#throwing this out here like sandra lee and a piece of fish

[pearwaldorf]

If you've followed me for a while it's pretty clear what my stance on anti/purity wank nonsense is. I was here when I saw the shift towards media consumption and shipping as activism/a proxy for morality, and the way this has been used to lay a veneer of righteousness on what we would have previously described as ship wars or fandom wank.

It's funny because antis/purity wankers have this view of people who enjoy the nasty stuff as genuinely fucked up the same way homo/transphobes view gay and trans people: existential threats to morality, truth, justice, and the American way. Having known a fair amount of them, they're just people in fandom. They just happen to be into stuff that not everybody vibes with, the same way some people are into high school AUs or soulmate tropes and other people aren't. It just requires a little more tagging to make sure people who want to avoid that stuff can.

So of course I was absolutely horrified when I saw people dismissing the revelations about how volunteers were treated in the wake of the CSAM attacks as anti bullshit. People out there have read the information available and blithely dismissed these credible accusations and actions (which have been confirmed by the OTW Board and Legal committees), as some sort of psy-op by groups gunning the OTW/AO3, some of which may include the Russians, TERFs, possibly the Disney corporation.

For a bunch of people who have accused antis of being brainwashed dittoheads, the OTW apologists have done an impressive lack of critical thinking themselves. Even beyond that, why is their impulse, when an organization has been accused of something extremely horrific, to side with the organization rather than the victim?

I would like to think we, as fans, understand that we do the things we do out of love. Certainly there will be annoyances and irritations in the process, but those are not the same as genuine harm. I know for many of us, fandom has been a refuge from extremely awful things in our lives. It fucks me up so much that a thing you do out of love can lead to such a devastating trauma because people who should have given a shit absolutely fucking did not.

--

Um, well then.

When I started this post I intended on doing a witty little rhetorical flip in the conclusion to be like "lol guess what u know who r the real monsters?" And then I started ugly crying. I think this is the thing I've been trying to get a handle on since I learned about what happened.

I thought we loved each other. I thought that would be enough, to be some sort of lifeline to ensure we wouldn't be monsters. Obviously I was wrong, and it was stupid to think that way, but I did not anticpate how much it would hurt to realize.