Sarah is allergic to strawberries. As soon as she puts them in her mouth, her face swells up and she gets hives. It’s non-life-threatening but uncomfortable for her.
Sally is also allergic to strawberries, and has the same symptoms.
Sarah informs her friends she is allergic to strawberries so they can stop using them in shared food. Some of them even stop eating strawberries too (or, at least, stop eating them around her), so she is more comfortable. Sarah researches places she can eat out that will take care with her allergy, and chooses restaurants who agree they can accommodate her, or who do not use strawberries in any of their cooking.
Sally, on the other hand, goes into restaurants specifically advertising only strawberry desserts, orders a dessert, and makes a huge fuss when she gets sick. She takes to social media, the local newspapers, everywhere, to tell people how terrible this restaurant is for not specifically accommodating her personal allergy. She goes back frequently to insult and harass specific staff. Some staff have even quit because of her. Sally says it is her personal right to have her allergy accommodated in every single place she feels like eating! She posts pictures of herself all swollen and ill everywhere and blames the restaurant and the staff for her discomfort.
Be like Sarah, not like Sally.
Control your own consumption of content, don’t enter tags you don’t like, and don’t harass creators that make things you don’t like because you’ve decided you have to have the entire internet cater to your personal likes and comforts.
LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK
As someone actually life-threateningly allergic to strawberries (and with multiple genres I don’t like and avoid) I completely agree. I don’t expect grocery stores to not sell strawberries, but if they’re sampling strawberry smoothies I just turn around and go somewhere else because the proteins are going to be in the air and on the cart handles and unavoidable. I might ask stores I frequent often not to sample things that involve grinding fresh strawberries in the store but but I’m not going to ask them not to carry strawberries, and if they can’t accommodate, there’s lots of other stores. (One store literally said, “call us and ask us and we can let you know if strawberries are being sampled.” The fic analogies are “contact me on tumblr if you have specific questions about triggers.”)
If someone tells me “There are no strawberries in this” and feeds it to me and then it turns out that there are strawberries, I have a right to get pissy. If they say, “This has strawberries” I just have something else. If they don’t list the ingredients and I choose to eat it anyway, any subsequent reactions are going to be on me, so I don’t eat unlabeled foods. And the metaphor is EXACTLY appropriate, right down to the fact that some people have life threatening allergies, some have uncomfortable allergies, and some people just don’t like strawberries, and the level of avoidance is different in each of those situations but that’s why people label foods and fics.
control your own consumption of content
Published
Question of Smoke 