it does kind of suck that the discussion surrounding older people in fandom and “acceptable” adult interests has been so thoroughly co opted by white women who want to be weird to children and people of color with no repercussions because it is a serious discussion that should be had. it IS shitty and hypocritical that grown men can spend thousands of dollars obsessively following their favorite sports teams and it’s considered normal, and grown women who have a similar interest in other types of media are considered weird or gross.
however it is ALSO shitty that whenever I see a post about the issue my first thought is “I have to check whether op is just saying this because she experienced consequences for being a racist or a pedophile”
like. if you’re gonna be an older person in fandom you have to accept that the landscape of fandom changes? fandom is subject to the same progressive cultural forces as the rest of society.
younger people making jokes you don’t understand, or coming up with art and fic trends you don’t enjoy, or criticizing you for your outdated, shitty views are not just misogynists who hate adult women enjoying things. more importantly, children and people of color with horror stories about predators in fandom are ALSO not misogynists who hate adult women enjoying things.
and if you get that upset about people trying to make fandom a more inclusive, less dangerous place, maybe there’s a reason people don’t want to talk to you anymore
oh and while we’re here, being criticized is also not ableist. a 15 year old neurodivergent kid telling a 30 year old neurodivergent adult that they’re weird and predatory isn’t ableism so quit it with that shit
not to be too humorless but i really feel like we could all do better when it comes to thinking critically about the images we pass around as memes. like, is it a picture of a kid? is it a picture of a likely unstaged act of violence? is it a picture of someone who doesnt know theyre being photographed? is it a picture that was fine in a particular context but could cause real problems for the subject if widely circulated? we have to owe each other more than this
is it a black person in distress? is it a black speech being regurgitated for the hell of it? are they making fun of prominent black features? to expand, are there ethnic features/customs/languages being poked fun at? is it a caricature of a black trans woman, in pain or just existing in her daily life? also very good questions in this discussion bc i believe meme culture is just the new minstrel, the new “freak show.” op is right, we need to pay more attention and remember how much we owe black people, black trans people and just people of color in general. extend your compassion to them and maybe we can all be a little safer
A lot of my more recent posts on disability may make it seem like I just want to convince everyone that they’re disabled and while that’s a very exaggerated and loaded way of wording it, it’s not entirely wrong once you take away the exaggeration and the tone of accusation.
TO ME being disabled or chronically in pain in general isn’t about belonging to a discrete category of people like it’s some social club or an archetype. It’s about what resources you need and what things you struggle with on a political, social and personal level.
Personally, I’m much more interested in people who suffer getting the resources and support they need to live their lives with ease than I’m interested in protecting the sanctity of the ideal of what being disabled is.
So yes, I want more people to realize that the conditions they’re living in are at the very least impairing and I want them to see it not so I can sort of “convert” people into it, but so they realize that they don’t HAVE to live this way. I want them to give themselves permission to seek out whatever help is available even if it’s just finding community with people like them so they feel less isolated, and I want them to allow themselves to rest and take care of themselves instead of keeping on grinding themselves into dust.
I especially want them to realize this so that living in pain, living in misery, stops being so normalized and silenced by everyone. The level of social gaslighting regarding pain and exhaustion is fucking insane, and it has deadly consequences.
Disabled people are the biggest minority, the only minority that EVERYONE can join at any time, anywhere; regardless of class, age, embodiment, and even behavior. Under rabid capitalism, more and more people are becoming disabled by their jobs, by piss poor access to proper medical care, by tangible violence, and so many other factors.
We have things upside down. Disability is denormalized despite our existence being an inevitable and massive fact, but the suffering of disabled people is atrociously normalized, despite the fact that it doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s switch things up.
I know misandry is fun and all but “men are born evil and women are pure and incapable of doing harm 😌🥰” gender essentialism still leads to transmisogyny ultimately even though you include trans men and women in it
It’s the kind of thinking that leads to the idea that afab = safe and amab = dangerous and one of the reasons why amab non binary people and trans women are still shunned within queer spaces because of perceived “maleness” being treated like a poison you can’t fully “cleanse” yourself of like essentialism is still bad when repackaged as inclusive of trans people and something that can be exploited to turn people who aren’t transfem against us lol
While it’s important to recognise where early cyberpunk literature is coming from with respect to its skepticism of body modification, it feels like a lot of folks are basically using that to excuse the ableism of modern cyberpunk.
Yes, it’s true that much of the chrome angst in first-wave cyberpunk literature is explicitly tied to the corporate state’s efforts to abolish personal bodily autonomy, and to the extent that having a robot arm is construed as dehumanising, it’s dehumanising because a corporation owns your arm, not because prosthetics are evil.
However, it’s equally true that the “prosthetics eat your soul” horseshit of later cyberpunk lit is something that popular cyberpunk authors were very much complicit in. They wanted to retain the chrome angst as an aesthetic trapping while dialing back its political dimension in order to better appeal to mainstream audiences; to this end, the idea that having cyborg parts is intrinsically dehumanising was enthusiastically embraced. This isn’t a pop-cultural misunderstanding at work – it’s a shift in attitude that’s present in the literature itself.
Furthermore, that transition happened relatively early in the genre’s history, and was probably the norm rather than the exception no later than the mid 1990s. For those keeping count, that was 25 years ago, which is considerably longer than first-wave cyberpunk managed to remain culturally relevant. Basically, cyberpunk sold out, and it sold out early!
The fact that literary cyberpunk had some interesting things to say about bodily autonomy in 1984 – and that the chrome angst is a core component of that commentary – doesn’t give the genre a free pass for all the subsequent “prosthetics eat your soul“ stuff, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the two thirds of the genre’s entire history can be excused as “not real cyberpunk” on that basis. If you want to constructively address that shit, first you’ve got to own it!
You know, right now seems like a GOOD TIME to ditch “prosthetics eat your soul” and revert back to “your cyber arm and brain implants are owned by Google, which can drop support for them at any time and it’s a crime to jailbreak them” I’M JUST SAYING.
understand that when you say “"proshipper”“ instead of "pedophile apologist” “incest fetishist” “draws/writes/supports cp” (whatever’s accurate) in your warning posts, most people are going to go “oh okay this is online geek shit and i dont care” and then tune out
once again the best takes on this website are confined to the tags
