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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 factuallyincorrect, and the arguments used to vault them out of the queer community are identical to the ones used against bisexual people.
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.)
flinders st: scene children have been crying here for AT LEAST a decade & they legally own all crying rights . approach@ur own risk (unless ur a scene kid). 3/10
flagstaff: good luck getting here, good luck avoiding acu students who’ll only make u cry harder wen they remind you that THEYRE gonna ENTer the WOrk Force. extra points for isolation and proximity 2 thousands of businessmen 6/10
parliament: u can ride the endless elevators , (gently weeping) up and down for all of eternity , 9/10
southern cross: sob hysterically in a vline for the 20 minutes it sits idle before leaving to geelong BUT country ppl tend 2 be nosier and kinder than city-slickers &umay be offered a tissue. get red rooster afterwards 2 feel even worse about urself 7/10
melb central: AVOID at all costs, there WILL be metdogs and they CAN smell weakness & find a reason to fine u (public nuisance possibly) 1/10
Something else that makes me cringe? People who think they’re irregularly dark. You know the type.
“I’m not like normal girls lol I read the wikipedia page on Bundy! I’ve got such dark fascinations.” “I guess I’m such a twisted person, I watch horror movies for FUN!”. “Haha unlike other girls….I LIKE night time!” “I know who cthulu is so im basically satanic, I bet my mom would be so shocked!!!”. “I reblogged one picture of a skull, so yeah you could say I’m morbid >:3” “I’m insaaane!!! The dark depths of my soul would scare anyone”
Like come on am I the only one who gags at this stuff
tbh i really dont like it too a lot of the time but on another hand i feel like i often fall into the category lmfao
well if you think about it, it’s kind of fucked up that girls absorb this notion of what girls are supposed to be like that’s so sweet and so clean and so harmless and so pleasant, that young teens genuinely judge themselves to be crazy or freakish for their totally normal human interests in horror, crime, and monsters. it takes them until their late teens and twenties to have the maturity and self-confidence to realize that these are normal human interests that lots of other women share.
That kind of self-perception and social presentation as “lol dark XD” probably comes from someone who’s been bullied and ostracized for being a bit weird and wants to head off the rejection as soon as possible It’s an attempt to make friends who won’t provide that experience of rejection, by warning away anyone who would police that kind of shit.
To me it’s a sign that they haven’t found a community they feel safe in.
Back when I taught beginner swordplay for a medieval re-enactment group, I had a lot of girls come in and try that on me–“I’m a freak and I’m into really weird stuff, people get grossed out by me.” “I’m kind of insane, don’t talk to me unless you want to damage your brain.” “I’m actually kind of into some violent things.”
The best part of doing that was treating them like totally ordinary people–”You’re into weird stuff? That’s a Ranma t-shirt, do you mean anime?” ”Oh, you’re insane? I’m mentally ill myself. I take meds for depression and anxiety, and it’s why I’m studying to be a psychologist.” “Yeah, it’s pretty normal around here to collect replica weapons. They’re really pretty, but I prefer to spend my money on less-showy sport versions that I can use in actual combat.”
You could see the defensive awkward grins melt off them, the anxious self-conscious fidgeting flow out of their bodies and onto the floor, as they suddenly started standing straighter, planting their feet firmer, meeting my eyes more, flinching less when they landed their swords on me. They stopped self-deprecating around me, started more confidently stating their preferences and sharing their personalities as something more nuanced than “you’ll probably dislike it.”
So sometimes I cringe a little when I meet a lol!edgy person, but mostly I feel bad because it means they probably haven’t found a safe group of people to shelter in.
