"Fiction affects reality!" aka the History of moral panic and censorship repeats itself 🧵.

Linking to threads on historical moral panics and moves towards censorship in the West (particularly the United States) over the past 150 years.
You'll see a lot of familiar sentiment

https://twitter.com/SamAburime/status/1624107286774808587

The issue with 'sex-negativity' & 'purity culture' was never that people have personal boundaries, the issue has ALWAYS been with people obsessing over OTHER PEOPLE's sex lives & attempting to exert control over THEIR sex lives & sexual expression, thus violating THEIR boundaries Nobody gives a shit if you hate something or don't like something that's your business and you have every right to not like something. The issue the whole time has been the attempt to sanitize how other people live and create media.

People who keep trying to argue that "We don't live in a pro-murder culture and that's why things like murder and (non-sexual) violence are perfectly okay in media" just keep proving every day to me that they are not living in reality but instead some babied White suburban bubble You jackasses have you looked at the news once in the past 5 months. Or ever? Genocide? Doesn't happen! Slavery? Who's that? The KKKlan? Is that a music group? School shootings, Gun violence & the US military? Military occupation? Colonialism? pro-military culture? Not a problem!

I'll never forget one time someone came to debate about the ethics of sexuality in fiction on one of my posts. I brought up Game of Thrones and they responded "My mom won't let me watch it yet but-" and I just sat with my face in my hands for a good 5 minutes.

https://twitter.com/wet_newdle/status/1766522623846998085

I told them not to engage with posts like that and told other people talking with them to block them and they were like 'i don't see how my age is relevant' and we

I have a request for all of you.

Make Online Safety go viral,
Get people talking about it.
Some of you have substantial social media platforms & Discords, or you work in libraries, schools, academia etc. & could help immensely. (READ FULL THREAD!) Official safety resources in🧵 Every online debate I see has been plagued by arguing about the safety of minors without many of the loudest people who claim to care about that safety ever doing a goddamn thing about it (pardon my language).🧵

I've seen this before. Issues:
1. Pathological framing; the whole focus is 'Japan as a nation is pedophilic'
2. Discussion switches between cartoons & real children constantly
3. Talks ethical media consumption with no sources on media consumption & lacks citation;
4. Xenophobic

https://twitter.com/Rednaxelawhate1/status/1744870275143913975

5. Uses a lot of assumptive language such as the term "Feel" "I feel" "men feel" "they feel" You're not supposed to assume people's feelings when you write something like this; you provide either proof, quoted anecdotes, or unassuming language.

I had to document this specific anti TikTok thread because it was so large scale (18k likes / over 862+ comments) and displays a lot of the fears/concerns antis have that I've addressed in both of my published articles: Mainly fears of aging & being perceived as predators, etc.🧵 Tons of commenters confirmed their fears of becoming adults believing they had to give up the characters they loved. 18 was the barometer for legality even if a fictional character had less than a 2 year age difference "I have to stop liking _ on my birthday" was common (1/5)

Online safety discussions for minors are always framed in such a one-dimensional way with this idea that NSFW is apparently the only danger out there online and if it's wiped out the internet is suddenly a safe place; reality-check it's not. [...]🧵 [...] Every time I see a call for people to censor themselves on social media like Tumblr or Twitter it's always because of NSFW art, but the funny thing about the internet is that it has always been a cesspool for radicalization, fascism and nazis, especially now. [...]🧵

I said what I said 🫖🍵 The way people act like US/Eng TV is at the forefront of everything when we only got our first mainstream queer YA characters 9 years ago (Korra) & the vast majority of what we have now only came out in the last 6 years. Shojo & BL series were doing this since the 70s, 80s & 90s

It really is F-ed up how normalized violence against REAL women is centered in this issue too: These people are SO enraged about fictional depictions of m/m ships that they will happily describe the most graphically violent ways they want to harm or kill REAL women & men over BL

https://twitter.com/SamAburime/status/1630371365244096512

This really is the center of the issue here.
People see content they don't like and believe it's harming them and their community-

despite any efforts (Citations from Asian sources) to correct their assumptions they vehemently reject these -

This kind of racist and xenophobic clown shit needs to straight up stop. I see shit like this at least once a week at this point.
I'm beyond tired of seeing takes like this weekly.
Maybe some people need to see it all in one place to realize how bad it is
/anti-Asian racism

1/21 2/21

3rd img was in response to a danmei writer being jailed for her writings containing queer nsfw content

The way some people in fandom discuss the morality of violence & gore vs. sexual content oftentimes keep framing violence as if it's child-friendly.
'Children know that murder/disemboweling someone is wrong' Okay but that doesn't mean they need to see that online either. Many people on here grossly underestimate how uncomfortable even fictional gore makes the average person, especially when they come across it without warning. It's not something you happily draw in public, discuss around children, or tell your boss about either.

People who unironically believe the outdated gender essentialist idea that all female BL readers relate to the male subs in BL because he's a "stand-in" for the 'women's' role' are weak and won't survive the winter.😂 🤝

Came across some particularly heinous disinformation while archiving posts. This needs sharing to be nipped in the bud before it becomes standard because this is the first I'm seeing it.

An anti-ship page just two days ago made this post about 'Mirror Neurons'

Lets Fact-check: 'Mirror Neurons' have not been a central talking point in fandom spaces discussing the fiction/reality discourse, and this is the /first/ I'm seeing it brought up in this context.
Now Aside from their vague quotes, the post provides no links to these supposed Legal ‘sources’

I am begging websites and legislators to focus on making kid-specific safe spaces online again instead of trying to make adult spaces kid safe. I see kids posting 'I FEEL SO UNSAFE HERE!' & talk about how upset they are ALL the time YET THEY STAY & DON'T LEAVE; THIS ISN'T HEALTHY It feels so surreal to see minors on a site populated by 80% adults yelling about how disgusted & disappointed they are in NSFW art saying they don't feel safe, but they're STILL staying on these sites? Because they don't have other options I guess and feel entitled to be there?

One of the most overused criticisms in modern media literacy is complaining about the 'Romanticization' of certain tropes or content, (especially sexual content lately).

But many times that's literally the entire point of a creative work; to be unrealistic and self-indulgent Like I was always a fan of Romanticism in school for those reasons. The definition of romanticizing is to "deal with or describe in an idealized or unrealistic fashion; make (something) seem better or more appealing than it really is" & it's the same with the artistic movement

The state of American anti-shipping:
'Consuming this fiction is harmful / people who include abuse in their stories are predators / children everywhere are in danger.'
But as soon as you try actually examining these claims with academic & scientific studies it's
'Not that deep😂' People who otherwise claim shipping content is damaging and harmful to people's psyches and thus should be eradicated, and that people who create such content are sexual predators (you know HEAVY claims) they belittle anyone who actually tries to examine this academically

More people are posting how anti-fandom is permeating their college experience & adult lives, & people are like 'HOW DO THEY NOT GROW OUT OF THIS?' Hello? They've been spouting literally the same rhetoric as conservative politicians and everyone just ignored it as kids being kids Did you forget conservative kids exist? Or that youth are frequently mobilized into hateful political views online? They don't just spring out of nowhere. The people who kept saying everyone was overreacting are just now like 'how could this happen'

😂😂😂😂😂
PLEASE

I always find the LGB Alliance hilarious given we know they don't give a shit about Bisexuals but they leave them there to still make it seem like a majority group that's 'progressive' when in reality it's just
LG(*B's may be tolerated if they follow these codes) Alliance. I know there are certainly bisexuals in GC groups, but any time I skim the forums for these groups you'll have at least half the people there expressing biphobia (just like sometimes there are BIPOC in these groups but a large % of the white majority expresses racist sentiments.

Somebody give me 30 million dollars to make a mediocre B movie with outdated sex jokes in it from which I somehow will still get more work and money.

https://twitter.com/helpmeskeletor/status/1584653031693766656

Like the people who didn't have to grow up in the 1990s/2000s "Pee pee, poo poo, BOOBIES, HAHA PENIS" jokes in movies coming from grown men do not know the immense media desert we had to suffer through.

I think one reason for the recent spike in "puriteen" discourse is while Queer representation is making waves in kids' media, there's still no LGBTQ+ history taught in schools & anti-trans groups are spreading misinfo. So teens are taking mass marketable LGBTQ+ content to heart🧵 For people growing up before this kid-friendly media, ALL Queer content was geared towards adults and this media WHOLLY focused on us being true to ourselves despite society treating us like freaks. I grew up with The Bird Cage, To Wong Foo, But I'm a Cheerleader and Pricilla -