I really think that antishipping is a movement that’s gaining ground with the younger & newer arrivals to fandom spaces; a kind of ‘cool trend’, so to speak. In aggregate, antishipping culture is beautifully constructed to be particularly appealing to teenage or college-age people – and especially American people – who are marginalized, oppressed, often social outcasts in real life and often under-educated about their own marginalized identity, and I kind of wanted to get into why.
the other day I posted to talk a little about why I think antis tend to be young (and American). To sum up & simultaneously add a little more:
- a brain still growing – until the age of 22-25, the frontal lobe of the brain does not finish development. the frontal lobe handles higher reasoning skills and complex problem-solving. Thus: the growing mind is particularly prone to incomplete reasoning, black and white thinking, and total empathy failure, making it hard for those under 25 to fully comprehend the impact of their actions, sympathize with others, or tackle social problems with nuance. Truly comprehending that others come from entirely different worldviews or have entirely different experiences and that being different doesn’t make them wrong and that most deep-seated problems need complex solutions that require nuance tends to come with this final brain growth. (Not always, of course. but often.)
- current American sex education being mostly scaremongering and abstinence-only + ready availability of sexual content, specifically pornographic material, online + hypersexual marketing = a deeply fucked cultural understanding of sex that adolescents are particularly unequipped to detangle
- escaping religious/Christian fundamentalist tenets but not their mindset: for a religion supposedly based on forgiveness, organized Christianity is not very forgiving. Everyone is a sinner & a single sin is enough to doom you to eternal hellfire, if you don’t do the right thing you’ll face Judgement in heaven/your salvation is always uncertain, and sinners must be cast out from your midst: the moral/communal purity that organized Christianity often demands can take years to deprogram (and this is not to mention the gender essentialism, homophobia/queerphobia, and anti-sex/anti-kink messages, accompanied by a strong undercurrent of anti-intellectualism to discourage self-education on these subjects!) teens just breaking away from this toxicity are especially unequipped to untangle themselves & tend to take the same purity standards with them to a more liberal cause instead (such as enforcing ‘social justice’ in shipping), with a side-order of internalized, unexamined anti-lgbt/sex/kink/etc rhetoric that dovetails rather neatly with exclusionist rhetoric.
- exclusionary gatekeeping as baby’s first lgbt/queer culture lesson – transformative fandom is a frequent haven for marginalized people who don’t see themselves in the media they consume (so they change the media to meet their emotional, sexual, social, etc needs, you see?). because it’s not taught in schools here in the US, it’s not too uncommon for newcomers to get their first big dose of history and cultural education that’s not centered around straight white men in fandom. but what are they learning? here on tumblr, since about 2013, exclusionists have used the relative lack of education on queer history to build an false history, one where the gender binary is strongly enforced and sexualities can only exist on the binary axis: nb/queer/ace/pan and sometimes even bi and trans -identifying people are erased or ‘not oppressed enough’. this history is the one that young entrants into fandom are more likely to encounter first and have no knowledge with which to counter it. Antishipping derives its mode of operation and principle values from exclusionists. It dictates who can write or do what based on their sexual/gender identity (and sometimes race as well). Its definition of social justice is also heavily influenced by exclusionists because its members are mostly young people who learned all their queer history from exclusionists.
- the particularly adolescent vulnerability to peer pressure (the need to belong & the fear of being ostracized): teens are particularly inclined to be influenced by friendships and maintaining social ties. antishipping is a highly cohesive, insular culture with enforced rules of conduct, striking clear in/out lines & engaging heavily in use of peer pressure. antishippers are encouraged to break ties with those who don’t conform to their rules of conduct, so existing friends are pressured to become antishippers themselves or risk losing their friendsgroup. once ‘in’, friends will abandon you for not keeping the party line & persecution of outsiders is encouraged, further strengthening the need to conform.
to stop antishipping is to lose your entire social media community/support structure and potentially endure a hate-mob of your former associates. In other words: it’s easy to become an anti in order to keep your friends and almost impossible to quit without losing everything, and teens are especially vulnerable to this kind of social structure.
- having a just cause & a space to control: adolescence is a time of particular powerlessness as decreased monitoring expands your horizons rapidly but your ability to affect the problems you see (usually) doesn’t. antishipping rests its laurels on a(n incomplete, corrupted) form of social justice/righting the wrongs of the privileged. being an anti feels like making a difference b/c your actions have visible impact on your immediate surroundings. (and having a space you feel you can control can be even more urgent with additional pressures like abusive home situations, past traumatic experiences, academic pressure, untreated/unrecognized mental illness, being forced into the closet b/c of queer/transphobia, etc.)
- an American (and to a lesser degree, western European) post 9/11 cultural shift from prioritizing personal freedom to prioritizing communal safety; those under the age of 20 were 3 or younger or not yet born when the shift happened. antishipping prioritizes communal ‘safety’ (‘bad’, ‘dangerous’, or ‘inappropriate’ things must never be mentioned to protect people from hearing about them and being either corrupted or harmed) over personal freedom (allowing ‘bad’/’dangerous’ things to be discussed, and it is up to the individual to personally decide what content to avoid).
of course, all of this is conjecture based on my own experiences and observations, and it’s not a set of rules – just circumstances that I believe absolutely encourage young fandom members to end up falling headfirst into antishipping and either never notice how hurtful it is or never get the courage to leave it behind. And I think there’s a lot more the popularity/prevalence of antishipping today, but this post is already longer than I meant it to be.
(I always go light on racism when i talk about antishipping because while antis frequently accuse shippers of racism, it’s disingenuous to class racism as the same kind of oppression as lgbt+-phobia & misogyny, particularly in America – they’re related, but not the same. Centering non-white (and especially black) voices does not get the same focus as centering lgbt and women’s voices in fandom, and I think it’s easy to dismiss legitimate charges of racism as ‘anti bullshit’ when we class all these types of marginalization together.)
added some sources to the original post. I figured if I was going to make this many assertions, I should provide at least a few links.
Yeah, let’s not include aces in with the actual LGBT people, given how disgustingly homophobic (as well as misogynist) ace Tumblr is, and how it deliberately distorts LGBT history to invite itself into a community it despises. “Reactionary exclusive gatekeeping” my fucking ass.
Also, while LGBT issues definitely get more focus in fandom than racism does, the bunch who came up with the term “klandom” for people who ship, say, Steve/Bucky instead of Steve/Sam and who rail against Rey for “taking the focus off” their pweshus cinnamon roll Finn are antis pure and simple. Nobody is obliged to ship anyone they don’t want to.
I like how out of everything in this post you honed in on the mention of ace identities as being part of the LGBT community and decided to take that apart – a passing, brief mention in conjunction with a lot of other identities – and following it immediately with taking my closing comment about racism in bad faith. I mean, if that alone doesn’t speak about your priorities …
Anyway, I guess it’s time to play Oppression Olympics because we’re all so fond of it.
That’s a beautiful example of respectability politics you’ve engaged there – the argument that unless a group behaves ‘correctly’, they don’t deserve protection or recognition. Let’s not decide who is and isn’t ‘actual LGBT people’ based on how some people in a group behave as if their behavior has any relationship to how straight and cis they are. This is the same argument that antis (and exclusionists) use to decide who they listen to: you’re not a ‘real’ survivor/gay person/mentally ill person/whatever-the-fuck unless you behave the way they want you to. It’s also been used to oppress pretty much all marginalized groups throughout history.
Is the person you linked being disgusting? yes. Are there many ace people on tumblr who say disgusting things? also yes. Should they be called out and stop being assholes? Fuck yes! Does that mean that all ace people are magically no longer ace? no, that’s absurd, and your argument is idiotic.
This continuous insistence that ace people are indistinguishable from straight people and experience minimal social difficulties or discrimination, and never belonged to the queer community before is factually incorrect, and the arguments used to vault them out of the queer community are identical to the ones used against bisexual people.
I enjoyed your second link immensely – I’d recommend everyone read it, especially to get a nice clear picture of how trans people were (and continue to be) misunderstood even within the community, how people whose identity didn’t exactly fall in the Major 4 were still largely invisible, and how bisexuality used to (and still does) only ‘count’ if you’re in a wlw/mlm relationship. (and how this guy has completely forgotten that queer went through an intense reclamation process in America in the 80′s/90′s and went on to be used in a mainstream way to refer to the community as a whole for the last 15-20 years or so.) It’s great to see the perspective of a gay man who lived a lot of that history, because it’s pretty different from the views of people who were in the community but still invisible – it’s a viewpoint that doesn’t get enough discussion on tumblr.
So: let’s not with the ‘who belongs here’ gatekeeping rhetoric, please? But hey, fail-fandomanon (from which you hail) harbors a solid community of biphobic lesbians, TERFs, and ace-exclusionists, so your position is not a surprise!
(For the record, I enjoy fail-fandomanon a lot and have enjoyed a lot of your posts here on tumblr, but this is a point on which we’re just not going to agree anytime soon.)
To your second point: of course there are antis that misuse accusations of racism to discredit people who ship things they don’t approve of, but let’s be real: fandom has a racism problem. There’s absolutely a bias towards shipping white characters over POC (especially black) characters. And who can wonder? it’s almost like there’s a lengthy American history of being really fucking gross to POC and thinking of non-white bodies in oversexualizing or desexualizing or stereotypical ways. (This problem gets aggravated by anti-shipping applying pressure to fandom and raising the stakes of criticism to insane levels for everyone, but it would exist even if antis weren’t here making it worse.)
in conclusion: There’s value to making the effort to deprogram your brain in light of white bias in media, but that’s not the same thing as making people ship things they don’t want to.
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