golbatgender:

I have to say—and I can hardly believe that I do—that I am wholeheartedly against restricting what authors and creators are “allowed” to write, or shunning and bullying the ones who write something you find distressing.

Yes, good for you, you drove one racist author off a social media site or whatever, but you’ve also harassed dozens of queer people, allowed child molesters and rapists and abusers to slip under the radar because now everybody thinks that accusations just mean someone wrote gritty fiction once, and created a culture where literary innovation is stifled. Because it’s somehow been deemed appropriation to write about anybody who differs in the least from oneself, or fetishizing if there’s the least hint of sexual content. Because people might get ideas, even if it’s scientifically proven that reading about bad things marked as such does not make people more likely to do those things.

May I remind you that we live in a time of increasing religious and right-wing radicalism. May I remind you that we are affected by our environments and that “intracommunity” discourse does not arise in a vacuum, but instead reflects the larger ideological milieu. May I remind you that oppressors wish to hurt us, and would love for us to willingly submit to our own oppression, and in the past have dedicated much funding to doing so—infiltration is far from unlikely.

It saddens and angers me to see supposed liberators proclaim the rhetoric of the oppressors—censorship, racial and gender separation, binary thinking, sexual conservatism, dismissal of individual consent, but most of all, fear. Fear of desire, fear of the individual’s autonomy, fear of reading, fear of complexity; fear of the other and synonymized invader. Right-wing politics is a politics of fear, and so is every exclusionary movement or “feminist” anti-porn crusade.

When you accept a politics of fear, you accept the politics of genocidal racists, of homophobes, of trans-exterminators, of austerity pushers, of war hawks, of theocrats. Oh, your targets may be different, for now, but you have accepted their patterns of thought and softened yourself for those hatreds. Or you may even have exactly the same targets—porn you don’t like, for example—but you’re doing it for the right reasons, so if you collude with the people who are doing it for the wrong reasons, and give them some concessions in return…do you see?

Do not base your politics on fear. That is, without exaggerating, death, and likely for you, not just “the bad ones.” Give me a politics of love, or at least a politics self-critical enough not to parrot the fucking KKK’s invasion rhetoric or the Catholic Church’s stance on pornography and violent videogames, and leave people in peace.