Month: March 2017

angryjerkandstrawboy:

ethereumwinds:

fun fact about the next avengers film being filmed in edinburgh: they’ve blocked off certain areas which is disrupting one specific postal van’s delivery route which is in turn leading to an awkward stand-off at the police station because Marvel Studios might be a billion dollar company but this man really wants to do his job and apparently interfering with the course of the Royal Mail technically counts as treason so they’re at a stalemate

this is the best thing i’ve heard all day

roachpatrol:

arashi-of-ota:

buckyballbearing:

I had the lightning rod realization why The Discourse about fiction feels so alien to me

It’s because 99% of the arguments boil down to denying an individual’s agency

Fiction is one of the safest ways to exercise your right to choose – especially fanfic, which comes with an entire culture of tagging and content warning etiquette

If you go seeking fanfic on AO3, you can try new things with a fairly good understanding of what you’re getting yourself into

And if you get in over your head – you can close the window and walk away with no regrets

No real people were hurt in the production of words on a page – you aren’t sitting there thinking “gosh, I hope those people in this YouTube video survived that fall”

Fiction gives you the right to try on all kinds of ideas

Which is why I get so indignant when I see stuff like “XYZ content could be bad for some people, therefore it shouldn’t exist”

Or “what if minors clicked on porn for ABC fandom uwu”

The truth is, you have agency

My god, but you have agency

If you are old enough to be poking around these sites without parental supervision, you are old enough to start reading the warning labels on what you consume

And if that isn’t true for you? Then ask someone in your real life for help

(I have some pals who do ask me to screen fics for things that might trigger them)

But seriously, with fiction, you can choose what to access, and learn (in private) what you can handle

Don’t let anyone take your power

antis straight up don’t believe that people have agency. or at least, not agency enough to cancel out the other things that they believe have power over us.

they’re rooted in the same politics that gave us terfs/swerfs, aka radical feminism, which believes among other things that women can’t make free choices under patriarchy – like the choice to do sex work or engage in kink or any number of other things. the reasons women give for doing these things aren’t real reasons, the only reason they do them is because patriarchy has manipulated and brainwashed them into thinking these are acceptable things to do. it’s a “feminism” founded on the idea that most women (except the radfems themselves, of course) are not real agents.

hence the transphobia – because being a woman isn’t about how you feel, only about whether you were assigned in childhood to a particular sex-based second class

hence the biphobia – because bi is a “lesser” kind of gay, because it taints the true equality of gay relationships with imbalanced man/woman ones, which are always inherently coercive towards the woman because the man has all the power

hence the hate of kink, of stories with cruel or abusive themes, because if you like that sort of thing you can’t be trusted to know your own mind. at best you’re participating in your own oppression, mindlessly acting out the desires of a bunch of old white men circlejerking it to your humiliation. at worst, you’re a traitor who’s enabling and encouraging our pedophilic anti-woman overlords, the creators of all cruelty, without which we’d live in a lesbian separatist paradise with no war or suffering.

it can never be just because you find something valuable in reading about weird shit – the only people who could do that without gagging are oppresor menz or brainwashed women. (nb people don’t really fit in here, so they’re ignored.) try on ideas? but some of those ideas are Dangerous, Corrupting, Objectively Sick, and it’s our job to keep you away from them. there are some thoughts that are too awful to ever be admitted into your head, even for a moment, because they’ll change you.

i mean, this sounds like a stretch, but the more i read the more i see it all fit together. it might not be what people consciously believe, but it’s what created this radical exclusionary politics.

ironically, women believing that their only power is to control other women both arises from and perpetuates a toxic patriarchy.  

shitiseeontwitter:

i love this