let’s just start with the heresy: the proshipping movement - you know, that online cluster of people who defend the right to consume, produce, and celebrate any fictional depiction no matter how taboo or disturbing - is a fundamentally neoliberal formation. this isn’t ragebait; it’s a genuine theory about structure, ideology, and the kind of personhood proshipping constructs and defends.
i’m not writing this to argue that proshippers are evil. i’m writing this because i think something strange has happened to how we, as terminally online queer folks, talk about fiction, desire, harm, and ethics; and because i suspect some of the core assumptions we rely on in these conversations come from a place we don’t always recognize.
if you’ve spent time in fandom spaces, especially queer or adjacent ones, you’ve probably seen the slogans: “ship and let ship.” “fiction isn’t reality.” “no kinkshaming in fandom.” or, as one queer “profic” account semi-recently put it in a tweet Skeet that’s been haunting my brain:
It’s real hard advocating for porn/art/ sexual freedom because you can be like “I don’t think moral corruption is real let alone comes from simply consuming media” and people who oppose you will be like “not only is it real but I’m justified in unparalleled violence against you to prevent it.”
this sort of thing tends to do numbers: lots of retweets, lots of agreement, lots of people (often young, queer, online) who say this sentiment is freeing, or even queer. and i get the appeal. it looks like, swims like, quacks like a defense against puritanism; queerphobia; being told your desires make you wrong. sometimes it shows up as: “fiction doesn’t cause harm”, or “consuming problematic content, if it’s fictional, is harmless and cannot have moral implications”. these are the axioms - the gravitational center - of what often gets called “proshipping”, or more recently, “pro-fiction”.
but here’s the thing: this is exactly how neoliberalism wants you to feel. specifically: i think the worldview that often underpins proship discourse - the way we talk about personal freedom, media consumption, even fandom identity - is, in many ways, deeply neoliberal. and i don’t mean “neoliberal” as a buzzword for “bad” or “capitalism is evil”, but in a more precise sense: a set of ideas (or patterns, rather) that emerged in the late 20th century and reshape how we understand morality, freedom, and what kind of people we’re allowed to be.
the neoliberal subject and the freedom to ship
neoliberalism (in the Mark Fisher/Wendy Brown sense, not just “corporations bad”) is more than an economic doctrine; it’s a totalizing lens, less a system than a pattern or formula. it reshapes what we think people are, what freedom means, and what politics should do. in the neoliberal order, the individual is a consumer first and foremost. politics becomes personal choice. freedom becomes non-interference. and moral questions? those get privatized.
this is the exact shape of most proshipping discourse. the core idea that all fiction is morally neutral unless someone acts on it. that there’s no meaningful relationship between what we represent and what we normalize. that your media consumption is your own business and anyone who challenges that is a moral puritan or authoritarian or, increasingly, a crypto-fascist.
that’s not just a fandom take; it’s an ideology. one that treats culture and its artifacts the same way neoliberalism treats markets: as self-regulating, immune to critique, and disconnected from their effects.
fandom as free market
the proshipper mantra that “fiction doesn’t cause harm” is, at its core, less an argument and more a declaration of market logic. it imagines fiction as a consumer product - like a snack or a pair of shoes. you either like it or you don’t. if it makes you uncomfortable, the solution is simple: Don’t engage. click away. refine your blacklist. curate harder. let people enjoy things.
this is the logic of the deregulated marketplace: where all taste is personal, all choices are valid, and responsibility begins and ends with the consumer. it frames media consumption as private, apolitical, and ethically weightless. and it relies on the idea that fiction simply floats in a void, unhooked from the world it supposedly doesn’t affect.
but fiction doesn’t just exist. it’s made, distributed, replicated. it circulates through algorithms and cultures. it accrues meaning. it gets aestheticized, emotionalized, memed. it picks up ideological baggage, not by accident, but because that’s what stories do. they encode values. they offer models of behavior, frames of feeling, and metaphors for what power, love, pain, and desire should look like.
to understand this, you don’t need a moral panic. you just need to look to the already-dense and vast bodies of knowledge and currents of theory about how culture and media function.
taken together, fields like memetics, semiotics, critical theory, and media studies all tell us the same thing: that fiction doesn’t just reflect reality; it helps construct it. memetics shows how certain ideas (like character pairings, sexual dynamics, or tropes) spread and reproduce not simply because individuals choose them, but because they’re emotionally and/or symbolically contagious. semiotics reminds us that stories are made of signs, and those signs carry meaning - they tell us what love looks like, what power feels like, what’s desirable, what’s forgivable. critical theorists (from the Frankfurt School to post-Marxist media scholars) would add that cultural symbols are never neutral; as long as we live in a world where culture is produced within systems of inhumanity, then the stories we tell will reflect and reproduce those systems.
this isn’t about scolding fanfiction writers. it’s about understanding that culture, especially popular culture (which, with social media, is becoming increasingly fragmented), trains us. it shapes what feels normal, what feels erotic, what feels dangerous or safe or worth romanticizing.
and this, obviously, doesn’t mean fiction is dangerous in a direct, alarmist, monkey-see-monkey-do kind of way. it means fiction is powerful. and if it’s powerful, then it’s also worth talking about; not just in terms of whether someone should be allowed to write something, but in terms of what that writing does, how it circulates, and what it reinforces.
Why proshipping rhetoric sounds (and feels) like freedom
the idea that fiction is harmless can feel like a kind of liberation. especially for queer people, survivors, and neurodivergent folks who’ve grown up being policed, pathologized, and punished for what we like. when someone says, “Your fantasy is immoral,” it hurts. and proship discourse, at its best, has tried to push back against that kind of simplistic moralism counterproductive to prevention and harm reduction: the argument that desire itself is immoral.
but here’s where neoliberalism creeps in: it teaches us to equate freedom to non-interference. as in: if something makes you uncomfortable, you should log off. if you don’t like a trope, don’t read it. everyone just curates their own experience, and nobody owes anybody else anything.
that sounds like it protects us. but it also means we stop talking to each other about what fiction is doing. it makes us feel like every reaction is a personal problem instead of a sign that something larger might be at play; about power, or trauma, or how we learn what love is supposed to feel like.
neoliberalism trains us to believe that desire is totally personal: not shaped by culture, not political, not up for discussion. and if desire becomes this totally sealed-off, private thing, then of course people get defensive when it’s questioned. it feels like your whole identity is being threatened - when maybe it’s just your tastes and media choices being contextualized.
fascist-coded puritanism
a strange thing has happened in fandom spaces over the past however many years: any attempt to talk critically about certain tropes - especially dark or violent ones - gets treated as an attack. not just on the content, but on the person consuming it. the logic goes: if someone says “this ship might be romanticizing abuse”, they’re really saying “you are an abuser”.
and i get it, shame is sticky. for a lot of us, fandom (and queer online spaces broadly) was the first place we felt like our brains were allowed to be weird. but the idea that critique = censorship is, again, a deeply neoliberal one. it assumes that other people’s discomfort is always trying to take something away from you - your art, your freedom, your pleasure.
but maybe that’s not true. maybe we should focus on distinguishing between someone trying to control you and someone trying to ask: why do we keep writing this? why does it feel good? what are we working out through these stories? what do they leave out?
those are hard questions. but they’re not moral police. they’re part of being in a community that’s actually free: because freedom isn’t just getting to want what you want; it’s getting to ask and know why you want it; whether that want arises from selfhood, or is a wound you’ve been taught and incentivized to venerate.
but, gorb, what does it look like to “grow past” all this?
it doesn’t mean giving up fandom. it doesn’t mean tribalism. definitely doesn’t mean going to purity culture or shaming each other over ships.
it might just mean asking: what are you protecting when you say “fiction isn’t reality”? are we protecting ourselves from shame? from accountability? from conversations we’re not sure we have the language for?
it might mean remembering that fiction is powerful. that it can be playful and healing and hot and weird…but also ideological, reinforcing, and viral. that the stories we choose to tell reflect something, and the way we talk about those stories reflects even more.
it might also mean being open to the idea that desire isn’t a private garden, but a field - grown in the world, shaped by it, and always in conversation with others.
it might also be worth asking what “came before” neoliberalism; what kind of ideological soil fandom might have grown in prior to neoliberalism’s “colonization” of everything. so let’s imagine fandom, prior to neoliberalism, as (perhaps too simply) something like an embedded commons. a place where media wasn’t just consumed, but interpreted together, and where interpretation itself was seen as a form of ethical and emotional labor, done within a shared world. in this model:
• desire wasn’t private property; it was porous, discussed, explored, sometimes gently interrogated - not because anyone believed in “thought crimes”, but because people understood that desire emerges in context. that what you find hot or romantic or cathartic is shaped by the stories you’ve been told, the “scripts” you’ve absorbed, the pain you’ve experienced. • critique wasn’t censorship. it was a way of staying in relationship. saying “Hey, this trope you like, it might be doing something questionable with power or race or trauma” wasn’t an attack. it was part of being in the same room. it assumed shared stakes in what kind of stories get told and retold, and what kind of futures they help make imaginable. • fiction wasn’t a sealed-off zone. it was a site of play, projection, healing, and experimentation - but not in a vacuum. there was a tacit understanding (maybe sometimes an unspoken one) that stories do things, and that those things ripple through people differently. which meant fandom was full of negotiation: about boundaries, about responsibility, about how to hold each other with care even when you’re writing or reading about violence.
so, Yes: The Proshipping Movement is Neoliberal
not simply in the cheap, dunk-y way, but in the deeply structural sense. it privatizes harm and violation. it commodifies desire. it rebrands regulation as oppression. it makes freedom into a synonym for deregulation. and it flattens activism into a posture of aesthetic entitlement.
that certainly doesn’t mean everyone who uses the label is doing this intentionally. there are people in proship spaces who genuinely want to engage critically, who are reflexive, who are aware of nuance. but the dominant rhetoric, the stuff that “does numbers”, is steeped in a worldview that was sold to us by capital, not community. a worldview that has, ironically, made us far less free to imagine better relationships to fiction, to each other, and to ourselves.
maybe it’s time to retire the label. maybe it’s time to stop saying proshipping is activism. maybe it’s time to stop defending anything under the banner of “just fiction.” because the truth is: fiction is never just anything. and neither are we.