( No Title )
An anon quote that perfectly captures why I don’t like shipping wank that asks people to please “just think about why you like ___”. What if I have thought about it? What then?
Want to know what’s funny? This shit doesn’t just apply to problematic fave characters or to ships. Two years ago, I went through a whole rigmarole exactly like what’s described above, over kinks. I’d have anti-kink people (radfems in particular) constantly telling me that I need to ‘examine / think about’ why I liked kink X or kink Y. At first I took the request at face-value and thought about it and wrote a giant-ass analysis post (for myself, never published, since other people don’t get any sort of automatic right to know everything about me, particularly not when it comes to abusive shit I went through) analyzing how I was dealing with and re-contextualizing the traumatic things I’d experienced as a kid and a teenager in the safe, controlled, consensual environment of BDSM scenes with trusted partners.
My answer in hand, I went on with minding my own business. But things went on much the same – whenever I’d clash with a radfem over their ‘all BDSM caters to the wishes of abusive men’ bullshit, I’d have the same thing tossed at me; the fact that I needed to ‘examine’ my kinks. To which I’d answer that I have, I’ve turned myself inside-out over this shit, I even brought it up with my bloody psychotherapist, what more do you people WANT from me?! But they’d go on repeating the same damn thing, like broken records. A few dropped the disingenuous shit altogether and outright called me a ‘traitor to other women’, whereas others claimed that I and others needed to ‘train’ ourselves out of our kinks entirely! As if we were dogs!
It’s the exact same malarkey over here, with the barely-hidden message behind what used to be a very useful request (it’s not a bad thing at all to look in-depth at why you like or dislike something, how your biases might’ve played into it, your past experiences, your traumas, etc, it’s a good way to know oneself better and to make sure that one isn’t being motivated by subconscious bigotry when it comes to interracial ships, for example) now having warped into ‘I’ll bombard you with this request constantly, no matter how well you’ve looked at yourself and your motivations, until I can get you to stop doing the thing that my precious self hates.’ When I keep saying that this place is marinating in radfem ideas and methods, this is what I mean – here we have their methods in action, the same way they were being used two years ago, with the very foundations of Purity Wank itself being based on their way of conceptualizing things.
Re-reblogging for the added commentary. When someone asks you to “examine X”, they pretty much always mean, “Examine X until you come to the same conclusion that I have.”
And they’ll keep asking you to “examine X” for as long as you disagree with them, because the measure of whether you’ve “examined X” enough has nothing to do with time or thought or honest introspection, and everything to do with whether or not you agree with them.
Discussion ¬