#the George Orwell is the *last* guy you'd want to evoke!

[lgbtlunaverse]

I'm very firmly on the anti-censorship and pro-kink side of things in the "should artists be allowed to depict taboo subjects in their work" debate, and have only grown more sure of that stance as time goes on. And I think I've now reached the point where I am convicted enough, and have surrounded myself with a social circle that generally also believe this, that I now keep seeing really really bad takes that ostensibly agree with me. And they annoy me to death. Frankly, more than that, I think they might be outright harmful for how we engage with art in this little community here, and our part in the fight against censorship.

Permission to retire the phrase "fiction doesn't affect reality" already? It clearly hasn't stopped censorship, so it's not effective, which is the only argument I could think of to keep such a blatant lie of a statement around. I don't understand how you can proclaim to like art and yet also believe it is something entirely disconnected from the world we live in. A litle pocket dimension that never touches anyone outside it. What, you close a book and it vanishes from your mind instantly? How dull. How sad. Of course, the relationship fiction has to reality is much more nuanced than 'monkey see monkey do'. But we've got phrases like "depiction is not endorsement" for that. We don't need this one, it sucks.

While we're at it! Retire the phrase "thought crimes" for this specific discourse too! I keep seeing the argent "thought criems aren't real only actions count" and gang, I cannot stresss this enough: making a whole movie or writing an entire novel are, in fact, actions. Putting words on a page is not a thought that is a thing you do in the real world! And therefore it affects real people! Again, this is far more nuanced than bad thing happens in story -> bad thing happens in real life, which is a belief that wayyyy too many people have, but if you're all so concerned about reading comprehension then statements so oversimplistic that they become outright falshoods are your enemy! Stop using them!

I think a ot of these problems come from the fact that these arguments arise from fandom spaces, so there is this air of "none of this fucking matters" but they are being applied to things that very much do matter actually. The writers of these posts clearly think their cause matters, so start acting like it! If your argument is phrased as such that, if you followed it to its logical conclusion, social critique of any artwork becomes "problematic" by default, you have already lost. If your worldview does not leave any space to call birth of a nation racist then you have already lost. This is not a tenable position! What are we doing here?!