#internet puritan bullshit

[noegrets]

As I keep saying - you know what's worse than a parent being homophobic until it's their kid who comes out? ... a parent who continues being homophobic after their kid comes out.

Besides, to the topic of OP in particular, rarely it is one singular event that changes someone's mind. You never know how many small little nudges did it take until it reached critical mass.

And also, speaking as an artist and particularly a comic artist since OP's post mentioned comics, I have in fact witnessed people changing idea for the better because of something I wrote. That's not trivial at all: it is one of the key purposes of art - to build community and dialogue. "Did they need to get their head out their asses because of my comic, couldn't it have been a more momentuous realization" - people's lives aren't tidy like that, they don't get the glorious soundtrack when they have a realization. Nobody does. The important thing is to let people change and appreciate that change when it happens - in you, and in others.

i do not care if someone learned compassion from a cartoon or a comic or an anime im just glad they're here with us now a better person fighting the good fight. should it have taken something so trivial? maybe not- but it's in the past! and this is the now! and if they're objectively better for it who cares

[tarisbackyard]

The internet has me so brain washed that i start to question if its okay to post certain stuff on my blog, meanwhile I would be perfectly fine saying the exact same words to a complete stranger in public. USA more like Prudistan.

[valkyrien]

wHAT

I JUST HAD TO READ THE TAG ‘I PREFER MY READERS TO BE 21+ YEARS OLD’ ON A FUCKING FANFIC

LIKE

WHAT THE BUGGERY DO YOU THINK YOU’RE WRITING THAT YOU BELIEVE WE NEED TO BE PUSHING SODDING MIDLIFE CRISES WITH A HEAPING SIDE OF POST-VOTING-AGE-EXHAUSTION AND SATURATED WITH AT LEAST TWO SHAGGING DECADES PLUS WORTH OF EXISTENTIALIST DREAD TO BE ‘READY’ FOR YOUR WORDS YOU FECKING CENSOR-HAPPY LITTLE TWITBIRD?!

[pro-sipper]

Sooo so so sick and tired of the holier than thou "proship and antiship are both dumb" "I'm so over shipping discourse" "I'm a secret third thing (adult with a job)" circle jerk bullshit I keep seeing on this site

First of all, most of these people don't even see what's actually going on here. It doesn't stop at what fandom ships are good or bad.

And where do they get off thinking it's just some dumb internet tumblr drama? Do you know that people who exist online also exist in real life? And the ideas that they express or act on online (like wanting to censor fiction, thinking they're the authority on what can be written about, sending death and rape threats to people who write fiction in a way they don't like) also carry over into real life?

Real life where we're in a fucking puritan nightmare of a media literacy crisis. You can really look around you at the world we live in and think a thing like censorship is just an issue that exists in cyber space?

[olderthannetfic]

Not gonna lie, sometimes being a writer in my native language feels... isolated and alienating. However not in the 'AO3 stats be low and less than English ones' that maybe one could thought of it at first, no, I know what I am doing writing and posting my non-English fanfics on AO3. I have really good friends and a minor readership that I love.

The isolation and alienation comes from people hating their own native languages and being so vocal (almost proud with others encouraging them) about it. Bet I am not the only who has see this. And I am sorry, but that just feel like hot bullshit. Why do you hate your own language that much? Why do you praise/treat like a better language English and English alone? Why do you say 'ew, a fanfic in my native language!" like that is a completely normal thing to say? I try to come with responses and their logic that aren't plain linguistic colonialism, but I can't. It feels alienating because I see it so. freaking. much. In Tumblr, in Discords, in Reddit, in Twitter, everywhere! Sometimes I have my lows and think 'man am I the wrong here? should I despise my own language, my own (literature) culture? everyone does it'. I respond with a 'no' obviously, since I keep writing in my native language and encourage everyone who approachs me to do it. That still doesn't erase the fact that seeing 'ew fics in my native language sucks!' comments in the wild are pretty demotivating and, to be quite honest, shitty, even if the people doing them aren't from my country.

This kind of feels like a consequence of how... imperialist (for a lack of a better word, sorry) the Internet has become in the past few years. Rather, the whole world, yes; and the Internet is just a part of it so of course fandom got affected by it. If it got affected by this puritanical, bigoted and radfem-y viewpoints, it was just a matter of time for this issue ('fics in English are superior/better in general/better to write/better to got numbers') to chime in. Damned 'globalization'. It was so fast.

--

I hate it. I hate it so much. It's been constant for decades (with the exception of a few languages like Mandarin). English isn't special! Whatever century's trade language can reach more people, but that's it: it isn't more beautiful, historic, nuanced, interesting, worthy, whatever.

And god is English not less cringey and terrible when it comes to words for dicks or squelchy sex noises or whatever else people find terminally embarrassing to write about. We native speakers had to get over it in order to write. Native speakers of anything can do the same!

Though, yes, Arabic-speaking anon from last time, I grant you that some languages' speakers are going to have to invent a whole new era of writing in the vernacular. Go forth. Write your Canterbury tales if that's what it takes.

[noegrets]

The whole article is great, and to specifically highlight part of the conclusion: But for this particular reflection, please remember these four points:

The majority of censorship is self-censorship or middleman-censorship, but the majority of that is deliberately cultivated by an outside power.

For this reason, we cannot consider state and non-state censorship separate things. State censorship systems work dominantly via shaping and causing private censorship.

No real censoring body has ever had the resources of Orwell’s fictitious Ministries—not even the Inquisition or the great totalitarian powers of modernity like the USSR, but they want us to think they do. Real censorship regimes tend to see themselves as constantly underfunded and understaffed, racing to grapple overwhelming crisis, while attempting to seem all-reaching and all-knowing as a part of their own propaganda.  We must analyze their actions remembering that the need to conserve resources and seem stronger than they are shapes everything they do.

Censorship aims to be visible, talked about, seen, feared. This increases its power.

Censors’ projection of fear and power is a form of deliberate psychological manipulation which can outsource censorship far beyond the censor’s sphere of control, even to citizens of other nations. We can only combat it if we work hard to cut through the Orwellian illusion and remember the realities of how censorship works.

While we must discuss and analyze censorship when we see it, we must also remember that censorship wants to be discussed and thought about, and think about how we can make sure our responses don’t strengthen the very thing they seek to oppose, by increasing the fear felt by those within the power of such regimes.  The blacked-out word on the page and the website that loads frighteningly slowly create spikes of fear in those who see them, fear which advances the goals of the censorious regime.

A great question to get at this is: Did the trial of Galileo succeed or fail? If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would.  If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time.  The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox.  Descartes and thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial—an event whose burden in money and manpower for the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been for them to get at all those scientists.  The final form of Descartes’ published synthesis was self-censorship—self-censorship very deliberately cultivated by an outside power.

-Ada Palmer, Tools for Thinking About Censorship

[nyancrimew]

Is it possible to remove all porn from the internet

no + why are you asking me such puritan ass bullshit fuck off

[firelightmlpoc]

Hey, just wanted to say good on you for standing up against the completely batshit accusations that have been thrown around the fandom lately. I cannot fathom how anyone believed those screenshots for even a second. I doubt you’ll get an answer, since the harassers are stuck in an echo chamber of validating their actions and will likely just stick their heads in the sand and pretend they can’t hear you. It sucks ass, but seeing that there are at least some people who will publicly question this bullshit is refreshing.

Of course. There’s a reason ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is something that’s supposed to be a baseline for an accusation of actions that have caused harm. After all, if someone makes a false accusation that then is treated as true, then another innocent person gets harmed, & then the waters get muddied for any other accusations thereafter.

After all, if someone lied about harm done & then makes another accusation, who’s to say that accusation isn’t just another lie? Something-something, ‘boy who cried wolf’. Then it also makes any other accusations in the nearby vicinity seem lest trustworthy because people don’t want to be wrong again.

Some people solely jumped on this hate-train specifically because it was against Pansear Doodles, & wouldn’t have interacted with this accusation at all if it didn’t center around someone they didn’t already dislike.

You want proof? Easy.

Look at the accounts saying ‘I always knew that Pansear was bad! Good to get proven right…’ and then look at their accounts. Almost always, they’ve been bashing Pansear (and other artists who do shipping of Slugcats & other similar art) because they just didn’t like the topic. And, instead of just acknowledging that they don’t like that content & moving on, they internalize that dislike & then try to find a reason to attach said dislike to the author. Then, they look for anything the author did wrong (be it true or not) & suddenly cry out:

‘I was right all along for hating this person!!!’

There’s an account that replied to my earlier post which REALLY clearly shows this in action.

@hourglass-meadow .

This reply is what they said.

An ask they responded to directly about Pansear. (Long-winded, yadayada.)

Their response:

And their first response to seeing Pansear gone.

Now, you know how many posts they made about Pansear potentially being a problem? None, except for the ArtiHunter comic, which has nothing actually ’problematic’ within. What about an ‘I hope the victim can find peace…’? Nonexistent.

These people don’t care if these allegations are true or not.

They don’t care who else gets hurt in this mess, as long as it isn’t someone in their circle.

They just want to see a ‘bad guy’ who is someone they don’t like get punished.

They want to claim their righteousness for all the world to see, as they cast judgement; a lynching in the court of public opinion.

And all of this targeting, IF this is fake, is more-or-less because people didn’t like seeing Pansear & others making /shipping/ art.

Because they saw someone else making something that THEY deemed ‘weird.’

There’s something to be said about the current political climate here, be it the Puritanical aspect of eliminating anything ’other’, ‘weird’, or ‘disgusting’ from sight no matter how innocuous/harmless it is;

the ‘Guilty until Proven Innocent’ mindset going around that makes actual victims more liable to not out their abuser out of concern for what will happen to their abuser (As, statistically speaking, abusers tend to be someone close to the abused, before abuse starts.)

Or even just the fact that people are simply emboldened to be as shitty as possible while they believe they’re anonymous online, because they’re of the mindset that they’re immune to consequences because they aren’t being directly known by these internet people in-person.

Don’t believe me? Look at every account celebrating Pansear’s self-eviction from the Rainworld community. Look at their actions & words from before this accusation. And then check what I said again. Cross reference this shit. See that the majority don’t care if there was a victim, much less if the potential victim is ok now or not; they just wanted someone they didn’t like, for one arbitrary reason or another, gone.

Cruelty was the point of many people’s actions against Pansear here, & by jove did they get what they wanted.

Remember folks! Remember this well:

No matter how much you align with leopards-that-eat-people’s-faces, the leopards won’t think twice about your face being next on their dinner plate.

That’s enough words from me for the time being, however.

[purpledemonlilyposting]

i really think it would be healthier for you to drop the act and go full kiwifarms rather than delude yourself on some puritan moral crusade

Kiwifarms is just a gossip forum. There's always been one, be it Encyclopedia Dramatica, 4chan, Something Awful, Portal of Evil, all the way back to Usenet.

The people who seem to fear the Farms the most are the ones who have had their crimes exposed by the people there. Dumbasses saying edgy bullshit doesn't matter if the information and evidence is solid.

You know like the literal puppy raping zoophiles they got put in prison. Or Keffals, who was absolutely grifting her audience and grooming teenagers.

I say we need a healthy injection of the Old Internet ways these days.

[devils-little-sistaaa]

Been seeing a lot of Percico hate lately. What’s up with that. Stop it. Get some help.

It’s fine if you don’t like Percico. Nobody’s forcing you to like it. But it’s extremely rude to threaten and incite violence on people just cause they like something fictional that you don’t like. All this puritanical anti bullshit needs to stop.

First of all there’s nothing problematic about Percico. Second of all even if there was : fiction does not affect reality in any way at all. And if you think it does you are either too young or too naive and immature to be on the internet yet.

Go play outside. Go touch some grass and make some friends in your neighborhood. Go play hide and seek freeze tag or something.

(If you want to talk about something fictional you don’t like, that’s fine but it’s best talk about in a closed setting where people who do like the thing won’t be able to see it. )

[bulbabutt]

apologies for another crazy vent. i feel weird being such a between gen of internet users. like im not old enough for the real peak forum days, but im too old to deal with half the shit people expect outta you now.

you wont catch me w a dni list cuz im a fuckin adult so if people piss me off when they rb my shit i just block them OR if a post gets outta hand i will simply turn off rbs.

take your twitter bullshit outta here. that concept did not EXIST 12 years ago. and when it started everyone knew it was really weird. cuz like..... nah man its everyones internet? the internet is public. if you post on a public forum people will just interact with you as that is what you do in public. why do people need to like.... look through your whole shit? and vice versa? thats some surveillance state shit... like tbh i remember 'before you follows' being weird enough, so this is so much weirder.

like the concept of like. 'hey im gonna make art but if you like it you better not have any of the following apply' or 'im going to need your entire history of making art before i decide if its okay to like this'

like bruh. your followers aren't your friends. your audience is not your friends. people who see your posts in a tag dont need to know you. youre not going in to business with strangers. its just..... people who see you on the street in passing and throw a coin in your guitar case, yknow what i mean? you dont need to know anything else about them, theyre just saying 'hey nice!'

like imagine if every time you went to a coffee place you told a barista 'you better not have a foot fetish' like. okay i mean. youre nuts. you are fully nuts. why would it matter, you are going there for COFFEE....... what does the interpersonal desires of a stranger fucking matter?

idk its weird to try and normalize that behaviour. it really disgusts me that this is how people speak about each other. hyping up their 'moral compasses' while painting strangers with monstrous labels and getting them hurt. it sounds so fucking puritanical. like literal puritans. 'PURGE THE DEGENERATES!'

like i do understand wanting people not to make you uncomfortable by misreading something you do, i fully get the desire. but the way people go about handling it is so fucking WEIRD.... all on the defensive 'are you a this or a that, i need all the details about you or else i will harass you and tell everyone your inner most demons' i am. a person. on the internet just posting shit. can i help you? i dont fucking know you??

like why not, idk, save the 'dont interact with me' until someone actually does something to cause you harm? where in that case the 'dont interact' is called blocking people. what the hell are we doing? youre in public? and youre screaming as if the person playing guitar is trying to kill as you walk past because you snooped into their purse and found drugs or some shit. wheres the etiquette?

but then thats the point. its not there as a warning, its a label you have to put on yourself to save yourself from being perceived as something evil.

some people act like every person who doesnt wear a specific badge is literally a serial killer and i really cant stand this culture at all. fucking LOOK AROUND right now. where this kind of culture leads. this is getting so dangerous.

but i guess saying all this is just gonna get me labelled something anyway. cuz everyone gets painted the same. no little nuances of humanity. just righteous good people who are wholesome and the rest are evil doers. sigh.

fascism is on the rise world wide. dunno what else to say.

[definedvines]

i hope one day the internet grows past all this puritan bullshit i didnt grow out of my religious trauma for This

[msnihilist]

Hey! So I saw your post responding to that one person’s ask, and at the end you said you had papers of fiction being a good outlet? Can you share some out of curiosity?

Sure! I did so much research for an essay I was writing during the spring, haha. I'll grab some of the ones that aren't paywalled.

The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire

This one comes from an Italian blog. It's not a research paper, but I very much enjoyed reading it!

Curative kink: survivors of early abuse transform trauma through BDSM

Here's a pretty telling quote just from the abstract summary: "Notably, participants only reported retraumatizing experiences prior to learning about the structural safeguards of BDSM." So all of that "you're retraumatizing yourself" bullshit from antis? Yeah, I'll need to see a citation, please.

Pornography and Sexual Aggression: Can Meta-Analysis Find a Link?

From the summary: "...evidence did not suggest that nonviolent pornography was associated with sexual aggression." and "Population studies suggested that increased availability of pornography is associated with reduced sexual aggression at the population level."

Emotional Expression and Physical Health: Revising Traumatic Memories or Fostering Self-Regulation?

This one is all the way from 1996. It studies the effects of writing about traumatic events on traumatized individuals, less traumatized individuals, and a non-traumatized control group. Turns out that writing helps! Crazy.

Adult attachment and engagement with fictional characters

This one is not quite what you asked for, anon, but is still interesting!

Swimming in It: Art and (Im)morality

Another blog post, but still a good read.

Who Gets to Write About Sexual Abuse, and What Do We Let Them Say?

This one comes from a journalist! It discusses many books that deal with topics such as rape or incest, and why there was such a significant backlash to them as well as the importance of these stories.

Punishing Sexual Fantasy

This article reveals a widespread and overlooked pattern of harshly punishing individuals for exploring their sexual fantasies on the Internet.

My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies

This one is a classic! The author compiles the testimonies of many different women who have been sexually assaulted or raped, and discusses how their own rape fantasies helped them find sexual liberation going forward. There is one woman who describes touching herself to the memory of her assault, and having the best orgasm of her life from it.

Drawing Out Trauma: Visual Art Therapy for Child Sexual Abuse Victims

This one is exactly what the title says, haha.

[amummy]

I’m once again asking people to have an OUNCE of media literacy and start seeing stories in greys. Not every character can be a vile villain or a pure saint. Humans and human adjacent characters are flawed and can do dreadful things. They also have their traumas. Some characters can’t be classified as good or bad and trying to put things in pretty little boxes is just an exercise in futility. You don’t have to approve or accept what they do(or IGNORE THINGS) but I’m begging people to just… get out of this puritanical good/bad, black and white bullshit that’s plaguing internet spaces. It’s killing storytelling.

[damnfandomproblems]

Posting a compilation of replies to Fandom Problem #5796.

Anon:

"Don't you think that minors would be more polite if..." No. No I don't. I was a minor in fandom. I also grew up at the dawn of the internet age and had internet safety pounded into my head from the age of 10 onward. If I interacted online at all outside of viewing and reading, I knew better than to be an asshole, because the internet has always been an adult sphere. I saw other minors get well deserved internet smackdowns for acting stupid online. If the kids are in actual kids spaces, then fine, leave them alone, that's their space. If they're on Xitter or Tumblr.com or A03 and acting the fool? No. You're in an adult space, interacting with adults, and those adults aren't there to cater to or coddle you. Which media the adult in question happens to like is irrelevant. You came into our spaces and started throwing a shit fit because you, a minor, didn't like what you, a minor, saw in our, adults, adult spaces. Most of the time we don't care if you're being cringe and having fun. Go, have fun, be cringe be free all that. Some kids are great and here to learn and have fun and are able to actually read the fandom room and know how to act like a respectable human while also having a good time. But if you're being antagonistic and hateful because you literally just are not mature enough to handle/comprehend what's going on in the space, then you don't need to be in the space at worst. At best, sit down, hush, and learn rather than running at the mouth about how you hate x y z thing because eww icky or you think it's problematic to your current pet social issue that doesn't even have anything to do with it. Kids are some of the biggest natural bullies out there. Kids being assholes to each other isn't just a trope, it's why secondary school/highschool was hell for so many people. Adults aren't all assholes, we're just better at calling kids out on their bullshit and don't have the patience for the "but I'm a minor" nonsense. Being a minor doesn't mean you're free from consequences, but some of y'alls parents clearly never taught you that. They aren't puritans, they're being idiots because they literally have no concept of fandom history and are just parroting nonsense that's been spoon-fed to them by other idiots. And rather than question things like anyone with critical thinking skills should be doing they take it all at face value and believe their own poor understanding or lack thereof is gospel, and everyone suffers for it, including other minors who also don't know better.

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Anon:

Fandom isn't just for minors though. Adults are allowed to be in fandoms even if it is uncomfy to minors. Adults are allowed to make NSFW of fictional characters in fandom if they want to. If minors don't like it, they can just ignore it. If minors want to be respected, they should also respect adults in fandom spaces. Complaints like "adults shouldn't be here" or "you are an adult, go get a job instead!" does not make you any better.

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Anon:

I agree with this tbh. Like adults are the ones making things unsafe for minors in fandom spaces. YOU are the ones who approach minors unprompted. Minors are just minding their own business in fandom, then you all come along and bother everyone.

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Anon:

I agree with this post, cause like... the ones doing the most harassing are adults. I am a minor, and it makes me feel unsafe in fandom spaces. Especially when I see adults drawing nsfw of characters who are MINORS! aging them up does not excuse that gross and creepy behavior. Just stop and give us a space where we don't get pushed into a corner and called annoying. Leave our fandom spaces!

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Anon:

When I was 17 so technically a technically still a minor I would have to keep my age off of all my blogs and accounts because so many other minors have ruined being younger in a fandom space. Literally just having my age up affected my numbers and how seriously I was taken. Y’all are not innocent though stop playing victim there are valid reasons why people don’t like you. Tons of younger kids these days are entitled overly sensitive and somehow both pretentiously “woke” and super disrespectful at the same time. So yea saying this as someone with pretty recent memories of being a minor online so many of you are actually insane and people not feeling comfortable around you is completely valid especially when you’re typing stuff like this up as your best defense. Especially with darker or NSFW stuff you don’t have to look we aren’t shoving down your throat you chose to be here just look away.

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Anon:

I see people getting mad about Fandom Problem #5796, but that kind of is just proving the point? You all act like the minors are the biggest problem in fandom, but you are the ones constantly inserting yourselves and making it about you. I see adults say things like: - "Fandom wouldn't exist without adults." - "Who do you think created fandom? Not minors!" - "Minors wouldn't have content if it weren't for adults." All are ignorant of the idea that minors are the foundation to fandom. Fandom would not exist if it wasn't for minors being interested in it and starting groups for people to join. Often times, the best artists and writers in the fandoms are THE MINORS. Adults make the space uncomfortable by inserting themselves and putting NSFW fics and art of minor characters. Then they get pissy when a minor points out it makes them uncomfortable and go "stop invading our space!" You are the ones trying to push minors out when we just want to have fun! Just leave us alone! -A minor

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Anon:

Of course, 5796 has a corollary: "To the minors who constantly complain about adults in fandom being mean to them: don't you think adults would be more polite to minors if said minors didn't make fun of them, didn't treat them like shit everywhere they went, didn't blame them for all the problems on the internet, didn't publicly shame them for minor social faux pas, didn't call them "pedophiles" for anything from liking an icky ship to saying two words to a minor in passing to just existing peacefully in a space where a child might theoretically be present, and didn't try to gatekeep them out of fandom spaces that were literally made by and for them?? And don't give me that "well we just want to be safe! 🥺" Bs. Because if that were in any way true, then y'all would be listening to the safety tips that the adults are giving you, not using them as a scapegoat for anything bad happening in fandom and generalizing them as these eeeevil predators who just hate children." It doesn't matter what your age is; if you refuse to behave in a given space, then you won't be welcome in that space.

[alice-syndrome-archived]

COTL update “drama” is so funny because you can literally jail people for any reason, make followers eat genuine shit, kill people, and enslave powerful deities but GOD FORBID YOU HAVE SEX!

Remember guys though that the people complaining at few and far between - its easy to tunnel vision and think there are more assholes than there actually are - but remember how many followers the official twitter got when they said they would be sex in the game

EDIT: Also the official discord has fostered a puritan and cringe culture attitude for a long time so I feel like thats where a lot of the bullshit will be coming from - as the people who have become comfy there think thats how the rest of the internet works, and will be having their world shattered at the fact that people like sex