arirashkae:

castorochiaro:

shipping-isnt-morality:

minuialeth75:

shipping-isnt-morality:

There’s no such thing as a “healthy” ship.

Ships aren’t food, they’re not exercise, they’re not even a nonfiction book or a classic novel. A steady diet of LGBT+ ships with no age or power gap won’t make you emotionally or mentally any healthier. It won’t teach you about how actual relationships work and it won’t prevent you from getting into an unhealthy relationship.

Unhealthy ships won’t ruin you. They won’t corrupt you, they won’t destroy your understanding of actual healthy relationships or erode your morality.

Your fictional diet isn’t your actual diet. There’s no organic vegan gluten-free ship that will fix a single goddamn thing.

Relax. Enjoy yourself. Read whatever fiction fascinates you, tantalizes you, engages you. The content doesn’t matter much for your health, but the joy it brings you might.

they won’t destroy your understanding of actual healthy relationships 
Yet, I can’t help but worry when I overhear young girls/women saying “I hope I find my Christian Grey one day!”

counterpoint: if anybody had actually taught them what a healthy relationship should and shouldn’t look like, they wouldn’t be saying that in the first place

if 50 shades didn’t exist they’d still have unhealthy ideas of romance.

(now, granted: an international best seller that depicts abuse while INSISTING, in and out of canon, that it’s not abuse, is bad. but it’s still neither the cause nor the solution to our problems.)

yes, exactly, thank you for saying this. i admit, i was in on the anti-twilight craze when that was a thing. i’ve realized now, though, reflecting on it all, it was pretty silly. 

i think the problem is we want to believe that there’s an enemy to fight and defeat when it comes to social issues. it’s easier to say “twilight/50 shades/whatever teenage romance novel gets popular next is making girls think abuse is okay!!” rather than confront the idea our society just has super fucked up ideas about relationships in general.

those books are products of our society, not the cause of its problems. now, i absolutely do think that we should have dialogues about WHY the relationships featured in those books are unhealthy, but just insisting they’re the problem and banning people from reading them doesn’t actually solve anything.

i’d much rather blame an abuser for abusing someone and the societal norms that allow it to happen than blame a kid for reading a book for their own abuse.

those books are products of our society, not the cause of its problems. now, i absolutely do think that we should have dialogues about WHY the relationships featured in those books are unhealthy, but just insisting they’re the problem and banning people from reading them doesn’t actually solve anything.