from here on out, i'd like to be impartial (read: quiet) & just post things i like, but as someone involved with / adjacent to fandom, there's something i need to address: the term "fanpol" (fandom police) is incredibly tone deaf to me as a black woman whose community is policed

anything you can escape by logging off of a website is not policing. anything that cannot reach you or stop you from doing what you're doing is not policing. for a subset of fandom so concerned with serious terms being watered down, yall do quite a lot of the same thing

last i checked, terfs are trans exclusionary radical feminists. not people who have opinions you don't like. not any sort of organized violence, or any ideology resulting in harm. terfs specifically organize for the destruction of trans women, & indirectly harm other lgbt folks

being a terf is intentional and has a specific goal. it is not a strategy you slip into as a logical failing while arguing about something entirely unrelated. if you cannot explain how someone's methodology works toward that goal of eradicating trans women, it's not terf rhetoric

again, you're watering down the definition of something direly important. purity culture is another bastardized term. it's the evangelical practice of using biblical ethics to control sexuality, mainly in women. it destroys women's relationships with their bodies, their faith-

their sex lives, and it often leads to ptsd. it's your own body being a vessel of sin if you pursue pleasure. it's your entire worth as a woman and your relationship to god predicated on you being well-preserved rather than damaged goods. it's being the reason men sin, tempting-

them to hell, so their life, their worth, their faith is in your hands as well. it is not people who have strong ideas on what should and shouldn't be eroticized in fiction. you take this term specific to a suppressive upbringing in the church and apply it to tweets you can mute

the historical censorship of sex in books was also fueled by staunch religious (and white supremacist) values. one man, one woman, performing sexuality in a very strict way, once married. you're accusing lgbt millenials who grew up reading r18 slashfic of being puritanical. lmao

that waters down how book burnings & bans were about control over people and history, not just "thought-policing" you can mute or block. books (particularly the bible) were the first medium in history to communicate the same values to masses of people. it was basically mass media

if the bible was successfully used to justify chattel slavery, keeping women as property, purity culture & violent homophobia, imagine what a book about sex could do. or a book that's honest about race relations in america. so they shut it down to keep a monopoly over the people

that... is not remotely comparable to anything happening in fandom on twitter dot com. among many other things, the power dynamic is missing. fandom is not a power structure that can be divided into oppressed vs oppressor based on fictional ideology. not to mention one key thing-

ao3 is still up. whatever fanfic you wrote is still there. your fanart is still posted. your twitter account with your oh so contested views? still here. so tell me what was censored, let alone lost to history in a book burning. stop coopting things that are not happening to you

witch hunts and lynch mobs are other examples. i do love seeing white women have the audacity to call a horde of tweets a lynch mob. absolutely disgusting. witch hunt as a colloquialism for a campaign against someone due to their views, i can let go. but lynch mob? not a chance

not when black people are still being murdered today with no recompense or justice simply because of our race. and as i sit in a country with neo-nazism on the rise thanks to leadership inciting violence, which makes going outside an extreme sport, i'm likened to nazis for uh...

thinking sensitive subjects in fiction should be framed with care. yall say judging someone for their views on fiction is inhumane when it comes to recognizing predators. but my views make me puritanical, a terf, a nazi, and police. all tangibly and historically violent things

it is hard to feel sympathy for a group of people who do exactly what they claim to hate. actively shitting on marginalized people for having different views, many who are women, lgbt or poc. coopting & watering down the meaning of extremely serious terms. seeing fictional views-

as an indicator of a tendency for violence (there's a time & place for this, but that's another conversation). + assuming my behaviors based on seeing an opinion as a nebulous affiliation. i think x, so i must send death threats or suicide bait, know people who do, or excuse it!

this thread is dragging on so I'll end it with this: the desire to be victimized has led to the above gross behavior. i don't support it, and screaming "wHaT aBoUt DeAtH tHrEaTs?" is not going to change my mind. i know yall think your shit doesn't stink. trust me, it does.

exhibit A: could've just logged off. as much as yall wanna read harassment into what i said, half the things you spend your time complaining about and/or engaging with, you could literally just ignore

honorable mention: being told i said something i literally did not say and willfully misinterpreting another tweet to prove it