I think it's worth saying to the antis who are mad at us "gross adults" that many of us got on the internet when we were their age and - guess what - we shipped hella problematic ships, including lots of age difference ships. Because it was OUR fantasy. We wanted to put ourselves in the place of the teenage girl courted by the hot older guy. It did not mean we were going to jump into bed with any random older creep. We knew the difference between fiction and reality. (1/2)
I think there is in fact a generational difference here, and Bush, and 9/11, and I think also the Janet Jackson “Nipplegate” controversy and subsequent anti-sex backlash have a lot to do with it. We remember a world before that. Most antis don’t.
I agree that there’s a generational difference. Young people, perhaps particularly young Americans, are growing up in a very different world with very different values than those of us who remember the 90′s, 80′s, and earlier. It’s much scarier, much closer and easier to access, and much more confusing.
But that very generational difference is why I think it’s condescending to tell young anti-shippers ‘when we were your age, we could tell the difference between fiction and reality.’ (It’s not that they can’t differentiate, after all - it’s that they assume that nobody else can.) They’re facing a whole new set of social challenges, existing in a world that has had internet as long as they’ve been alive and growing up on social media platforms designed to bring user everything, whether they want it or not.
It’s not really about ships: it’s about having a space that they can control in a world that has always been a mouseclick away, huge and uncontrollable and unknowable. The internet was what opened our horizons and helped us find others who are like us when we needed it; we reveled in finding out that we weren’t alone in our fantasies (no matter how fucked up). Today’s teens grew up with their horizons already expanded, never knowing a world without internet, and their social media experience has been wrestling web 2.0 for the ability to create a smaller, safer, space to rest in (which web 2.0 actively resists).
And in a social environment that’s wildly partisan and ‘post-truth’, with a world that’s so big and with values so relative, where every voice seems equally likely to be telling the truth or lies, is it any wonder that the exclusionist and authoritarian voices start to become comforting? Is it at all strange that young people especially start to rally around people that guide them in who to filter out and who to trust, or causes that simplify the world into ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘helpful’ and ‘harmful’? That gives people a group to dehumanize and say, ‘they are the cause of all my troubles, and I will destroy them’? I think it’s pretty common. Anti-shipping is just one of many forms this radicalization of worldview takes (and a particularly mild version of it.)
In short: young people today are facing the same challenges as everyone else on the net, but with less life experience, less fixed principles, and a very different frame of reference on the whole. It’s different enough that I think it’s unfair to compare our teenage experience to theirs.
It’s the technology. The platform shapes our cultural norms instead of the other way around . And until we address this issue, will continually be circling and snapping at each other .