What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Anonymous asked: I was under the impression that "anti" is a term for people who are against pedophilia and incest being portrayed pornographically. isn't there a difference between that, and the general "purity culture"?

You’re right in saying that antis object to depictions of paedophilia and incest in fiction and art, but wrong to say they extend this exclusively to pornographic depictions. And on the face of it, that seems like a very reasonable position to take! It is certainly extremely reasonable as a point of personal preference for any reason whatsoever. But anti culture doesn’t believe this should be a matter of personal preference - rather, they believe that nobody should be able to write or read any material of which they disapprove, and the problem with this is threefold: 

- firstly, conflating depiction with endorsement: that is, arguing that anyone who writes/draws fanart or original works containing this sort of content, or who reads or enjoys those things in fiction, is inherently Bad and not to be trusted IRL, as though writing or reading about something can only mean you support it, a position which, among other things, obliterates the distinction between something being presented negatively within a text, or overtly tagged to indicate the author knows this stuff isn’t acceptable IRL, as opposed to its simply being present;

- secondly, relying on a definition of paedophilia in particular which is broad to the point of total inaccuracy - that is, arguing that an adult writing about two fifteen-year-olds having consensual sex, even non-graphically, is paedophilic, or that anything with an age-gap where one party is a teen, even a nineteen-year-old, is paedophilic (both arguments I’ve seen made more than once); and

- thirdly, advocating that any such content should be banned and, potentially, its creators reported to the police - I’ve even seen antis argue that libraries should have “problematic” works removed from them to avoid anyone reading about Bad Things, which is a literal authoritarian tactic, oh god, please read some history, I am beg of you.

So no, there isn’t really a distinction between anti culture and purity culture: it’s just that a lot of antis haven’t really thought through the knock-on implications of their own arguments, or considered that there’s no practical way to monitor fictional content for moral purity that isn’t a complete shitshow, or any number of other things. 

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