I keep seeing people (both profic/profship and anti) lately making the point that “not all antis are pro-harrassment and not all proshippers are anti-harrassment”, with some antis even making conciliatory statements about how horrible it is that proshippers get harassed even though their content is till wrongbad etc. I want to reply that by asserting that fiction can be the direct cause of real world harms these “less extreme” antis are still knowingly spreading rhetoric that justifies the beliefs of those who *will* act upon that ideology with harmful behaviors against proshippers due to what the harassers perceive to be preventing the greater harm for the greater good.However, I worry that this argument has an inherent weakness that could be claimed as contradictory on my part; that by implicating “anti-harrassment antis” to some extent for the behavior of “pro-harassment antis,” I am ironically making a similar assertion to the very one antis use to argue that profic/proship folks are responsible for contributing some nebulous cultural environment that leads to the crimes/social ills the antis are railing against.I feel I may be losing some nuance here in the discussion and am trying to reach clarity. Maybe I’m just overthinking it.
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I wish my internet weren’t down and I were on a real keyboard.
Briefly, magical thinking and being anti science are dangerous above and beyond whether anti harassment antis contribute to harassers. “Your rape fantasies mean you’re sick” is a message that causes active harm to huge numbers of people all on its own. That shit normalizes the pathologizing of perfectly commonplace and unremarkable human thought patterns.
Discussion ¬