a neurotypical: if you have noise sensitivity why do you listen to loud music?
me: one loud noise is easier than 20 loud noises all at once.
Me: Loud music that I can control is better than loud noises I cannot control
Me: Loud noises that are rhythmic, familiar, and pleasurable to me are better than sudden ugly chaos
“transition poses some ethical questions. Such as, from what age should you be allowed to irreversibly change your body.“
This of course completely ignores the fact that puberty makes irreversible changes to your body. But let us just rephrase the question: “from what age do you gain bodily autonomy?” Now it gets very easy to answer: From the moment you’re fucking born.
I’m sorry, I’m reblogging this twice in a row it is that important
Stand up and say it again for the people in the back row.
Unpopular fact that needs to be said now: if you ignored or worse cheered on the constant encroaching censorship of artists and didn’t speak up because it wasn’t the ‘right’ kind of art (your ~pure eroti ca~ art) that was under fire, you’re 100% part of the problem.
The weird ero artists, the hardcore ero artists, the distasteful ero artists, those gross artists have been your canary in the coal mine and y'all decided it was canary season and now… well we may all be in the grave YOU dug but guess what, you’re here too!
Maybe y'all will learn a lesson. Maybe y'all will stop flinging around false accusations for peak woke points and stop censoring art you find icky and artists that don’t peddle only the purest and unproblematicest of smut. Probably not. But a boy can dream can’t he?
The solution always is to speak out against censorship. “But I’m afraid to speak out–” The rest of us who put our necks out and got burned, how do you think we feel? But we speak out against censorship. We defend 'icky’ art. Because we know the price otherwise.
And if you won’t listen to me because I’m just some queermo who makes weird comics, then maybe you’ll listen to a professional.
"[I]f you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.“ - Neil Gaiman, WHY DEFEND FREEDOM OF ICKY SPEECH?, Dec. 1, 2008
Got asked for my opinion on this post. Not linking to it because judging from the OP’s posts over the last day they’re just getting increasingly upset about people reblogging to disagree. Kindly don’t harass the OP with this post if you know who they are.
(built-in cw: nsfw due to open discussion of real and animated pornography, though there’s no graphic content. cp mention, pedophilia mention, human trafficking mention, sexual exploitation mention.)
This teen posted to say that a speaker from an organization called Traffic 911 came to their school and confirmed everything antis say about drawn cp and fictional, written/animated porn:
Before anything else, I have to give the OP points for their sheer audacity. by using vague language, they’ve asserted that you, random porny fanwork creator, are directly responsible for human sex trafficking because all porn increases demand! wow. (also yikes.) That’s bold, and probably doing the usual thing where smutty fic featuring adolescents over the age of consent having a sexual interaction with each other is no different from literal child porn.
but hey: they got it from somewhere, right? It seems reasonable to trust an organization fighting sex trafficking to have an educated position on porn. But as this post is thin on details and we have the organization name, let’s see what they’re about.
Traffick911.com is the only anti-trafficking organization that comes up if you search ‘traffic 911’ on Google. And they have two speaker programs aimed at teens: ‘traps’ And ‘hooked’. ‘Hooked’ is all about how porn affects the brain, apparently, and judging by the curriculum, is probably what the OP attended.
I can easily see how the OP of the capped post heard ‘fanworks about fictional teens are child porn and gateways to sex trafficking’ from this curriculum. So what are the resources on which this seminar is based?
Before we dig into these resources below, note that this is some classic SWERF argumentation going on here. ‘Porn is not a victimless indulgence’, it asserts. Well, no - if the people in porn are being exploited/are trafficking victims, then porn is not victimless. but this only highlights the importance of making the effort to obtain ethically produced porn, not a need to stop watching porn altogether.
The seminar’s strongest points seem to be about how developing a porn addiction is harmful to the addict - which, fair, addiction to anything is frequently harmful, and porn can become an addiction. but apart from that, the points run very thin or dovetail neatly with SWERF rhetoric: porn is bad and harmful and must be done away with.
As this is the only reference provided by Traffick911′s ‘Hooked’ program that seems to have anything to do with porn that doesn’t feature real people, let’s take a look at this article in more depth.
First it helpfully tells us that all animated porn is ‘hentai’, which we should not look up because it’s just that gross. (wake me up when American imperialism is done telling us that all bad animated content comes from Japan.) it then goes on to explain that animated porn is just as bad as porn with real actors because
(is this a screencap from otaku no video? i could swear it’s a screencap from otaku no video.)
(We could also really do with the myth that ‘animation is only for kids’ being done away with. When has even US animation ever only been for kids? Warner Bros shorts were for adults, The Flintstones were for adults. The Simpsons are for adults … please. this is a ridiculous falsehood.)
In summary, this article presents a bunch of evidence that animated porn is, at worst, hurting the person who chooses to view it and summarizes with ‘but it’s still just as bad as porn with real actors because reasons!’
Moving on.
some of these may be worth a read, but I haven’t taken the time to take an in-depth dive into any of the studies to see how solid the methodology is. I clicked through the third link - ‘Studies Find Escalation and Habituation in Porn Users’ - which provided around 20 studies illustrating that habitual porn viewing tends to ‘escalate’ in the sense of moving from ‘vanilla’ to more kinky or ‘extreme’ porn. There was one link that stated that viewing adult/adult porn at too young an age might create a predisposition for viewing cp down the line; another asserted that the high availability of porn thanks to the internet might increase the likelihood of a map who is also attracted to adults discovering they are a map (only the abstract was visible ahead of a paywall, but despite a provocative title, it did not look like research had demonstrated that porn use created an interest in minors/prepubescent kids.
Under the 5th link on the front page, part of a summary reads: “multiple studies reveal a link between porn use and sexual performance problems and sexual dissatisfaction”. so, again: habitual porn use may decrease interest in participating in sexual activity yourself, which makes the link between porn addiction and contributing to sex trafficking demand rather tenuous.
And the final resource:
well. at least PureHope is honest about being a Christian purity culture advocate.
and hey: I’ve asserted before that I think the hypersexualized messaging in contemporary US culture is harmful to young people. But the US flavor of hypersexualization plays heavily on the taboo of sexual desire and sexual acts created by purity culture. its power is in sex being forbidden and dangerous and, for young people especially, mysterious. the sad fact is that when the effort to keep children ‘pure’ is taken too far - to the point of never educating kids about sex or allowing normal, age-appropriate levels of curiosity to be satisfied - it sets young people up to be completely defenseless against the inappropriate levels of sexualization that come all too soon. Ignorance does not protect kids. Accurate, honest education does. (The sexual stuff will, for better or worse, exist either way!)
in conclusion: If you have a porn addiction, getting help is good, and I’m not saying that all porn is ethically produced by any means or that it’s entirely possible that viewing exploitative porn does potentially increase demand for trafficking. but ‘viewing teen porn and cp, even fictional […] directly influences the demand for human trafficking’ is, uh. not well supported, to say the least!
after clicking on that last link, though, I thought I’d take a closer look at traffick911. and, uh, what I found did not improve their credit with me.
I’ve cut the rest only because this post is already long and I’ve addressed the main point, but tl;dr: traffick911 is a borderline-openly Christian organization that supported FOSTA-SESTA. between their hooked seminar and its anti-porn, SWERF-rhetoric-compatible sources that twist their own data in bizarre ways, their disregard for the safety of sex workers who are not trafficked, and their open support for purity culture, we can derive the following:
smdh coral just keeps getting sluttier
Unpopular opinion but gender is fucking fake and if someone doesn’t want to identify as a “man,” “woman,” or your pre-approved Non-binary™ terms then so fucking be it. If someone wants to be stargender then who cares it has zero bearing on your life, it doesn’t matter if you understand it you football loving bastards.
You go you funky little starbabies, the cosmos are in your eyes
you literally cannot be a star
Humans are literally made from stars
Many of the same people who say gender is “made up” are the ones who throw hissy fits when people dont respect their personal choice of pronoun that week and make life harder for transpeople
Don’t mind me, just makin’ it hard for transpeople
Plume is an open-source, federated, user-run blogging platform. There are no ads, no data harvesting, posts come to you in chronological order, NSFW is and always will be allowed (depending on the instance), and it has a lot of tumblr-like features other sites lack: no character limit, a rich text editor with bold/italic/hyperlinks/etc, inline pictures, headers, tags at the bottom that can be used to organize posts on your blog, comments, likes, sideblogs, and so on. It’s still under very active development too, meaning more features are on their way!
But what about the userbase? You may ask. I’ve never even heard of Plume - is it completely dead? The answer is yes and no - there aren’t that many people on Plume, true, but that doesn’t matter. Plume uses ActivityPub, the same standard used by Mastodon and the other sites on the fediverse - what that means is people on Mastodon can follow you, see your posts, and like/comment them from Mastodon. Same with other platforms like WriteFreely, PixelFed, Hubzilla, Diaspora, Pleroma, Friendica, etc, etc. And I can tell you from experience, the fediverse is bumpin’; you won’t have to worry about your audience
The problems with tumblr are inherent with centralized corporate social media, and switching to another corporate master won’t solve them. What you need to do is stop giving power to profit-motivated companies to control your experience. Take that power back yourself on the fediverse! Join Plume!!!
What all ask boxes look like for me (submission boxes look exactly the same):
Left: what happens when I try to open dms (New Message does nothing); I can’t even read them. Right: when I try to go to someone’s dms from their blog.
Neither new things I post nor old things I post show up in the tags they’re in, even if they were before.
I can type things into replies, but it won’t actually post them.
Since it doesn’t seem this one has been encountered by many people yet, maybe reblog this so people know about it. I’m probably getting deleted though
I’m glad this is spreading but simultaneously it makes it sound like the shadowban is much less severe than it is because I didn’t realize, and this shadowban is so severe I can’t even add on / tell anyone that.
All my likes, reblogs, and replies are hidden from the notes of EVERY post.
When I like or rb things it doesn’t show notes in someone’s activity / dash, except long-time followers (not sure about the exact cutoff/conditions).
If I reblogged and added something to this from a non-follower they wouldn’t even know. Check and see: my rb’s don’t even show up in the notes. So people couldn’t even find out I added something on by checking the notes either:
Not to mention: I’m hidden from all searches, can’t be @’d, past @’s of me are hidden from my notes, I don’t get notified when people reply to a post I replied to, my @’s don’t give notes, and every search on my blog is blanked. I can’t even ask/submit to myself even with anons, and lots more.
Oh, yeah, and: MY BLOG ISN’T EVEN MARKED NSFW. Every flagged post I’ve found was restored. But every flagged post you contest brings attention to you that risks you just getting shadowbanned randomly.
THIS is the version that should get spread around…
this was a good thread i saw about how of course this is all more trash coming down from the total shit that is sesta/fosta
Image Description:
A Twitter comment thread by user Cookie Cyboid:
“Why are Tumblr and Facebook cracking down on sex so much? And why is Facebook in so overzealous about it? It’s all Apple’s fault!” Ect etc.
I can explain it all. It is largely the fault of a set of US laws called SESTA and FOSTA.
Here’s an article about them, but in short these laws make websites responsible for third party content related to sex work. They can be sued for having full service sex work ads on their platforms EVEN IF THEY DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT IT. https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-backpage-230-internet-freedom
I’ll get to Tumblr and Facebook but first just lemme take a second to tell you these laws don’t do what they’re designed to do. They don’t stop trafficking, they actually make it harder to find victims. Turns out the easiest way to find victims is online.
Also turns out if you remove sites used to screen clients, pimps spring up offering safe client lists. Removing advertising also forces sex workers out onto street corners. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/anti-sex-trafficking-advocates-say-new-law-cripples-efforts-to-save-victims-629081/
These laws were passed in April and we saw a lot of sites disappear overnight. So why are Tumblr and Facebook acting now?
They come into force next month. Next month any website with a US prescence can be sued if it allows, even unknowingly, sexual solicitation.
To my mind, Tumblr saw Apple removing the Tumblr app from their store and went “eh, we needed to ban porn anyway, we’ll just act early.”
Their algorithm sucks because training an algorithm to spot lewd content is incredibly difficult.
Facebook yesterday announced its policy on sexual solicitation. Which is ludicrously overzealous, bans the discussion of anything related to sex, including incredibly vague language like “I’m looking for a good time tonight.”
The reason they’re so overzealous isn’t because they’re screaming “Somebody think of the children!”
It’s because if they miss *one* ad, they can be sued. They know algorithms for this suck, so they’ve decided to overcompensate for that and effectively ban talking about sex.
These laws come into force next month. At that time I expect Twitter to also crack down on sex work. I don’t expect we’ll be warned, Twitter will just remove accounts overnight.
“Why don’t you just start your own website, you aren’t US based, just do that.”
There are a myriad of reasons I can’t do that,
1. Age verification laws are going to happen soon here and I can’t afford to pay for that software.
2. The UK gov is considering our own SESTA/FOSTA laws.
Go to PornHub!
Mate I’ve made my opinion on that hellsite very clear. I don’t need another store front. I need a place to communicate with queer communities and advertise. PornHub fucking sucks.
SESTA/FOSTA is an attempt to limit not only sex work, but queer expression online. Queer relationships are seen as inherently sexual to some. We need to be fighting this, because it’s not just a stick to hit sex workers with.
To my mind these laws were always about stopping consensual sex work, whilist also punching at queer people, and sexual expression. This is a censorship bill.
Yell at your elected representatives, America. Make them realize what this is, because it was sold on stopping sex trafficking. The options on it were so good that all the democrats voted for it too. Liberals are just as much at fault here.
I know there is a lot happening, and it’s hard to keep up with it all, but this is important. SESTA/FOSTA needs to be repealed.
Ancient Roman gold nipple cover, 1st century AD.
from Czerny’s International Auction House
My favorite part about all this is that even the sober, disciplined, thoughtful blogs devoted to history/science/academia are taking potshots @staff. Fucking outstanding.
are these female presenting Ancient Roman gold nipple covers?
I don’t know if I’ll keep using Tumblr or switch to something else, but here’s where you can see my stuff and keep in touch!
All you need to do is follow me to be in the draw! The more people who follow me, the more prizes I’ll give out!
also yeah the best feature tumblr has (or lacks, i guess) is the inability to see other people’s follower count. not knowing how many followers anyone has makes this site more fun it’s easier to pretend we’re all just like, hanging out in a cave together.
After hearing the news about Edge switching to Chromium
Did y'all see the rules Facebook rolled out? If y'all thought Tumblr was going Puritanical….wheeeew
Wait no what’s the tea
yeah, this is fucked. the silver lining is that this gives the fediverse an advantage, since we can ignore all that
