WIP new design for the "Antiship Dangers" page. The pictures won't work until I move this to the default folder after the site is ready.
NOTE: This page is different than the rest of the pages on my Neocities. It is not fun or gif-heavy. I want to keep it easy on the eyes because it's very important to me that as many people as possible are able to read it.
This’ll go into a video once I finally get all my stuff in order to make it, but I feel obligated to make a shorter, simpler starter pack for people who doubt my admittedly bold claim that “anti-proship” views are reactionary in nature and parrot many talking points directly from known bigoted ideologies, as well as providing an easy method of priming people to overlook abuse happening in front of (or to) them.
I genuinely think this ideology is dangerous, and this page is my attempt to back up that viewpoint. Rest assured I am not writing this to “dunk”, but to educate.
Breaking it down into a few simple categories, here’s what I will cover:
- It (referring to the opposition to “immoral” ships or kinks) fills well-meaning people with the fear of becoming a monster
- It’s an insincere method of social control that often puts minors in danger
- It’s cruel to abuse survivors who find healing in dark fiction
- It repeats the exact same sentiments that Conservatives direct at queer people, verbatim, against a slightly altered target
- It uh, straight up copies radfems!
- It leads to violence regardless of whether you denounce the extremists
Now I will, of course, elaborate on each of these. I’ll cite each screenshot right above the image(s) unless I took the screenshot myself or am providing censored versions of screenshots I’ve found. It’s not particularly fancy, but you can click on each thumbnail to see the full image. Every single link will be an archive link to keep this page sturdier, but many, if not all, are (as of writing this) still live.
Please be aware that everything I will be discussing and showing may be disturbing. There are some truly heinous things in here, including graphic descriptions of sexual violence, extreme transphobia and other forms of bigotry, death wishes and threats, victim blaming, and possibly more. Of course, the theme of taboo/dark sexual fiction will be present as well.
1. Fear of becoming a monster
I’ve seen many of the people who get wrapped up in this need to avoid enjoying anything “problematic” become paranoid, self-loathing, and too afraid to think for themselves, strikingly mirroring indoctrinated religious people using self-shaming to keep themselves from “sinning”.
I can’t objectively describe something like the “vibes” I get from text, but I will find it astonishing if some of this doesn’t ring familiar to people. It’s so viscerally uncomfortable to me.
I have many examples, displaying several concerning things.
In this first situation, a 13-year-old TikToker was bullied into “renouncing her proship ways” before receiving lots of sudden praise and encouragement for it. |
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In this screenshot, someone “encourages” an author when they “relapse” into their “proship”, and OP responds with the sentiment that they don’t feel like they’re a good person unless they abandon the ship, even planning to delete the writing they just worked on. |
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Here’s another quick one full of conditioning and strangely self-flogging language. I’m especially alarmed by “I was being harassed, which I deserved.” |
Here’s a big pile of 13 to 18 year olds worrying themselves ragged because their fictional crushes are minors and “oh no what if I can’t stop liking them when I turn 18??” Despite this genuinely being a scenario that can only occur with fictional, drawn characters because real people don’t age past each other like this. |
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There’s no way around these types of comparisons for me because the parallels are too obvious: This sounds quite a bit like how I’ve seen people describe the way they would try to snuff out their own queer feelings because they didn’t want to be “immoral”, didn’t want to “sin”, and didn’t want to disappoint their loved ones who happily told them they were doing the right thing by rejecting the thoughts their religion disapproved of. They talk about “recovering”, using the language of an addict. |
Same as Source 1 |
Besides the self-shaming, many people live in fear of their own friends and followers, and will be manipulated at best and beaten into submission at worst if they start to like a ship or even a character in a way their friends think is wrong.
Here’s one example of the manipulation and guilt-tripping tactic, the basic context being that an 18-year-old shared a suggestive picture of Kirishima, who is 16, and was prodded relentlessly about it even though OP had liked Kirishima since they were 15 and generally carried the same beliefs about fiction as the people hounding them. |
From this document [Source 9], under May 3rd. |
And here’s the apology that was squeezed out of them: |
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Here’s the aftermath of a time someone was aggressively turned on by his peers until he caved in and apologized, despite it once again boiling down to a different interpretation of art that made it non-problematic in his eyes, but wasn’t a good enough explanation for his harassers. |
I encourage you to watch out for this behavior if you run in these circles. Look how terrified your peers are, look at the language they use to talk about their own feelings that are blossoming out of their control, ask yourself if you hate a certain ship because you think it’s evil or because you’re terrified of what will become of your friendships if you don’t stay in line.
2. Social control and danger to minors
The goal of ridding the world of “dangerous” fiction doesn’t solve the issue it claims to and is often used to control and manipulate people, including minors who are told that this is the “safe” mindset to have.
I’m not sure if everyone is aware of the genuinely predatory behavior some people display towards minors using “anti-proshipping” as a framework.
Here are some examples of accounts talking about how to “save” proship minors, which read to me like adults wanting to hover around kids they meet online so they can get into their heads. |
From Source 1 |
Here's one where an adult encouraged a minor to private message them so they could try to convince them that they're secretly being manipulated. |
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Here's another one where an adult invited a 12-year-old into a whole Discord server full of other adults to “help them”, and then the adult tried to punish the kid when they didn’t comply. |
Finally, here’s a very detailed and disturbing account from a mother whose 14-year-old daughter was lured into a Discord server full of minors, but run by an adult. The girl and other minors were frequently sent porn by the adult, manipulated into fearing everyone around them except this “safe adult” they were talking to, and encouraged to “help stop pedophiles” and to send violent harassment to their peers. Of course, the full post is available to read, but I want to highlight a few parts, so the images are cropped for your convenience. |
“What the rules were”.
“probably molesting her sister”
“Speaking with a ‘brainwashed person’”
“calling her father a ‘Pedophile enabler’”
This act of trying to mold the often-sexual interests of children is flat-out unacceptable, whether someone is doing it out of malice or not.
I will once again compare it to how sometimes religious people carry bigoted beliefs because they’ve convinced themselves that letting people live their lives is tantamount to abandoning someone who needs “saving”. Not all bigots are bigots because they wish to hurt people. Many of them want to help, but they’re misguided in how to do so.
Sometimes so much so that they’ll start outright justifying the most obvious, hurtful things, such as in these examples of people attacking minors in the name of... protecting minors??
The aforementioned 13-year-old from above was sent horrible things before she decided to “stop being a proshipper”. |
From Source 1 |
One of the most horrifying situations I’ve looked into is the time some adults tried to get another 13-year-old sent to a psych ward because of a shock horror story she wrote. |
“[I]f age is 13 and is this fucked up in the head, that’s just asking for some other fucked in the head piece of shit to take advantage of that.” These people actually convinced themselves they were helping this kid.
One time, some teenagers wrote a graphic minor/adult murder fanfic about a real child as punishment for them being a proshipper. Yeah. |
Honestly there are entire giant compilations of people knowingly being nasty and inappropriate towards minors for “proshipping”. Here’s one. Here’s another.
(↑ Not all of the posts in the 2nd one center minors, but many of them do.)
I can drop a few here as examples. |
From Source 3 | Source 17 | Source 18 | Source 19 | Source 20 | Source 21 | Source 22 | Source 23 | Source 24 |
3. Cruel to survivors of abuse
It’s been well-established that fiction is a valid and encouraged way to cope with and process trauma. Not only is it okay, but it can be so helpful for survivors who cope in similar ways to find each other and feel less alone.
I won’t be lengthening this further by trying to prove that here, but you’re welcome to peruse my compilation of research and professional input on dark fantasies if you don’t believe me.
To continue, however, I will link a set of testimonies from survivors who enjoy transgressive fiction, but since these amount to quite a lot of text, I’ll also post some small snippets as highlights that stood out to me, mostly focusing on the perspectives of survivors on their kinks and trauma, or on the way kinkshaming and moral judgment for their coping choices have hurt them. Remember, if you’d prefer the full context, every one of these are in the link.
Source 25, which includes these full images, and a whole Tumblr blog with survivor testimonies. Also, for good measure, here’s a big long set of survey answers from self-identified proshippers who are also survivors, and their opinions on antishippers’ insistence on equating drawings to the real abuse of children.
I’ll start with bits from the CSA survivor who was interviewed and later talked further on their kinks: |
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Here is another user who wrote out much of their justified anger at being treated like the worst type of human scum for their tastes in fiction despite being a survivor who uses it to cope: |
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A couple of important perspectives on “at least keep your problematic fiction to yourself”. |
One image from here. |
Lastly, someone pointing out, yet again, that the environment cultivated by antishippers causes them deep pain, as a survivor. |
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The most important factor here is honestly just the fact that everyone responds to life differently and that’s why you all get different responses from your own therapists.
For some of you, problematic shipping is not helpful, and may be triggering. But for others, it is healing, it makes them feel seen, it gives them back power and control that was taken away from them when they were abused.
It’s not fair to arbitrarily pick out the “right” and “wrong” ways for survivors you don’t know to use stories or art or anything else. No one can tell you what’s effective for YOU. It’s cruel to demand that people throw away an important healing tool, especially because there is absolutely no basis for saying that it can’t ever be used for good, or that it’s inherently unhealthy.
(It’s also worth mentioning that the “privilage” of getting to enjoy transgressive fiction should not be restricted to survivors, but it’s important to keep in mind how this whole thing hurts survivors in particular, especially since they’re one of the groups antishippers claim to be protecting.)
4. Repeating Conservative sentiments verbatim
There is no smoking gun evidence to suggest that this type of fiction is dangerous. None of the reasons I’ve ever been given stand up to scrutiny, which again, is an entire topic that you’re welcome to read about elsewhere (and that I will elaborate on in my video). My biggest point, however, is that getting rid of transgressive fiction would never succeed in ending abuse. Predators will use any tool they can, and many of those tools are harmless things like candy or compliments on one’s art or fake interest in one’s favorite thing.
Eliminating “gross” fiction won’t save anybody. Meanwhile, attacking people who enjoy it is causing harm, very often to the very people you want to protect. There’s a reason Conservatives often use this exact tactic. The idea that fiction can corrupt and ruin is so historically rooted in bigotry, it’s not even funny.
Let’s start with the Hays Code, which I’ve seen some people in this “discourse” joke about, but some of you seem to need reminding of what the Hays Code was and why it absolutely was not on your side.
I might have also accidentally annotated a little bit. |
Source 26 | Source 27 | Source 28
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The Hays Code included, among other things, rules against depicting: any ridicule of the clergy—because of course the Catholic Church had its mitts all over this thing; pointed profanity or vulgar expressions; sex, suggestive nudity, anything else ~perverse~; and “miscegenation,” precisely defined as “sex relationships between the white and black races”. There was also an intense and thorough emphasis on making sure good was shown to be good and evil was shown to be evil. No sympathy for villains, no gray morality, no complex moral situations. And as you may have heard, it ended up affecting queer media by design, despite not explicitly forbidding it. |
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Here are some direct quotes from the documentation: |
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There’s another organization called the “National Center of Sexual Exploitation”, previously called Morality in Media. Just to give you an idea of who we’re dealing with here: As of 2023, their members were composed entirely of anti-trans, anti-abortion, anti-porn, anti-“woke”... creatures… many of whom directly stated that “porn convinces women that rape isn’t so bad” and that it’s “not a private, victimless sin”. |
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Directly stated or endorsed by NCOSE are plenty of sentiments that the acceptance of “transgenderism” will lead to the “decriminalization of pedophilia and incest” and “leave women and children vulnerable to predators”. Oh, they jump at every opportunity to call queer people pedophiles! |
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They also pull the “minor-coded” type bullshit by claiming that the main character in Fifty Shades of Grey is meant to appeal to pedophiles because of her innocent and inexperienced nature, that her stated age of 21 is a lie, and that the book is “purposely advocating the raping of a child and attempting to normalize” it. |
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Even more notable to me is how they, like the Hays Code, don’t consider barriers between adult spaces and child-friendly spaces to be good enough. They view porn to be so damaging and corrosive to a child’s mind that it shouldn’t be allowed to exist! And yes, they make the argument that predators will use porn to groom children. Therefore, we cannot take the risk and it must all be purged. |
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So much of their language is identical to how antishippers talk, the only difference being that NCOSE’s targets are a little broader. Narrow trans people down to “fujoshis / straight girls pretending to be nonbinary” and narrow pornography down to “illegal ships / gross fetishes”, and the sentiments are EXACTLY the same. |
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They also share a perspective with radfems in that women supposedly can’t consent to any type of aggressive or violent kink activities, that those who do must be coerced or manipulated or abused into it (and again, replace “women” with “minor proshippers”, who are often accused of being groomed because of what they ship). They even cite the legal issues with consensual injury as an inherent good rather than something to question and fight against—which, yes: “My body, my choice” should apply to kink just as much as abortion or bungee jumping or MMA fighting. |
I’ll stop here, but there are many more examples of antiship rhetoric being eerily close to broader Conservative rhetoric, which goes hand in hand with radfem and TERF rhetoric as well, and I’ll demonstrate that next.
5. Radfem talking points
I once told a couple of Discord server mods that their “anti-proship” views parrot TERF talking points, and they were so focused on almost cardboard cut-out comments against me that I’m not even sure they noticed me say that.
I would have expected them to at least deny it, or say, “wtf do you mean!?” but it wasn’t acknowledged at all.
With that said, you need to acknowledge this. Here are some examples.
1. Arguing against someone’s own feelings and insisting that they know better and that it’s impossible for anyone to truly want something they think is evil. |
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Compare this to the way antishippers talk to people who say that they truly enjoy or find healing in transgressive fiction, by the way: |
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2. Here’s a taste of just how often people steal TERF posts to repost for themselves, without questioning what’s actually being said in those posts. I’m sure not all of them are antishippers, but it’s still important to acknowledge that TERFs intentionally craft posts like this to bait people into spreading their rhetoric. |
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3. Open TERFs posting the exact same vitriol against rape kink that antishippers do or once again telling women they don’t actually choose to enjoy dark kinks. |
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4. More insisting that the vulnerable group—for TERFs it’s women and for antishippers it’s abuse survivors—cannot make their own choices. |
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Also here’s a hilarious attempt to create specific lines between what is problematic and what isn’t, giving me similar vibes to this Tweet thread about “which dog cocks are acceptable”. |
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I highlighted some parts in case you, once again, don’t want to read this entire thing: |
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5. This post was stolen from a TERF and is indistinguishable from those antiship posts with more aggressive tones. |
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6. Here’s another post in the “kink critical” tag that could have 100% been written by an antishipper OR a TERF, we’ll never know. |
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7. Which of these were said by antishippers and which ones were said by radfems? |
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That last one, of course, being a quote by known SWERF Gail Dines and being endorsed by anti-porn radfem accounts. Notice that Gail is just saying words and then people go, “SEE!? It's dangerous!” Notice who else does the same: |
I don’t have to spell out how ridiculous all those claims are, right? Like, they’re either wildly unverifiable or demonstrably false. It’s just one ass-pull after another, but tons of people eat it up. The Tweet from the fourth image had over 15,000 likes. Over 15,000 people who just rolled with that. What the hell.
8. Here’s a proud radfem who rejects the “antishipper” label despite spewing the same shallow “ew, pedo/incest shipper” stuff. |
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9. Here’s some posts from open radfems that are just railing on kink in the exact same way antishippers do. Their opinions are the same. |
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And if you’re wondering, yes, “Proshippers want to be oppressed sO BAaDD” is a line I have seen multiple times. (I’ll find more examples as I complete my video, but here's a couple.) |
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10. Last one, I promise, but oh so damning. If you didn’t read any of those, read this one. These are posts by TERFs using blatantly transphobic language (like “TIM/TIF” and speaking of being trans like it’s a disease), and they’re lengthily and thoroughly explaining why they think anime is a huge “culprit” in “transing” people. And let me tell you, it’s disturbing how easily you could plug in the subjects most antishippers talk about and maintain the same meaning. Replace all their derogatory terms for trans people with proshipper/pedophile/lolicon, etc. Replace the descriptions of “idealized girlhood and mlm relationships” with “romanticized abusive dynamics” and other similar phrasings. This is my smoking gun. The stance that “fiction is a dangerous, corrupting force that causes vulnerable people to embrace abuse as normal” is just completely and fully a TERF belief. It is foundational to many strategies used by bigots of all flavors, and it is the delusional worldview of nasty, transphobic slimes who dehumanize and belittle trans people. Keep all of that in mind as you read the following screenshots. |
6. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” doesn’t protect anyone either
See, I think this is a good time for me to acknowledge that, like some of these “kink critical” radfems, antishippers don’t generally proclaim a hatred for ALL sex, or even all kinks. A lot of them are adults who draw and enjoy kinky art themselves, and this is why I’ve had to specify when I’m talking about “taboo” or “transgressive” kinks. But I don’t think accepting only some kinks is good enough, and that’s what this category is about.
The perfect example of the inherently escalating nature of “callouts of proshippers” can be found in an incident within the Amphibia fandom, which I’ve already documented thoroughly over on Tumblr—I’m not going to repost the screenshots here, but I will summarize quickly:
A user named phibbyburner and an anonymous mole working with him comitted to a long-form plan to expose a bunch of private nsfw art by four artists, which directly inspired another person to doxx a 17-year-old girl for her transgressive ship art, thus putting her at very real risk of being killed due to the country she lived in.
This is very far from the only time something like this has happened—far from the only flavor of horrid abusive behavior that gets flung at “proshippers” on the daily (don’t even try me on that one, this list grows all the time). But! This situation was truly a wake-up call for me.
If you go around convincing everyone that a certain group of people are monstrous abusers undeserving of basic humanity, it leads to violence. That is how it works.
Oh, but don’t worry, this is the response you’ll get for pointing that out half the time: |
Hopefully anyone who would actually read this far does value decency a little.
Also, you aren’t safe even if you think you’re meeting the standards of an angry mob.
You needn’t look any further than the time someone was sent tons of violent, nasty messages and put through a big smear campaign for drawing completely innocent, sfw art of a baby minotaur.
It really is that ridiculous at this point.
Source 51—it’s very organized, actually. I’ll post some of it here, but you should read the whole thing! It’s our last stop, after all.
| The art they drew:
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The response (condensed):
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| Constant spreading of lies and rumors:
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Violent, hateful harassment:
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| Mocking their age for some reason:
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Accusations of something sinister going on because these people sincerely believe that just being proship means you view every single thing through a raunchy, sexual lense, and therefore it’s “suspicious” that the artist drew a child at all (seriously, what the fuck):
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Keep in mind, the artist didn’t even ship any minor/adult ships, and did not enjoy, nor draw underage nsfw, and they were still treated like a diseased freak who deserved to die. No one is safe. Your standards for which art is “harmful” mean nothing.
I honestly believe that the reason so many people jumped on this artist is because they made something people loved, and those people felt betrayed when they saw the “proship” in their bio. This is a common response I’ve seen from fans of artists who are outed or even just perceived as “gross” for one reason or another, but I think I’m done for now. I think this makes my point plenty well enough.
Conclusion
Nothing about this “anti-proship” mindset is healthy or helpful. It’s all destructive and terrible, even to the people perpetuating it. You can criticize fictional stories and depictions of sensitive topics without turning real people into dehumanized punching bags—boogey men you can shoot on sight.
I don’t think anyone who wants to protect the vulnerable and the marginalized should be okay with their views contributing to stuff like this. If you never knew that this stuff happens and have just found out here, you should be re-evaluating some stuff. You should be disturbed if you’re a member of a marginalized group and your views align with TERFs and Conservatives.
No one should feel obligated to engage with fiction that upsets them, but neither should anyone be made to feel unsafe, broken, immoral, or otherwise wrong if they enjoy that type of fiction. By standing by the seemingly harmless belief that those people are wrong, you are perpetuating an environment of violence, abuse, and self-loathing.
Believe the evidence or don’t. That’s up to you. And do keep in mind that this information is FAR from complete, but I merely wanted to create a good place to start.
If you’re craving more (what are you, some kinda masochist? xD), I also maintain a big Carrd full of sources on all kinds of topics relevant to the “proship vs. antiship” thing. I will link my video here as well when I finish it. Have a good day.