On anon because I'm a coward. Sorry for the long ask.

I was just wondering if any other ex-antis had anything that helped them work out the cognitive dissonance? Somehow I have two conflicting beliefs that are (allegedly??) core to who I am as a person, these are my unmovable moral values. But unless the core of who I am as a person is "hypocrite whose beliefs don't make sense," that can't possibly be the case.

I don't really think I'd call myself a "proshipper," but I must say I agree with a lot of what they believe. There's never a valid reason to censor things, no matter how immoral it is. Censorship is always less morally correct than whatever is being censored. Also, antis are huge fucking assholes who are miserable to be around. They make fandom not fun. I'm getting really sick of policing what I actually enjoy or having to performing shame well enough to "justify" why I like it. I don't like feeling ashamed of the things I like, and I don't like making other people feel that way either. I'm here to have fun, and on the modern internet of ragebaiting for engagement, you have to be intentional with your fun, or else you won't have any. You have to seek out communities that align with your interests, morals, and values if you want to find that, because the modern internet is specifically designed to not give you that so you'll keep clicking and watching and looking for it forever.

I DESPERATELY want to find a community that doesn't feel like this anti bullshit all the time. You guys look like you're actually having so much fun. People still harass you for what you like sometimes too, but you don't seem so afraid of those people being your friends. Your mutuals. Everyone. I want what you have SO BAD. I want to be part of that. I hate the little voice that's always asking me if whatever I'm making is too niche, too gross, too weird. I know I got it from other fans policing me, and I know I've helped pass that onto others too. I hate it. It feels like Big Brother is always watching me. Making sure I'm having fun right.

But at the same time....

I don't believe you can be a good person and have certain attractions. There's something fundamentally evil about people who are attracted to, say, children, whether they can change that about themselves or not. Simply the fact they experience that attraction almost makes them beyond redemption. And the only kind of person that I find more deplorable than someone who's attracted to children is someone who isn't, but someone who defends them anyway. You cannot be a good person in my eyes as long as you have that attraction, and people who come to their defense are just as bad if not worse.

I judge the moral compass of a creator by their art (but specifically and especially smut) because it tells me what they're attracted to. That's why this doesn't carry over to other kinds of fiction. But we don't go around scrubbing the internet of the paintings of people like John Wayne Gacy, despite him doing significantly more damage to significantly more real people than any of these random artists on Tumblr or AO3 who're being so severely stepped on. The same should be true of this. The art still deserves to exist, no matter how shitty its creator. But I do assume its creator is shitty.

I know I won't find these things in the same community. What I'm looking for is a defining trait of one group, and another of its polar opposite. They're almost mutually exclusive, yet they both feel so crucial. I know the problem I keep running into in these anti communities is a creation of that scrupulosity I believe in so strongly, and the specific reason I didn't feel so pushed out of proship spaces is because you don't find that there.

But... It's like trying to make me believe the sky is green with spots. You can keep saying it and showing me pictures of a green polka-dotted sky but I just know that can't be right, I've seen outside my whole life and it's never been anything but blue. I could maybe understand if you'd said orange or purple like at sunset, but green with spots? You just can't make me believe that, and I don't really think I can either. I don't really know how to reconcile that. Am I just a hypocrite? How do I stop?

https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/797550519104258048/on-anon-because-im-a-coward-sorry-for-the-long <- Hello, fellow Nonnie!

So, I was going to reblog that post, but I realized that I don't necessarily want to attach the full thing I'm about to say to my blog in the current political climate because I am a paranoid person. Most people who know me will be able to recognize that this is me, though, and I'd be down to talk if you want. (Just make a side blog and use it to comment if you want to maintain anonymity.)

This is going to be a little bit of a rambling story. (And I want to say off the bat that it will not involve CSA at any point, and pedophilia is not going to come up literally at all. At the end you'll see why I need to hammer that in.)

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My earliest sexual fantasies are from when I was very young, years before puberty. (This is very normal, as I would learn when I started studying the topic more seriously.) I didn't actually know that's what they were. I remember spending years and years confused about why I kept having these pervasive thoughts. I remember the first time I was old enough to have a physical response and suddenly realizing,
"Oh. That's why."
So, my sexual preferences are baked very deep into me. Nobody taught them to me and I didn't pick them up from any outside sources. I was pretty scrupulous about avoiding stuff my mom didn't me to see and she was very conservative and careful with what she exposed me to, so it's not like I was copying media.

I also had the same opinion you do that there are some preferences and urges that are fundamentally evil: for instance, you might not be a serial killer, but if you have the impulse to murder, that's messed up. Even if you don't act on those impulses, people are naturally moral; if you have desires opposed to natural morality, you're definitionally evil. The examples you gave in your post were on my list of Evil desires. I contrasted this with doing bad things for normal reasons. I figured that most crime was the result of bad circumstance: you bully people because you feel unloved and have low self esteem, you steal because you don't have the money for stuff, that sort of thing. Nobody actually wants to do bad things... so if you do, you're not like a normal criminal who just needs therapy and some community support. You're actually evil.

That's exactly why I did so much intense self-reflection. You see, my baked-in-my-soul sexual preference is for rape. Long before I knew how sex worked, I had fantasies of beating heroes up, holding them down, and torturing them. The instant I learned what sex was that got added to the fantasies. I considered: 'Aren't rape fantasies really common? I probably have the normal kind where people like to role-play stuff.' And then I reconsidered: 'But the idea of it being with someone who's into it completely ruins the appeal. The only thing that's interesting about this scenario is hurting people, and that's horrible.' I went in circles like that analyzing all of the specifics of my fantasies and trying to find a non-evil explanation for them, and couldn't.

So, starting then, I began identifying as Evil. It's a part of my identity to this day.

The difference is that I didn't particularly see that as a bad thing. Okay, yeah, evil people exist! Obviously! But I was also raised religious, and specifically in a religion that teaches about universal salvation and forgiveness. I somehow completely missed the memo on religious guilt. If God made me this way, then I am what I am, and I'm no worse than anyone else who was born funny. I never acted on those fantasies, and I even took steps to make sure that I never would*. Yeah, I'm evil, but that doesn't affect the rest of my life. Evil people still have to do the laundry. They can still volunteer at bake sales. I loved the book "Anatomy of Motive", and it was funny how of the serial killers and rapists in that book, there were some who were gross creeps and some who seem like they'd have been likeable and fun to talk to. Honestly, you can talk to a serial killer ever day and like it as long as you never find out. The difference between me and them was that I was never actually hurting anyone. And if all people, even bad people, are deserving of Salvation, why wouldn't they also be deserving of, like, going to the coffee shop and having a croissant?

This attitude of mine got repeatedly vindicated and ended up worked into my political beliefs. I never stopped being interested in abnormal psychology and I never stopped studying criminal behavior, so I was researching. I came to the same conclusions you did, honestly. To use a less charged example, even if you think that alcohol is morally wrong to drink, you have to agree that Prohibition did nothing to prevent alcohol from being consumed and caused a ton of violence and gang activity. That's true of a lot of things: you have lower instances of STDs and teen pregnancies when you teach sex ed younger, there are lower rates of drug addiction in places where safe use centers exist, et cetera. I believed in Evil People who were Just Bad, but they were rare, and it's stupid to legislate around them. It's like you said: censorship does more harm than good even IF some people are fundamentally bad and exploring their evil in fiction. On the rare instance you find someone who is both Evil and Doing Harm, you deal with them personally. Don't punish normal people because of them. In fact, the easiest way to keep and Evil Person from doing harm is by making it much easier for them to satisfy their urges without hurting others (ex. through fiction) than to do it in the real world where real people are.

(*I was really into psychology, so I knew that suppressing intrusive thoughts usually makes them worse. Instead, every time I caught myself fantasizing about a real person, I would start intentionally fantasizing about a fictional character instead. I would also make the situations in my head outlandish enough to be irreplicable. I figured there's no temptation to do something that can't happen anyway.)

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Anyway, surprising nobody, I am no longer particularly religious and I no longer believe that some people are just bad. I still think a lot and write a lot about hurting people, but the difference between the real world and fiction is that real people would get hurt! I want to hurt people, but I don't want people to end up hurt in the process! I want the action, but not the consequence, and you can't have the consequence without the action! It turns out that as much as I'm an Evil person, I'm also kind of a Good one, and when it comes to making decisions about my hobbies Good wins out every time without contest.

Kink and porn communities, as well as proshippy fandom communities like this one, have made it very easy to live with my intrusive thoughts and urges. It's funny, because OTNF is right: when people aren't in the habit of talking about their sexual fantasies, you never know what's normal, whereas smut writers who write rape fantasies are a dime a dozen in sex hobby circles.

On the other hand, it does keep surprising... y'know. everyone else. I had a therapist one time ask me "Are you sure you weren't sexually abused as a child?..."

As far as I can tell, you and I are the same person, with one exceptions: you can point to those evil people as other, whereas I was one of them. You're talking about the big conflict where you agree with anticensorship political beliefs, don't understand how people can just accept evil. Well, I had to accept evil because I was evil. I had to accept evil like a person who lives next to a quarry has to accept the sound of heavy machinery. I had to accept evil like a person with ADHD has to accept overstimulation. Turns out it's pretty easy if you get used to it. The real surprise is learning that it's harmless.

I still identify as Evil. It's fun and funny to me. Believing in fundamental good and evil was an important part of my culture, and believing that you could be Evil without being particularly bad remains formative to how I live my life. For example, suppose Satan Himself decided to run for president on a platform of maximizing culpable guilt. Well, things like crimes of poverty and stuff don't count, so you have to make sure everyone has their needs taken care of so that they don't rely on churches for support, can afford all of the hard drugs they want, and get to have lots of consequence-free sex. Satan runs for president on a platform of universal healthcare, UBI, safe housing, plenty of access to good food, et cetera.

In that situation, I vote for Satan Himself. He's probably torturing people in the basement of the Whitehouse, but I'm pretty sure the current guy is, too.