you can, though it’s kind of a hard question to answer succinctly, and it depends on exactly what you mean by it. I’ll do my best though (and I don’t mind being DM’d for a more detailed convo—I promise I don’t bite)

See, as a rule, I don’t go out of the way to use the word ‘proship’ for myself these days—I’ll still self-identify as such for convenience’s sake, but the term has accrued a much larger connotation than what it, at its most stripped down form, means. Also, I don’t really like limiting it to a shipping/fandom issue—not out of any disrespect for shipping or fandom, but because I think it’s a philosophy relevant to art as a whole.

It’s a bit hard to answer the ‘why’ for me in a phrase, because for me, it’s always been like… a neutral value? or, rather, it’s not that I think fiction is NEVER harmful or bigoted or purposed towards destructive means, but that its innocent until proven guilty—if you want to argue that a piece of art is damaging, you need to explain HOW its damaging, who specifically its hurting, and how you propose to solve the problem it causes without unnecessary censorship. Like, so often, people will point out things I AGREE promote bigoted or dangerous views, but that means those stories need to be critiqued, not burned. Or how there ARE problems with very easily triggering horror/nsfw in common spaces with teens or just, people uncomfortable with it, but trust me, there’s no one who wants a safe separated space for NSFW artists more than NSFW artists. There are solutions to this other than ‘run them even further underground’

(and also, yeah, it’s not irrelevant that a lot of this comes to sexual content—antis like to point out the focus as some kind of gotchya, ignoring the fact that they’re the ones who targeted it in the first place. sex isn’t special. it is not inherently a dirtier or more traumatizing part of life than any other common human experience. arousal is an emotion, exactly on par with every other, and just as valid to induce artistically. there is no reason nsfw content should be policed more than violent content… if anything, it should be be the other way around, because—and this is a hot take—violence is worse than sex, actually, on every imaginable level)

The bottom line, really, is that there all sorts of reasons someone might engage with a specific fictional topic, and you literally cannot know it from their art alone. people can make the same things for VASTLY differently reasons, and the only way you’ll ever find out what those reasons are is by talking to them, in good faith. Usually, even terrible people are very happy to tell you what they believe if you ask them nicely (case in point, me taking the time to answer this ask—if you’d come in spewing vitriol, suffice to say, my response would be very different!), including when what they believe is absolutely reprehensible. Like, we didn’t learn JKR was a terf through a deep reading of Harry Potter, we learned it because she told us, very explicitly and very proudly, that she was anti-trans on twitter dot com