's first word but I'm not trying to hear that"

[sonypraystation]

"hello 911?!? help my parents are in a burnin build-"

"i dunno kid.... you sound just a little young and.... idk.... im not really feelin too comfortable with this" *hangs up*

One top-level comment replying to the post asked, "Like what even is this person trying to say?"[2]

/u/Bokai replied:

[/u/Bokai]

The context for this bullshit opinion is complicated, but tl;dr in fandom subculture there's this slow boiling war on between people like shipping certain characters and people who don't. The people who don't have begun to accuse the people who do of every nasty thing under the sun to get them to stop, including pedophilia, even in cases where, for example, the ages of the characters are unknown but one of them could be 17 and the other could be 20.

The insanity of their position has extended past shipping and now this whole massive philosophy about how if you're over 18 you need to get off the internet and stop doing things that could harm minors, including communicating with them, has arisen. Like all bizzare fandom arguments it has no connection to reality whatsoever.

The specific details of how this happened makes for some good popcorn reading if you're like me and enjoy watching people make endless problems for themselves, but it's a much longer read depending on how far back you want to go.[3]

When someone did ask for more details, /u/Bokai responded with the essay. It was edited at least once after posting to add a short glossary of terms:

  • Shipping - Derived from "relationship." Imagining two characters being romantic. This is usually accompanied by producing fanworks that depict those characters in a romantic situation. The relationship can be canonical or not, and the fan works can be everything from PG handholding to XXX vore. (If someone ships Kylo Ren/Rey it means they like to think of them in a romantic/sexual relationship.) The pairing itself is called a ship.
  • Shipwar - When shippers of two different ships attack each other over their ships.
  • Wank - common fandom term for drama
  • Antis - People who invest energy in attacking shippers of a particular ship, and employ arguments of morality of social justice to do so.
  • Fandom in this case refers to a particular subset of fandom that is traditionally female oriented, focuses a lot of male/male pairings, and often chooses fanfiction as its primary output.
  • Topping - In gay sex, the act of penetrating your partner. Sometimes more broadly used as the one in charge during sex, regardless of logistics.

Excerpts

There are 2 big things to remember as you read this. 1) Some people are SUPER SERIOUS about fictional characters getting it on together, and 2) they will use any means at their disposal to stop people from doing it wrong. Imagine the ridiculousness of PS vs. Nintendo fanboys ratcheted up to 11 and you get an idea of how some fans approach shipping.

Generic ship wars have been happening for a very long time. If you thought Harry Potter deserved to fall in love with Draco Malfoy and Ginny was the devil you were in good company and would gather together to get those dirty Ginny fans run out of the internet. Bad actors have always been around to exploit this, either to troll, or to worm their way into popular or rarefied circles. The Ms. Scribe Story is a good example of what the old school shipwars could produce as far as wank was concerned. And in it you see the seed of what would become the modern "Anti" mentality, which is framing yourself as a victim of bigots to win sympathy points, all for the purpose of forwarding your preference of who bangs who.

This portion of fandom has always been closely linked with genre fiction, since many people in the latter are engaged in the former. Genre fiction had and still has some issues concerning race, sexism, and homophobia, which is par for the course in almost all media everywhere. In 2009 those issues came into contact with some MASSIVE WANKERS, leading to what continues to be known as Race Fail '09. A lot of people don't know this, but the term Social Justice Warrior started to pick up usage around this time, to define some very particular, very caustic people who were destroying communities by claiming the moral high ground and attacking anyone who had an opinion even slightly different from them. A few of them are listed at that link. It quickly became apparent that pointing the finger and claiming -ism! was an efficient method of silencing certain people.

Fandom, however, remained relatively insulated from this fail, which was spreading mostly in certain websites and in professional circles at the time. In '09 the internet was still relatively decentralized, and fandom was dispersed among various livejournals, archives, webforums, and so on. This limited the damage one movement could do, because just because Winterfox was shitting up one site didn't mean there was another that hadn't escaped unscathed. Enter web 2.0, and specifically, Tumblr.

As the internet began to coalesce into platforms that aimed to monopolize user engagement, the separation between communities grew more and more difficult. Before, if you wanted to see Kylo Ren and General Hux having kinky tentacle sex you went to a community specifically for that and didn't have to worry about those people who had their own community for Rey and Finn. But now, all the shippers were converging into a single pot, a pot that had no filters, no privacy functions, and actively wanted everything to be shared as widely as possible.

Another massive change that happened about this time is that the attitude towards kids in fandom had shifted. Back in the good old days a 13 year old understood that lying about their age was the price you paid to get your porn. The kids these days no longer have that mentality. They don't think twice about declaring themselves children on the internet.

Comments at the Reddit Post

[Change4Betta]: I literally cannot believe what I just read. How can people be that fucking invested in made up relationships between FICTIONAL characters. Blows my mind. Is there an anti-ship ship? Cuz call me captain.

[ClimateMom]: To be fair, the anti culture is very vocal and becoming increasingly difficult to avoid due to the design of Tumblr vs past fandom communities like LiveJournal, but it's still a relatively small portion of fandom shipping culture that is much more prominent in some fandoms than others. By and large, shippers might have their OTPs, but are too busy making/consuming fanworks about them to get into pointless fights over whose OTP is better, just like most sports fans can watch a game without getting into a fistfight with supporters of the other team. Unfortunately, there's always those few that give the rest a bad name.

[ClimateMom]: Anti culture is mostly high school and college age kids, or at least people pretending to be high school or college age kids. Personally, the age of the main perpetrators and the emphasis on "purity" makes me suspect that another contributing factor to the rise of anti culture is the abstinence-only sex education policies pushed by Bush, which were similar in being extremely sex negative and focused on purity. However, the antis have dressed what at heart are some extremely regressive ideas about human sexuality (and particularly female sexuality) up in the language of social progressivism, which conceals how regressive it is. In truth, it's little more than a modern version of all the Victorian hand-wringing about how reading novels would make women "hysterical".

[Bokai]: Do you think the lack of females involved in the depicted relationships is to reinforce that purity component since many (most?) of the authors are female?

The current surge towards purity is relatively recent and m/m shipping is old as dust, so I'm not sure I would make that connection. Many people believe that the lack of females (with many exceptions) in pairings has more to do with the characters mainstream media provides fans + a desire to avoid stereotypical romance tropes and gender roles that may come up when a pairing is heterosexual. Also, a lot of women just find man on man action hot.

If anything the prevalence of m/m ships has given some antis another line of attack. They can accuse enemies of fetishizing gay men and claim that straight women are being homophobic by depicting gay relationships in one way or another.

[ClimateMom]: my experience the fact that so many female fans love male-male sexual pairings is more often used by antis to try and shame the fans of male-male (slash) pairings, rather than to try and maintain the "purity" of the female characters.

You've actually stumbled into another long and ongoing debate within fandom that's related to anti culture but not totally overlapping. There are as many reason for shipping slash (male/male) pairings as there are slash fans, but a few common ones include:

Heterosexual women love seeing/imagining two men together for much the same reasons that heterosexual men love lesbian porn
There are typically more male characters in media (for example, there's a 2:1 ratio of male:female characters in speaking roles in movies) and they are more likely to be the protagonists and to be better developed in general, so their relationships with other male characters are often more interesting and complex than the bland and by-the-numbers heterosexual pairings presented in many canons
There is a much higher percentage of LGBT people in fandom than the general public (one survey of users of the popular fanfic archive AO3 - which is not representative of anti culture, btw - found that only 29% identified as heterosexual, compared to more than 90% in the general population) and many use fanfic as a way to add LGBT representation to their favorite stories. This isn't necessarily directly tied to their own personal identity, i.e. most lesbian fans I know prefer femslash (female/female) pairings, as you would expect, but I've also known some who wrote primarily or even exclusively male/male pairings. Bisexual and pansexual women make up a large percentage of fandom and are enthusiastic consumers of m/m slash fanworks for the same reason that heterosexual women like them.

The controversy comes in because some fans feel that heterosexual women (and to a lesser extent bisexual and pansexual women) are "fetishizing" gay men by shipping slash.

This argument was happening long before anti culture became prominent, but some antis have seized on it as another weapon in their arsenal to drum fans of the "wrong" ships out of fandom. In these cases, they'll accuse female fans of fetishizing gay men to try and shame them and drive them away from their favorite slash ships.

[TractorDriver]: There is more to fandom and SJWism. Almost every popular, mostly American, fanfiction author for Harry Potter, felt it was obligatory to solve every single social issue in Wizarding world. Emancipation of house elves, removing house rivalry, educating about equality and racism was obligatory issues to tackle to get positive reviews and readers, creating so called "fanon" i.e. axiomatically accepted rules and characterizations in between fan stories. It became much more important than what actual books said, i.e "canon".

I too believe, this is where rabid SJWs take their origin.

As shippers, f em. I still remember one good author teasing readers and not revealing on beforehand who will end up with who. The amounts of rabid name calling and rage, including false reports to the site and threats IRL, by people who couldn't stop reading because it was too good, but freaking out that they might accidentally read a ship that repulses then. They got screwed 2x when last chapter shown one pairing living slow elderly life, but at the very end revealing that the opposite pairing preceded it, her succumbing to cancer at one point - basically HIMYM...

[Soltheron]: Well, it doesn't have a disclaimer about how quickly "SJW" changed from an incredibly tiny amount of douchebags into a reactionary slur and strawman. It would be a nice detail to include.

I think it also overinflates the motivation of shipping when it has more to do with the underlying belief that under-18ers are quite incapable of agency (which is rather absolutist).

I mean, maybe it doesn't emphasize it too much if we're just talking about a small number of people, but certainly the people who think that 20 year olds and 16 year olds should never be together are not all motivated by fandom drama.

[Bokai]: Yes, SJW no longer means what it once did, and is essentially a useless term for identifying troublemakers now because it's been co-opted by reactionaries.

And yes, I'm talking about a small, loud group within a subculture taking a reasonable opinion and twisting it to suit their ends. I'm certainly not claiming that overall social norms about age differences came from shipping culture.

The challenge is separating the small kernel of truth from the way that truth is used as a weapon. The brilliance of this approach is that on its face most normal people would agree completely that younger people can be vulnerable to abuse from adults, and that adults should maintain appropriate behavior around minors, even online if they can manage it. It's only when you dig deeper that you realize that a lot of the people who were shouting this to the heavens were only doing so to tack on a, "therefore X shippers really are pedophiles," to the end of it. People who are then genuinely concerned that their behavior is abusive then go, "Oh, I should stop shipping this then if it's hurting children to do so."

[Lord Rapunzel]: Well it was always a slur. "Social Justice Warrior" was sarcastic, but then you had people going "well why shouldn't people fight for social justice?" and completely miss the point, so it sort of got co-opted into legitimate movements while still being used as a slur against people taking white-knighting to a whole new level. THEN the other side started using it as a slur to describe people fighting for legitimate causes because "racism doesn't happen any more" or knee-jerk anti-BLM bullshit and all kinds of garbage.

[Bokai]: I think the problem is that you're looking for reasoning when there isn't any. None of it makes any logical sense and a lot of it is dripping with hypocrisy. The qualification for who is being a "pedophile" changes constantly in these situations to benefit the people making the claim.

For one example there is a blogger who I will not identify due to the fact that she's disclosed mental health issues, who is 20 years old. She posts often about how terrible it is that adults are constantly making fandom dangerous for her by endorsing pedophilia, which means that they ship Shiro/Keith. She is literally positioning herself as a 20 year old child who is threatened by older people. In this environment it's very important to some people that you have the high ground, and the reasoning comes after the accusation, so suddenly 20 becomes young enough to be the victim of pedophilia. People do attack fans younger then them, but they have to take a different approach and concern troll "for the children." But in this environment if you're younger you're pure and if you're older you're dangerous, which is the thought process that led to the OP.

You have to remember that "pedophilia" does not mean to these people what it means to any normal human being. When people swear a relationship between two men in their 30s is pedophilia all bets are off.

[ZombieBiologist]: The logic these people use to justify their stance is twisted beyond all possible comprehension, but it comes from some Tumblr trends in the SJW circle - that, by having a non-X speak for X, group X is silenced and oppressed. You know how on AskReddit threads, everyone goes "Not an X but..."? That's not excusable in Tumblr circles.

Now, the pedophile argument started a dilemma - by saying possibly underage characters were not allowed to be with characters of age, younger fandom members could also no longer consume - or be encouraged to consume - fanfic, pornographic fan art, or anything relating to fandom and porn. But this got in the way of arguing for their ship - many of it's supporters are 12-16 year old girls! So, instead, the Tumblr ship police got on the train and said, "Okay, I guess their ACTUAL ages are irrelevant. What's unacceptable is the AGE GAP - and anyone can be affected by that! Therefore, 18-22 year olds are CHILDREN in comparison to 23-30 year olds - and we can speak for that! We're 18-22! Anyone younger than us is illegal and therefore wrong, and anyone older than us is a pedo and oppressing us!" Now, this logic actually spread into most fandoms on the website, and now even ships between consenting adults are policed for even being unhealthy. Yeah, that's right. Every ship also better be a healthy and good relationship so all the kids reading this porn can know what a good relationship is like. The kids that also aren't allowed to even look at content creator's work, as the "NO UNDER 18" tags on tumblr blogs' headers got more and more popular. It's doublethink is what it is. And all for porn.

Source: was on tumblr and active in many fandoms since 2012, so I witnessed this shit firsthand. The post is pretty accurate.

[hrtfthmttr]: You know what's interesting about this? It's the same argument that's been used to police pornography since forever. Just about adults limiting access for kids. But the ages have shifted, and the content, since it's fictional, has added the uncertainty of "age" of the sexualized subjects.

The wierd thing is that this argument has existed for decades, with books like Lolita. But the interest and access wasn't really available to younger generations, and wasn't porn. I'm sure there is even more to consider as Japan's sensibilities around younger sexualization met anime fandom and Western sensibilities, religious morals on the internet for Western audiences.

Jesus.

[the great tanuki]: I just want to say how completely accurate you are. I used to be part of multiple pre tumblr Fandoms and this is exactly how it was for us, we had our own little places to go to inside the site for our ships/thoughts/discussions and it was great! I could talk to anyone and we all got along, mostly.

It was weird when a new kid came along, the moment they said they liked the Fandom but weren't sure about pairings and asked for thoughts and comments it was basically war trying to win the newbie over to your side. And im guilty of that, I used to see the new fan as prey that I had to get my claws into first. As I grew i realised Fandoms couldn't all be in one place at one time. The fights were bullshit and just sucked the enjoyment out of my shows, music and books. One fan war inparticular was for an infamous Korean boy band that broke up. Fans tried to live vicariously through them and their issues and brought the band's problems upon themselves. Fans started fighting amongst themselves and split the site in half. I bailed real quick, people were turning on eachother and it was ugly.

Honestly reading through all this again does not make me miss those days but does remind me why I stay the fuck away from tumblr.

[Sempais nutrients]: It was right around this time that people everywhere realized that to become noticed you just have to be sufficiently outraged. now its a competition.

[zoaliz]: Tumblr is always so angry.

TJLC is such a fascinating mess. I checked the tljc tag when I first found out about it because I was told the drama was worth seeing, and very entertaining. And it was, but it soon became way too sad to see those people actually believing their conspiracy theories and making up new dates for their imaginary episode 4 as if they were members of a doomsday sect changing the day of the rapture (then getting angry at the comparison if someone pointed it out).

I make a point not to check Tumblr much these days. I don't want it affecting my enjoyment of things. I like the new Voltron but didn't know about the Voltron wank.

[Bokai]: I think it's important to realize that this tactic works because real and serious issues are used as part of the argument, so SJW stuff, however you like to define that, and fandom stuff feed into each other. If problems with racism in the media didn't exist, it would be harder for people to claim people are shipping things because they're racist. It's only when you realize that these arguments are being brought to bear to stop people from drawing two fictional characters holding hands that you realize something is weird. If I were to draw a venn diagram there would be a lot of overlap between "SJW" and "fandom" but it is by no means a complete circle. There are still pockets of fandom where people like to write all about gay sex but are actively homophobic towards actual gay people, but they have been a minority for a while.

[casualbongos]: I mean, theoretically, this is the standard for feminism. But tumblr has been harder and harder on the blame the victim card lately. It wasn't the abuser's fault, it was your fault for shipping Kylo Ren/Rey, you groomed yourself with this fiction and have nothing else to blame. It wasn't the p-edophile's fault, it was yours. Tumblr really has a weird bastardization of feminism. "Support feminism, but all you hags in fandom past 25 are totally gross p-edophiles! Go back to your knitting, old women!" and saying by liking fiction people cause their own abuse and rape. It's something else, that's for sure.

[Tigerfairy]: Okay, so I know you're just trying to do an overview, but what you're describing goes waaaay further back than most people realize. The first fandom wars (though not quite shipping wars) were in Star Wars communities in the early 80's, and did reach the point of death threats and very dramatic textposts. But the biggest part I'm not seeing is the shift from LiveJournal/FF.net to Tumblr/AO3. If you read or look back to mid-2000s fanfic, you'll see a whole different attitude towards this shit, with terms like "Don't Like Don't Read" (which would solve all of this, omg, why did that vanish), "Squick" being used in a way 'trigger' gets sometimes used now, etc. You'll also see a lot of disclaimers; I only got into this in around 2012, after the shift, and I was still writing "Not Mine, all characters belong to (creator)" before every single thing I posted on ff.net. There wasn't a lot of underage or noncon, and where there was, it was hidden in the depths of LJ. Why? Because content creators, most notoriously Laurell K Hamilton and Anne Rice, would sue or send cease and desist letters to big name fanauthors! There was a real check on a lot of fandom activity for a while (Homestuck excluded, it's a long story), because few people wanted to risk getting sued. You were doubly at risk if you posted something illicit, initially with m/m or f/f fics (Xena had weird legal issues too), and then for anything underage (by US standards). But eventually things calmed down, fanworks got bigger and pushed more boundaries, people stopped caring so much.

Shit hit the fan again with the LiveJournal Purge, which I think was around 2007? I wasn't online then, but I've heard about it from people who were, and here's an article about it from the time. Basically, under the name of protecting minors and cleaning up their site, LJ silently deleted and shadowbanned a bunch of fandom users, specifically those who included underage characters (Drarry got hit the hardest) and the more explicit nsfw ('lemon' or 'lime'). Lots and lots of content straight up vanished, forever, because of "pedophilia". People left in droves, and Tumblr was largely where they ended up. A few years later, ff.net pulled a similar stunt, deleting accounts and shadowbanning literally thousands of users, partially because of underage ships. In response, fans moved their forums to tumblr, and moved their fic to Archive Of Our Own (AO3), which is fancreated/supported. AO3 and its tag system specifically exists for the spirit of dldr, and so fans who moved over were able to keep whatever fucked up things they wrote in their own little enclaves, where people didn't have to see what they didn't want to. Tumblr doesn't have a great system on its own, but with the introduction of xkit, blacklisting tags and blocking "bad" users became a thing. So communities were largely able to self-segregate, and things would get bullshitty in individual groups, but antis weren't so common.

Sometime in the last five years, that changed, and I think you described it really well. I think it also comes with a really charged political climate and the whole culture around "receipts", where shit you posted at 13 can be dragged out and listed on peoples' block-lists. There are also more trolls now than before, who stir up shit that antis then use to 'callout' other users. The whole ethos of dldr has been forgotten for a lot of newer users, so you get shit like SU fans sending actual rape and death threats to Rebecca Sugar (whhhhyyy) and tljc (which was fun at first and got weird way too quickly). The very new fandoms have it the worst imo, I was in the spn fandom way too deep, and it's notorious for being batshit insane but vld has the worst antis I have ever seen and it's less than a year old! Like, I watched the show when it first came out, and within a month people were getting threats for not headcanoning Pidge as trans or like, the "wrong kind" of trans? There's some great people in it but goddamn, the antis are wild.

[Wombat Vs Car]: I know have this wonderful mental image of Tumbler as being a gigantic space battle with rival "Ships" engaging in battle for their ideology.

Comments Elsewhere

shinelikethunder replied to freedom-of-fanfic (July 2017):

This is a good writeup, but I feel the need to clarify something about pre-Racefail ‘09 fandom, and the loose web of creative and nerd communities that surrounded it: it was overwhelmingly socially liberal. The presence of reactionaries, social conservatives, and the occasional ranting right-wing nutjob was a lot more tolerated, because toleration was one of the core values of that brand of liberalism. But it was on an “as long as you more-or-less behave yourself in public” basis, and the social norms and power structures of Nerd Culture were reasonably resistant to being co-opted for conservative agendas. Because in the pre-Facebook era, one of the cardinal rules of nerd culture was “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The social norms were extremely hostile to discrimination and double-standards based on the traditional group-identity divisions–race, gender, sexual orientation, religion–because it was explicitly acknowledged that all you knew about someone’s identity status was what they told you, which might or might not be a lie.

The Achilles heel of this kind of liberalism is a kind of false equivalence between prejudice against groups that have traditionally been marked out for discrimination, and prejudice against the unmarked ‘default’ group that’s traditionally been the one discriminating. At its worst, it leads to the hostility-to-chauvinism norm kicking in against highly visible displays of minority-group membership, especially if they don’t pay adequate respect to the value of “no discrimination, not even reverse discrimination.” And because of the marked/unmarked distinction, visible-minority anything gets saddled with defusing the suspicion that it’s playing identity politics, as well as having to swim upstream against whatever unconscious biases might be at play. On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog–but what happens when you want to talk about how awesome playing fetch is in a room full of cat people?

So that’s a tension that exists within liberal social models, and a place where they were genuinely in need of reform. But it was a vast improvement on the environments most of us were coming from, and the tension wasn’t enough to break social cohesion–as long as the norm of toleration held. The one that said “you can believe any damn fool thing you want and get up to whatever ideological antics you feel like, even if I think your ideology is the cancer killing modern society–as long as you aren’t a dick to the other members of the community.”

SJ was not a reform. SJ took a flamethrower to the norm of toleration and the norm of nondiscrimination, and set up a system where social norms on a person-to-person and small-community scale were dictated by adherence to, and active participation in, a political ideology that demands that social power, credibility, and guilt be assigned based on group membership in society-wide conflicts. It’s been a decade-long slow-rolling trainwreck that devastated some portions of LJ fandom from the moment it took hold. Every new development in Tumblr fandom has come, not from perversions of SJ’s underlying logic, but from perfecting its idea of how power should be allotted and deployed, finding new and fun places to apply it to, and dragging us ever further down the slippery slope.

Gatekeeping is a reaction to the inevitable results of making power depend on marginalized-group status, then lashing out so hard against reverse-discrimination taboos that it carves out a giant zone of impunity where horrific mistreatment “doesn’t count” if it’s against majority groups. Antis are just SJ media criticism abandoning its last holdover inhibitions against categorical thinking, the last vestiges of “we’re not saying nobody can write this just that structural oppression makes it very hard not to do it Wrongly” giving up the ghost. They weren’t even the ones who obliterated the distintion between an opinion and a demand for control–that happened a long time ago.

The liberal model of the 90s to mid-00s had structural flaws on top of the inevitable conflicts that come from humans being human. But it was generally a stable system, and it led to a great flowering of internet culture and creativity. The SJ model has been unstable and destructive from its inception–it narrows possibilities instead of broadening them, lifts things up selectively and conditionally and tears them down with vicious finality. Even the art by and about marginalized groups that’s emerged since it gained dominance has been a trickle rather than a flood, produced anxiously under immense pressure to “perform” politically, constantly under fire from both the circular firing squads within SJ communities and from the reactionaries in the anti-SJ backlash. It’s not sustainable, and it’s not even fixing the problems it sold itself as the solution to.

I think if there’s a solution, it’s some kind of liberalism-with-modifications– an awareness of the marked/unmarked blind spot + a norm against double standards that accounts for skewed standards that already exist, and allows more (but not infinite) room for un-skewing them. But after the cultural devastation of the past decade, it would have to come armed to the teeth with defenses against the quasi-totalitarian factionalism that the latest generation of SJ and anti-SJ warriors have grown up with.

#tumblr 'social justice' #online communities #fandom #meta #fandom history #illiberalism

Further Reading

References

  1. ^ From /r/quityourbullshit's sidebar, accessed April 27th, 2019.
  2. ^ /u/KyleSJohnson, top-level comment replying to Not exactly what this sub is about, but still fits ( X-post r/tumblr)
  3. ^ /u/Bokai, second-level comment replying to Not exactly what this sub is about, but still fits ( X-post r/tumblr)
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