thisiskatsblog:

lapelosa:

wecantchange: lapelosa: wecantchange: lapelosa-blog: Wow. Fucking wow. is this anon seriously trying to compare thinking 2 members of a boyband are in a relationship to living in constant fear for your life under a terrorist regime is that seriously whats happening here It’d be good if the anon could come back to argue for him- or herself. But considering that they were basing this off their own personal experience, I will give it to them. And what the anon was reacting to was what I’ve been calling ‘prisoner mentality’ type thinking. Like: If we are too happy about Louis and Harry being together they will have to hide again. Or, if we openly talk about what we see, then the boys will be ‘punished’. Etc etc. All of the kinds of thinking that has people constantly self-censoring themselves out of fear, and the fear is that if you speak up then others will be ‘punished’. And apparently a lot of the tactics in these two very different scenarios, according to this anon, are strikingly similar. This is a fandom where a lot of people are afraid of being too happy, out of fear that others will be punished for it. And that’s fucked up. Your framing the issue as ‘thinking two boys are in a relationship’ ignores the point, and seems disingenuous. how does thinking someone is well and truly over dramatising a situation seem disingenuous? i’m not being insincere or pretending i know less about the situation than i do - i do, in fact, ship larry. you aren’t going to be murdered - and neither are any member of one direction - because you openly support whatever type of relationship they have. you will be murdered for openly supporting the opposition whilst living under a terrorist regime. they aren’t in the same league what so ever, surely you can agree on that? a girl got unfollowed on twitter for no apparent immediate reason - this is not the same as the true systematic oppression ongoing in many areas of the world today and is in fact probably pretty insulting to people going through that at current. louis and harry know far more about the situation behind the scenes than we do as fans. if they do something together then it’s most likely because they know it’s fine for them to do, or they’re willing to take whatever consequences it’ll incur. this paranoia overtaking the fandom is insane and pandering to it and not calling it out when it’s seen only makes it stronger - although i’m sure that it’s not helped by the constant bullshit on twitter about how modest is supposedly an all powerful being who can delete your dms and your blog and get you blacklisted by interpol or whatever level of fear has been bred now. hyping up what’s happening and detaching from the reality of the situation (ie. larry shippers being less likely to get a follow on twitter and being more likely to get called out by 1d or a family member if you get annoying on twitter, louis and harry maybe getting a bit of a talking to or having to do damage control) provides nothing other than a ground for more fear to breed; it doesn’t calm people down and allow them to speak out, it just gets them more scared to which is the opposite of what i. and i’m assuming you, want. I’m assuming you did not see the anon’s response to your post, as you do not address any of their points. Including 1) we are talking specifically about what I’ve been calling ‘prisoner mentality’, people self-censoring themselves out of fear of ‘punishment’, and 2) the anon is speaking from personal experience, as someone who lived under a terrorist regime—which means your response that they are insulting people who have lived under a terrorist regime is inappropriate. Resisting this type of hyped up fear is exactly what I am talking about, so this is common ground on which we agree. http://lapelosa.tumblr.com/post/84837538942/1-we-were-talking-about-prisoner-mentality-we-are-not Adding this response as well: http://thisiskatsblog.tumblr.com/post/84839506090/i-find-very-interesting-you-bringing-up-prisoner

In fact here is the relevant bit:

“

But there are lots of other thoughtful and insightful blogs, whose owners at some point told me, or friends that I have spoken to about this, that they got the feeling their blogs were being monitored. Apparently that thought scared many of us, as so many people reserve their thoughts for the tags (which don’t show up in the notes) and do not use the public tags. The reasoning seems to be: “If I speak up too much about seeing through the tactics, the reigns on Louis and Harry are going to get even stricter, and so I will keep quiet, so as not to hurt them more.”

Marta (the-love-laws) and Angela (lapelosa) have both compared this to the tactics of a dictatorship in private posts to me (and I am sure they don’t mind me repeating it here). I fully agree with them. It’s a standard tactic of people trying to control other people’s actions and minds, to not only scare them into silence, but to do it by making them feel complicit to their hurting of others. Hannah Arendt wrote about this in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (and in “The Banality of Evil”) - she describes how the Nazi’s would hold a female prisoner, a mother, at gunpoint, and ask her which of her children they were to shoot, only to shoot them both when she refused to choose, making her complicit to their death. There’s no comparison in the atrocity, and the suffering imposed, of course, and I do not want to trivialize the holocaust by making the comparison, but the tactics ARE similar: if you do not want to have a part in the suffering of others, then keep your head down, and make sure you do not catch our attention.

The motivation to do this, however, is of course not because they do not want to see you – they can see you anyway, if they want to. The motivation to do this, is so that others, who may have their doubts about what is happening, who may feel alone, who may have a mind to speak up, and revolt, but who need just that extra little bit of courage to do so, to make those others feel like they are utterly alone.

And this isolation, and silence, is achieved in more than one way. There’s complicity, as I said; and there’s also pathologization. I think it was Angela who identified that in some of the anon hate we’ve both been getting. As the “she’s just a teenage girl with hormones – whose words by definition carry no value in society” argument won’t work on either of us, we’ve both been targeted by anons who wanted to make us look silly and stupid, usually by taking the weakest of our arguments, misconstruing it, and attacking that, and then by anons who would like to make us look like there’s something very wrong with us: we’re just dirty old ladies perving on teenage boys for our own pleasure – whose lives must surely be failures because what else are we doing blogging about this all the time. Surprise! Most of us do have careers, family, friends, social lives, AND a hobby: THIS. And yes, it’s a hobby we are passionate about it, we feel it’s important, but that doesn’t make us sick – unless every guy who’s obsessed with trains, football, a tv show, a band, or a record collection, … and who appreciates the features of the latest hot female tv presenter ten years younger than him, is sick and crazy too.

Let me explain the conclusion of my answer to one of the previous asks: why I feel this blog is important, and why I feel what I have to say on here is important enough to tag publicly, so that, with 500 followers, it’ll show up in the public tags just in case Modest and HJPR have not yet found me:

Equal rights and social justice are important. LGBT-rights are important. We pride ourselves on living in free societies, where it’s not okay to condemn people for features they have no control over. Those are our values, but we haven’t achieved what we wanted, yet. LGBT* people are in danger for their lives, and discriminated against, all over the world, still. Ethic differences are cause for strife, and ethnicities erased to ‘fit in’, all over the world, still. And young teenage girls are taught their opinions, their fantasies, their wishes, have NO value, all over the world, still.

I am not here to ‘prove’ Louis and Harry are in a relationship. I already know that they are, and when people have asked me why I believe such or so, I have been happy to oblige them, teaching them a little bit about theory of knowledge, and about reasoning, in the process. But that’s not why I am here.

I am because I know a free society needs lots of work. Freedom of speech, the right to privacy, equal rights: you can’t just say “we’ve said it’s important in our constitution and our human rights covenants, so have them, it’s fine” and sit on your ass and do nothing and wait for everything the generations before us achieved to disintegrate again. It takes special attention to hold up those values in every aspect of our lives, it takes people speaking up for them when we see they are being trodden, anywhere, by anyone. The bad guys are not just dictators in ‘developing countries’ and the semi-dictatorial regime in Russia. The bad guys are everywhere, and we are the bad guys when we don’t say anything about it, because in the end “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” (Edmund Burke, British politician)

I write about freedom of speech, social justice, equal rights, privacy rights, those kinds of things, on a daily basis, in my professional and academic life, for politicians, academics, ngo’s, people who read the paper. But it’s not all up to the politicians and the professors and the people who have an interest in politics and academia, is it? The whole of society needs to support this. And I can’t just forget about all that when I watch my tv-programs and listen to my music, something which almost everyone does, and which influence public opinion as much, if not much more, than the papers and academic journals, and political party programs do. So when I see that two world famous guys with over 14 million and over 17 million Twitter followers respectively, are in a commited, loving relationship, and while being closeted, at the same time still use the little bit of freedom of speech they have to also be very clear about their support for gay rights and love for eachother, thus constituting an example, and ray of hope, for so many of their young fans who need someone to look up to, then I feel it is important to talk about that. And when I see that their management not only keeps them very firmly in the closet, but is waging a war in fans’ minds to ostracize and pathologize the fans who see this, and talk about this, and for whom this is very important, and to encourage other fans to bully, and isolate them, then my blood starts to boil. Because that kind of attitude, which is an old generation attitude, that many of us have personally suffered from, by our families, teachers, employers; does NOT need confirming in the generation that comes after us. The previous generation, and we, have fought so hard, are still fighting for equal rights, and the new generation should be champions for it, not turning back the clock.

So while Modest Management may say they are perfectly in their right to try and make money off homophobes by closeting two gay guys, I will say that I am perfectly entitled to use my right to free speech to say that 1. the way they are doing it, by vilifying “Larry shippers” in the media, and encouraging mutual bullying in the fandom, is morally despicable, and that 2. the way they are currently implementing the contractual clauses to make their artists comply to their moneymaking wishes would most likely not hold up in court for violation of non-discrimination law as well as human rights law. And if they, or anyone else, wants to scare me into not using that right to free speech, by giving me the impression that the private lives of those two boys that I’ve grown quite fond of, will be further impacted by my actions, then I will say in response: 1. Modest’s actions to restrict Louis and Harry in their private lives, do not seem to have scared Louis or Harry from doing and saying things that still suggest they are in a loving relationship with eachother and that they support equal rights– so why the hell would they scare me? 2. Ditching my right to free speech, in favor of the smallest bit of extra leeway for Harry and Louis (which I can’t even be certain about, can I? and Harry’s certainly not refraining from tweeting dicks and balls and other gay innuendo to get more leeway, is he?), it’s also ditching – what is 10% of 18 milliion? 1.8 million? Or we can take 10% of the Tumblr 1D fandom, which is still several thousands of young people – it’s ditching thousands of young people, and leaving them to think they are alone in noticing, in wanting to say something, in wanting to find representation, a community, something to enjoy together, and leaving them to the moneymaking hyena’s who think it’s fine to encourage their peers to bully them.

In short: I refuse to spend my lifetime stuck in silence afraid I’ll say something wrong (x).

I prefer to use my right to free speech to build a tolerant, lgbt* supportive fan community.

Edit to add: I feel much of the same rage about the whitewashing of Zayn and the way this fandom is portrayed as a pot of raging hormones to be discounted on gender and age alone - which is not what I generally focus on but I thought it was important to mention - apologies for these aspects getting lost in the tracks a bit.”