I got an ask on my sideblog saying you are a pedophile and not to reblog from you, so I have no idea where that’s coming from. I’ve followed you since basically forever and I’ve seen no evidence of that lol. I’m guessing maybe people are spreading rumors about you since you got involved in the shipping discourse?
100% due to shipping/fandom discourse. People originally started by calling me a pedophile apologist because of ship discourse and I guess that’s losing it’s effectiveness so they’re moving on to straight up calling me a pedophile — which is absolutely disgusting to me as a CSA survivor and hilarious as someone who has always been attracted to people who are significantly older than I am, never younger and very rarely actually in my own age range. I wasn’t attracted to kids when I was a kid and I’m certainly not now.
I wrote a post about a similar ‘callout’ I received here:
which discusses my opinions that frequently get me put on these callouts and has plenty of links to go through.
But that accusation and any accusation of me being a pedophile apologist is absolutely baseless. I’m just another person in a long, long line of other people getting put on a smear campaign over stating that fiction and fictional ships are not reality and not on the same level as actual abuse experienced by actual people.
I agree that fiction isn’t reality, but consider this: a person with sexual feelings towards minors reads a fiction where a pedophile is described in a positive light. If they get the courage to go rape a minor because of said fiction, isn’t the author of the fiction partially to blame?
No, they absolutely are not.
If someone who fantasizes about murder watches Hannibal and goes out to kill someone, are the writers of the show to blame?
If someone who fantasizes about robbing banks watches a movie about Bonnie and Clyde and goes out to rob a bank, is the writer of that book to blame?
If someone who fantasizes about going on a violent crime spree plays Grand Theft auto and goes out to enact those fantasies, are the creators of the game to play?
The answer to all of these questions and yours is, of course, no because the only thing and the only person responsible for a person’s actions is that person. Reading about something happening in fiction does not cause people to do those things. It does not force them to do those things. Fiction does not posess the power to compel a person’s actions even if the person fantasized about before, no matter how romantic that fiction may be, because they have to CHOOSE to act and fiction can not force them to make that choice.
This is not a line of reasoning I’m pulling out of my ass, either. This is a subject that psychologists have studied for years – questioning whether violent video games or horror movies cause violence and similar lines of questioning have been asked, it’s been studied, and the conclusion has always been a resounding no: fiction by and large does not cause people to be violent and it does not cause them to commit crimes. And on the rare occasions it does, the person influenced has either been in a state of mind where they could not tell the difference between fiction and reality OR they already planned to commit an act of violence and the fiction only gave them an idea for how they wanted to do it.
Denying this, saying that anyone is responsible for an abuser’s actions other than that abuser, is also an incredibly dangerous line of thinking. It opens the door for abusers to deny responsibility for their actions, to blame them on something other than their own choice to harm another person when – again – it is absolutely a choice. No matter how much a person fantasizes about something, no matter how much they write about it or read about it, the point when/if they decide to act on that and make their fantasies real is something THEY have to actively choose to do. That is on THEM.
Pedophiles who abuse children make the choice not only to act but to take the most harmful action – rather than seeking counseling, rather than turning themselves in to the police, rather than moving to the middle of nowhere and isolating themselves away from people, rather than even killing themselves, the action they CHOOSE is to harm a child for their own gratification out of a million and one other possible actions they could have chosen instead.
Fiction is not responsible for that.
Writers are not responsible for that.
They are responsible for that. It is 100% on them. That is the choice they made and they do not have any right whatsoever to reduce their own culpability for their own behavior and their own choices by trying to pin even a sliver of the blame for their actions on anyone else.
This is a good and lucid post that explains very clearly the way that anti logic benefits abusers.
someone could watch babar and then want to go poach elephants even if nothing bad was in the show, this is what antis don’t understand
the fact that antis think people are mindless and just do whatever they see on TV/think whatever they see/read/play is A-OK just shows how inexperienced they are in the real outside world
Marshmellowmilktea 