#about any given topic essays are so fucking easy to me it's scary

[psalmsofpsychosis]

Me: i'm so uninspired :( i can't write for shit :( :(

Also Me: *casually writes a 5 page essay in 5 minutes on Eastern minimalism vs. Western minimalism after watching Jacob Geller's video essay on Heizer's "City" *

[itsfrenchfornothankyou]

okay so you said genuine question and im not from around here but i do have an answer! so you've unlocked an unskippable cutscene!

this is a much bigger topic than it appears on the surface, and i might be able to answer your question succinctly and briefly, but it would miss out on a lot of the stuff happening behind the scenes which is actually very important!

since this is going to be quite long (I did a rough notes on my thoughts and what i might say and it was almost 1k. so.) i am going to put the rest under a readmore

but now that you've clicked the button and commited, let's break this into parts for both our sakes.

part 1: moral purity and the loss of 'squick'

so there's been a fun phenomenon happening lately online, and it's the idea that you can assign morals by the type of things that someone likes. that the act of enjoying something or disliking something is an inherently moral act.

this in itself has a lot of reasons behind it, and digging through that history would be an essay in its own right, so im going to glaze over it. but the current state of affairs is that your own personal taste, be it in media, in people, or yes, sexual thoughts (even ones without actions) are in themselves, moral.

no matter the cause of these feelings, the outcome is this: if you find yourself liking or disliking something, there must be some reason behind it. if you find yourself grossed out by something, there is a moral and justifyable reason behind it.

this is, to me, related to the loss of the idea of a 'squick'; something that just grossed you out. 'squicks' didnt have to be triggers, they didnt have to be evil or harming you, they were a preference about something you just personally did not like.

now however, along with other terms, we have lost the idea of a 'squick' and so if you don't like something there must be a reason this thing is evil.

so now you have people seeing things like animal packers, and they are for some reason uncomfortable with them. where we might have once said 'oh well, not for me', we must now have a reason for why we are uncomfortable with this idea.

1.5: the perpetrator and the victim

in any given situation, to prevent discourse from becoming muddied or hard to answer, there must always be a person who is definitively in the right, and a person who is in the wrong.

this is a really normal reaction, it's hard to accept something as not having a clear answer, and so it's easy to find ourselves doubling down on something so we dont have to confess to the worst thing of all 'i dont know'.

Coming from disability advocacy, it's important to recognise that there are going to be situations which are not clear cut, in which nobody has done anything wrong, but people have ended up hurt or upset. sometimes needs and people are simply incompatible, and there's nothing wrong or evil there.

but that is difficult and scary, so instead it's much easier to talk about the victim and the villain. if someone is being hurt (i am looking at something that grosses me out) then someone must be intentionally hurting them (evil gross kinksters)

In this understanding of things, the discomfort itself must be harm done, and if harm is being done, then someone must be at fault. it becomes a matter of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim. So in order for them to be uncomfortable and not be evil themselves, the thing that is making them uncomfortable must be evil itself.

now that we've established these things we can actually get around to answering the actual question you asked:

Part 2: why zoophillia?

if this person has deemed the act that these people have done to be evil or bad, why not just call the act itself (which i am given to understand is hyper-realistic animal packers?) evil?

well what you surely understand, and somehwere in the back of their brain they understand, is that that's incredibly fucking stupid.

if you walk up to the average person and say hey, this person is doing this evil thing, and explain that, theyre going to think you're insane. so how are they supposed to tell the average person that this person is evil? they escelate it to most awful acusation they can think of in the moment.

in most communities, the terrible thing that they will accuse someone of is pedophillia, but in the therian circles, they dont need to escelate it to that point, because there is already a hot button topic they can point to instead.

Zoophillia, as i am given to understand, is one of the most hot button topics in the therian community. it is the group which is regularly aligning themselves with therians, that many if not most therians want nothing to do with.

it's also a group that is often conflated with therians, meaning that many therians have an immediate 'no fuck off that's not us' reaction to it, as a form of self preservation. because as soon as people have made a claim that you may be a zoophile, and you fail to respond in the appropriate way, you will be cast out of your own therian in group.

so the use of using zoophillia as an acusation is two-fold. for one, it makes people take the accusation seriously, and for two, it prevents people from doing their own research and looking into it.

because if you are told this person is evil, and if you support them you are also evil, at that point any questioning on your part is seen as complicity in evil acts. as apologism. this person is evil and if you ask my why, you must also be evil.

so lets circle back a little bit here, earlier i mentioned that the typical claim is pedophillia, which everything i said previously about evil acts is still true of, but you might not fully believe me about people escelating to the nearest most terrible thing they can think of, but the thing is that i have seen this before.

Part 2.5: tired asexual

hello again, youve probably never heard of me before, so let me tell you that I'm Asexual. more importantly, I'm an asexual person who has been on tumblr for a solid decade.

if you werent around in the mid to late 10s, you might not know just how bod aphobia on tumblr got, but i was there for it. and you know what the most common accusation of why asexuals, and anyone trying to discuss asexuality were evil?

because discussing asexuality was pedophillia.

yeah, asexuals. the well known 'lack of sexual attraction' community.

Now I can go into the series of claims that led to this, hell I could probably go diving on my old blog and find screenshots of these actual accusations, but that’s kind of besides the point. The point here is that the actual reasons people give for it being ‘insert evil thing’ are unimportant.

yeah, when i say it to you, a person who i am assuming knows a little something about asexuality, that that was the claim, your first thought is that that's an insane thing to say.

but for a lot of people the first time they heard about asexuality was in this discourse. so their brain is now primed to make the connection of 'oh, okay, asexuality is evil.' and now, when they see people defending asexuality, they're already defensive. they assume youre trying to trick them, or make them complicit.

asexuality is not the only place this tactic has been used though, you see it all the time. it's at its most common in things like homophobic legestation, anti-trans bills, or drag bans.

These people cannot justify the initial action as evil, so they jump to something you are more likely to agree with, and try to argue it is the same thing. this is what we call equivocation.

equivication is an incredibly effective tactic in fear-mongering, splitting up groups of people, and getting something innocuous labeled as morally wrong

'Think of the children' is a good example of this. No it’s not that im transphobic, it’s that I’m concerned about children. Therefore, if you’re arguing against me it must be because you yourself hate children and want harm to come to them.  

but not everyone is as obvious as to say 'think of the children' or some other line we've heard a bunch before. they find new ways to say it, and because the current safety tactics are to watch for certain phrases and words, people dont know how to look for underlying beliefs and sentiments, leaving people more vulnerable than ever to this kind of manipulation.

so now i've hopefully answered your initial question of 'why zoophillia', i want to take this a litte bit further and ask, 'what is the end goal?'

part 3: what next?

okay so would you believe me, if i said that until now ive actually been taking an incredibly good faith reading of the discourse so far?

currently I have been presenting this as a misdirection of discomfort, but not necessarily actively malicious. now however, i want to go back to the ace discourse.

bigots on tumblr weren't actually starting shit with the ace community because they really had a bone to pick with asexuals, they were doing it because they were transphobes. Surprise!

this isnt speculation on my part, transphobes have since openly discussed that they used aphobia as a kind of 'gateway' to 'gatekeeping'

if they come out of the gates talking about how 'transexuals are evil' and should be 'kicked out of the lgbt community', then they would be immediately revealed as transphobes and most of the queer community won't listen to them. these transphobic talking points have been around long enough to be identifiable and more easily discussed.

asexuality however was, particularly at the time, very under-discussed. it also wasnt a part of the 'standard' LGBT acronym, which made it easier for them to make the argument that asexual people should not be allowed to be considered part of the community.

aphobia at the time was considered less divisive, you could be more easily convinced that this community you have never heard of is evil, dont question it. theyre pedophiles and groomers, if that isnt enough to convince you theyre evil it must be because you're also an evil person, so don't question it or do your own research. then we might come for you.

This was wildly successful! And now that that campaign has gone so well, they can now openly admit that they were secretly transphobes all along! And wow, you already aligned with us, so you need to double down on hating trans people because the rest of the queer community doesn’t want you back after that bullshit!

now maybe you consider this to be a particularly poor faith reading of the current discourse. maybe i had you in the first half, but all of this stuff about secret transphobes and conservatives playing along in ways that are more acceptable seems a little far fetched and conspiratorial to you. a bit of equivication here and there isnt inherently a sign of deeper sinister intentions. isnt all of this a bit of a stretch?

and maybe youre right, maybe im just someone who has seen something similar play out before, and im jumping to defence at something that wont become the same issue.

but isn't it interesting that the people being most vitriolistically upset about all of this, and attacking the creator of these things and accusing them of zoophillia are also misgendering him?

[Tw: Zoophilia mention]

Genuine question: WHY do so many people in this community jump on everything they find weird and immediate label it as zoophilia?!

Like- animal packers, fantasy toys, yiff art, pet play, kink gear, LITERALLY ANYTHING.

Seriously, relieving dysphoria, having "dirty" urges related to your identity, even straight up liking some freaky shit does NOT mean someone is attracted to animals. And it definitely does not mean they are actively harming/thinking of harming real animals.

People really take whatever is too weird for them and try to accuse it of war crime. Be better y'all.