Being an active participant in fandom requires a certain level of self-regulating in order to be a healthy activity. It requires the ability to say “Not for me,” or “Not today,” and walk away.
We can have conversations about patterns we see in fanworks. We can discuss how we portray characters and relationships, how to effectively convey what we want to in writing, how to sensitively approach representations of marginalized characters. But having those conversations productively requires that we approach each other in good faith, and it requires the ability to self-regulate–including recognizing that often there is no hard line, no black and white answer, and we won’t always come to the same conclusions.
It requires an understanding up front that eliminating all fanworks we don’t care for is not the end goal of these conversations.
I’ll give a personal example. There is a ship that deeply, viscerally upsets me in like 95% of its iterations. I can explain why I don’t like it if asked. I’ve written about why I don’t think it’s handled well in canon.
And if I wanted to–if I wanted to–I could make a very convincing-sounding argument for why that ship is objectively bad and wrong and no one should ship it. Not because that’s objectively right, mind you, but because I’m good at arguing. I could slap that together in like… ten minutes, probably.
I don’t do that. If I vent about it on my own blog, it’s as infrequently as I can manage, because I do my best to avoid the content that upsets me. I don’t seek it out to get riled up about it. I don’t seek out content that upsets me, read it in its entirety, and then leave angry comments and send my friends to harass the author. I don’t choose a high-profile writer for the content I don’t like and engage in a targeted campaign of harassment against them all while claiming to be addressing a general problem.
If you are deliberately seeking out content that you know will upset you and reading it anyway and then feeling that you need to take those bad feelings out on the creator, you are not taking care of yourself. You are not engaging in healthy behavior or productive coping mechanisms. You are not keeping yourself safe, and you are not helping to make fandom safer for others. You are not engaging in good faith.
If you find that you do this and you can’t seem to stop, you may need to take some kind of further steps up to and including taking a break from fandom. I’m serious. I’ve taken breaks myself for that exact reason. There’s no shame in it.
Please monitor your own ability to self-regulate. Please actively evaluate whether or not you are engaging in healthy and productive behavior, for yourself and for others.
If you are deliberately seeking out content that you know will upset you and reading it anyway and then feeling that you need to take those bad feelings out on the creator, you are not taking care of yourself.
He was an activist who inspired millions to fight for their rights. He knew what was wrong with our country and risked his life to help his people achieve equality. In the society where black were treated like animal he did everything possible to change this. His brave soul, his will and courage changed the history of America , changed the people. He made us believe we can win this war. He payed for it with his life. He will always be remembered.
I think this is very important, because a lot of people think that being an ally is just not saying queerphobic things or defending a queer friend when someone insults or attacks them. To me, being an ally means you’re one all the time.
Specially when there’s no queer folk around, because it’s not about proving yourself to the community, it’s about being supportive and doing what’s right, like they did. This asshole showed who he really is behind that smile, and they’re basically like “Well, you ain’t getting money from me, so fuck you and your dumb beliefs”.
One reason why the “we need more nonsexual LGBT spaces because gay bars are evil dens of sin and predation” thing bothers me so much is that I have known quite a few nonsexual, minor-friendly LGBT spaces that did not revolve around alcohol consumption as business model or whatever – I worked for four years at a gay and lesbian bookstore in Vancouver’s gay village! You know what’s really, um, difficult to do (under capitalism etc)? Maintain a successful small, community-based business that caters to a marginalized community! It can go well, but it can also be just really really hard. The place where I worked was firebombed multiple times (not while I worked there, although I did have shifts canceled a few times due to bomb threats), it was put at the center of a sprawling legal case about government censorship of LGBT literature that cost the owners literally millions of dollars, when I worked there I don’t know if it ever really turned a profit, and no one was paid enough, and the owners eventually got burned out but couldn’t find someone with decent ethics to sell it to so they’d be sure that their employees and this space they’d built for LGBT people would be in good hands.
I loved that bookstore with all my heart and soul – it was my one refuge when I was living in a violent, abusive situation; it was the first place I was able to have a sense of belonging to an actual community of LGBT people, an experience which was really formative for me and helped me heal a lot from the small-town homophobia I was coming from; when I was too poor to buy food, the manager told me to just take whatever I needed for dinner or groceries or bus fare out of the till and leave her a note letting her know, and she’d literally just like, reimburse whatever I needed. This is an OUTRAGEOUS thing to do, but she was an elder lesbian and she knew I was young and bi and in a really tough place so she did it anyway. One of the store owners, at a time when I wasn’t speaking to my mom for a number of complicated reasons, would call my mom to let her know I was showing up for work and I wasn’t, like, dead in a ditch somewhere. Those people looked out for me – and for other people like me – in ways that went so beyond what I could have ever asked anyone for. And they did it while struggling immensely as a business.
And you know what often kept that place afloat? Gay bars! I’m serious – when the bookstore was in trouble, when they had legal fees, etc, it was gay bars who hosted fundraisers. It was gay bars who provided space for stuff like LGBT trivia night, or for the bookstore’s anniversary and new years’ parties, or for anything that required more space than a small bookstore could accommodate.
So I really resent seeing people pit the idea of spaces like LGBT bookstores and cafes against the idea of spaces like gay bars! Listen: it’s been said a million times, but I think it bears repeating, that most of the people doing this seem like they have never been to an actual gay bar but are basing this stance entirely on what they’ve seen on TV. But also, I feel like maybe these people have never been to an LGBT bookstore or cafe or community centre or other social space for LGBT people that isn’t a bar! Because if you think that there’s no connection ever between these spaces and the ways they exist, if you think that undermining the right of gay bars to exist is supportive of gay bookstores and coffee shops, you’re very, very, extremely, much, very wrong.
I was wearing this outfit today to a grocery store when I made a baby smile. I was wearing this outfit today when I threw my head back and laughed, when I sang in the car with my family, when I filled it with yummy food to keep it healthy.
I was wearing this outfit today to a grocery store when I overheard a woman telling her young daughter who was pointing and laughing that I would get what’s coming to me. I was wearing this outfit today when a woman told a man that it was the wrong kind of attention and that I was asking for someone to get me. I was wearing this outfit today when the same man stared at my body longingly and then agreed with the woman that I was asking for an attack.
I was not wearing this outfit when I was raped. I was wearing a size XXL hoodie and a pair of my mom’s sweatpants, much to the shock of the friend I told after, who asked what she’d been taught to ask: “What were you wearing?”. I feel so terrible for the little girl whose mother was teaching her at the grocery store that she deserved to be assaulted if she dressed comfortably for the weather, which was climbing above 80 degrees, or for an injury, which called for a brace and a boot that doesn’t allow room for long pants, or for her body, because it’s hers and she can put on it what she damn well pleases. I feel terrible for the man who will look me up and down as though I was a 5 for $20 steak deal he might purchase and will immediately after speak to a presumable stranger about the violent fate I deserved. I feel terrible for the woman with fabulous hair who feels she can express herself but refuses to let me do the same.
Summer is coming up. It’s hot outside. I have an injured ankle, and a tight boot and brace to wear on one leg. I will not dress uncomfortably to protect complete strangers who are so offended by an expanse of skin that they console themselves by predicting my next rape.
Stop perpetuating slut-shaming and thus perpetuating a culture of excused rape. Stop perpetuating slut-shaming and thus perpetuating a culture of insecurity, inherent shame, and body image distortion which can cause an innumerable amount of incredibly dark issues nearly impossible to overcome.
My body is mine, and I love it. It is the house I live in, with which I will someday create a family, with which I run and dance and hold the strong lungs I use to sing. I refuse to be ashamed of it for any reason, especially the reason being that this culture which glorifies sex and punishes those who have it, which encourages being sexy and then preaches that sexy girls ask for attack, has taught its people that my stomach is a sin.
Please think twice this summer before you choose to say anything at all to or about anyone who wears something they choose to wear. Please think twice before you say that a girl deserves to be raped for wearing shorts. Please try and catch yourself when you think things like that. Please be courteous and gentle and loving, and spend your effort tackling real problems. My stomach and legs are not a real problem.
they want to make the internet like tv. with channels and paying to get to specific websites and things. net neutrality = not doing that
This impacts every internet user. Please signal boost the hell out of this and sign the petition if you are American
I do not reblog things like this very often, but this affects me both personally and my business as a freelance artist.
In the economy here; cash is already strapped as it is. You bet your ass companies would suck the ever living life out of misc. art sites.
I don’t want it to ever come down to me choosing between groceries or purchasing a new tier package via comcast to be able to access tumblr or DeviantArt (let alone not guaranteeing I’ll even be seen by my customer base since they may not want to pay out their asses either). It doesn’t seem important to most, but I do 90% of my business online entirely.
Please sign up, fight for this and share it with your followers/friends/family and urge them to give them hell as well.
Not writing related, but this is incredibly important. While we pay for service via ISPs, the internet has been a relatively free space where everyone, no matter their income level, is able to connect, access a wealth of information, and express themselves. The Internet has become a major part of our culture as human beings and the notion that ISPs might be able to limit what sites I can access unless I pay them more is utterly sickening. A lot of us are cash strapped as is, and I’d rather not be limited even more by someone else’s greed. Net Neutrality is essential and I hope you guys will understand why it needs to remain.
-Morgan
P.S. Signal boost this if you’re able.
“ limit what sites I can access unless I pay them more”
limit what sites I can access unless I pay them more
limit what sites I can access unless I pay them more
limit what sites I can access unless I pay them more
limit what sites I can access unless I pay them more
DO YOU WANT THIS? NO?? CLICK THE LINK. REBLOG.
As I understand this ruling, it means that businesses now have to pay extra to ISPs to have access to their websites through that ISP provided at a reasonable speed. If you don’t pay, users’ access to your website will be slowed to a crawl – so independent people and small businesses can forget about getting onto that high speed access tier.
This means that the American internet is going to be firmly under the control of those who have the most money. You’ll only get to see the content of those who can pay the ISPs to provide access at a reasonable speed. This means that you can expect to see skewed representation of just about everything, with those bigger businesses who can afford to pay ISPs a premium for access deciding what you can and cannot read, view and consume on the internet.
This is not something that we have in the UK. Our ISPs compete with each other to provide higher speeds, better services and lower prices, but because there’s a monopoly in the US of a few ISPs who provide services, they can afford to do this to you. You can’t go anywhere else, after all.
Everyone in the US needs to sign that petition, call their representatives, write angry letters and do whatever you can to tell your government that this ruling is Not Okay.
Maybe you guys are sick of this post but It’s really important to freelance artists and pretty much everyone who uses the internet, so here it is again. o0o/
if you put trans women in danger because you can’t help running your fucking mouth, you are the ENEMY and will be ERADICATED
if you are a cis person who scrolled past this without reblogging because you don’t feel like it’s a necessary message for your other cis friends to see, i want you to know you’ve made it that much harder to trust you
Question of Smoke 