Academically speaking, I still find the whole “anti-shipper” movement to be fascinating from a sociological perspective.
You have what amounts to a extremist purity cult whose beliefs align nearly precisely with those of Conservative American Christianity in terms of sexual purity politics (admittedly with some additional flourishes that I’ve watched develop in real time), but is mostly composed of minority members whose sexual-and-gender identities are opposed and oppressed by Conservative American Christianity. Additionally, their tactics also mirror religious pro-censorship groups (such as Warriors For Innocence), but their rhetoric is entirely secularized and derived from leftist theory.
Did they arrive at this structure via convergent evolution? Via socially dominant concepts in the greater socio-cultural space that they occupy? I doubt it was by direct emulation but the possibility does exist on some levels.
I’m literally doing my sociology research paper on them right now.
Ooh? Go on.
It’s a qualitative study looking at the ways that Tumblr antis define the word “pedophilia”. It’s pretty interesting stuff because the definitions are so unique to Tumblr anti culture. I’ll have to go through my coding more thoroughly, but I think I’ve broken them down into four categories:
1. Legality based arguments where they’re very stuck on the idea of Age of Majority. Usually these people believe that it’s pedophilia if an 18 year old dates a 17 year old because they view age 18 as a hard and fast line from childhood to adulthood.
2. Psychological-readiness based arguments are a lot more subjective. These people often use arguments about differing life stages as a reason to call something pedophilia. Some even bust out that “peoples brains don’t fully age until 25” factoid. For this group, age gaps are a real no-go, even if both partners are legally consenting adults. The acceptablity of age gaps varied.
3. Physical appearance based arguments are focused against people who like young looking or young acting characters, even if those characters are adults. These people define pedophilia as an attraction to the perception of youth. This belief is strongly correlated with anti-DD/LG posting.
4. I’m having trouble naming the fourth category. It’s based around an argument of sneaky pedophilia or maybe an uncovering of the fan creators hidden desires? These antis argue that aging up characters past canon ages and shipping them is pedophilia because they believe that the shipper REALLY wanted to ship the child but didn’t because they were worried it wasn’t socially acceptable. In this instance, the character is portrayed as an adult by fandom and there is nothing childish in their appearance or mannerism. Because the character was depicted as a child in canon, however, the anti believes that the character must always be depicted that way in fandom and that only tricky pedophiles would be interested in exploring that character’s future.
Similarly, I noticed a newer trend of calling adult ships between people who canonically knew each other as children/teens to be called pedophilia or at the very least jailbaity, predatory behaviour. This is particularly true when the characters are a couple years apart. The idea there is that, if they knew each other as children, they’d never be able to see each other as adults. So if they have sex as adults, they’re mentally thinking of the child version of their partner and are therefore a pedophile. I wonder if this is a projection of the beliefs from #4. Perhaps it is the antis who, once introduced to a child/teen, are never able to see them as anything but a child and therefore they believe that everyone else must feel the same? That’s only a guess. I only saw this one a handful of times and it was all pretty recently, so I didn’t include it in the data for my paper. It does seem to indicate a level of escalation in these definitions though. I’ll have to check in again at a later date and see if it sticks around.
I’ve seen all of those as well, and I’d be fascinated to see your results when you’re published.
As for names for the fourth category, can I suggest Canonical Stasis arguments? As in, “the characters are forever frozen at the ages that they are presented”.
This is fascinating.
Infuriating as always, but fascinating.
Maybe I’m just new to the particular depths of this discourse but I’ve recently found out about criticisms of some ships that has cross-pollination between types 2 and 4 in defining ships as incestuous because characters are “sibling coded”??
Reminds me strongly of the Reylo antis who insist that Reylo is shipping pedophilia because of the age difference between the actors.
(also repeating the purity spiral - can’t let the teens be alone unsupervised, if Sally and Bobby are left unattended they might develop pantsfeels and since they’ve been friends since childhood that would be inappropriate and therefore must be prevented)
There was a point in time when TV Tropes banned entries about an NSFW Tangled fic. The fic was about adults who are canonically married, but because the target audience for Tangled was children, the fic was considered “pedo porn.”
I don’t know if canonical statis necessarily explains #4. #4 (and really all of them, but especially #4) seems to be reflective of this idea that “monsters” have very specific characteristics, tastes, and values - that you can always spot a monster using various tells. And if they dare do something like what #4 suggests, they are hiding those tells, so they are extra monstrous. There is likely a very real anxiety around not being able to tell offhand who is safe and who isn’t, about predators that hide in the midst. “You never know who you’re talking to on the internet!!! They may be GROOMING YOU!!” This may seem to be an attempt at unmasking these predators, these monsters - but, as someone who’s had the misfortune of knowing such monsters first-hand, it’s not particularly effective.
I was originally thinking something similar. That’s why I had written it down as “sneaky pedophile” at first. lol Upon further reflection, however, I think that canonical stasis is more accurate. That pedophiles have specific tells and that aging up is an attempt to subvert those tells is the argument. The underlying belief for that to work, however, is that canonical ages must remain static. Otherwise the argument falls apart.
That is similar to the reason I went with a psychological readiness label for #2. Originally I had just put down “age gaps”, but age gap only encompasses the argument. The underlying belief for the problematic elements of age gaps is that one partner is psychologically/emotionally unready for the relationship. This strikes at the core of the concern, which is the perceived power imbalance between the partners. This power imbalance is then sometimes conflated with pedophilia. Age gaps are just one of the ways this is expressed. Other arguments in a similar vein are that the characters are in differing life stages or that the characters brain is not yet fully developed (some psychological studies suggest that the human brain is still developing up until age 25, so some people argue that people under 25 are still too young for relationships with older adults).
The paper is done! Check out my Tumblr post for the link!
op and all the comments on this post have brain worms
Gotta love how they just respond with insults. And by “love”, I mean “time to block another one.”
Really looking forward to all this. I also wanted to add a very subtle way in which these mindsets have also started to affect real life people / influence how puritanical antis have started to view the world: the weird insistence I started to get to a funny old story that in denying my supposed “victimization” between my adult self and another adult, I was supporting the perpetuation of pedophilia. I scened with an older guy at a BDSM club, including sexual activity. Afterwards, the guy’s friend and the host of the party came up to me and asked, “Hey, did anyone check your ID at the door? You look so young, I want to make sure you’re safe.” I do look very young - I’m on a fast track to thirty and people still ask me what grade I’m in - so I’m used to stuff like this. This was a generally funny moment for me, and I had a good time that night. The closest thing to duplitious intent I could imagine of those men is the typical “implying a woman looks young to flatter her” cliche - and to be honest, I fully expect that was basically happening here, since BDSM communities tend to have a culture of safety, with a built-in way for interrupting scenes if someone might be in danger (i.e. safewords, DM’s, etc.) But what frustrated me about telling this cute story online was how people started to say that these guys must be pedophiles, because if I really look so young, then what does it say about them that they enjoyed sexual activity with me? This was a real life instance of people projecting those last two types of pedophilia definitions onto me. In theory, if this were pedophilia, I would be the “victim”, both for being chronologically younger than these men, and for looking so significantly younger. It’s particularly infuriating because their worldview is effectively punishing me for appearing the wrong age - which is typical of misogynistic and patriarchal ideals of feminine appearance. Women must be punished for looking the “wrong” age, and while we normally see this as woman being devalued for appearing older than the ‘ideal woman’, this also certainly felt like an instance of being punished for appearing younger than the ‘ideal woman’. Under this logic, I, a 100% consenting adult, can never have sexual activity with anyone, ever. Any actual adult who participates with me is only doing so out of a secret desire to have sex with a child and using me as a substitute, so even if we’re both enthusiastically consenting adults, I’m perpetuating or enabling pedophilia. Meanwhile, if I were to have sexual activity with someone who actually is the chronological age I appear as, they would be minors and thus I would be the predator. The growth of purity culture in fandom, on Tumblr, and the social media world in general is starting to influence how people view real world sexual activity - and the real life people having it.
I feel like there is a degree of assumption of good faith given to antis here that is not deserved.
The general assumption I am seeing be made is that antis start at a definition of pedophilia and go forward from that - that they check against one or more predefined definitions of pedophilia and if one or more of the definitions fits then that is where they have a problem.
I think in many, many cases it is the opposite. An individual experiences a reaction of disgust, assumes their reaction of disgust is an objective assessment of a problem, and then put into words the reason for their disgust. Having put the offensive into words they assign that “pedophilia” to create a moral justification for their disgust. These ‘accepted’ definitions of pedophilia then get picked up by people to explain why their disgust is objective truth, conflicting ideas pile on top of each other and are cherry picked to suit their purposes in any given situation.
I feel like this more accurately describes anti behavior. A given ship or behavior is disliked, and so one of the definitions of pedophilia is forcibly applied or a new definition invented if one does not exist.
Basically, the core belief is not in any of these definitions of pedophilia. The core belief is that their gut reactions are reflective of objective truth. This is why the behavior patterns of antis are virtually identical to Conservative American Christianity and sexual purity cults while their justifications are built around progressive language. Judging righteousness by gut reaction is a core Conservative American Christianity teaching. The idea is pervasive through our Christianity dominated culture (both secular and religious). You tell what is right not by well reasoned ethical and moral principles but by gut reactions (aka the spirit of god, a conscience, etc.)
What is more, all of this constitutes well understood behavior patterns followed by many groups under many circumstances. Racists being disgusted by the intermingling of races, homophobes being disgusted by gay people, terfs being disgusted with trans people. The pattern of behavior and underlying motivation is always the same, and various justifications are given after the fact by every group. And it is particularly telling that in virtually every case concerns about pedophilia are cited.
Antis, their behavior patterns, and their obsession with using an ever widening definition of pedophilia as a justification for their behavior is pretty much standard for any moral panic. Their justifications are slightly modified in self serving ways, as is the case for all moral panic driven groups.
I think the reason why there’s such a divide between older fandom and younger fandom is because older fandom has higher percentage of queer people (since it’s gone more mainstream since then), and we’re old enough to have seen first hand the “people we don’t like are pedophiles” argument being used against gay people, so we learned the hard way exactly how this discussion goes.
“The core belief is that their gut reactions are reflective of objective truth. This is why the behavior patterns of antis are virtually identical to Conservative American Christianity and sexual purity cults”
Yes, remember when ALL gay men were assumed to be pedophiles? And then beaten to death in the streets?
Echoing one of the points above:
… there is a degree of assumption of good faith given to antis here that is not deserved.
Coming at a different angle, though. Because a lot of fandom conservatives (antis) have gone far beyond, “I am a smol bean whomst feels uncomfortable so this must be A Crime,” and into the straight-up opportunistic realm of wielding words like “pedo,” “abusive,” “incest,” etc. as a set of cudgels.
Especially on Twitter, they create multiple accounts, Jokerfy their interactions with people once they’re nailed on contradictions, DM threats and arguments, and heighten every pile-on with noise and nonsense posting. The point, increasingly, is to demonize to the extent that there is no permissible ship, written content, or visual fanwork excepting those which they have deemed appropriate and which they want to see fanworks for.
Beyond even complaining that there’s not enough of their own ship art, art of other ships must be reduced or eliminated so that there’s time for those artists with large followings to focus on the characters or pairings that harassers want to see. Until they produce, the audience can be turned against them if what they draw/write is loudly deemed “pedo shit”; likewise, they are promised an increased audience if they draw/write the “right” stuff.
Specific authors/artists or friend groups are harangued to the brink of deletion and/or falsely mass-reported. New and low-profile artists may be spared. But certainly if the art is popular/good, and it’s not ‘their’ ship (meaning the characters or ships preferred by fandom conservatives), it’s bad. In order for good art of ‘their’ ship to be produced, they will label the current focus of that artist/writer/group problematic in some way. You know, instead of attempting to create that art or fiction, themselves.
It’s not just that there’s too much credit assigned to these groups, it’s that their continued expansion of bullshit creates soft, nurturing ground for predators to move in and feed freely on the spectacle, growing strong on the same supply of attention. Much Tweeting has been horked onto the internet about grooming, but fandom conservatives with a supposedly deep concern about it will defend the late-20s ‘allies’ to their causes who place the borders to ‘adulthood’ wherever it benefits them most in order to keep their oomfies/followers at their side. The ‘brain doesn’t fully develop until 25′ thing from above, yes, but wilder screenshots regularly circulate, bumping the goalposts for adulthood to wherever. ‘I still haven’t moved out of my parents house at 28, so I’m literally still a minor.’ ‘I’ve never had a physical relationship so I’m still a minor.’ ‘I was assaulted at a young age so my development stopped so I will always be a minor.’
Groomers are undoubtedly wearing sheep outfits in the middle of these fits of outrage, the same way your neighbors on Facebook might not see what’s so bad about Qanon-ers who are ‘only trying to protect children’ and have no real gauge of how rampant the racism and antisemitism goes in the movement. Because it hasn’t been made the public face. Just like Tom Cruise is the public face of Scientology, not the guys who make character actors scrub toilets on the Freewinds between bit parts for thirty years.
Fandom conservativism is already breeding the wildest fucking outright racism I’ve seen in fandom in a minute. Specifically, there’s a been a rash of, “The Japanese are all [insert slur or insult] because of anime and how perverted they all are.” The deliberate misinterpretation of gege/didi and ‘sworn brotherhood’ applied to BL works has done much to alienate diaspora and Chinese voices who have no hope of being heard over the western outrage. And when Twitter search terms condemning Asian works and artists align with political or non-fandom cultural causes, fandom conservatives welcome the pile-on from Trump-avi allies who link a whole hemisphere of the world to a pandemic that is fueling a lot of their own rhetoric right now. Fandom conservativism is already sharing its platform with virulent racists and if they mind that, it’s kinda hard to tell. So long as it adds weight to their scorn, they’re shrugging over it without much attempt at gaining distance from it. Or, again, Jokerfying their posting to ‘embrace the madness’ or whatever because power is stored in the Edginess and in the Cry/Laugh Emoji.
