literally, nothing exclusionists do, and nothing you say to an exclusionist, will ever matter. nothing will ever get a response beyond “nuh uh!”
they’ll phrase it different ways every time: “aces are cishet. cishets are cishet. they just wanna be oppressed so bad. they’re literally not oppressed in any way. they don’t experience homophobia or transphobia. they benefit from homophobia and transphobia. they are lying. that never happened.
“you can’t use their tumblr posts as proof. you can’t use studies about them as proof. you can’t use every real-life org including them as proof. you can’t use our community’s own oral history as proof. you can’t use our community’s own written historical documents as proof.
“lmao i’m not a terf, i’m literally an nb lesbian. lmao i’m not quoting terf rhetoric, i’m literally an nb lesbian. lmao i’m not consistently attacking trans women inclusionists, i’m literally an nb lesbian. lmao our movement isn’t full of terfs, we literally called out a terf once. lmao how dare you show me a blocklist of hundreds of terf exclusionists to call out, I’m literally an nb lesbian.
“anyway the community literally started to combat homophobia and transphobia. anyway it’s always been lgbtpn. anyway it’s always been lgbt. anyway cishets aren’t lgbt.”
some of the things that canonically Don’t Even Matter and are clearly Fake News:
(Same study: A higher percentage of trans aces are harassed at work than of trans LGBQ people. A much higher percentage of trans aces have had to quit school because of harassment, than of trans LGBQ people. A higher percentage of trans aces have experienced family rejection, than of trans LGBQ people. A higher percentage of trans aces lack health insurance, than of trans LGBQ people.)
I had no idea about any of these facts. Have so far tried not to get involved but according to these stats it’s a lot more important than I thought
honestly, getting involved in Discourse is probably pointless. It seems like the only exclusionists left are people who are so invested in their beliefs that they can’t or won’t even look at other information; they just insist everything’s all lies, and make fun of it without reading.
But getting involved in supporting aces in whatever ways they need/want, or raising awareness among the rest of us? That’s always worth doing. 💖
i was talking to my bi ace genderqueer cousin about this and pulled up the post again and like….
i just want to highlight this part. This list is all from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which had a sample size of something like 15,000 people. Which is fucking huge for that type of study.
A higher percentage of trans aces are harassed at work than of trans LGBQ people.
A much higher percentage of trans aces have had to quit school because of harassment, than of trans LGBQ people.
A higher percentage of trans aces have experienced family rejection, than of trans LGBQ people.
A higher percentage of trans aces lack health insurance, than of trans LGBQ people.
None of this is because we are trans. If it were because we were trans, then the numbers would be similar to the numbers in the other groups. The difference between the groups is that we’re ace.
I need to point that out, because I’m pretty sure the knee-jerk exclusionist reaction to this would be “but they’re trans, so it is just because they’re trans.”
And it’s not a surprising difference. It parallels what happens when studies of things like suicide, poverty, et cetera, in gay+bi vs straight people, actually separate out the gay and bi people. It always turns out that the bi people have the highest rates of whatever is being studied.
This is just the same thing happening again. The groups that get the least attention have the worst outcomes, gosh gee I wonder how that could be… and then that makes it harder for us to advocate for ourselves, which continues the vicious cycle.
basically, a lot of exclusionists have seized upon Pride Month as a great time to double down on claiming that “aces aren’t oppressed in any way”
this list is my gift to everyone who sees those posts and has to be like, “I mean, we might not die or be kicked out or assaulted for being ace, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy” or “so we should take a backseat, but we deserve to be in the car”
print it out, crumple it into a ball, and throw it at an exclusionist today!
Just reminded with that reblog about when the proverbial Missing Stair gets tolerated inside the family.
My own family has enough problems with ways it’s apparently OK to treat people, but luckily that wasn’t one of them that I ever knew about. Another thing which really shouldn’t involve luck. The idea is totally appalling, especially where it involves kids getting shoved to the bottom of the collective family priority bucket to the point of being actively placed in danger.
That didn’t mean that there weren’t several other people in the community with bad enough reputations and/or creepy enough behavior that I got warned to stay well away from them as a kid.
One of those lived right up the street from us for several years, and I played with his kids who were around the same age. But I was forbidden to ever go inside their house or be alone with the guy. He came across that wrong to my mother, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d also heard some things because smallish communities.
There were a few people like that, but that particular guy was the closest and the hardest to totally avoid. It didn’t even really strike me at the time just how messed up the whole situation was, especially for the children who were just not in a position to avoid these people. Including their own, too often 😦
Anyway, after a few years we moved, and I was honestly pretty glad to be away from Alicia’s Creepy Dad hanging around. (And that’s in a culture where dads are expected to pay more attention and spend more time with kids. Just…not like that.)
My family’s involvement with ACD wasn’t totally over, though! Because he owned a garage, and would pass basically anything not super blatantly dangerous on state car inspections for an extra $20.
Dude may have been creepy enough to warn your kid away, but that deal apparently looked like a tempting enough offer when inspection time rolled around and there wasn’t money for proper repairs. My mom didn’t even like to go there, and would get my dad to take the cars in for ACD’s special inspection deal so she didn’t have to deal with him. But, they still gave him money.
Anyway, I eventually got old enough to drive, and a while after that my $500 car came due for inspection.
($500 in like 1992, but still. The thing was a year younger than I was and mechanically sound, to the point that my dad was still driving it some when I left 10+ years later. But, it had a few quirks. Let’s put it that way.)
You can maybe see where this is going. For some reason, both of my parents were busy, and my mom turned pissy when I protested, insisting that I eventually needed to learn to handle these things on my own. Which happened a lot, tbqh. And of course in this case that involved going for the ACD Special Inspection Deal.
By myself, dealing with somebody who creeped me out and that she had explicitly told me never to be alone with. Maybe 17 was too old for him to act Like That, but I was just not willing to find out. I explained why I didn’t want to do that, and that got treated as ridiculous.
So yeah, I set up an inspection at a different garage. And it was all my fault when the car failed on a busted defroster and a missing California-only ‘70s vintage exhaust device. And it had to go back to the same garage to be reinspected.
I got to take back roads as much as possible and try to dodge cops for probably 6 months after that, especially trying to get to and from school in the next town. Until my dad could track down a junkyard smog pump for shipping (pre-modern Internet) and we could get the defroster reconnected enough to pass.
My mother would send me out to run errands in the no sticker car, and yell about it being all my own fault if I said a word. I did get a ticket at one point, not surprisingly. (And yelled at over that added expense, of course.) Mostly surprised it did only happen once. I got pretty good at avoiding places you often saw cops.
The whole thing was about as stressful as you might expect, especially for someone who’d only had a license for about a year at that point. I still think my mother’s behavior was inexcusable, but yeah she wasn’t ever about to admit she was wrong to begin with. If you could ask her now, I’m sure it would still be all my fault 25+ years later.
And I really was not in the wrong for being unwilling to deal with Neighborhood Missing Stair that I had been warned about, by myself, when I was 17 years old. And was offered no reasonable alternatives by people who should have known better.
Hadn’t thought about that experience for years, very possibly because I didn’t want to. But, reminded of it today. And I evidently needed to rant some.
Imagine that: giving time and attention to somebody that everybody else hates and keeps at arm’s length might possibly help them show the world that they’re not a freak?!?! What a concept!!! /sarcasm
ok i was gonna put this in the tags but i’m really passionate about this so fuck it:
i strongly believe this is something everyone, especially teachers, should fucking have in mind at all times. i just became sort of an assistant guide for the cubs of my scouts group a couple months ago, and there was this one kid everyone warned me about, and i understood what they meant just minutes after our first meeting began.
this kid, let’s call him k, is around 8yo and is just super energetic and can barely stand still, and usually doesn’t listen to whoever’s talking. i didn’t get to interact much with him that day as i was trying to figure out the group dynamics and how i’d manage to deal with those kids once a week for god knows how long, and he didn’t go to any of the meetings for over a month. that is, until a couple weeks ago.
i was the first person at our meeting place, and he got there just after me. i didn’t recognise him at first, but he seemed just like most of my kids there: excited to be there, if not a little hyper. so listened to what he said to me, and just sat there and talked to him for five minutes or so, until the other kids started to come in. when we officially started, i brought him to the circle and kept him next to me, helping him calm down a bit, and stayed with him for the rest of the hour and a half we had, walking in the woods and talking to him about aquariums and what sticks looked like the best ones for us to take.
my conclusion: k’s actually a really sweet, thoughtful kid, but the treatment the other guides usually give him (which usually amounts to shushing him and saying they won’t let him participate if he isn’t quiet) is fucking shitty as hell. he just works different than the other kids, shushing him ain’t ever gonna do any good, and calling him a problem child ain’t gonna help either. expecting every kid, and every person for that matter, to fit certain boxes of what you’d call “acceptable” behaviour is bigoted at worst and ignorant at best.
Because those are specifically what I’m talking about. The argument
isn’t about it catering to children, it’s about not catering to people
who consume that kind of content. Which there is thousands of, if you do
a quick search of any of the tags used to find shit of that like.
I’m saying that while I personally abhor such things on such a visceral
level to the point where even thinking about it in a fictional context is making me shake and want to throw up as I type this, that doesn’t give me the right to decide who to censor and who to not. Cause where do you then decide that censorship ends? Once you allow the one to be censored, it allows for the censorship of the personal as well which is exactly what happened before. And anyone naive enough to believe that it wouldn’t happen again is in for a very rude awakening. We’re already seeing it come into effect with Microsoft censoring what they deem to be “explicit content”, which includes a lot of things from explicit imagery, right down to swearing.
This is actually something that’s been hashed out in courts of law over and over and over until we have come up with the laws that we do have, which are very helpfully explained here and are well worth the time to read:
And it has already been decided that legally, fictional depictions of certain acts even between adults and minors, can only be judged on a case by case basis to determine whether something has artistic merit or if it can be deemed too obscene as to be harmful.
And people making reports to the FBI over this kind of thing, is going to obliterate fandom again, and all the safe spaces the generations even before mine worked so hard to build are going to go with it. Again.
Just because I’m anti-censorship and losing my fandom spaces, doesn’t mean I want those stories on there, it doesn’t even make me okay with them existing on a personal level because I am not.
But I am aware of the consequences of what will happen if we do allow for that kind of censorship, and it’s not as clean cut as a lot of people believe. In an ideal world, maybe it would be. But we’re not in that world.
Now if you’ll excuse me. I’m going to go throw up.
This is, to me, a pretty solid example of why sometimes learned history and empirical examples trump good intentions and feelings.
Because every part of me screams that of course banning luridly ephebophilic content on creative platforms is the right thing to do. (And pedophilic content too of course, but that’s actually pretty heavily policed already). Especially platforms that minors frequent, where minors regularly consume content labeled ‘not for minors’, and there’s no good way to keep them out of such content. And it’s not immediately obvious to me why this would be a difficult issue to selectively police. Arguments for why it’s a slippery slope tend to sound like apologist arguments to me, rather than legitimate difficulties.
But you know what? I’m wrong. How I feel about this is demonstrably, historically wrong. Countries around the world have struggled, really fucking struggled, to decide how underage sexual acts should be legally handled in media and absolutely none of them have come up with an easy solution. The most common one is “the legal system will handle it on a case by case basis, when it’s clear there’s something to be looked at”. And I mean … damn. When that’s the best legal scholars can do you know it’s bad. I don’t even want to imagine what law school courses on this subject are like.
And in fanfiction specifically, there are horror stories of how this kind of policy was abused. How well-intentioned efforts had awful far-reaching consequences and how malicious actors abused the policing systems. The effects of this in the past unmade creative fandom on the internet and forced it to basically start from scratch so far as platforms went.
I wish, I wish, that simple common sense policing policies for this stuff worked. And it feels to me like they should! That makes it really hard for me to let go of the idea that there should be some way to make it work. But all the world’s lawyers and all the world’s committees haven’t managed to do it, so I’ve just got to bite my tongue and admit I’m not that smart. I will not succeed where they failed. So for fandom, we’ve just got to let fandom be posted and hosted as is.
Thank you, you just summed up exactly how I feel about all of this. And I’m so incredibly bitter that I’m having to be the one to make the “slippery slope” argument cause it just feels wrong. But this isn’t about my feelings. It’s about protecting ourselves against those who would silence us entirely, and if you think this whole thing is “just” about fanfiction, you are absolutely dreaming.
And as I’ve said during kink discussions— this slippery slope ends with the burden being predominantly taken by young women and queer folx who are just trying to explore their world. No one’s talking about MLP fandom or actual loli fans. This doesn’t hurt people with social capital to burn, like straight men sexualizing young girls. This is all within an community most specifically used by marginalized people. LGBTQ writers and people with trauma in particular bear the brunt of these attacks.
just as A Thing: this doesn’t just include fandom.
Sex education is so shitty in the US because there is a strong, real fear that any frank discussion of sex or how to do it will entice children to be sexual before they are ready. The common idea is that sexual discussions should be between parents and children because only parents can appropriately gauge both what moral lessons they want to impart to their children and what information is appropriate for their own children to hear, even though parents don’t actually provide their kids with basic sexual instruction or do so in a patchy, gender-biased, and non-comprehensive way.
Anything non-cis and non-het is still thought of as inherently more sexual than anything heterosexual. This is the reasoning behind double standards regarding, for example, nonsexual public displays of affection between same-gender couples instead of different-gender couples. This is often linked to a “conversion” theory of queerness where impressionable children become queer from being exposed to it through interactions with other queer people and through the media. This is inexorably linked with pedophilia and the idea that queer people are all pedophiles who “make new ones” by molesting children. (This is further complicated by the fact that LGBTQ people, more often than straight people, are fine with and interested in relationships with 10+ year age gaps)
But of course you don’t mean sex education. But of course you don’t mean queer couples. But of course you’re fine with people who write stuff out of trauma, or are minors themselves, or are portraying it as a bad thing.
Fun fact: the law doesn’t give a shit about that. There is no “but only if it’s portrayed as bad” law. There’s no “but only if it’s a result of trauma” law. There’s no “it’s okay if you’re a minor yourself” law, as kids find out all the time. You can have your philosophical discussions about where to draw the line all you want, but you cannot then assume that the law has come to the same conclusion you have about it.
A lot of abuse survivors who are like “this obviously abusive content is fine it doesn’t hurt me” have probably seen abuse normalized in their lives. I know I have. It doesn’t mean the content isn’t harmful.
“It helps me cope” that’s not a GOOD thing. I hate this site for saying everything is valid and refusing to look beyond that
not only that but when abuse survivors continue to consume and try to rationalize abuse by saying its fine, it only retraumatizes them and sets recovery far back. “coping” with abusive ships & content isnt real!
Fucking… @autismserenity@fandom-is-for-pleasure, either of you wanna tackle this? I… just can’t. I’m stressed and broken and don’t know where to begin, but I also can’t just let this stand.
I’m gonna go with: when people say that a story about an abusive relationship helps them cope, they mean it’s helpful to:
* see that other people know what it’s like
* see that other people know they exist
* see their terrible experiences reflected in a universe that’s really important to them – because it lets them feel like they could belong in that universe too, it’s not just for those other, valued, un-abused people
* see how characters they admire deal with that abusive situation.
(This covers a lot of things, but off the top of my head: maybe seeing them get sucked into a shitty abusive situation, not even realizing that’s what it is at first, is helpful because if this amazing protagonist can fall into that trap, then the viewer doesn’t have to shame themself for falling into it anymore. Or maybe the character eventually gets out of it, and it’s helpful to see how they escape and start to heal.)
* work through some of the shit it brings up for them
(I feel like a lot of people respond to that last point, or to all of them, with a contemptuous “you should work through that in THERAPY, that’s what it’s FOR, not by fucking around at home with fanfic or anime or whatever!” and like… Yeah, that can be really helpful, if you have a good therapist you can afford, and… these people are probably already doing that?
You don’t get to just have things come up and work through them in therapy, this shit is constant. You go to therapy or counseling to get help processing all the stuff that’s coming up in your everyday life. And having one person, who you’re paying to be supportive, tell you you’re not alone and shouldn’t shame yourself, is not nearly enough.)
A non-sexual, theoretically non-abusive example:
It’s true that this stuff CAN be retraumatizing. It’s also true that that experience can be cathartic.
And that being retraumatized by watching, or reading, something that you know isn’t real, is VERY different from being retraumatized by experiencing more violations in your own life.
Using that term in a way that implies those are the same thing feels very disrespectful of my experiences with abuse. Because no matter how horrible something I read or watch is, it’s not the same experience as having a person in my life who is violating my boundaries. YMMV.
Anyway: I used to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, back when it aired.
It killed Tara off RIGHT after a partner of mine killed himself.
That was extraordinarily retraumatizing. Especially since Willow and Tara had been very rare representation. And I’d really idealized their relationship and wanted them to get back together and do well by each other. Much like I’d idealized my own relationship, and wanted it to live up to my image of it.
I was watching that whole plot arc play out, week after week, while grieving, and raging against my partner and the show, and wishing both situations would magically somehow get fixed. Frequently, I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to keep watching the show.
But despite how hard it was, it was also helping me a LOT. For complex reasons, I couldn’t, at that point, tell most of my friends he was dead. Only one other person in my life knew, and he didn’t know how to respond or show up around it.
Having a similar tragedy playing out in fiction meant that my feelings were validated, by the reactions of other characters. It meant that my experience was, to some extent, validated, acknowledged, by what I was seeing on TV.
When nobody else in my life could grieve or rage for, or with, me, these characters could grieve and rage in parallel to me. I could see what support looked like, even if I couldn’t have it. When I felt like I wasn’t handling it well, I could say to myself, “At least I haven’t suddenly become evil and turned anybody inside-out.”
You could argue that that’s not the kind of content you’re talking about. That that plotline… what? Doesn’t normalize violence against women? Violence against lesbians? Gun violence?
That it’s okay because the villain meets with a terrible end? Even though Tara’s murder is something that does happen in our world, and Warren’s death is totally unrealistic and literally impossible here?
That it’s not an abusive relationship, just a single act of abuse? That you only mean people who watch or read or talk about abusive romantic relationships?
It’s just. If the arguments above make sense, then Harry Potter should be getting it for depicting an incredibly abusive, neglectful relationship, year after year, with the adults in power refusing to even acknowledge it. With the author, IMHO, treating what she’s describing very lightly, as if it’s just sort of inconvenient and rude of the Dursleys to make him live in silence in a closet.
That does get criticized, rightly. But according to this thread, people shouldn’t write or read anything like that, full stop. They’re doing something bad if they read those books over and over because they relate to Harry’s experiences of abuse. Or write more stories about that relationship. Or draw his uncle screaming at him and locking him up.
Or: Nobody should create or watch the US version of Queer As Folk because it depicts an emotionally abusive man in his thirties dating someone who, initially, is 17… even though the 17-year-old realizes, as he learns and grows, that he’s in an abusive relationship. And tries to set boundaries, and eventually leaves, and numerous characters tell the older dude that he’s being incredibly terrible, and that he should end the relationship.
The US version sucks (I haven’t watched the UK original) and there are a million terrible things about it IMHO. I can’t recommend watching this shit, on multiple different levels.
But I also have to recognize that there are people out there who idealized THAT relationship, and stood by it, insisting that it was healthy and fine – and that a lot of them, young and old, eventually figured out, through it, that their own relationships were toxic and they needed help.
And there are people who never got into those relationships, because they saw what this one was like.
And there are people who had no interest in anything like that, who saw people idealizing it and making fanart that idealized it, who reached out to support them instead of screaming at them for being terrible and wrong. And some of those people idealizing it were able to get out of bad situations earlier because they had a supportive community around them.
Idk, I’m pretty sure that the knee-jerk reaction will be to skip reading any of this, imagine what you think I said, and then be a dick about it, but it was worth writing for me anyway at least.
(Note: I called the Buffy situation “theoretically non-abusive” because, of course, we would learn later that Joss Whedon apparently killed Tara off because Amber Benson pissed him off by, basically, setting boundaries.
And also, accidentally killing one person by trying to kill another is legitimately an abusive act, albeit one that misfires. Not all abuse is sexual.)
i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there – of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space – often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just – it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr – I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing – and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups – and their main support network – when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault.
(It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y’all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.
Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
I like this last addition.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.
So we did.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.
This thread keeps getting better.
It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over
Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y’all, so y’all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.
You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.
Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.
Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.
Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.
I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”. If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:
A preview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!
I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.
1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)
2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.
3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men.
Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.
Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.
(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)
The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.
Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable.They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.
This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.
History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.
(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)
Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.
He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyone got them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.
There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.
You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.
Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.
It’s been touched on a little before but really it’s hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.
Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didn’t know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.
Also FanFiction doesn’t really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) It’s only years later, reading fanfic history posts that I’ve started to piece together what happened.
Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didn’t even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.
Hot damn, this post just keeps going!
I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and you’ll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblr’s purity crusade.
If you haven’t been TOSsed you really don’t get it, imo.
If you haven’t spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really don’t get it, imo.
Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going “I really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.”
A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we don’t remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.
Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.
Your professor will not be happy with you if he says the Stanford Prison Experiment shows human nature and you say it shows the nature of white middle class college-aged boys.
Like he will not be happy at all.
For real though. That experiment. Scary shit.
This reminds me of a discussion that I read once which said Lord of the Flies would have turned out a hell of a lot differently if it was a private school of young girls (who are expected to be responsible and selfless instead), or a public school where the children weren’t all from an inherently entitled, emotionally stunted social class (studies have shown that people in lower socioeconomic classes show more compassion for others).
Or that the same premise with children raised in a different culture than the toxic and opressive British Empire and it’s emphasis on social hierarchy and personal wealth and status.
And that what we perceive as the unchangable truth deep inside humanity because of things like Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment, is just the base truths about what happens when you remove any accountabilty controlling one social group with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an inability to feel compassion.
I will always reblog this.
I just wanna say that the Lord of the Flies was explicitly written about high-class private school boys to make this exact point. Golding wrote Lord of the Flies partially to refute an earlier novel about this same subject: The Coral Island by
R.M. Ballantyne. Golding thought it was absolutely absurd that a bunch of privileged little shits would set up some sort of utopia, so his book shows them NOT doing that.
This is also generally true about most psychological experiments.
There’s an experiment called “The Ultimatum Game”. It goes something like this.
Subject A is given an amount of money (Say, $100).
Subject A must offer Subject B some percentage of that money.
If Subject B accepts Subject A’s offer, both get the agreed upon amount of money. If Subject B refuses, no one gets any money.
The most common result was believed to be that people favored 50/50 splits. Anything too low was rejected; people wanted fairness. This was believed to be universal.
And then a researcher went to Peru to do the experiment with members of the indigenous Machiguenga population, and was baffled to find that the results were totally different.
Because, to the Machiguenga, refusing any amount of free money (even an unfair amount) was considered crazy.
So the researcher took his work on the road (to 14 other ‘small scale’ societies and tribes) , and to his shock found the results varied wildly depending on where the test was done.
In fact, the “universal” result? Was an outlier.
And that’s the problem. 96% percent of test subjects for psychological research come from 12% of the population. Stuff that we consider to be universal facts of human nature… even things like optical illusions, just… aren’t.
You can read an article about it here. But the crux of it is that psychology is plagued with confirmation bias, and people are shaped more by their environment than we realize.
I remember reading that the removal of a single word changed the initial test scores on recreations of the Stanford Experiment test pool. Of course, they weren’t full recreations, because of how unethical the original experiment was. What they did was look into the initial scores of the test population, and someone went ‘Huh, all the test subjects were technically sane, but these scores are way off the national averages for xyz’. They compared notes with other people, got some backing, and came up with a test for the test itself.
So they tried to recreate the test pool for the experiment by changing up the ad a bit and testing the psychology of people who applied. Something very interesting was discovered that could have entirely skewed the final result.
The ad itself.
By changing the ad to hide that the simulated environment would be a prison, the test pool changed entirely, even among the same age, area, and gender. People who signed up for a simulated prison environment were shown to have higher levels of aggression, quicker tempers, and to be more sadistic. People who signed up for a simulated environment were calmer, more empathetic, and less likely to react with angry outbursts.
The test was biased before it even began. Again, even people who otherwise fit the original specifications (college-aged men from the Stanford area) scored far differently than the people actually involved in the experiment. They were simply less likely to sign up for a prison-based experiment than people who were prone to aggression.
TL;DR: Sane people can be aggressive as hell and the Stanford Experiment was too biased to be a representation of the average population.
It also came out quite recently that the Stanford Prison Experiment participants, specifically the guards, did not just “naturally assume the role of guard and abuse the prisoners,” they were *coached and encouraged* by the experimenters to act like “real prison guards” and told if they didn’t act aggressively enough they weren’t helping with prison reform.
idk can we stop…treating a.ce disc.ourse like it’s some haha funney cringe compilation or whatever the fuck because it fucking destroyed the entire ace and aro communities. there is no solid aspec community on tumblr anymore (which was by far the biggest number of aspec ppl). exclusionists took our community and fucking smashed it to pieces and y’all treat it as this fucking stupid joke when they traumatized, gaslit, and abused an entire group of queer people back into the closet. fuck every single person who doesn’t take that seriously.
My personal experience is just that, but it’s really indicative that I have watched almost every single ace and aro person I know, irl and online, actively recloset themselves as a direct result of the consequences of The Disc Horse™
I watched irl queer groups disintegrate bc a few ppl who got into leadership positions used that to make the space hostile towards ace ppl (among others as well), saw friends go from being loud and proud aces n aros to actively avoiding any mention of it and letting ppl assume their sexuality. I myself, having been IDing as ace for 10 years at least, have in the past couple since this whole “"discourse”“ came into being, actively and intentionally stopped telling anyone at all that I’m ace. To put that in some kind of perspective, I am incredibly out as trans and will actively out myself pretty constantly except to total strangers I will never see again. I feel safer telling ppl I’m trans than ace. Especially in queer spaces. It’s fucked me up so much I didn’t even quite grasp how much but today my therapist asked me for the first time about like romantic relationships and I physically could not say I am aro and ace. Completely incapable, utterly frozen, and I just kinda let her believe what she will. Ironically the fact that I’ve gone from being willing and ready to tell ppl I’m ace as just another facet of myself to entirely unable and unsolicited to tell anyone, is probably a thing one might want to talk w one’s therapist about.
This has really fucked not just the community at large but fucked up individual ace ppl in so many ways. It’s not something “funny” or remotely harmless, it’s absolutely devastated us.
like even if you believe that ace people aren’t truly oppressed or what the fuck ever can you maybe realise that when i, a Confirmed Lesbian who will share that identity with anyone who stands still to listen for two minutes:
a) will no longer tell people i am ace until months into a knowing each other & even then am completely prepared for rejection, bc that is what my online experience has taught me to expect.
b) am more afraid to tell queer people that i’m ace than straight people – genuinely! i am more concerned that queer people will react badly to that than straight people!
can you maybe then accept that somewhere along the line we fucked up? can you accept that whatever your belief is on what the experiences which, as a community, ace people share – & boy oh boy do i wish you would listen to us about that – the real effect that all of this has had on individual people is unacceptable? bc it is not acceptable, not at all, & i am so tired of keeping my mouth shut about it
I used to be an exclusionist, because I legitimately thought that meant “let’s create two communities that sometimes overlap and that are generally allied with one another.”
I stopped being an exclusionist in part because I rethought things in general, but mostly? Because BOY WAS I WRONG ABOUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WERE ENVISIONING, and boy was i NOT OKAY WITH THAT,
Since joining this site I’ve gone from being comfortable with being asexual to actively avoiding telling people. Thanks so much, Tumblr.
I don’t remember exactly what you said in which ask, nonny, but:
Honestly I think there are a goodly number of people out there who confuse “I’m not very in touch with my emotions” with “I must not have them” and…
…this is uncharitable, but having seen how angry this discussion seems to make some folks who think I’m calling them evil (which is a perfectly sensible thing to be angry at, mind you, though it’s not what I think I’m doing)…
…I suspect that at least some of the people in it are having things I’d recognize/label as “intense emotions” but they’re reporting “my emotions are weak and inconsistent.”
Which either means I’m reading their tone wrong (too much of a positive ping on my detector for “frustrated/insulted” because I’m too NT-like to get it), or that I’m reading them right and they’re not recognizing they do have Large Feels about this at least.
I think part of the reason is alexithymia.
I see a lot of people with alexithymia describe it as “not feeling emotions very strongly”. But the psych research on alexithymia describes it more as “inability to tell what emotions you are feeling”. Case reports describe things like people attempting suicide, showing a ton of behavioural signs of depression, but saying that they don’t understand why they’re doing this stuff because they’re not feeling sad. Or, in less extreme examples, having clear physiological signs suggesting a likely emotion, such as increased heart rate in absence of a physical reason, but not being able to identify an emotion underlying these responses.
I suspect what’s often going on is that people with alexithymia are feeling emotions, and sometimes expressing them in ways others can pick up on (although probably with less accuracy than reading people without alexithymia), meanwhile not being consciously aware of those emotions.
So someone with alexithymia might claim not to feel empathy because they don’t feel *conscious* empathy, while subconsciously feeling empathy and basing decisions off of it, which they then proceed to explain as conscious processes because the conscious mind loves to confabulate things it can’t explain. Similar to how people with left spatial neglect will base decisions on things to their left side despite not consciously perceiving them and then misattribute the reasoning for that decision to a conscious factor.
Oh. Oh gosh.
Oh goodness. Yes, that could explain it. Oh wow.
I can’t tell you how many times in this conversation I’ve read a post where someone is, as I parse it, very upset, yet telling me they have extremely flat or inconsistent affect.
Or how often the same people saying that have an entire blog full of social issue stuff where they don’t just post about someone getting hurt for unjust reasons but sound mad about it to me (anger is an emotion imo) or where they post something about a good ally or wise action and seem happy or hopeful to me (so are those things.)
So a bunch of this discussion seems to me like “but… you… you have emotions all the time? You’re having them DIRECTLY AT ME right now, completely understandably but also so ‘loudly’ it’s impossible for me not to feel emotions back. Which understandably makes you react to me being angry, which… etc.”
Or even situations where someone who tells me “I have low empathy, meaning I don’t feel much for others” do things that seem to me to arise from emotions about others. Which puts me in a bind, because I want to say “you do have empathy, I’ve seen it, and some of it looks affective to me!”
But I don’t want to claim there isn’t a reason someone labeled them that way. So I just go “nnnnnnwhahahshfnf….” and people can tell I’m annoyed but not why.
Which makes me go “hey wait, either I’m much worse at perceiving others’ emotions accurately than I (and several NTs I know) think I am and MY empathy is low rather than high as everyone outside this particular conversation seems to say it is or… you don’t define emotion in a way I understand. Wtf.”
But if I’m perceiving how they feel more directly than they are, and they’re having to think it through, then… that makes way more sense.
Thanks. I feel distinctly less like I’ve gone completely crazy now.
Let me try to put it as clearly as I possibly can.
I don’t lack emotions. They might be inconsistent and inappropriately calibrated, but I have them. I haven’t seen anyone you’ve talked to claiming they lacked emotions entirely, though it’s possible I’ve missed some context.
What I lack is emotional response to another person’s distress. By drawing on other experiences, both my own and ones I’ve heard about, of what’s distressing them, I can come to the conclusion that their suffering is wrong and I should try to ameliorate it. I don’t (so far as I know) lack cognitive empathy. I’m capable of thinking “it really sucked when I fell down the stairs, so it probably sucks for this person too. Therefore, because I value a world in which fewer people suffer, I should help them.”
I don’t, however, experience an emotion in response to their emotion. I might, as I mentioned above, experience a memory of a time that I felt similar, but that’s entirely theoretical. I am not someone who can look at a crying person and feel a tug on my heartstrings. It’s just a piece I’m missing. Perhaps, by your standards, that makes me a person in whose presence you feel uncomfortable. That is your right. But I have done my damnedest to construct a moral code in which that absence is not disabling.
Yeah, I’m a little baffled by the insistence that strong affective empathy is the same thing as like…. having emotions about things. It’s not. It’s not even remotely the same thing, and it’s not even remotely universal even among people who are entirely neurotypical. Like, this whole line of discussion has been crossing my dash over and over again, and it’s frankly the most bizarre thing that I’ve seen on tumblr this week, which, let me tell you, is a high bar.
‘I am angry/frustrated/annoyed by your post and feel compelled to respond to it’ is an emotional response. It has not a goddamn thing to do with empathy, affective or otherwise.
OP seems to be conflating affective empathy, cognitive empathy, compassion, moral reasoning, and emotions in general all together in a really weird way. Those are all different things. Most people have some degree of affective empathy, but it varies widely, and insisting that anyone who’s not an amoral monster must experience strong emotional mirroring (or otherwise be suppressing it, or too ignorant of their own psychology to understand what’s happening in their own heads) is kind of ridiculous.
ETA: Also, people getting annoyed because they feel that you’re deliberately misunderstanding them are not reflecting back your anger; they’re annoyed at your behavior. That’s a different thing. That’s emotion, not empathy.
That’s actually what’s weird to me. People are saying “emotions aren’t necessary for moral action,” and I’m saying “but much of action is fueled by emotion, so much of moral action, as a subset of action, would be too. Most of what I’ve seen suggests ‘empathy’ is a major driver of most altruistic action.”
And people are saying “but you can be moral by reason alone; my emotions are super erratic, so I can’t make them part of why I do things, or at least not morality-things. If I did, I *couldnt* be consistently moral.”
Which is confusing because no one has explained how that works yet. And when I ask them to they say “hey whoa I HAVE EMOTIONS CHILL” and it’s weird because… I’m not the one saying you don’t, you’re the one saying they only show up some of the time?
I guess I still don’t understand where the sticking point is, because to my reading (a) that’s not what people are saying at all and (b) several people in this conversation have explained themselves repeatedly and clearly. This may just be like an extrovert/introvert thing, where the experience of one group is so profoundly alien to how the other group functions that they find it impossible to–if you’ll pardon the term–empathize with.
It’s not ‘my emotions are super erratic’, it’s ‘my direct emotional response to other people’s emotions or distress or pain is inconsistent if it’s there at all and therefore my moral choices for how to respond to a person in distress have to be considered rather than impulsive because the automatic impulse to alleviate their distress isn’t always there’.
Some people see a person burst into tears and have an immediate, automatic response of ‘OH NO YOU’RE CRYING WHAT’S WRONG HOW CAN I HELP? (often modulated by an adult awareness of appropriate social response, but still present). People with very strong affective empathy will experience this even if they can’t stand the crying person. They find the sight of another person’s distress automatically distressing. That’s emotional mirroring.
Some people don’t experience that, or don’t experience it strongly or consistently. The vast majority of the time, if I see someone burst into tears–even if it’s someone I love–my immediate, automatic emotional response is ‘…huh. You seem upset.’ I come across as very stilted and cold in-person; I’m actually a lot better at responding appropriately online, because I have more space to make a conscious, deliberate choice to respond with compassion instead of blank indifference.
It’s not that there’s no emotion there, but it’s farther back. It isn’t an automatic mirroring. It’s ‘I don’t want to see you in pain because I know that it feels bad to be in pain,’ not ‘I don’t want to see you in pain because your pain is directly painful to me.’ I have to reason it out to get to the correct response.
Aaand I think that’s about all I can say on the subject; if that doesn’t clarify it, I don’t think anything I say will, so I think I’m going to bow out of this one now.
If “morality is a matter of reason alone” is not the claim, there is no disagreement. That is the only thing I take issue with. I do not think not mirroring is an indication of badness.
If “morality is a matter of reason alone” is taken off the table, then the dispute is entirely about whether “lack of empathy” should be used in a less precise way to mean “consistently not caring about others” or whether it should be reserved specifically to speak about failure to mirror.
The reason I’m reluctant to give up the broader usage is because I find it handy as a way to talk about the behavior and seeming motivations of the Administration. Part of what offends me so much about the things they do is that they don’t honestly seem to believe doing bad things is the best way to be helpful or that certain cruelties are actually a necessary evil; they seem invested not just in failing to regard other people but also in inducing others to do the same.
and part of the way they do taht is, I think, by inciting fear so as to breed callousness, which is a particular kind of lack of emotional response (or of turning off one you’d otherwise have thanks to some excuse.)
I think it’s unfortunate that the two uses exist side by side! But I haven’t found a suitable replacement for the second one, and I want to be able to talk specifically about what the fascists are doing rather than just say “people sound callous now” or something.
I don’t think morality is inherently a matter of reason alone. I don’t think it inherently involves emotion, either. I suspect that the meta-disagreement here is that one camp is trying to find a sort of unified theory of morality and the other is content to parse it as many separate-but-clustered impulses. I think human cognition, and therefore motivation, is extraordinarily varied. I believe you when you say that emotion is integral to your own sense of morality, but I don’t believe it’s possible to boil down, not really.
To me it’s like saying “I experience sexuality in X way; therefore X is integral to human sexuality.” There are certain broad similarities, but I think it’s a fool’s errand to try and unify them into a solid sense of what sex is. If one person, say, experiences sex as overwhelmingly physical and another as overwhelmingly emotional, it’s impossible to say which of them is more sexual than the other. There are a lot of different ways to get to the same place.
“I suspect that the meta-disagreement here is that one camp is trying to find a sort of unified theory of morality and the other is content to parse it as many separate-but-clustered impulses.”
Yes, this is the thing I’m saying. I’m saying the idea that “morality” is one big unified ball of stuff doesn’t make sense to me and never has. (This is also something that gets me into arguments with people who say morality is purely consequentialist, for similar reasons.) I’m pretty sure what we understand morality to be is a cluster of impulses that make us form communities and care for one another, meaning that it’s origin is evolution, and evolution is a goddamn mess that loves to glom things together imperfectly as long as it works. So being perfectly systemizing about morality seems to me most likely false, though appealing in some ways.
Your metaphor makes a lot of this make more sense to me.
To me, it’s like… you know that picture that explained the autism spectrum as a bunch of ice cream toppings with different traits on them? Like one might be texture sensitivity and one might be selective mutism or whatever?
To me, people are pointing at the sprinkles and going “Moral Motivation!” And I’m pointing at the chocolate sauce and going “Moral Motivation!”
And people are going “I GUESS you can ADD chocolate sauce if you WANT but only sprinkles are RELIABLY DELICIOUS! Also CHOCOLATE IS BAD FOR YOU, so a lot of CHOCOLATE EATERS aren’t as good at Moral Motivation as they think!”
(And there are even a few subthreads where I’m going “how… how is chocolate weird and inferior when your sprinkles… are chocolate… help”)
I think the thing to remember here is that the people screaming “no! It can’t be emotions!” Are having a strong emotional response that you don’t have the context for. They’re mad because emotion and empathy are words that have been used to discredit them by people who don’t understand either. They’ve been told time and again that they didn’t understand emotions or don’t have the appropriate ones, so what they’re hearing when you talk about emotions being connected to morality is “you cannot be moral”. This is a strong response because it is rooted in an injustice. ND people often experience deeply traumatizing interactions that are worded a lot like your argument was.
That’s fair, and I do get that people think I’m saying that. I do wonder whether part of this is a difference between what some researchers mean by low empathy (“this person’s willingness to do terrible things and his consistent lack of/muted response to others’ emotions seem connected in some way”) and what people here mean (“just because I don’t mirror doesn’t mean I’m not nice!”) or if it’s a more substantial disagreement, something like “those studies of responses to emotion words in psychopaths were flawed because x, and actually a lot of people do the exact same thing and you haven’t accounted for y yet.”
That’s what I have been trying to ask, and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten an answer. Which yeah, I suspect that why is people having an understandably strong (triggered, even?) reaction to my asking it at all.
That just seemed weird to me because it seemed like the same people who were *too emotional to offer reasoned counter examples* were saying I put too much weight on emotion. So I was just like “dude but you just…”
Which I maybe shouldn’t have done, but it’s like I said in reply to you(??) earlier: I have a lot of triggers/personal berserk buttons around “I’m not doing the thing you say I’m doing,” especially when it sounds to me like “oh, I’m perfectly calm, YOU’RE just ANGRY.”
Which a lot of this discussion was beginning to sound like to me, especially when it got to “emotions are bad moral guides.”
Because I mean, yeah, “you piss me off so much I’m going to kill you” isn’t moral just because it’s feelsy.
But “you’re hurting me, Ms. Therapist, even though you tell me it’s good, and I’m angry!” was the first step to “what you’re doing to me isn’t right,” which was the first step to “That’s immoral,” which is pretty huge in how I understand right and wrong.
The whole reason I am a disability activist now is ableism makes me mad. Yes, I’ve reasoned on many a Lonely night “let’s examine this again, could treating kids that way ever be excusable” and I’m glad my reason comes up with no most of the time.
But I’m not an activist because I reasoned about being good. I’m an activist because what happened to me pisses me off, and if anything hearing about it happening to some other kid pisses me off MORE, not less.
In response to your actual question, then:
YES. People are triggered, and YES, this is in response to flawed research that has damaged us very very badly.
As an Autistic person who, when I was more physically able, worked with Autistic children, and as someone who has had a lifelong interest in psychology, it is absolutely my belief that the idea that Autistic people are bad at emotions and empathy are due to flawed research due to a lack of empathy in the researchers.
OK, I actually believe rather firmly in what comes next, but I’m basing a lot of this on Autistic people who are a lot like me, and hey, sundae bar metaphor and whatnot – this might not carry over for everyone. But I can say that this is a perfect example of how I have struggled around this issue, and I think it holds pretty firm for a lot of people:
WE ARE OVERSTIMULATED. Researchers know this, but somehow completely fail to account for it; I noticed that a lot of things that people are BAFFLED about when it comes to Autism are directly caused by overstimulation, but I guess if you’re not the one experiencing the overstimulation it just looks bizarre and random? I think it comes down to this: Autism means a brain that takes more energy to interpret sensory information. I think maybe NT researchers see “ok, you can do this level of reasoning, therefore you’re at this level of development” without accounting for this very fundamental difference and then put value judgments instead.
Some personal examples:
– I can track someone’s words in a conversation, or I can track their tone and body language, but trying to do both at the same time takes the same amount of energy as watching and understanding two television shows simultaneously, (literally, I find these to be equally doable activities, and the skillset is the same) PLUS trying to connect their meanings to each other. I can do this, and I think probably pass for NT, and be gregarious and lovely all night at a party, but the next day I will be, for the entire day, at that level of exhaustion where you put your glasses in the fridge and the milk on your nightstand and don’t notice till the next day.
– Related: Looking someone in the eye takes all of my attention. I don’t understand what people get out of it, I really don’t. What am I meant to be interpreting from it? When I’m giving someone eye contact, most of the time it takes all my energy just to pay attention to the emotion and respond on that level, but I have no idea what the actual content of the conversation was, unless I have a ton of energy at my disposal, or it’s someone I know well enough to really understand their emotional situation.
Speaking of energy I think I’m out of it, hahaha. I have more thoughts but I think that might be the extent of what I can get out for now. Hopefully this makes some sense.
I do want to touch on one more thing very briefly: overstimulation means that Autistic children are constantly displaying emotions that NT people don’t understand. They’re being assaulted by an environment that feels normal to other people, and they’re cranky and “OVER EMOTIONAL” about it… which is the beginning of a lot of us learning that emotions are bad. Eventually what we end up seeing is a lot of people behaving irrationally and saying we don’t get it because we don’t get emotions… not true. What we don’t automatically get is the underlying drive to the emotion. But the EMOTIONS BAD! battle cry comes from this trauma, imho, and frankly I think a good chunk of
alexithymia comes from Autistic people being told repeatedly, by people they trust, from a very young age, that their perception of the world is WRONG and “No, that doesn’t hurt, what’s wrong with you? The light is fine. The sound is fine. The world is fine. The problem is you.”
Ah, okay. I think the thing that confused (actually, confuseS, but I’m much more open to the idea I’m wrong now that you’ve explained this) is that I didn’t see those psychopathy studies and autism as related in any clear way.
I mean, I know that people say “sociopaths lack empathy” and that some autistic people say “I lack empathy” but I couldn’t figure out why anyone would even use the same word.
Because I was thinking:
Autistic people: I get overstimulated by sensory input, so sometimes I might shut down or withdraw or avoid people being BIG LOUDY. (Fwiw, I relate to this. I see myself as pretty darn cousiny, which is part of why this whole convo feels so strange to me.)
Psychopaths: …Why would anyone find “violent rape” any more disturbing than “doorknob?” NTs are weird, man.
Those… don’t look the same. Or at least they don’t to me. Those don’t even look similar to me in superficial ways.
So I gathered that people were connecting the two somehow, but I had no idea why.
So what I saw in the activist community was what LOOKED LIKE to me what @acemindbreakersblog was talking about, “First we as autistic activists explained, ‘we do have empathy, it’s just not visible in a way you immediately parse.’ But then we decided that we were being uninclusive, and so as not to exclude people with personality disorders, we started saying ‘you’re right, NTs, this isn’t empathy, and that’s fine. Not ND as in happy, neuroqueer as in fuck you!’”
While I sat there watching going “wait, guys, this seems like a bad move. Some traits actually aren’t good, and if you’re jumping into Angry Activist mode without thinking about what that guy over there MEANS when he says ‘yeah, who would be good just because they like other people?’ I worry that some of you might get hurt. I’m not gonna tell you who to hang with but I’m worried for you. And kind of worried for me, too, because the next time someone says ‘I have low empathy’ I have to figure out which thing that is, and I might guess wrong since I’m only a cousin.”
Ok, so here’s a disconnect that might be causing a lot of the confusion, then:
A lot of Autistic people have internalized the incorrect idea that they don’t have empathy, and aren’t capable of understanding emotions. This happens because of the abusive ways that society interacts with Autism, and it creates a cognitive dissonance that leads to a lot of logical fallacies. In part, what happens is that they end up changing their definitions of empathy – “it has to be this more mystical sounding feeling other people’s emotions kind of thing because my parents/teachers/etc always said I had no empathy, but I’m capable of reasoning through and connecting to emotions, so that can’t be what is meant by empathy.” But that interacts with a lot of other definitions, too. What you end up with is people with a lot of internalized ablism that is a part of their definitions of words, which makes miscommunication inevitable.
*EDIT: I’m not trying address the whole debate. Just trying to represent why Autistic people often have a complete disconnect with NT people when we start trying to talk about emotions or empathy at all… there’s a whole side of this that I wasn’t actually trying to address and definitely don’t have the spoons to go even ponder right now.
But like also, now that I’m thinking of it more clearly, we are really bad at recognizing what’s wrong with people. We slap value judgments on things because we don’t understand them. So if low-empathy people are coming out and saying “I’m still living a morally good life”… maybe they’re right? Isn’t that worth considering before condemning people?
Because my point about the over-stimulation wasn’t “oh, isn’t this cutesy and overwhelming for me.” It was explain why people lash out and do unreasonable things… When you are in pain and you are little, you lash out, and you hurt people. and then you get labeled as “bad” and “manipulative” and low empathy. And cognitive empathy is a skill. Someone could be quite low on a more intuitive level of empathy, but then getting labeled as low-empathy is almost definitely going to impede them in developing the more reasoned empathy.
At the end of the day, you can’t be certain that you know what qualities make a “bad” person… you can know that sociopaths aren’t too bothered by having committed murder, but it certainly doesn’t stand to reason that all sociopaths are murderers just because of that.
I don’t think that murdering someone and being overstimulated are the same thing, obviously. But a low natural empathy that gets treated the way that Autistic kids get treated… that sounds pretty traumatic to me too, tbh. Why not just teach cognitive empathy, and frankly, most NT people need that a lot more than they realize, and stop deciding who’s traits are the ones that mean they’re a good person, when there are people saying “hey that’s not true, I know because I’m living it”
So like… I guess that’s how it happens, if that was illuminating at all, lmao.
“In part, what happens is that they end up changing their definitions of empathy – “it has to be this more mystical sounding feeling other people’s emotions kind of thing because my parents/teachers/etc always said I had no empathy, but I’m capable of reasoning through and connecting to emotions, so that can’t be what is meant by empathy.”
This is exactly what I think is going on, actually. Just far better worded than I was.
And… on your second point, I think the reason I’m so resistant to that is that most of the people I’ve met who aren’t good are people who assume they are good and are horribly offended at the idea they might not be (especially if you imply that their disability/illness could be part of why they’re behaving in certain ways. Thinking here of a boss I had that behaved horribly abusively to all of us in the office until she got let go, who had BPD but saw herself as “recovered” and so was terribly resistant to “you might be splitting right now? Joe might not deserve that?” Because “I don’t have BPD any more, I don’t do that.”)
So my mind associates “accept that I’m good because I’m upset that you said I’m not” with “I’m about to be awful.” Where if people say, like, “here’s the thing I don’t understand and I handle it this way” I’d be a lot less uneasy.
I mean, I think I try to be good! I hope other people think I am good! But if people said to me “reason is part of morality though, do you think about what’s right?” I guess I can see reacting angrily initially.but after some thought, I HOPE I’d say “I do, actually. I wasn’t saying that I don’t reason morally, I was saying that emotions are part of my motivation, and some of those emotions in my case do fit ‘you look sad and I find myself wanting to fix it without consciously thinking about that.’ You’re absolutely right that I shouldn’t go with that alone if I’m deciding what to do in a dilemma, but when my buddy texted me? Works okay.”
So what you and some others are saying now, “yes, emotions are part of the moral life for me too, but it’s not always as obvious to me what’s going on in my own head or anyone else’s,” makes sense to me, where “emotions aren’t part of morality at all” (which someone said a round back, no one is saying it now) doesn’t.
Thank you for talking with me, especially when this brings up bad stuff people have said or done to you and other autistic people! I really appreciate it.
Tumblr is self-destructing and the entire conservative government just got found to be in contempt of parliament for the first time in HISTORY this is the greatest 24h of my life
What did I miss?!
Oh man. This is absolutely golden.
So first off. What’s contempt of parliament? In short, obstructing parliament from its duties. In the UK that extends to publication of reports and papers that would be necessary for parliament to, well, parliament. Normally this extends to an individual person being especially obstructive.
Now. The Conservative government obtained legal advice for the Brexit shitshow. But they refused to publish it in full which means parliament (which includes, y’know, opposition parties and non-conservatives in general) can’t parliament.
What reason could they possibly have to refuse to publish legal advice on something that effects the whole country? I wonder. Hmm. Thinking emoji.
Anyway. Today the entire Conservative government have been found to be in contempt of Parliament. The entire government have been found to be obstructing the proper running of the country. We hold votes on that sort of thing, and the general consensus (18-vote majority) was “the Tories are obstructive little pigshits”
Also they have to publish that legal advice. In full. Tomorrow.
No word yet on whether the entire government is going to be sent to the Elizabeth Tower yet. We haven’t done that since the 1880s but I’m willing to bring it back.
Glorious!
Readers from other countries: you have to understand that, so far, Brexit has been about three years of nothing happening and still somehow dominating the news cycle. A random MP from Croydon will say that they don’t think Theresa May is doing well and it’ll make headline news. Like, that’s not news, that’s rolling above a nat 1 on perception. The ‘nothing happens’ is occasionally broken by Something happening, except it’s always terrible. At this stage, people keep arguing about whether to accept a shitty deal or no deal, because nobody took Critical Thinking at AS Level and the concept of a false dilemma is somehow unthinkable to them.
Meanwhile a good portion of the Labour party really do not want Brexit to happen, except the leader (Jeremy Corbyn, and I would require a whole other post to talk about him) who is like ‘Brexit is okay but ONLY if we do it.’
Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats are like ‘we’ll cancel Brexit! And we’ll legalise weed!’, but nobody’s forgiven them for double-crossing us on tuition fees and they keep accidentally electing bigots, so the twelve voters who support them can’t really do all that much.
The Green party do technically exist, and that’s all I can really say on them.
UKIP, the nationalist bastards who got us into this mess in the first place, haemorrhaged membership back to the Tories in the most recent election (shocking. i know). General cretin Nigel Farage quit as party leader when Brexit got voted for, claiming he’d done his job, and recently he just left the party altogether because he doesn’t like where it’s going. something something moral backbone of a chocolate eclair something
Also the Leave campaign were found to have lied, accepted dodgy donations and pulled some VERY shifty things, meaning that a lot of people who voted for Brexit now feel they made a mistake.
So the people have been trying to demand a second vote on Brexit, or to at least have some say on the conditions of the leave agreement (did I mention everything we’ve done so far is fully reversible?), but TMay just keeps repeating things like ‘will of the people’ and ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and then going home to relax by killing a few disabled people after dinner. You know how it is.
But then the actual Brexit agreement is released and ministers start dropping like flies. The guy who wrote it quits IMMEDIATELY after it’s published because he Doesn’t Like It. Cue the tiniest violin in the world. People are squabbling over the right way to do Brexit and keep mentioning just leaving without a deal, which is like quitting your cushy job by taking a shit on the counter and just hoping things will work out for you.
So, essentially, I’ve given up hope on this not becoming a complete clusterfuck. It already is a clusterfuck. My only hope is that it will be an entertaining one, as it’s been so astonishingly dull, and this has very much met my hopes. They fucked up so badly that the whole government is on the naughty step. The fucktangular omnishambles continue, and I for one say throw them all in the tower, vote them out of government one-by-one like Big Brother, and televise it to make money for the BBC.
Yesssssss
So… from the little I know about parliamentary systems of government…
Does “contempt of parliament” also mean “vote of no confidence”? Are y’all about to have another election?
As far as I understand it, contempt of parliament is like, ‘stop that right now! Stop it!We can’t govern unless you stop.’ and it can apply to one MP or a parliamentary group or in this case, a whole party.
Vote of no confidence is, ‘you’re all fucking incompetent, I have no confidence that you can run a foot race, let alone a government’.
If a vote of no confidence is successful then a general election has to be held, but people won’t vote against their party so it’s super rare.
But if they can’t govern, that would mean they’re fucking incompetent, and therefore a new election should be held? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Does this mean a vote of no confidence is going to be held, and then another election? (Because at least in Canada there are certain things that automatically trigger a vote of no confidence, like not being able to pass a budget. I was wondering if this is one of those things as well.) Or can you folks not recall the bastards who did this bullshit? (That’s one of the things I always liked about the parliamentary system… if the gov’t can’t run, y’all have an election, like pronto. Wish our system was like that.)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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