The Thing About "there Needs To Be Space To Discuss Sexist Tropes Is..." Isn't This Just Inviting People

The thing about "there needs to be space to discuss sexist tropes is..." isn't this just inviting people to look at servers for mlm ships and go "hm, I need to go in and harass people in this server for not shipping these boys with their canon love interests" or something. I have been in so many servers ruined for me because people came in and started yelling about m/m shippers and making me feel guilty about discussing the ships, even if they weren't talking about me individually.

No, but people will invite themselves into MLM spaces to do that regardless. (Also that's homophobia, not sexism.)

Homophobes will try to enter MLM spaces spaces regardless of the intent of the space or if they're welcome or not. Having spaces that permit critical discussions have no relevance to things like homophobia beyond the fact that these people will merely see it as an easier opportunity to be a dickface and will try their luck.

But again, they'd try their luck anyway. That's what bigots do. They're like diseases, invading spaces and trying to infect and destroy them.

Its on the people who run the servers to adhere to their responsibility to keep them safe, in those instances. This is why I always try to dissuade people from establishing Discord servers open to the public if they are not 100% willing and committed to actually moderating them and taking on that responsibility of safeguarding.

Being "incognito" in an antiship space when you are proship and vice versa can genuinely be so dangerous. On both sides. It is absolutely not worth the potential risks. Whatever benefits you think you're gaining form it I can promise you aren't worth it.

Very specific question, but do you (or anyone else) know of how to get rid of that nagging feeling of sharing everything you create?

I'm a writer, both in the fanfic sense and of my own stories. I'm also proship, but nobody I care about knows that fact due to be so severely anti to the point of me mentioning the discourse (to test the waters) gets a blatant "proshippers aren't human beings and should kill themselves".

I really want to write a small fic about a problematic ship (young child x older person) that I don't even actually like! I don't ship it, though I don't care if other people do. But I'm fascinated by the idea of it, the possible dynamic, because it's very popular in the proshipper circle of the fandom and it's been nagging at me. The problem is that I write and then want to share it. Writing for myself feels.... Wrong, almost? But I cannot share it with my loved ones. I had previously already suggested writing a similar idea to a very close friend and he was severely disgusted by it, asked me if I was genuinely considering writing it and I had to very quickly play it off as a joke.

And I know the next suggestion will be the proshipper side of the fandom, but sharing my work online for others I don't know to see makes me personally uncomfortable, which is a major shame.

(I'm not even going to touch the fact that your "loved ones" think people like you should kill themselves.)

But. A good way is to treat them like an assessment opportunity. Make a copy of each piece and use something like Google Documents to annotate and evaluate what you've written. Move all of the originals into a secondary folder.

Not only will this help improve your writing in the long run, but it somewhat changes the intent of the literature from something written to, at its core, be shared, into a personal resource.

There's also the option of making new friends. You don't have to go out and gather people up like a squirrel with a winter store, but even just one likeminded person whom you can get to know well enough to feel comfortable sharing your work can help sate that need to share and engage with someone about what you create. You can send your content to them privately, then, rather than uploading it for the masses.

But. I would just gently like to say that perhaps its not the need to share that you need to reflect on and try to negate. If you have to ask how to stifle yourself so that your loved ones don't think of you as inhuman meat that needs to be slaughtered, perhaps you're asking the wrong questions.

I always want to wholeheartedly agree with the "create what you want, just label it" argument. I really want to. Right up until people defend unexamined bigotry. For example, I once ran into a story where Martha Jones was actually about to fail out of medical school when she met The Doctor, because she was "incapable" of learning human anatomy and medicine, and despite "bribing her teachers". I wrote in my journal that I thought the story was racist, in a public post, and people scolded me for being censorious and not letting people "have fun". (This was back when LJ was viable.) I have a pile of other experiences like that. I would never agree with the antis that Someone (aka them) should prevent people from writing whatever, but I feel like to completely agree with "create what you want, no limits, nothing matters but creating," I have to agree that a fan of color has no right to be hurt by a story that turns an intelligent Black woman into a cheat and an idiot, even in that fan's own space. What do you think?

You have every right to feel offended or hurt by a story. But your hurt and offense does not negate someone else's ability to create. Nor does it dictate that you can tell them what they can and cannot create.

How do you know the author wasn't a person of color themselves? How do you know they weren't writing the story based on their own emotions, difficulties or experiences? Is painting a person of color as 'unintelligent' a common theme in their works or was it just the plot device of this specific story? If Martha Jones was Asian or Indian or Caucasian, would you have still been offended on her behalf that an intelligent woman/intelligent woman of color was being turned into 'an idiot'?

These are questions we have to ask ourselves when trying to determine if a work was genuinely created with the intent of being harmful. Because individually not liking or being hurt by the content's of a story is not a good enough reason to advocate against it.

The 911 fandom, for example, saw a lot of it with Eddie Diaz. People were so entrenched in fandom virtue signalling that pretty much any depiction of Eddie Diaz in fanfiction was getting bitched about as 'out of character' or 'racist' including works written by actual people of color. It got to the point where for quite a while fanfiction production within the 911 fandom dropped way down because people were too annoyed with or upset by the constant accusations no matter what was being written.

And I know it probably sounds like I'm just smokescreening for racism or excusing it. but I can promise you, I've blocked and reported authors and fandom creators before for being blatantly racist in their content. But fanfiction and literature become trickier because the purpose of stories is not to be palatable or feel-good. Stories do not have to be pleasant. Fanfiction does not have to conform to the source material.

Describing someone as "incapable" is typically a turn of phrase and has nothing to do with trying to allocate unintelligence to a specific type of person. Plenty of people would be classed as "incapable" of learning medicine because its a hard fucking thing to learn. You need to dedicate more or less five-ten years of your life to studying it before you even really get anywhere with actually practising it.

If you're someone who's easily distracted or has trouble remembering things and vice versa, you're unlikely to go into a career field that especially demands these things of you.

I imagine in any case her failing out of medical school was likely the plot point that leads her to going off with The Doctor. Which is a simple narrative and not a case of "unexamined bigotry." Its just as likely that if the author had had Martha Jones simply give up her aspirations and career to follow The Doctor, someone else would've been offended by the trope of a (black) woman giving up everything for a (white) man and deemed the story sexist or racist. Possibly both.

When analysing literature you have to be critical of if something is offending you personally or if it was intended to offend people of color as a whole. If the answer is only the former, then its a situation where you just have to recognise the work is not for you and move along.

Because I said 'there needs to be spaces' and the first thing you said in response was that 'actually X is a different matter and needs to be given spaces.'

My point isn't that every single fandom space should be free from these things. My point is that there should be at least some that are, regardless of what relevance an issue has to the fandom.

By saying 'X is a different matter. There needs to be space for it' you either made the completely irrelevant point that it should be present in the spaces that I'm not talking about, or you're making the contradictory point that they should be in the spaces I am.

I am actually begging some people to just let some spaces exist untouched by real-world issues and horrors.

Like I've lost count of the amount of times peaceful game or fandom servers have been ruined by people stampeding in with political rants, bitching about world issues, demanding internal activism, demanding vent channels so they can whine about their shitty parents, ect.

Like. Respectfully. Not every single space has to be inclusive of and welcoming of outside topics. The real world sucks. We don't needed to be reminded of that absolutely everywhere.

Genuinely curious why so many people demand entitlement within spaces to be negative and miserable and focus on upsetting things.

"I just want advice and support and a place to release my emotions!"

Okay but do you have to do it in a Pokemon Discord server? Do you have to talk about genocide in front of my fruit salad recipe? Why do my horny thoughts about mpreg Stucky need to be interrupted by you complaining that everyone you know sucks?

Not every single space is obligated to cater to you in terms of providing you with a "negativity space."