#also the forest is burning around me and i'm mad about the gentrification and air quality where i live

[shallowrambles]

wait are you pro-ship or aren't you

I'm live and let live. Ultimately, I don't view female-predominant fandom spaces as much of a threat. If at all.

But, contrary to popular option, I don't actually think ideas and fantasies are harmless, and deep down, even with our lip serve to "killing the cop inside," we all know this.

Ideas matter, and ideas affect real life. We're almost always in the process of judging how dangerous an idea is, how much we think that idea attenuates actual behavior, and to what degree we allow them to exist and spread. Much of that involves observing the context of where and how the idea appears.

It's why I will always love the movie Quills. It's a bit of an unanswerable ethical question, really. Sociological behavior is multi-factorial. These things are notoriously hard to study. Average folks muddle our way through best we can.

Part of it too is, "do I feel like the spread of this idea affect attitudes that in turn affect behavior that in turn affects my real life in a meaningful way?"

That's just life. We're all doing it to some degree.

Lotsa folks are anti-censorship until they perceive the other side as spreading "dangerous propaganda and brainwashing." Lotsa people are "pro-free will" until the other side starts supporting the Wrong Things (TM).

It's why people are good with shutting down MAGA shit and Blood-and-Soil crap on campuses. We call the censorship the "consequences of free speech," "oh, it's just the majority rising up in dissent" etc etc. But the reality is, we have judged the idea to be harmful. Contagious. And even when people are freely choosing the trap of these ideas, we think the harms to society outweigh the benefits of the unfiltered freedom on a megaphone.

So, yeah. I'm "proship," but because I think the degree of harm is very small, not because I think some written ideas are magically harmless and insulated from having an effect on real-life behavior. That's just not what history shows. I don't find it to be based in reality.

For the record, I actually view the gleeful fetishization of incest and low-class stereotyping as actually affecting the lives of the very poor. I think it perpetuates attitudes that have immediate effects on our medical but also indirect ones on our access to jobs, education, etc. And people don't care, because the aesthetic and the belief systems of the region are too shitty to deserve respect, and there's this idea that Those People Deserve the Jokes, or Can't Help it if it's True...they're so "hateful that they deserve it." (Meanwhile, want shorthand for incest? Give 'em a hick aesthetic. Flannel! Want shorthand for stupidity, give 'em a hick accent.)

The fact is, ppl would rather bask in low-country incest jokes and toothless jokes than extend meaningful help...or even lobby for increased dental care or access to education. "Those people do it to themselves," we say. We can look at other regions in the world and see the chokehold of propaganda, zealous nationalism, and lack of resources/education, but we sometimes can't see it in our own backyard.

But THAT SAID, I don't think being proship is harmful to most people or society at large, not in the the way that structural pollution is to low-income areas, and inequitable funding for education is. Rich bitches beating off in the privacy of their own homes to the fetishization of the results of poverty and the neuroses of the downtrodden in is a dime a dozen. To them, it represents a sexy, "forbidden" release from the horror of their boring, mundane lives.

For me, it boils down to this; it annoys me, so don't put it in my inbox. In the end, that's all that really matters. My opinion is separate to my boundary.