When Pro-Shippers Turn on MAPs

Like many people on the internet, I enjoy writing fanfiction and participating in fandom. Besides writing fanfiction, I’m mainly a lurker. I like to follow people who create content for my fandoms, and quietly retweet their posts, gifsets, and other fandom content. There’s one problem: I’m also a paraphiliac, specifically a minor-attracted person (map).

    I’m also anti-contact, meaning I am very opposed to the idea of adults having sex or romantic relationships with minors. What this all means is that while I find a few minors attractive, I’m never going to act on it. I’m non-exclusive and am mostly attracted to adults. In a perfect world, my paraphilia wouldn’t be a big deal.

    Unfortunately, maps are incredibly stigmatized and stereotyped. The word “map” sends the average twitter user into a moral panic, invoking visions of pedophilic zealots who prey on and groom young children over the internet. Anyone who has had any interaction with the map community would know that this is not what we do at all, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of hating maps when otherwise reasonable people are convinced that all maps are predators. (I actually fell into this trap myself at first; you can read about it here.)

    When I entered fandom spaces using an account where I was “out” as a map, I naively expected that anyone who had a problem with me would simply block me and move on. This is what a chorus of pro-shippers – people in fandom who are against censorship of fiction – always tell anti-shippers to do when they come across material that they don’t like: block and move on. Block and move on. It’s a pro-shipper mantra. I assumed that this mantra would apply to me, too.

    But it didn’t. Instead of blocking me, people who I’d followed because I enjoyed their fandom content started writing call-out posts for me. Sometimes they were disgusted that a map had followed them. Sometimes they wanted to “warn” their fandom friends that there was a map in the fandom. Sometimes they just wanted to harass me. I started receiving frequent abusive DMs and replies, with users going as far as to give me death threats and suicide bait me. Here are just a few examples of what went down (scroll past for the rest of the post):

These people were upset that I had a large number of bait accounts following me, assuming that this meant I was a sexual predator. 

    Things really blew up when twitter users began to slander me, picking through my twitter posts to find anything they could take out of context and use to hurt me. For example, when I had vented to a friend about feeling like I wasn’t able to participate in fandom due to what was becoming constant harassment, my friend jokingly suggested that we make our own fandom. She joked that we could pretend we’d written other people’s fanfiction. I laughingly agreed. In bad faith, twitter users took our conversation out of context and began making call-out posts on me based on the idea that I was going to steal fanfiction, and that I wouldn’t stop there.

    Because I am a pro-shipper, I had been interacting with the pro-ship segment of fandom. Specifically, I followed the accounts of “rainbow meaties” (or “rm”s for short), the term for pro-shippers in the Hannibal fandom. Rainbow meaties treated being pro-ship as an elite club rather than an ideology, and maps were certainly not welcome to use the “rainbow meatie” label – or even the two emojis denoting this label.

My minor attraction has no bearing on my presence in fandom. Unlike many fans who aren’t even minor-attracted, I don’t like to consume fanworks about couples with large age gaps. I don’t read fanfiction where one partner is a minor, and I’m not interested in sexual fanart of minor characters. In short, I don’t talk about my minor attraction in fandom spaces at all, even though there are plenty of people who do enjoy sexual fanworks about minor characters. So it’s baffling that there was such a huge uproar when I joined fandom spaces. And there was not just one uproar, but multiple.

I’ve been a tumblr user for going on ten years now; I can’t remember a time where I didn’t have a tumblr presence. In the past, I kept my tumblr accounts very, very separate from my map accounts. Nobody on tumblr knew that I was a map, and nobody on map twitter knew who I was on tumblr. Sometime after the initial fiasco with pro-shippers, I noticed that a lot of my fandom friends on tumblr were migrating to twitter. So I tried to migrate, too, by creating an account that mirrored my presence on tumblr. I just wanted to chat about fandom with friends. I didn’t want to have anything to do with maps.

But rainbow meaties found out that I was the same person, and the harassment that followed was worse than the initial harassment I’d endured from pro-shippers. Multiple people – including this person, who you’ll notice I’d kindly blocked instead of followed – accused me of making my new twitter account in order to “block evade” and infiltrate pro-ship spaces that I wasn’t welcome in:

(I did not threaten to "think of kids again," by the way.)

I sincerely had not intended to follow anyone who had previously blocked me. But since such a huge number of people had blocked me in the past, and since not everyone had communicated with me that they had blocked me, I did end up following some people who had blocked me earlier. This blew up, with all the major pro-ship accounts weighing in on the “Quinn discourse.” They made it very, very clear that I was not welcome in pro-ship spaces, even on accounts where I did not mention anything about being a map.

Some even tried to pretend that the reason I wasn’t welcome was not because I was a map, but because I had “manipulatively lied” about who I was. Some said I wasn’t welcome because of the joking post my friend and I had made about pretending that we’d written others’ fanfiction. Some even went so far as to say that I wasn’t welcome because I’d “encouraged self-harm” (I had actually used harm reduction strategies to try to make sure that even if a friend was intent hurting themselves, that they caused as little harm as possible). As you can see, people combed through my twitter account, retroactively finding reasons to hate me so that they could pretend that this was about anything other than map discourse.

Pro-shippers will tell you that they are uncomfortable with maps in their spaces because many of them are survivors of sexual violence. I’m a survivor, too, so I fully understand where they are coming from. I have never intended to violate anyone’s boundaries; if someone communicates with me that they don’t want me to interact with them because they’re a CSA survivor, I won’t interact.

But it seems very suspect to me that a community built on accepting problematic things in fiction, including things like fiction about adults raping minors, would be so abusive to real people who happen to be attracted to minors. Because I entered pro-ship spaces, I was literally reported to the FBI and to Prostasia. This all speaks of the severe mapmisia (prejudice and discrimination against maps) that has infiltrated our culture.

Anti-contact maps do not want to hurt anyone. Some of us just want to be able to enter fandom spaces and enjoy fandom like the rest of you are able to do freely. Why should that be treated like a crime?