This is such a predictable outcome of the notion that you are your thoughts and your thoughts have a 1:1 relationship with the reality outside your skull.

If you have a Bad Kink you are a bad person and there’s nothing else to be said about it. https://twitter.com/bizzaroren/status/1387774139134525441

I want to say two things about this.

The first is that, as I have screamed about many times before, this is the most abusive ableist shit as far as worldviews go, in part because it demonizes anyone with intrusive thoughts and pushes them toward dangerous levels of self-hate.

BUT pushback against this absolutely must go beyond people who have thoughts they don’t want. Because if they’re (grudgingly) willing to allow people like us to be okay, they’ll start demanding mental illness receipts. They already do this with abuse survivors.

“All right I guess you maybe aren’t a pedo but PRODUCE YOUR PAPERS FOR INSPECTION OR I WILL ASSUME OTHERWISE”

Fandom gestapo, very cool

The other thing is more insidious, and I think one could argue that it’s a stretch but I would disagree.

I think this is an opening for irrational, conspiratorial thinking.

Some of this is already present. This kind of attitude reeeeeeally resembles QAnon in a lot of ways, specifically the notion that there’s some sort of secret cabal of sexual predators out to groom and abuse minors—especially in fandom, although this is no longer confined to that.

With the explosion of Pizzagate on TikTok, I think we need to keep a really careful eye on this, because these people are already primed to go way deeper.

But here’s the thing about assuming someone’s thoughts are the whole of who they are and if they have Bad Thoughts they are Bad People, and it’s connected to the conflation of fiction with reality that we so often see in these circles.

A caveat first.

I am not remotely saying that fiction has no effect on reality. I’m saying that the relationship between fiction and reality is NOT 1:1 and any discussion of that relationship must recognize that nuance or it is at best incoherent.

NOW.

The conflation of nonmaterial thoughts with the whole of a material person is dangerous because it opens the door for the sort of category collapse of thoughts and material world that we see in a lot of new agey A Course In Miracles-esque conspirituality.

I know, I know, I’m obsessed with conspirituality, I see it everywhere, I won’t shut up about it.

The thing is, it’s kind of everywhere rn.

And the thinking that leads to it is extremely common and easy to fall into.

Which is one of the reasons why I think and talk about it a lot: we need to be watching that thinking (I especially need to be watching for it in my life because of my own spiritual practices).

When you can make the whole of a material person their immaterial thoughts, and you’re already confused about the relationship between immaterial fantasy/fiction and material reality, you’re in the danger zone. You’re starting to lose your grip on, well, reality.

I heartily recommend this thread by @matthewremski, because it lays out a huge amount of what’s going on with conspiritualist thought. But I think one other thing I’d include here is a deep confusion about the relationship between material/immaterial and fantasy/reality. https://twitter.com/matthewremski/status/1358008571234045952

Which are extremely complex relationships, and one that philosophers and scientists have been arguing about for, well, basically since we attained consciousness I guess.

Conspiratorialist/conspiritualist thinking collapses that complexity into a black and white proposition.

The sort of reality that people like Marianne Williamson/Helen Schucman (the author of A Course in Miracles) argue for is one where thoughts are reality and reality is thoughts and the material world basically doesn’t exist.

So Bad Thoughts = Bad Person.

(And also if you’re sick or poor it’s your fault for having the Bad Thoughts and you could fix everything and manifest your perfect dream life if you just got your shit together and improved your thoughts.)

When you’re confused about reality vs fiction, you’re confused about something very, very fundamental, and your whole view of humanity is going to suffer as a result. You will treat people worse. You will have a hard time dealing with others in a compassionate way.

And when you collapse a complex human being into a very small part of their psyche, and when you give your own gut-level preferences (“what grosses me out personally is immoral and sick”) the weight of absolute objective morality... hoo boy.

What attracts people to the sort of attitude that presents a list of Bad Kinks and demands that anyone who likes anything on that list never engage with them ever is the exact same thing that attracts people to things like QAnon.

Which is a maladaptive coping mechanism that seeks to address existential anxiety about a world which is ultimately not under your control and where there are usually no clear, clean answers when it comes to human beings.

It’s more than that, but that’s a big part of it.

It’s also, by the way, the same anxiety that drives people into many hardcore religions, particularly Christianity: the false comfort of false moral clarity.

It’s just more complicated than that, folks. Sorry, but it is.

So anyway, yeah. The sort of metaphysical, thoughtless confusion represented in “IF YOU HAVE A BAD KINK NEVER SPEAK TO ME” doesn’t lead directly into QAnon or whatever, but there are connections and overlaps, and we need to be attentive to them.

Lotta fandom kids out there really well-groomed for cults. If you want to talk about “grooming”.

I mean, I’d argue that fanpol/antidom already shares a huge number of things in common with a cult, although I’m sure cult researchers and scholars would also point out some important differences.

Wow, I didn’t mean for that to be a Whole-Ass Thread, sorry.

That’s one of the things that drive me absolutely bonkers about this, I mean I find it genuinely distressing: the people ginning up moral panic about “grooming” are *fucking grooming vulnerable kids *. And abusing them. And protecting other abusers. https://twitter.com/sciendere/status/1388193339388964865

Hearing people who escaped—yes, escaped—those circles talk about the trauma they suffered as a result of it sounds for all the world to me like people who have escaped cults that distorted their thinking and damaged their ability to discern reality.

The hideous shame they report about the moments when they realized they were thinking or liking A Bad Thing is just absolutely heartbreaking. They really were made to believe that fiction was reality and what they thought was who they were.

Thing is, again: this is total metaphysical category collapse. They are either incapable of or unwilling to draw any meaningful distinction between fantasy and reality. If you like to fantasize about a thing/enjoy stories about it, you think it’s fine and good. Period. https://twitter.com/bizzaroren/status/1387777786174218242

It’s a hop-skip-jump from “your thoughts are you and you are your thoughts” to “thoughts are the only reality”.

So anyway fellow true crime and horror ghouls I got some bad news

In all honesty, I worry about someone who can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. I worry about what they might do.

Love how I’m like “the idea that there is a secret cabal of sexual predators grooming kids in fandom is a conspiracy theory” and the response I get is “there is tho”

Imagine saying that, to this thread

If you believe in worrying potentially dangerous conspiracy theories please DNI

(I mean okay, DI maybe, but don’t talk to me about them)

Not going to call anyone out but I did get at least one person suggesting that this was me making a lot out of nothing (also they seemed skeptical about me bringing ableism into this), so in case anyone thinks this is just about oversensitive teenagers:

Yeah, it is. Until it isn’t.

OPs tweet is about fandom purity culture. Please research fandom purity culture, if you don’t know anything about it.

It ruins lives and has probably gotten people literally killed.

Someone making Bad Kink DNI lists on Twitter seems ridiculous but relatively innocuous, and certainly not ableist. Unless you know the context, where it comes from, what it enables, and what it signifies.

In and of itself it isn’t necessarily abusive or conspiratorialist. But it has direct connections to a culture and a mindset which is profoundly so.

People who were inside it and have gotten away from it have things to say about it. Listen to them and believe them.

And I’m sorry, any culture that teaches traumatized and mentally ill people to hate themselves is ableist and I’m never going to back down from that.