Qanon is lolicon
August 12, 2023 9:12 AM Subscribe

Anarcha-feminist writer RiotLinguist on Qanon: It is important to understand that QAnoners consume QAnon AS pornography. it is NOT about "protecting children," it's about the consumption of children's bodies as sites of highly sexualized boundary violation, the "violated innocence" fantasy (link to original twitter thread).
They've (under the name narcissus) written about the problems with the book Harmful to Minors, how body autonomy [of children and adolescents] is not synonymous with “sexual availability,” and misogynists and pedophilia apologists in anarchist movements. Content warnings for (non-specific) discussions of child sexual abuse and predatory behavior, additional content warnings in individual essays.
posted by spamandkimchi (56 comments total) 37 users marked this as a favorite

It took me a few minutes to realize that the first main link was of a compilation of a Twitter thread, in case anyone else found the "paragraph breaks" weird. Reading on. It's a good read.
posted by brundlefly at 9:24 AM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

When I try to go to one of the other links, I get a "loading" message in perpetuity when I try to read it in Safari. (With "just one moment" in brackets.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:39 AM on August 12, 2023

That was a very informative (not surprising considering QANON) read, thanks for sharing/posting.
posted by Fizz at 9:44 AM on August 12, 2023

I'm not sure "pornography" is quite the correct characterization, but the underlying fundamental insight is, I've long thought, correct. It's no surprise that the evangelical movement, with its fixation on teen purity, has hosted so many abusers who found the atmosphere of obsession with the vaginas of teen girls easy to breathe.
posted by praemunire at 9:57 AM on August 12, 2023 [25 favorites]

The last link really shows the ass of the modern “Anarchist movement.” I’ve always found it to be a weird conglomeration of very, very academic leftists, chaotic gutter punks, self-centered libertarians, and practical folks trying to build mutual aid networks, none of whom seem to have a clue about the motivations of the other groups. Destroying hierarchies is great for getting rid of abuse of authority, but it turns out there are also other kinds of abuse.
posted by rikschell at 10:00 AM on August 12, 2023 [33 favorites]

This is a fascinating (and illuminating, to me) lens to view their obsessions, and exactly spotlights why Q and all similar cult-like theories that swirl around sexual availability/innocence/ownership/degradation can get away with being utterly incoherent and yet shape-shift at a moment's notice to evade any sort of objective analysis and not merely survive but its adherents emerge with ever stronger convictions about it. It bypasses all rationality and not only goes to ego (I have secret knowledge!) but also directly to the mute power of the intersections of sex and control and who gets a free pass to violate the consent of victims rather than nobody at all being allowed to violate consent.
posted by tclark at 10:08 AM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Finally got immerautonom.noblogs.org to load for the last link, and... whoa.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:30 AM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

a weird conglomeration of very, very academic leftists, chaotic gutter punks, self-centered libertarians, and practical folks trying to build mutual aid networks, none of whom seem to have a clue about the motivations of the other groups.

Think I spotted the bad ones.
posted by Artw at 10:31 AM on August 12, 2023 [23 favorites]

Artw, yeah, those are the most toxic, but the politics of balancing practicality, ideology, and violence against oppression are tricky in the best of communities. Especially in a framework that demands consensus. Church politics are similarly bad, I think it’s true for any group who think they have The Answers. Makes me want to be a hermit, honestly.
posted by rikschell at 10:41 AM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Thanks for this -- it'll take me a while to read all the links.

It never escaped my notice that facially innocent Q-aligned or hard GOP memes on Facebook* often come with pictures of extremely blond children and/or sleeping infants, looking as fresh as the child in the Daisy Girl ad. I had always taken this as a racial dogwhistle, and of course it is that, but RiotLinguist's points make it super extra flesh-crawling.

And it adds extra horror to the Fourteen Words' "secure ... a future for white children." It's the kind of future that children have when they're raised in fundamentalist compounds in Utah. Such children would be possessions, available for use under authority, intended to grow into instruments: soldiers or breeders of soldiers -- and discarded the moment they failed to serve that use.

----
* Look, I have relatives
posted by Countess Elena at 11:01 AM on August 12, 2023 [15 favorites]

This is your reminder that the only member state of the United Nations to not have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child is...the United States of America.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:16 AM on August 12, 2023 [38 favorites]

My understanding is that this relates to the legality of what was known, in my day, as ass whoopings. I think at least a generation will have to pass, if not more, before it won't be political death to allow politicians to say "The UNITED NATIONS will not let a parent DISCIPLINE A CHILD and that's why these GANG BANGERS GROW UP TO--" Etc., etc.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:19 AM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

Reminder that multiple state GOP legislatures have opposed outlawing child marriage.
posted by rikschell at 11:24 AM on August 12, 2023 [18 favorites]

All accusations are confessions, etc
posted by Reyturner at 11:25 AM on August 12, 2023 [26 favorites]

This might be considered only tangentially related, and if so, sorry, but: For quite a while now, I've been seeing virtually nothing about or out of QAnon. I don't really think there was any bright line between "Nonstop QAnon" and "Virtually no QAnon", but I think maybe the aftermath of January 6, with "QAnon Shaman" in the news, was the most recent thing I've seen that was more than just a passing mention until now.

I don't follow QAnon-related things directly, so I've been wondering for some time if it's just that the sources I follow tend to talk about them less, or if they're actually less active. And if the latter, if that's just because of the election cycle timing (or whatever), or if they are actually petering out.

I'm sure they're not gone, and I'm sure they're onto other insanity that's not necessarily labeled as QAnon, but I've been optimistically (and probably naively) hoping that perhaps some significant number of adherents have finally noticed that nothing Q predicted came true, and that a lot of those things were... well... totally fuckin' stupid (e.g. long-dead son of longer-dead president is going to save us all by revealing that he is actually undercover as Mike Pence, or as Donald Trump, or as Q, or as some random small-town dude who goes to a lot of Trump rallies, or I dunno maybe all of the above).
posted by Flunkie at 1:53 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

This is another tangent but could somebody point me to the any writings on the Subject/Object concepts more generally? Who first came up with them, where and how they apply to different things, etc. I've been wondering this for ages and my previous internet searches didn't lead anywhere.
posted by ropeladder at 2:04 PM on August 12, 2023

ropeladder, this entry on feminist objectification (at Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy) could be a good place to start. The entry includes a discussion of 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant (see below)

Martha Nussbaum (1995, 257) has identified seven features that are involved in the idea of treating a person as an object:
1) instrumentality: the treatment of a person as a tool for the objectifier’s purposes;
2) denial of autonomy: the treatment of a person as lacking in autonomy and self-determination;
3) inertness: the treatment of a person as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity;
4) fungibility: the treatment of a person as interchangeable with other objects;
5) violability: the treatment of a person as lacking in boundary-integrity;
6) ownership: the treatment of a person as something that is owned by another (can be bought or sold);
7) denial of subjectivity: the treatment of a person as something whose experiences and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.

Kant's Lectures on Ethics that “sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry

posted by spamandkimchi at 2:27 PM on August 12, 2023 [23 favorites]

Ropeladder - For a good rundown on the visual subject/object relationship, check out John Berger's Ways Of Seeing - it's mentioned in the Twitter thread so probably informed the writer's approach.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 3:09 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

QAnon is sort of a movement now, but it was first and most importantly a person or people called "Q" who made sexy predictions and revelations online, the so-called "QDrops".

None of the qdrops amounted anything, and the fabulation after the November 2020 - that Trump had a master plan you just had to come to DC on January 6th to make come true - was a disaster, given we know Trump's "plan" was the shambolic no-chance effort to convince Republican officials to declare or otherwise make so that he'd won, and that after J6 he didn't pardon any of them, but did pardon everyone who had one of his kid's private cell number on speeddial.

From that point onward, there's pretty much no credibility in Q even for the most enthusiastic of QAnon people. They can still be a club of nutjobs, but no longer have their animating force.
posted by MattD at 3:51 PM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Well, I mean Mike Flynn is still a heavy on the Q convention circuit, and there's not a zero percent chance he ends up appointed to a position somewhere if Trump gets elected.

This is all such a giant tangle, because Trump is Truth Socialing Q messages all the time these days. And so yeah maybe Q things have a smaller percentage influence than they did previously, but now TFG is actively trying to keep them in his court.

And really, if the numbers are about 15% are Q people in the US, that's enough to swing a nomination, if probably not an general election. And the increased tangle of having a presidential nominee who is also undergoing a full handfuls of trials during the election is only increased chaos. Which Q thrives on.
posted by hippybear at 4:37 PM on August 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

God, all of this is so, so nauseating.
I am a 40 year old Christian anarchist. I had to stop using the phrase "anarcho-libertarian" because of sick bastards like Andrew Lloyd.
I live in America and I already have zero political representation in this country. I'm tired.

Two Sundays ago I preached a sermon where I specifically called out my own Michigan house representative for voting against legislation that outlaws child marriage in Michigan. My rep was one of six, out of the 110 members of the house, that voted against the bill.

In the last year I've been in discernment regarding my relationship to anarchism, the only political label that's felt "right" for me since my early 20s. I read everything I could about Foucault and his "predilections," and I approached all of it with an open mind. I am only an anarchist because of my faith in Jesus Christ.

I can't put into words how much I hate the white evangelical church in America. Qanon and all of it. It's loathsome, sick fantasy and it's a transparent, crocodile-tears treatment of the scourge of child abuse in our country. Those people are sick monsters who spend their days literally fantasizing about hurting children and cover it with the fig-leaf of "protecting" children. The evangelicals are the same, as far as I'm concerned.
And now the anarchists. I'm completely out of corners to hide in.

I suppose all of this is adding gross tonnage to the trash compactor of my own life. I was heinously abused as a child over the course of about a decade, three years of which involved regular sexual abuse when I was around the age of my own three small children.

The rage I feel is impossible to put into words, so I lean on the understanding of Jesus' teachings about millstones and deep waters.

I am not an inherently violent man. But every single day I see things like this and it drives me deeper into a dark place. Sometimes it feels like this reality, the "world today," - was custom-built to hurt me and turn everything I love and trust into ashes in my mouth.

All I want is to serve Jesus and administer the sacraments and care for people at every stage of life. If I had a thousand years to live I'd never understand how someone can hurt a child, or sexually abuse a parishioner, or petition a stranger for sex, or even sexually harass somebody. And it's not like I'm without vices. Kyrie eleison, I'm drinking vodka and sucking on a nicotine lozenge as I write this comment. I get wanting to hurt yourself. I just can't fathom reaching out into the world with sharpened talons in order to hurt someone, anyone, who has done nothing to you.

I know I'm supposed to pray for them. Hell, that was the whole point of my sermon about my disgusting elected representative. I live in a small town. I see her at least once a month, typically at the grocery store. I have to remove myself from the setting. But I can preach the words, "at the heart of her, at the ground of her being, is a living icon of the entire universe." If only I could believe them in my own heart.

But I'm getting so tired of the lying, cruel games these monsters play at. Just be evil and be evil plainly. Stop covering yourself with the garments of holiness in order to hide your sins. Whitewashed tombs. Vile bastards. Christ forgive me my judgment but I hate them so deeply and bitterly. Sorry for ranting.

This is a fantastic thread and I'm grateful that it exists but I hate its necessity with every shred of my existence.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 5:56 PM on August 12, 2023 [58 favorites]

Metafilter: a weird conglomeration of very, very academic leftists, chaotic gutter punks, self-centered libertarians, and practical folks trying to build mutual aid networks.
posted by ZaphodB at 7:05 PM on August 12, 2023 [25 favorites]

Okay, it's been achieved. We can close things up now. Thanks ZaphodB.
posted by hippybear at 7:09 PM on August 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

Does anyone know anything about the reference to Rousseau's intention to groom a child? I googled around a bit about it but didn't find anything. Had not heard this appalling story before.
posted by kensington314 at 8:51 PM on August 12, 2023

I've been paying close attention to Q shit since 2016 and this Twitter thread is 100% accurate. No notes.
posted by Scattercat at 9:12 PM on August 12, 2023

They hate CSAM so much that they all are fine with Elon Musk paying xitter poster Dominick McGee after it reinstated his account, a right-wing influencer who had tweeted an image of a toddler being tortured.
posted by oldnumberseven at 10:52 PM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

I completely agree that the Q folks who turned to "saving the children" are in it for their own gratification. I think sometimes it's for the savior fantasy, but I do think there is a huge titillation factor for many of them.

The telling thing for me is how much they focus on extreme trafficking scenarios. I mean, those do happen, and they are awful, but the overwhelming majority of CSA has nothing to do with that. It's parents, siblings, church members, neighbors, babysitters, family friends, etc - it's the people with easy access to kids because they look perfectly normal from the outside that do the majority of the abusing.

I speak from bitter experience, and I get simultaneously incandescent with rage and coldly sick at the way these shitheels are using my trauma and that of so many others to get their kicks.
posted by Vigilant at 12:19 AM on August 13, 2023 [13 favorites]

I read a really interesting book in college about Catholic virgin martyr saints, and how in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, folk tracts with these long descriptions about the torment and death of St. Catherine or whoever because she wouldn't submit to the pagan king... were basically porn. I mean, they were this. They were for titillation. More than that, though, they were replacing the active, mature, life-giving sexuality of pagan goddesses like Freya or Venus with a passive victim whose suffering was emphasized way more than her miracle.

I think one of the things that distinguishes QAnon/super-right-wing people from leftist concern about trafficking and abuse is there's no real concept of neutral or healthy sexuality. Like, there isn't really that idea of a sexual encounter where all parties are equally informed and thrilled to be there, the way there is in queer spaces or woke lefty spaces. Which is kind of in line with what RiotLinguist says, that they conceptualize ALL sex as somehow violating to women, but also they're kind of into that?

Buuuuuut woke lefty spaces are obviously also not immune. Like, there isn't as much Madonna-fetishizing, but there's still apologia, like "We'll give this predator a pass if his ideas/art are good enough", and it does almost always seem to be a dude. Just like in evangelical Christianity, women/femmes/kids/POC are supposed to just provide infinity grace and listening and sexual indulgence and sandwiches and support to angry white men while they do the Real Work, and I would like to fire that idea just directly into the sun, thanks.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 6:34 AM on August 13, 2023 [11 favorites]

Kant's Lectures on Ethics that “sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry

Not sure what that has to do with the fascinating list by Martha Nussbaum but you did remind me why I dislike Kant.
posted by coolxcool=rad at 6:59 AM on August 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

on the pedophile-apologia in anarchic circles - is this something that people have experienced? I'm new-ish to my local circles and don't know the cultural history beyond what's been canonized but in that article used to cite that claim there's reference to

1) a catfish internet persona by a 50-something white male pedophile who wasn't an anarchist or existed in anarchic social circles outside of this totally fabricated persona 2) a very lowly, negative-pointed comment on reddit, and 3) reference to a much criticized 'anarchist' poet who outside of being disavowed for being a pedophile was criticized as being a 'lifestyle anarchist' who was less about the political theory known as anarchy and more about like just vibing man, noted as representing "aestheticism plus knownothingism; cynical as to the possibility of meaning, allergic to analysis, hooked on trendy word-play", of whom the much better known Murray Bookchin was a vocal critic of
posted by paimapi at 7:31 AM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

There's a bit more here on Peter Lamborn Wilson/ Hakim Bey. He was given passes and excuses in anarchist circles for far too long.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:20 AM on August 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

Thanks TheophileEscargot. I had somehow missed the whole Hakim Bey thing, despite a grad school professor approvingly referring to Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ). TAZ lost whatever luster it had for me once the crypto pushers started describing projects as such, e.g. decentralized autonomous orgs. Ugh. From the linked essay:

Many of Hakim Bey’s best-known anarchist pitches first saw print as paedophile apologies. NAMBLA published his “Association for Ontological Anarchism, communiqué #2” in July-Aug 1986, and a journal called Gayme ran “A Temporary Autonomous Zone” and “Pirate Utopias” in issues of 1993–95...

Bey’s best-known book Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) describes spiritual zones in which anything goes, where the oppressive rules of the outside society need not interfere with what feels good to do. I realise that many honest people have read TAZ without taking any sleazy impression from it. I hope they’ll forgive me for pointing out that paedophiles say these same things to children.

...

Pressing the anarcho-paedophile cause in another way, Wilson (Bey) reviewed the reprint of the late 19th century German-based anarchist John Henry Mackay’s book Fenny Skaller and Other Poems, etc.. Bey’s essay was entitled “ Man-Boy Love Novel Still Relevant 100 Years On.” (NAMBLA Bulletin April 1989). In “Obsessive Love,” Bey again invokes Mackay (1864–1933), whose paedophilia was never known to other anarchist writers during his life: “I admit to a philosophical preference for Mackay’s position...” [which means the] “ giving up of all false chivalry and self-denying dandyism in favour of more ‘pagan’ and convivial modes of love.” He closes the essay with his clearest anarcho-paedophile statement: “it has taken on a tantalising reality and filtered into my life in certain Temporary Autonomous Zones an impossible time and space and on this brief hint, all my theory is based.”

posted by spamandkimchi at 9:09 AM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, from the RiotLinguist essay (line break added):

We see it as significant that Lloyd was caught relatively quickly when he was operating primarily in sex worker spaces, as actual sex workers quickly recognized the behavior of a predatory john; yet he managed to establish a popular reputation and maintain it for two years when operating in anarchist spaces where the perspectives of sex workers are largely subsumed by liberal and patriarchal stereotypes.

Lloyd was selling a fantasy of what “sexual liberation” and sex workers’ liberation means that a large number of anarchists wanted to buy, but which actual sex workers quickly saw through for the client-oriented fantasy it was — a fantasy of sex work as sex, but not work, as uniquely exempt from the exploitative and abusive conditions of capitalist labor relations, because it is sex, and sex is supposed to be liberating per se. His reputation as an anarchist voice for sex workers and authority on anarchist sexuality enabled him to abuse and exploit an anonymous sex worker’s likeness without their consent, even posting their appropriated nudes for display, and enabled him to sexually coerce an untold number of young radicals.

posted by spamandkimchi at 9:20 AM on August 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

*sigh* I also missed learning about Hakim Bey until now. When I read anarchist tracts like TAZ I always seem to mentally assume they mean freedom among freely consenting adults, but now understand that if it's not stated as such in the text then it can be a mistake to assume such is the intent. I'll probably toss my copy as I haven't read from it in a while and now it will irritate me to see it on the shelf instead of being a prompt for happy memories.
posted by indexy at 10:01 AM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

on the pedophile-apologia in anarchic circles - is this something that people have experienced?

Answering adjacently to the question: my lived experience is that creepo exploiter 50-something white male anarcho-hippie dudes were everywhere in the late 80s, early 90s. This may or may not still hold true.
posted by majick at 10:04 AM on August 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

Honestly I get bad vibes whenever i think about where the cool vaguely hippyish outsider contrarians from that era have gone because so many of them that didn’t die have ended up at bad places - MAGA/libertarian, Q-ish conspiracy theorist, tankie-fash. It’s a relief when you find out that hasn’t happened to someone.
posted by Artw at 10:47 AM on August 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Flunkie, I can't speak for the US but in New Zealand QAnon acted as a gateway drug for a far-right influence operation, including:

Tax Payers Union [not a registered union, don't represent taxpayers]

Voices for Freedom [anti- vax, lgbt and seemingly aligned with US Federalist Soc] . Posey Parker in on this.

Groundswell [astroturf - farmer oriented, has successfully torpedoed a national clean water programme]. Many American & UK agitators flying in to organise.

Also numerous old fascists, pro Christchurch massacre... Govt. was slow to see what was happening and now a serious problem with credible treats to PM, and MPs, infrastructure attacks, and a move to undermine voting system.
posted by unearthed at 12:38 PM on August 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I suspect the reason we’ve heard less about it later is the crazier parts of the Republicans current culture war are just Q mainstreamed.
posted by Artw at 12:47 PM on August 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

that was a big thing in the 70s as it is now, right? that there were people who clothed themselves in the aesthetics of liberation and those who were actively organizing for it in their communities with a fairly large gap between the two (the latter being far more burnt out, I imagine, which is exactly the same as it is now)

it's always disappointing to hear that the culture of US anarchists allowed for it. I still def subscribe to the philosophy of actively and intentionally erasing imbalances in power between individuals but like with Walter Breen and Marion Zimmer Bradley and how the SF community handled that shit (poorly), it does mean that newer folk like me still need to stay vigilant
posted by paimapi at 1:07 PM on August 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Shoot, I'm another person who'd missed that Hakim Bey is an awful person. One of my first big writing projects was based on TAZ, but I haven't paid attention to him other than that.

I used to have some anarchist book from that era containing NAMBLA-related pages the printer had refused to print and the publishers had printed elsewhere and then taped into the back. I don't think it was put out by RE/Search, but it was the same size and went well with it. Maybe Semiotext(e) USA?
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:11 PM on August 13, 2023

Ah yes, it's Semiotext(e), this book listing shows the pages (folded, it's safe to click on the link).
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:12 PM on August 13, 2023

I follow a couple various Q-adjacent Telegram groups and they are all going strong with all of the various Qniverse conspiracies. The Michael Protzman groups are going strong with their gematria woo and have yet to acknowledge that Protzman died a few months ago. Like zero mention of it, they’re just pretending he’s alive. All of the messaging on these groups is save-the-children, vaccines bad, storm is coming and the whole Biden crime family house of cards is about to come tumbling down. It’s a fascinating look at delusion.
posted by misterpatrick at 2:24 PM on August 13, 2023

on the pedophile-apologia in anarchic circles - is this something that people have experienced?

The notion that, say, age of consent laws might be included among the stodgy ideas to be swept away by the Sexual Revolution seems like it had a foothold beyond the anarchist fringe for a little while there - remember what McMurphy was in for in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

Though I tend to think of this moment as the product of ideological cross-currents and contradictory ideas of liberation (or: liberation for whom?) given that those same laws could be viewed as liberal reforms of a few generations earlier.
posted by atoxyl at 2:56 PM on August 13, 2023

I’ve seen this history come up repeatedly recently as a gotcha by the right against the left, tied into the general right-wing sexual panic, which of course is pretty stupid and dishonest if you have any idea of the subsequent evolution of ideas about consent and who has driven it. But I do sometimes feel like too many attempts to reckon with this part of the past don’t make it out of “well that guy was a bad anarchist/of course, we know better now” territory, rather than really addressing it in context and treating it as a lesson to be learned.
posted by atoxyl at 3:03 PM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's sickening, the divide between what TAZ seemed to be saying to naive young art rebel types in the 90s, and what it actually meant to its author. It's not the universal truth, but it sure seems like every "edgy" iconoclast eventually proves to've been harboring some terrible ideals and intentions.
posted by Claude Hoeper at 4:26 PM on August 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I want to point out that the author of the linked posts is also an anarchist. Anyone can call themselves an anarchist and there are also different traditions within anarchism.. just as DSA is not full of Stalinists even if both represent "socialism". Anarchism is a big umbrella.
posted by latkes at 6:38 PM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I know I'm late to the party, but I wanted to collect my thoughts, and also I seem to be completely ignored at work at the moment, so here we are.

The first thing I want to say is that in hindsight this feels so obvious I don't know why I didn't work it out before. When you look at Qanon from the persective of serialized fiction, that's clearly what it is. I was instantly reminded of this part of Folding Ideas' Fifty Shades video

A big thing that I want to talk about, because it's going to be the most relevant later, is the legacy of serialization. This is an issue that compounds as the books go on but it's significant pretty much right out of the gate. In particular, the serial fanfiction method tends towards a sort of public performance. A writer might publish a short dead end chapter, purely because they haven't posted anything in a few weeks and their fans are wondering if the fic is dead. Ideas might catch the author's attention but after a few weeks they decide it just isn't going the direction they or the audience want and so the plot thread is abandoned. Because the nature of serial fiction is to always keep pushing forward, and edits are only made chapter-by-chapter, these problems then persist into further derivatives. For Fifty Shades of Grey in specific, these mostly manifest as a lot of cyclical repeating scenes in the middle of the book, petty arguments and conflicts that happen often enough that it's hard to remember which specific one was in which specific chapter, and numerous side stories that last a chapter or two before abruptly ending.

I worked out a while ago that the vast majority of fiction is, for the writer and sometimes others, fetish. From Quentin Tarantino's obvious foot fetish as made most obvious in From Dusk Till Dawn, to most of The Handmaid's Tale, to the titles Harvey Weinstein had Miramax green-light based on the young actresses they would attract, it's clear that the world of fiction is driven by what drives (as in turns on) writers and the other major players in the industry.

So once you see Q stuff as serial fiction, you can assume that it's not driven by truth, it's driven by fetish. Then you can see that it's consumed as such.

I had wondered why it was so easy to find convicted child sexual predators in a movement that claims it's fighting against them, but now it makes perfect sense. The narrative is arousing holistically, and the rest is role play. The obsession with the topic is far more important than the specific role being played, plus the role as described is not necessarily the role as acted. This also goes some way to explaining the number of anti-LGBTQ+ LGBTQ+ people in politics and other public roles. Once you ignore the self-described role in the narrative and simply look at the narratives that people are obsessed with, of course someone obsessed with, say, gay sex is always talking about gay sex.

(I'll pause here to explicitly state that I don't intend to kink-shame, and I'm pro LGBTQ+ (be your best self). I'm mostly, when I'm paying attention at all, anti-hypocrisy. Apologies to anyone I upset.)

I now feel like Calvin going neo-cubist. Seeing fictional narratives everywhere and interpreting them as a guide to what the speaker is into while ignoring their stated role makes so much of the world easier to understand. As a person whose fiction lives in clearly bounded areas and whose IRL tries to be built around truth and process, it's not immediately obvious what someone's motivations are when they're actively blurring desire and role-play with the real world. Thinking about it, my experiences with this in other environments have been disconcerting and not something I hurry to repeat. I mucked about with an AR game called something like Dust which I can't find on the Internet anymore, and found the deliberate bleed of fiction into real life to be weird. Now I see it's common.

This is why you can't break someone out of one of these narratives using logic. "You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place" is a fine and largely accurate quote, but I might now argue that it completely misses the point. Commitment to a position not rooted in truth has nothing to do with reason or reality; it's about desire and fetish. It's an enjoyable fiction they get off on. You can't make someone stop reading a novel by giving them a text book.

From a different perspective, I assume this is the root of the epic levels of "projection" from various high profile figures and groups. We write off the claims someone makes about others' actions when it's clearly something they're doing instead, but should we take a step back and say that the projection is only one aspect of a fetishized narrative being woven by desire, rather than any real belief that anyone might consider it true? Are the baseless claims of very specific actions just the internal thoughts and desires of individuals uncontrollably leaking into the real world because they're too strong to contain?

And how do you protect yourself from these deeply-driven fictions? When someone's motivations are specifically selfish and gratification-based, how do you limit the impact? I don't want to be drawn non-consentually into someone else's fetishes and sex games. I certainly don't want laws that impact my daily life, or even stories in the nightly news, driven by these impulses.
posted by krisjohn at 7:42 PM on August 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

Some stories, motivations, and behaviors are about sexual gratification, sure. I believe I have heard that is the case.

But there's LOTS of other kinds of gratification. I don't think things are generally as sexual as you think they are. There are other pleasures and obsessions. Even sex is not always primarily about sex.
posted by Baethan at 9:39 PM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I use "sex" three times in that whole thing. If you're thinking every use of fetish implies sex, here's a definition from The Britannica Dictionary: "a strong and unusual need or desire for something".
posted by krisjohn at 10:28 PM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks krisjohn, you have given me a bit to ponder.
posted by oldnumberseven at 12:41 AM on August 14, 2023

I use "sex" three times in that whole thing.
"drives (as in turns on)"
"The narrative is arousing"
"It's an enjoyable fiction they get off on."

Look, I've had to learn to identify when people are talking about sexual stuff. Your word choices and examples are pretty clearly signaling that you mean fetish and gratification in the sexual sense. Also the fact that we're discussing QAnoners consuming QAnon as porn.

If that's not what you mean, if all the "get off on" etc is metaphorical and simply talking about any kind of gratification, then.... Okay? Yes, people often aren't altruistic and most people's behavior is often (if not usually) strongly influenced by their internal world.

Are the baseless claims of very specific actions just the internal thoughts and desires of individuals uncontrollably leaking into the real world because they're too strong to contain?
"Desire" seems to be the overall theme of your argument, but it's simply not a framework you can apply willy-nilly.
posted by Baethan at 7:05 AM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was just ranting about this idea this morning. After hearing an interview segment with this transparently fradulent anti-child-trafficking crusader (links to his website), my first question was "How long before he's busted for some form of abuse against children?"

Also, these guys recently offered some interesting perspective on the cozy relationship between QAnon and the "anti-trafficking" crowd, especially wrt the Sound of Freedom phenomenon (spoiler alert: apparently most of the "true story" the movie claims to be is not, in fact, a true story at all).

Buckle up, y'all... child trafficking is going to be a centerpiece of the numerous elections happening in 2024. And not in a good actually-addressing-child-trafficking kind of way. Guess which party will be smeared as (best case) not caring about trafficking enough, or (worst case) the actual ringleaders of global trafficking on an unimaginable scale?
posted by Rykey at 11:24 AM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

A 13-Year-Old Girl Is Apparently The New Leader Of the JFK-QAnon Cult

“Tiny Teflon,” whose mother is also in the cult, has announced her plan to indoctrinate more children into it.

Reminder that these people are obsessed with “grooming”.
posted by Artw at 2:10 PM on August 16, 2023

On the bright side, the new 13-year old leader is probably an improvement.
posted by Flunkie at 6:18 PM on August 19, 2023

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