the way repression works

front, everyone saying just don't participate, that's what i'm doing, but i'm pointing out what's going on, this is anti culture, this is censorship, this is the death of free expression, this is fear

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I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen this all before.

Let’s go back to my time in an elite boarding school in Britain. I went there as an exchange student, after my senior year of high school. I was in the Upper Sixth form, and the girls in lower forms wore uniforms, but L6 and U6 didn’t have uniforms. We were expected, instead, to adhere to a dress code.

It said “professional attire”, and said “nothing too casual”, and was very clearly open to interpretation. When in doubt, they said, go to one’s house warden, and present yourself, and she would decide whether your outfit was suitable.

That’s all well and good if you’re wealthy, but I was not particularly wealthy, and had come with a very small baggage allowance. I bought myself a pair of trousers, which were quite expensive and that I thought looked quite smart, only to find that the house warden considered them unsuitable. I could not return them, and was stuck with a pair of trousers I could not wear, and no funds or opportunity to replace them.

I loaned them to a friend, who was thinner than I was. (I was and am quite fat.) On her, they were looser. On her, they passed muster; she could wear them to classes. She even asked specifically, and the house warden approved them.

The problem was not the trousers. The problem was my body. But the problem was mine, either way. I saw similar issues with the very few non-white girls at the school; they were held to much higher standards of dress than the white girls. The fat girls, the brown girls, the gender non-conforming girls, all of us together had to spend extra time and money on our appearances not to get caught up in the subjective enforcement of the dress code that got us harassed by the various authority figures. I spent most of that year in an ugly blazer and a midcalf skirt I hated but that teachers didn’t look at. (And, oh yes, when I started having an affair with another female student, the scrutiny intensified, and I was almost expelled. Fat, foreign, and queer wasn’t a good combo for getting left alone.)

Before you think, this old granny is ranting, understand that I am talking about censorship. This is how censorship works. It suppresses deviance. And it may seem straightforward what deviance is, but anytime it’s subjective, it is not straightforward. And the very idea that all content has to pass through some filter before it is presented, that’s censorship. That everything must be subject to controlling decisions? that’s censorship.

“I know it when I see it,” the censor says. And then where does he look? He looks at the outspoken. He looks at the nonconforming. He looks at the “troublemakers”. He looks at the outliers. He looks at the ones that don’t look like him, and don’t talk like him, and don’t think like him.

The ones who are like him, he lets slide. “They don’t mean it like that,” he says. “They mean well.”

No graphic depictions, it says. Nothing hard. Nothing too dirty. What does that mean? What does it ever mean?

It means, nothing I don’t like. It means it’s not up to you. It means Only things I think acceptable. It means accept control. It means conform and be nice to us, and we’ll let you do what you want, provided you stay Acceptable.

It means I don’t participate in any exchanges or events with subjective content limits. It means if it’s not for everybody it’s not for me.

It means, yeah, probably I could be acceptable, probably my stuff wouldn’t trip their subjective filters because I have Acceptable tastes, but I know what it’s like to be marginalized and I’m not going to trade on my passability to leave my marginalized compatriots in the cold. (Your picture was not posted)

dsudis:bigsoftbison:more girls need horns. demon horns, satyr horns, lil antlers, whatever. this...

lil bleater content queued up for when i got to writing this thing

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dsudis https://dsudis.tumblr.com/post/639429206522150912:

bigsoftbison https://bigsoftbison.tumblr.com/post/637359420053094400:

more girls need horns. demon horns, satyr horns, lil antlers, whatever. this post is self-explanatory (Your picture was not posted)

some-stars:some-stars:i think a lot of people—espe

my god it's so important to remove individual tastes from policy

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some-stars https://some-stars.tumblr.com/post/639493636667621377:

some-stars https://some-stars.tumblr.com/post/639491912099938304:

i think a lot of people—especially maybe people who weren’t in fandom before ~2015–haven’t seen/don’t understand the EXTREME chilling effect antis can have on a fandom. ive seen entire huge fandoms ruined and deserted because of anti shit. you have to nip it in the bud!!

also, as an addendum, i think a lot of people don’t understand what “harassment” is and is not, although antis are very good at it indeed. firm but civil disagreement in one’s own space: not harassment! (Your picture was not posted)

No need to reply if you don't want to. I just wanted to express my support for boycotting censored f

eskel big bang, there did not have to be wank about this but here we are

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I didn’t even intend this to be a crusade or boycott or anything, I was just truly horrified and dismayed by the fact that there seems to be this new idea in fandom that heavy, subjective censorship is the default way to be inclusive.

Like, that’s the worst part– the EBB people seem to genuinely think I and those who agree with me are on this weird crusade to force them to look at our trash. I’ve honestly had overwhelmingly positive responses but the occasional outliers are just frothing about the– here’s the thing, I chose to summarize my fic to make it clear what kind of content I wanted to create, which I was fairly certain was what that exchange was actually looking for (I am not a darkfic or trashfic writer! No shade, that’s just not what I do), and the responses are like “ew her gross scat rape fic” and that is so clearly something they’re bringing with them to this, and I don’t know where they got it.

(Genuinely, I know some trashfic writers– I’d fallen out of touch! 2020′s been dark! I don’t even read that stuff lately! but in these dark times we need to rekindle connections sometimes– and I can’t think of a single one who’s into writing scat. It’s a weird, weird fixation, which does not originate within the trashfic community, I promise you.)

There is this wide, deep movement within our culture in general and fannish culture specifially that is wildly pro-censorship. It’s a kind of Purity Culture creep that’s startling, to those of us who’ve been here a while, and is just the latest wave of the Strikethrough bullshit. What’s stunning is how deeply mired within fannish spaces it has become; all kinds of people I’d blithely assumed were generally common-sensical are up in arms over this and are clearly not reacting to what’s actually been said, but what it’s said has been said, which–

I don’t even know who the mods of the EBB are? I don’t hang out on Discord servers generally and that seems to be where the younger set does its wheeling and dealing, though I’m not sure even of that. I only know what’s been publicly posted on Tumblr and even that, only what’s been reblogged into my sphere, so I have no idea who’s actually said what, but as far as I can tell, the drama is entirely that they feel attacked by this.

I’m not attacking anyone. I wrote that entire post inwardly-directed; I feel excluded, I am sad to be excluded, I am upset at this bizarre trend. I didn’t want to attack anyone, and I’m not even interested in drama.

But I definitely felt that if we can’t put our feet down against pointless self-censorship (don’t like don’t read is a phrase as old as fandom and if we lose that we lose ourselves) in an extremely adult-oriented fandom, then we’ve lost the beachhead entirely.

Censorship is NOT normal. It is NOT normal and no, not everyone’s going to just “know what you mean” when you say “no dead dove”. (IIRC Dead Dove actually really just means “tagged thoroughly and accurately”, though my source on that is, you know, watching the meme develop, so maybe The Kids use it differently now, but I do feel like the original meaning’s kind of important.) No, appealing directly to the mods to review every story concept is not sustainable or fair or NORMAL it is NOT NORMAL. That is not how ANYTHING works. That is a new change.

It’s a slippery slope, and I genuinely don’t want to hurt people’s feelings about it but oh my GOD no. This is an 18+ canon, and you cannot POSSIBLY run a general-interest event that you censor MORE STRICTLY THAN CANON and then have the absolute blind nerve to say this is “for inclusivity”. (Your picture was not posted)

I find the EBB thing really... full-on anti rethoric trying to sneak into it at last minute. "We're

censorship, the witcher, Anonymous

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It is anti rhetoric. And it goes deeper than I’d expected.

See, I did try to reach out for clarification, and it was ignored. I poked around and asked other people if they knew what the hell was going on, and I never could get any good answer. The event had been announced long before, signups were already happening– this sudden content-restriction thing seemed to come out of nowhere. And any questions they didn’t ignore were answered as though they were asked in bad faith, and in ways that contradicted one another. (It does not engender faith in a subjective moderation process when a mod decides to clarify a policy by deleting an earlier statement rather than editing that original post to reflect the update? It also does not engender faith when each successive clarification was less clear than the last. It super does not engender faith when the list of things is so clearly not well-researched and kind of random (genuinely, tell me, how many vore fics are there in the Witcher fandom? I’d expect there’d be a bunch but was startled to find that’s not the case), and when it repeatedly comes down to “well you just have to ask about your specific thing”. I’m sorry, you want me to invest how much of my time into this project, and then beg for approval??? from people who take any pointed questioning as a personal attack?? I would not do this professionally, and I will not do this for free.)

Now that several of us, not satisfied with what few answers were forthcoming, made our own posts saying “well, if that’s how this is going to go, then we can’t participate”, the response has overwhelmingly been absolute fury. I’ve only had one or two asks (well, besides all these supportive ones) that seemed to be trying to be helpful– one of them was very faux-cheerful, and hinged on the premise that of the banned topics, it was only graphic depictions of them that were banned. Which was not what had been stated, and also, who tf decides what’s graphic, when this canon includes so much dark stuff in the original source?? The next clarification https://eskelbigbang.tumblr.com/post/639419406775140352/hello-we-have-decided-to-turn-off-anonymous was inconsistent (underage, for example, was listed both under “not graphically” and also “not at all”, but as separate entries), no more detailed (still no explanation of what counts as “graphic”?) and contained a furious insistence that people were “spreading misinformation”. This complete inability to take any kind of criticism– there’s no avenue that would have been acceptable, there, private or public, private are “harassment” and public is “spreading disinformation”– that’s an anti thing. Nobody there wants a conversation.

The fact that those of us who objected have been furiously told to “start our own event” and now that another, inclusive event was announced, there’s been a campaign of bad-faith asks and DMs very clearly trying to bait the exchange mod into some kind of answer they can do something with– yeah they don’t actually want anyone to make their own event, there. That’s an anti thing. They don’t want this kind of content to exist anywhere.

One of the angry reblogs https://in-love-with-writing002.tumblr.com/post/639430711276945408/an-update-on-the-aro-eskel-fic-progress to my post (don’t read that if you aren’t prepared for complete incoherence) was just FURIOUS that I would WRITE such a thing. “Don’t get preachy on your fucking blog!” they said, in a tag. How dare I write about this in my own space. There is no space where it would be acceptable for me to discuss this, in their own words– questioning them gets dismissed as “snark” or “attacks”, talking about it in my own space is “spreading misinformation” and also “attacks”–

Because that’s how antis work. There is no dissent that is allowed. You cannot, cannot deviate from the narrow path set, there. It’s a fucking cult, you guys.

I’m not angry at them, I’m terrified, for them. It can destroy people’s lives and ability to cope with reality, getting sucked into things like that.

The vast, vast majority of responses I’m seeing are agreeing with me, but the ones that aren’t are really chilling.

I do feel terrible for the mods; at least one of them certainly had no idea what they were getting into. But that’s the problem with anti stuff– since no dissent is tolerated, there’s no way to gently warn them, or pry them out of it. Once there’s a toehold, there’s no longer room for dissent.

My biggest regret is that one of the big anti recruiting techniques is grooming, and just like the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses sending young members out to recruit is designed to teach them that the world is hard and cruel, this kind of dismayed and respectful disagreement being so aggressively framed as an “attack” is only entrenching them further within the anti culture.

But I can’t save them, from here. All I can do is make sure that this bizarre misguided “think of the children!” culture doesn’t get further normalized.

(please note that the EBB DOES allow explicit sexual content, which apparently is fine to show to children? like somehow the FBI or the FCC or idk the USDA, whoever they think cares about this, is going to be super chill with your vanilla gaslighting soft domestic abuse E-rated smutfic [allowed, by their rules] and not with, idk, M-rated fantasy fireplay [Not Allowed unless maybe you’re a friend of the mod and can convince them it’s not “too graphic”].) (Your picture was not posted)