Anonymous asked: Is it me or is the anti movement... really american? We have that stereotype over here that americans are super uptight about sex and super shy about it and obsessed with purity and hiding it from the children and stuff. Idk as a european it always striked me as a product of american culture
it’s very, very American. While there are certainly antis who aren’t American, many of them are.
I have a lot of theories as to why this is, but a lot of them are covered in this post: anti-shipping as the cool new trend (while it’s mostly about the age bracket of anti-shippers as of June 2017 (this time last year), it’s an americentric post talking almost entirely about US phenomena).
tl;dr version? anti-shipping is:
the natural result of growing up both LGBT+/queer and marinated in American-flavored Puritan Christianity/purity culture
with a side order of valuing safety over freedom
b/c you’ve always had freedom of information
but you’ve never known a sense of security
thanks to lifelong internet access
paired with post-9/11 paranoia.
add a dash of radical feminism/exclusionist thinking
never being taught how to think critically, and
zero education on sex of any kind, and
viola: anti-shippers.
someone* added these tags to their reblog of this post, which, uh: this is literally the basic, standard fandom anti-shipper position on ships.
Whether you call yourself an ‘anti’ or not, this is precisely what a fandom anti does: ‘throw down’ if they think someone’s ships are ‘abusive’, ‘pedophilia’, or ‘incest’ (generally with widely expanded definitions, hence the scare quotes).
it’s a pretty solid example of how this works, though:
tag op is 21: too young to remember a world before 9/11 happened or remember a world without internet access
tag op’s strong feelings about fictional ships suggests they flatten fiction and reality to equal levels of potential danger: classic black & white thinking structure that is strongly encouraged by American Protestant Christianity
tag op didn’t read this post with self-awareness and/or application of critical thought, much less click the link that the tl;dr list references
tag op feels justified in limiting other people’s freedom to use fictional ships to explore certain social/romantic/sexual dynamics, threatening to throw down over it.
this is because those social/romantic/sexual dynamics are not safe or healthy in real life.
even though ships are fictional, the safety of censorship is more important than freedom of expression or thought.
the concern is always about ships/sex fantasies: never violence/fantasies about harming others. this is the combined effect of purity culture and radical feminism in a society that glorifies and normalizes violence.
tag op will fight you for bad ships, because it is okay to fantasize about fighting people but not okay to fantasize about unhealthy fictional relationships
Anyway.
I have a lot of sympathy for antis because I think their lives often set them up to favor censorship and abhor education-as-inoculation, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re being jerks to fellow fans on the basis of assuming things about the core of their person because of what they ship.
fandom policing of this sort is assumptive, presumptive, and deeply damaging, both to the victims of anti-shipper cyberbullying and the anti-shippers themselves, who are encouraged in this abusive cycle hellhole behavior by emotional manipulation and coercion.
(I want to end this with a joke about how American this is, but assholes are everywhere tbh. Americans are just especially susceptible to the thinking patterns established by fandom antis at this precise moment in history because of the factors listed above.)
*if you figure out who it is, kindly be a decent person and leave them the hell alone.
To take this the next step which is to say, why does this matter? There’s a phrase that’s hovering at the tip of my tongue, can’t quite remember it, but it’s a word that basically means “a culturally specific passcode.” (Ed. I looked it up – it’s “shibboleth”.) A thing that members of the community will use to challenge you on your authenticity, to verify your right to be in that community, with the specific implication that this kind of verification is essential for keeping the community safe. The classic example is that of an American brigade in the European theater in World War II, suspecting the presence of a German spy, remorselessly interrogating a new recruit about World Series baseball scores. Because of course, any TRUE American would know everything about baseball scores! – and no non-American would, so if someone fails this test you are righteous and justified in declaring them The Enemy.
The overt, performative denunciation of Bad Content has become the “shibboleth” for modern fandom, as managed by the increasing influence of antis. Why is that every time one of these posts come around people so inescapably feel the need to add “but of course I don’t condone the pedo stuff” to their reblogs? Do they have reason to assume that pedophiles are so universal and normative that any reasonable person would assume they were, unless they explicitly state otherwise? Of course not – it’s a passcode. A performance of cultural acceptability.
And as the anti movement is hugely American, that means that the passcodes and rituals are also firmly based in American culture. Why all the focus on who is and isn’t eighteen? That’s the age of legal adulthood in America. There’s no magical transition in America where you go to bed on the eve of your 18th birthday an infant and wake up the next day magically transformed into an adult, any more than this same metamorphosis occurs at 16 in the UK, or at 20 in Japan. Concepts like the age of adulthood are entirely arbitrary and culturally defined – but the only acceptable metric, among antis, is the American one.
All the other Unacceptables are equally foggy as soon as you step outside the USA boundaries. Are relationships between adopted siblings considered incest? What about non-blood related people raised in the same creche? Childhood friends? Step-siblings? Classmates? Second or twice-removed cousins? Ancestors or descendants? Different cultures don’t all answer these things the same ways (nor is there any reason that they should,) and that murkiness provides plenty of foothold to launch an attack from, when someone else is shipping in a way that Just Doesn’t Seem Right to you.
Anyway, a lot of this goes under the surface. Many antis don’t even realize how inherently American their anti-ness is, and how much of their opposition to Bad Fan Content is rooted in opposition to non-Americanness, because very little of this happens out in the open. They don’t say to themselves, “American culture and ideals are better than any others, and anyone who fails to adhere to those must be punished,” – instead it gets sublimated into passphrases and rituals, little things you do to signal that you are one of the Good Ones, you are Doing Fandom Correctly. And outsiders who don’t know the correct passphrases and don’t perform the right rituals aren’t just newcomers or people with different cultures – they’re abuse apologists and pedos and predators. Outsiders against whom the community must be defended, even if it comes to a fight.
@mikkeneko ’s addition is wonderfully astute, as usual.
this post has had more than one addition from anti-shippers with various objections, and I’d like to make a few additions to address some things not clearly laid out above.
before anti-shippers nicknamed themselves 'antis’, fandom generally referred to people who shit-stirred over fictional ships they didn’t like as 'rabid shippers’ (b/c they usually loved a different, rival ship) or 'fandom police’ and called the shit-stirring 'fandom wank’.
Secondly: fandom anti-shippers focus most of their energy on policing FICTIONAL CONTENT - fanworks and fanwork creators in particular - by 'whatever means necessary’.
They also frequently smear anyone who argues with them as a 'pedophile’. (raise your hand if being called a pedophile over and over again for arguing that nobody deserves to be sent death threats for their fictional content makes you throw up in your mouth a little every time!)
Finally: fandom anti-shippers constantly dismiss and steamroll input from non-Western (particularly non-American) fans regarding anything they dislike in fandom, even if the creators/content aren’t Western/American.
other examples include: getting into arguments with fans over what constitutes statutory rape when the age of consent is different in different cultures*, claiming that first cousins getting married is 'incest’ even when the source culture has no issue with first cousins getting married, or arguing that various traditional romance practices unfamiliar to American/Western cultures are 'gross’ and therefore harmful/abusive.
*there’s nuanced arguments to be made about what’s the appropriate age of consent, etc, but let’s be real: we Americans are hardly in a position to judge or police other nations.
In conclusion: Besides the contentions I make in the OP about how anti-shipping culture is shaped by a very American crucible of thought, the imperialist behavior of anti-shippers:
the 'our moral standards are the Only REAL Moral Standards’ thing, and
the 'we know your own words better than you’ thing,
“i don’t want you to be with me, ben,” his father is saying now. “not for a long time, anyway. i want you to live; i want you to want to live, understand me?” — excerpt from:strike me down, chapter seventeen.
