Seduction of the Antis
Anti-Shippers’ Adoption of Fredric Wertham’s Terrible Takes
Fredric Wertham should have been a man whose accomplishments in life sought to make him a decent figure when looked back upon, especially by the standards of leftists today. After all, he was a German Jew who moved to the United States in 1922, worked hard to defend the clinically insane (testified in favor of insanity for cannibalistic child-murderer Albert Fish c.1935), and in the 1940s developed a psychiatric clinic funded by donations for poor Black children in Harlem. His work was cited in the overturning of segregationist legislation and at the time he was a leading expert in the human brain. With all this going for him, why is Fredric Wertham a name that has transcended time among fandom to the vile status it has today and why is it that when the young forget, they risk the resurrection of his legacy?
One matter to note specifically about Dr. Wertham was that he was decidedly liberal. Considered a social progressive in his time, he was fundamentally different from the likes of other censorship-driven activists. He was not any kind of evangelical, he was a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, he was considered an intellectual…and yet this man would testify before the senate to censor comic books. His book, Seduction of the Innocent and subsequent activism would result in a moral panic which would culminate in the formulation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA), an entity which fundamentally destroyed whole genres, careers, and lives.
It turns out that censorship is not just a conservative’s game. As we’ve seen (increasingly often) in fandom today, social progressives have clearly begun their crusades against what they believe to be “harm” caused by fiction. Most of these people are younger than 25 and have been cutting their teeth on modern discourse for years, developing reactionary tendencies and honing them in forums such as Tumblr or Twitter. The usage of inciting and inflammatory speech is common, encouraging suicide and doxxing. It’s fairly common among fandom servers and Twitter pages these days to see plenty of “kys” (kill yourself) and “unalive” among other more creative suicide bait. It’s surreal sometimes to see those who believe they are morally just running about like teething gremlins, keen to tell anyone who will listen that there is a great plague in fandom—a plague of incest and pedophilia and racism and degeneracy. Many times they plead for fiction readers and writers to seek therapy or find medical help for these moral failings. It sounds increasingly evangelical but it’s important to note that it is not.
After all, the very nonreligious Dr. Wertham would have agreed. His argument was nearly entirely based on the aspect of comic books as a public health issue rather than one of cultural censorship. Wertham’s crusade was based on the fact that comic books in the 1940s were immensely popular, reaching huge audiences of both adults and kids alike. His arguments were ultimately founded in what he believed to be comic books’ tremendous negative effects on children. Comics were said to drive children to villainy, criminality, and homosexuality. Several sources in the late forties compared Superman comics to Nazi propaganda, comparing the notion of a single all-powerful being to the rise of Hitler. Wertham, despite his origins in social progressivism, called for public book burnings of comic books, his evidence based not on research but anecdotes, and any pushback was met with attempts to discredit and defame his critics.
“The Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies, of the nature of which they may be unconscious.” — Fredric Wertham
A young Twitter user, who will not be named as they are 16, is but one in many youthful Twitter users who exemplifies this regeneration of Wertham’s ideologies. For the purpose of this post, I will call them “Sam.” With an exhaustive “about” page, Sam makes it apparent that by no uncertain terms, they are a social progressive of the internet age. They are decidedly against racism, homophobia, ablism, and fatphobia. They’re against all kinds of exclusionary tactics common among Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), and in bold letters, their DNIs end definitively: “emphasizing a lot lot more do not follow me if you're a pedo/groomer/proshipper (i'm a csa victim)”. A closer look at this last, seemingly logical, statement reveals something curious. It doesn’t fit with the rest. Because what Sam is talking about here includes people who are, objectively, not pedophiles. In a thread from August 2022, Sam claims to have been groomed by fictional stories on Wattpad, a site designed around writing and sharing fiction.
From the very first reply below their tweet containing their content warnings (heavily altered to avoid muted tags), Sam runs into the same fumble that Wertham did, a studied psychologist of the 1940s and a 16 year-old of the modern age: they rely on an anecdote. Their insistence that “fiction affects reality” in their introductory tweet is suddenly derailed by the logical conclusion a reader should have obtained by the end of the thread—that their interests were merely capitalized upon by an online predator, or as is often the case, by a very stupid and malignant teenager. This experience has thus colored their perception of fiction writers who enjoy certain topics to be pedophiles. Is there any evidence to back this up? In a word: No. Was there any evidence to back up Wertham’s claims in the 1940s and 50s? A review of Wertham’s papers around 2012 from librarian Carol Tilley concluded that the doctor’s claims were unfounded, his evidence falsified and his conclusions based on his desire for healthier moral frameworks in fiction rather than scientific or social betterment.
Sam is hardly the first social progressive on Twitter to espouse these ideals for these particular reasons. There are hundreds if not thousands of young socially progressive Twitter users who are falling for Wertham’s already-debunked claims which led to the degradation of the comic book industry in the 1950s. The mirror of history shines through as Wertham’s insistence that Batman and other superheros in their skin-tight suits (Robin’s bare legs!) were advocating for pedophilic homosexual relationships seems to correlate well to the anti-shipper ideology that writing or drawing any kind of child character can be a tool used by pedophiles to groom young audience members who identify with the characters. Twitter user @theslowesthnery recounts in this thread how even simply drawing a child character existing is liable to bring out the people who believe that wholesome art is somehow meant to cater toward pedophiles and that the creator themselves is a practitioner of pedophilic acts.
“[Wertham] exhibited absolute moral certainty of the rightness of his cause; equated any opposition with love of the vice he was committed to destroy; denounced and discredited any adversaries (or even those who declined to fully embrace his conclusions); poisoned the debated with over-the-top rhetoric and invective; propounded his aesthetic preferences as scientific fact; vigorously pursued publicity; wildly exaggerated the threat; puffed up his own importance; and portrayed himself as the victim of evil forces.” — Robert Corn-Revere in The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder
The modern anti-shipper seems almost like a miniature cookie cutter copy of Fredric Wertham, insisting that media has some profound effect on the mentality of children without empirical evidence and with only the most tenuous of anecdotes. Responses to questions and criticism are almost always ad hominem attacks, correlating perfectly with the Wertham playbook, and further cementing their insistence that they fight against a morally corrupted mob of degenerates. Even in their insistence that they’re not censors do antis resemble the German doctor. He insisted that he “detested” censorship and never once could admit that censorship of what he considered morally reprehensible content was in fact censorship. He goes to incredible lengths in several instances to deny and alter the definitions of censorship to validate himself, claiming that “The word censorship in its original meaning is not applicable to the control of children’s reading.”—a statement that many modern social progressives should be balking at for their often very public support of unbanning books in public schools’ libraries. Anti-shippers have often stated that “self censorship does not exist” and that the only entity capable of censorship is the government (gentle reminder here that the CCA was a non-government entity), denying their role in anything censorship-related even when they’ve coalesced large amounts of accounts into abusing the report function on a website to censor content they find morally reprehensible thereby directly having censored a creator.
Fan fiction has been an increasingly popular creative outlet and has begun to take on a life of its own, becoming a new and exciting form of media that attracts people young and old. Like comics, fan fiction has an incredible amount of genres, types, tropes, and readers. Naturally, it would attract the same kind of negative attention that up-and-coming forms of media often does when they become more popularized in the social consciousness. Robert Corn-Revere, a leading First Amendment and media lawyer muses on that particular brand of negative attention: “These recurring campaigns are typified by exaggerated claims of adverse effects of popular culture on youth based on pseudo-scientific assertions of harm that are little more than thinly veiled moral or aesthetic preferences.” What we can gather from these observations and from the correlations made between anti-shippers and Dr. Wertham is that absolutely none of this is news. But how do we make certain that what happened to the comic industry in the 1950s doesn’t happen to fan fiction now? Trick question: it already has happened. Through events such as Strikethrough and Boldthrough along with the Tumblr porn ban, we’ve seen multiple attempts to curb the proliferation of transgressive fanworks. So really the question is, what are we doing about this?
The 1960s saw an underground movement in comics stemming from the counterculture wave—a movement that was almost entirely formulated through spite against the very code that had forced them underground. Eventually these gritty, freaky comics were popular enough that larger entities began picking up on their influence, Marvel’s Stan Lee rebounding the super hero genre well enough that it’s a staple of media consumption today. It took until 2011 for the CCA to finally unravel entirely. Fan fiction, as well as comics, seems to be a medium destined to be transgressive, strange, and quirky. Fan fiction, as well as comics, seems to be a medium also destined to be driven by the incredible force of spite. The answer, it seems, is to just keep creating. This was one of the reasons that the Organization for Transformative Works and their Archive were established, to prevent these entities from having control over what people are allowed to create. No voices, neither from the right nor the left should be interfering with our creative pursuits as transgressive fiction is no more or less moral than any other piece of literature.
Like Dr. Wertham’s ideologies which have been decidedly discarded and trampled into a fine powder by the astronomical success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other comic-inspired media, it is very likely that with more mainstream acceptance of fanworks, these resurrected ideologies will eventually become abandoned as well. Creators must simply weather the storm as it does not seem to be abating any time soon. Hopefully this time, it doesn’t make it to the Senate floor.