Let's wank about wank baby

[thebratqueen]

There's an annual event at my college that's so important many alums go back to it year after year. (And yes, I'm aware the fact that this is the event, as opposed to say, a party, speaks volumes about my school.) It's the Take Back the Night march and speak out. It starts with a women-only march. Hundreds of women get together after dark and walk through streets in the Upper West Side together that no smart woman would ever walk at night alone, or with even two or three of her closest friends for that matter.

During the march they shout and blow whistles and chant things like "University silence perpetuates the violence!" and "Yes means yes and no means no even when you're on frat row!" and so on.

After the march everyone gathers on the lawn in front of the library - men are allowed to join in too - and one by one women get up to tell the story of when they were raped. As you can imagine, it's hard for them to do, but they do it. In response to which the hundreds gathered call out "We believe you!" thus providing an unbelievably caring and supportive environment, particularly in light of all the disbelief those girls must have faced when telling others about what had happened to them.

Now picture all of this, if you will, and then wonder: What would happen if just one of those girls had gotten up and said, either lying or truthfully, "I was raped by my professor, and his name is..."?

Suddenly scary to think of, right? And do you want to know why? Because mobs, even ones gathered with the best of intentions, are scary things.

Let's talk fandom_wank

FW was a mob that started with not the most generous of intentions, but still it was started in fun. Take the silliness of fandom - all the Harry Potter plagerism problems, all the BNF debates, all the RPS kerfuffles, and make fun of them. Point and laugh and remind yourself that it's fandom, not AIDS research. Not bad, right?

And for a start it wasn't. However the key words are "for a start".

FW had at its heart a singular irony. By modeling itself as a group that pointed and laughed at others, it was by definition assuming that those doing the pointing and laughing were somehow superior - an action that in and of itself should be considered wank-worthy.

As long as FW remembered that irony it was okay. Which it did. But, again, only for a start.

Once you hang up a battle flag of superiority, even in jest, it becomes a temptation to those who want to feel superior. And let's face it, fandom lives by this superiority. Fen themselves are already considered freaks by non-fen. The only way to redefine yourself as "normal" is to point to somebody else and go "They're the weird ones." Hence why regular fen make fun of fanficcers, fanficcers make fun of slash folk, slash folk make fun of RPS, RPS makes fun of chan and so on. We thrive on this societal buck-passing, and when FW set itself up as the ultimate in pointing and laughing you'd better believe it attracted the worst element. And not only that - encouraged it. And suddenly a mission statement that was meant to be self-ironic lost that sense of irony. You can see that right now with all the ex-FWers wailing about how they shall not be stopped! They shall overcome! Censorship shall never silence them!

Gee guys - weren't you not supposed to be taking this seriously?

The defenders of FW are very fond right now of pointing out that it was just words, and all in fun, and anyone who didn't like it was a big poopy-head who is guilty of that most horrible of FW crimes - taking themselves too seriously.

Which sounds great on paper. Except no.

Because you see, FWers can protest all they like that "It was just words! It doesn't mean anything!" except for the fact that obviously words do mean something to the FWers or else they wouldn't give enough of a shit about all of the flame wars out there to wank about them in the first place. So sorry, guys, but apparently you agree that words annoy you and at the very least ruin your fandom fun - certainly ruin it enough that you need to retaliate or vent, which were the two purposes of FW in the first place.

And oh no, they protest, we were never trying to silence anyone! Anyone who stopped posting because of us needs thicker skin!

Except again no, because why else expose these offenders of fandom to public humilation? (Let alone harass them in their journals as many FWers liked to do) You wanted them to stop. You wanted them to remember "you write gay porn, get over yourself". You wanted people to notice the words and be affected by them. Maybe this got a few innocent bystanders along the way, but you can't say shutting up those who annoyed you wasn't your intent.

But anyone can wank! they say. We wank ourselves most of all! We think the suspension is funnier than you do!

Maybe some of you do, but some of you don't. Some of you are whining, and saying it's not fair, and doing the LJ equivilant of bitching to the cop that why did you get pulled over when so many others are speeding and - gasp! Some of you even want to make your journals friends-only now because of the mean, mean fen who are picking on you.

Excuse me as I wipe away the tears with my plastic hand.

You violated the LJ TOS. Bitching about the censorship of this is like complaining that you can't watch movies at your local gas station. You knew what the establishment was when you got into this. Cope. And if some of you feel like you can't post in public anymore well - gee, I guess you need thicker skins now, huh? Christ. This is like being surprised when the guy you met while he was cheating on his wife now cheats on you. You set up your own instant karma for this one. Suck it up.

And while we're at it, let's address the most favorite of FW defenses - "You can wank back at us!" Guys? Let me put this into more tangible terms:

"You just hit me!"
"That's okay, you can hit me back."
"And this helps my broken nose how again?"

You fucked around, you hurt people's feelings and when people called you on it you didn't even acknowledge that you were talking to human beings. Instead you wrapped the flag of FW around yourself (there's that missing self-irony again) and pointed and laughed - sometimes literally with posts that said no more than those three words - at anyone who dared to suggest that you'd crossed a line. And for those of you who apparently need the reminder, the words to say when somebody comes up to you and says "You just hurt me" are "I'm sorry".

Should fandom take itself too seriously? I don't know. I think it should be taken as seriously as anything else somebody spends hours of their time on, or else why not take up a more fulfilling hobby? Why write fanfic if you don't enjoy it and think you're good at it (or have the potential to be)? Why analyze the shows you watch if you'd rather be knitting? We do this because we like it, guys, same as you. So, yeah, there's a certain amount of seriousness to this. Yes, granted, it's not the cure for cancer and even cancer surgeons could stand to get over themselves once in a while, but that fact does not negate the fact that y'all acted like assholes sometimes and then patted yourselves on the back for it.

It's just wanking, gang. Calm the fuck down. And don't suck your own cock so much that when a person stands in front of you and says back off because you've crossed a line you ignore them or worse yet take it as a compliment. Because that warning happened multiple times in the Te thread alone and y'all only took it as a reason to get worse and worse.

And now you're all complaining that you got TOSed without warning. Well how about the warning your fellow fen gave you, dipshits? Cause, meet effect.

Can we never have a FW again? Sure we can. Snark can be as valuable and worthwhile a passtime as compliments. But you can't have FW without taking at least some of it seriously, or else it turns into the disgusting feeding frenzy that it became.

Remember - you can't mock us unless you honestly, seriously remember that you're one of us. Otherwise you're the biggest jerk-offs of them all - fen who for some reason want all the supposed benefits of the fandom that they're both mocking and disclaiming any association with.

Oh yeah. That's a group to be proud of.