maybe I’m just becoming a jaded perpetually online zoomer with a high degree of asshole factor, but I’ve grown tired of the notion that the policing of language is something that matters more than actual political activism.
like you’re quibbling with people over whether or not they can say “stupid” or “bitch” or “cunt” because they all have histories of being ableist and sexist-
change the culture and the language will follow.
worry more about expanding services for people with disabilities or providing healthcare to women in countries with limited services, than you worry about some white boy from Colorado saying his friends are “dumb as fuck.”
when you do shit like that too, you alienate people who might actually listen to you if you were educating rather than attacking.
this has gone around on Tumblr before but I’m going to say it again.
an old white guy calling people trannies but being generally supportive > person who uses the proper leftist language but thinks that we need “to be careful about letting kids identify as trans.”
beat people who use slurs like the r word, yes, ok, because the use of that word has become very taboo, but spending your time on Twitter or Tumblr trying to stop every Internet user in the world from saying, “moron.”
good fucking luck.
that’s a great use of an “activist’s” time.
I mean, encouraging a group to police words is litterally a CIA sabotage technique. It saps effort, makes communication harder and causes infighting.
Look up the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
“Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”
“Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible ”
I’m gonna start calling people CIA plants when they do this shit.
Full offense and pun fully intended, but I genuinely think the very existence of “dead dove, do not eat” was a fucking canary in the mines, and no one really paid attention.
Because the tag itself was created as a response to a fandom-wide tendency to disregard warnings and assume tagging was exaggerated. And then the same fucking idiots reading those tags describing things they found upsetting or disturbing or just not to their taste would STILL click into the stories and give the writer’s grief about it.
And as a response writers began using the tag to signal “no, really, I MEAN the tags!”
But like.
If you really think about it, that’s a solution to a different problem. The solution to “I know you tagged your story appropriately but I chose to disregard the tags and warnings by reading it anyway, even though I knew it would upset me, so now I’m upset and making it your problem” is frankly a block, a ban and wide-spread blacklisting. But fandom as a whole is fucking awful at handling bad faith, insidious arguments that appeal to community inclusion and weaponize the fact most people participating in fandom want to share the space with others, as opposed to hurting people.
So instead of upfront ridiculing this kind of maladaptive attempt to foster one’s own emotional self-regulation onto random strangers on the internet, fandom compromised and came up with a redundant tag in a good faith attempt to address an imaginary nuance.
There is no nuance to this.
A writer’s job is to tag their work correctly. It’s not to tag it exhaustively. It’s not even to tag it extensively. A writer’s sole obligation, as far as AO3 and arguably fandom spaces are concerned, is to make damn sure that the tags they put on their story actually match whatever is going on in that story.
That’s it.
That’s all.
“But what if I don’t want to read X?” Well, you don’t read fic that’s tagged X.
“But what if I read something that wasn’t tagged X?” Well, that’s very unfortunate for you, but if it is genuinely that upsetting, you have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.
“But that’s not a lot of fic!” Hi, you must be new here, yes, welcome to fandom. Most of our spaces are built explicitly as a reaction to There’s Not Enough Of The Thing I Want, both in canon and fandom.
“But there are things on the internet that I don’t like!” Yeah, and they are also out there, offline. And, here’s the thing, things existing even though we personally dislike or even hate or even flat out find offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable existing is the price we pay to secure our right to exist as individuals and creators, regardless of who finds US personally unpleasant, hateful or flat out offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable.
“But what about [illegal thing]?!” So the thing itself is illegal, because the thing itself has been deemed harmful. But your goddamn cop-poisoned authoritarian little heart needs to learn that sometimes things are illegal that aren’t harmful, and defaulting to “but illegal!” is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the fascism pop quiz. You’re not a figure of authority and the more you demand to control and exercise authority by command, rather than leadership, the less impressive you seem. You know how you make actual, genuine change in a community? You center harm and argue in good faith to find accommodations and spread awareness of real, actual problems.
But let’s play your game. Let’s pretend we’re all brainwashed cop-abiding little cogs that do not own a single working brain cell to exercise critical thinking with. 99% of the time, when you cry about any given thing “being illegal!!!” you’re correct only so far as the THING itself being illegal. The act or object is illegal. Depiction of it is not. You know why, dipshit? Because if depiction of the thing were illegal, you wouldn’t be able to talk about it. You wouldn’t be able to educate about it. You wouldn’t be able to reexamine and discuss and understand the thing, how and why and where it happens and how to prevent it. And yeah, depiction being legal opens the door for people to make depictions that are in bad taste or probably not appropriate. Sure. But that’s the price we pay, creating tools to demystify some of the most horrific things in the world and support the people who’ve survived them. The net good of those tools existing outweighs the harm of people misusing them.
“You’re defending the indefensible!” No, you’re clumsily stumbling into a conversation that’s been going on for centuries, with your elementary school understanding of morality and your bone-deep police state rot filtering your perception of reality, and insisting you figured it out and everyone else at the table is an idiot for not agreeing with you. Shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and read a goddamn book.
This is horrible and reminds us once again that there is no legislation for how truthful a documentary has to be. Other jobs like journalists have colleges where you have to face consequences if you lie or manipulate information, but documentaries don’t. That’s how we get fake documents being used like this AI-generated images of a real person, and also all the liars on Discovery Max and the History channel spewing anti-science stupidity and pretending like it has any basis.
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