the thing is that they're so fascinated by sex, they love sex, they can't imagine a world without sex - they need sex to sell things, they need sex to be part of their personality, they need sex to prove their power - but they hate sex. they are disgusted by it.

sex is the only thing that holds their attention, and it is also the thing that can never be discussed directly.

you can't tell a child the normal names for parts of their body, that's sexual in nature, because the body isn't a body, it's a vessel of sex. it doesn't matter that it's been proven in studies (over and over) that kids need to know the names of their genitals; that they internalize sexual shame at a very young age and know it's 'dirty' to have a body; that it overwhelmingly protects children for them to have the correct words to communicate with. what matters is that they're sexual organs. what matters is that it freaks them out to think about kids having body parts - which only exist in the context of sex.

it's gross to talk about a period or how to check for cancer in a testicle or breast. that is nasty, illicit. there will be no pain meds for harsh medical procedures, just because they feature a cervix.

but they will put out an ad of you scantily-clad. you will sell their cars for them, because you have abs, a body. you will drip sex. you will ooze it, like a goo. like you were put on this planet to secrete wealth into their open palms.

they will hit you with that same palm. it will be disgusting that you like leather or leashes, but they will put their movie characters in leather and latex. it will be wrong of you to want sexual freedom, but they will mark their success in the number of people they bed.

they will crow that it's inappropriate for children so there will be no lessons on how to properly apply a condom, even to teens. it's teaching them the wrong things. no lessons on the diversity of sexual organ growth, none on how to obtain consent properly, none on how to recognize when you feel unsafe in your body. if you are a teenager, you have probably already been sexualized at some point in your life. you will have seen someone also-your-age who is splashed across a tv screen or a magazine or married to someone three times your age. you will watch people pull their hair into pigtails so they look like you. so that they can be sexy because of youth. one of the most common pornography searches involves newly-18 young women. girls. the words "barely legal," a hiss of glass sand over your skin.

barely legal. there are bills in place that will not allow people to feel safe in their own bodies. there are people working so hard to punish any person for having sex in a way that isn't god-fearing and submissive. heteronormative. the sex has to be at their feet, on your knees, your eyes wet. when was the first time you saw another person crying in pornography and thought - okay but for real. she looks super unhappy. later, when you are unhappy, you will close your eyes and ignore the feeling and act the role you have been taught to keep playing. they will punish the sex workers, remove the places they can practice their trade safely. they will then make casual jokes about how they sexually harass their nanny.

and they love sex but they hate that you're having sex. you need to have their ornamental, perfunctory, dispassionate sex. so you can't kiss your girlfriend in the bible belt because it is gross to have sex with someone of the same gender. so you can't get your tubes tied in new england because you might change your mind. so you can't get admit you were sexual assaulted because real men don't get hurt, you should be grateful. you cannot handle your own body, you cannot handle the risks involved, let other people decide that for you. you aren't ready yet.

but they need you to have sex because you need to have kids. at 15, you are old enough to parent. you are not old enough to hear the word fuck too many times on television.

they are horrified by sex and they never stop talking about it, thinking about it, making everything unnecessarily preverted. the saying - a thief thinks everyone steals. they stand up at their podiums and they look out at the crowd and they sign a bill into place that makes sexwork even more unsafe and they stand up and smile and sign a bill that makes gender-affirming care illegal and they get up and they shrug their shoulders and write don't say gay and they get up, and they make the world about sex, but this horrible, plastic vision of it that they have. this wretched, emotionless thing that holds so much weight it's staggering. they put their whole spine behind it and they push and they say it's normal!

this horrible world they live in. disgusted and also obsessed.

The focus should really be on people learning how to consume a wide range of media in a healthy way, and that includes being able to process feelings of disgust, rage, and discomfort in cases where the narrative absolutely is intending you to feel that way!

It feels like we're witnessing a lot of people now grow too comfortable with what they are familiar with that they project their inability to process negative feelings on others and blame the content itself.

For instance, I am aware that I cannot handle very explicit and violent scenes of SA, and had no warning when I first watched The Flowers of War movie. I remember being so affected, I was haunted by those scenes for days. But I don't condemn the movie for existing just because it contains a subject and content that makes me uncomfortable and upset. Especially for what was a war movie.

Ugly things deserve to exist. The critical focus should be on the execution and narrative intent, and even if those end up being bad, people are allowed to make bad things! People can suck at writing! They exist!

We cannot be wishy washy when it comes to creative freedom, especially when you try to commit what is "morally good" to paper under such a subjective perspective.

Multiple things can exists at once, and in this case it's also the fact people are getting too comfortable with the thought of normalizing certain topics and not in a media literacy type of way, but more of a

"Fiction doesn't equal reality!" Or more disturbingly "So long as they only do it behind close doors and doesn't effect me I don't see the problem"

No one has any issues with horror, or disturbing media, and before anyone says anything I say this as an English literature teacher who focuses on Post war literature so you can IMAGINE the things I have to teach and share understanding with

To word as simply and crudely as possible look below

And not to demonize, but if you are watching say Lolita, and rather than understanding that this is from the POV of a predator and has layer of layers to the story, and instead ingredients IDOLIZING and making this sad story out to be sexy, chic, or god forbid, romantic, then you need to stop and question why and see if you have any further issues adding to it

And as much as people hate to acknowledge this, authors DO infact need to be watched and criticized when needed. It's incredibly easy to make CP, romantic violence, bigotry, and hate filled works, and simply slap a genre label on it and then cry "THE ANTIS A RUNING EVERYTHING AND TRYING TO CANCEL ME 😭😭😭😭"

Splatterpunk ESPECIALLY has this issue and is happening with more frequency this last few years

To simply call someone an anti without even stopping to think why and to ignore the same critical thinking you demand others to use is sad at best and bitterly pathetic most of the time

Perhaps you're not getting the point of the original post, so I'm going to back up a bit. You may not have been in fandom spaces for long enough to know that "proshipping" is a term created by antis so they could carve out an "us vs. them" space in fandom.

Proshipping was the default. "Live and let live" was the motto most fans lived by, at least when I first got into fanfiction in the 90s. This is how I (and a lot of people) define it.

I know exactly why antis think they way they do. I was Mormon once. You don't get more pro-censorship, thought-policing than that. So, yes, I have years of personal history and critical thinking when it comes to considering the media I consume. Don't worry about me, I'm doing just fine.

What I worry about are young people growing up in this environment where fantasies aren't only considered sinful, they're considered harmful, and they're being told to purge them from their thoughts if they want to be a good person. I can't even begin to describe how harmful that is to children and adults alike.

Tl;dr: as someone who's been in a creative slump TWICE as a result of this, EXTREMELY harmful. Because it tells me that I'm a terrible person because because I like characters in danger, that essentially being mean to Sims negates my reaction to actual people suffering

I’ve said this multiple times on here, so some people who follow me will have heard this rant already, but:

My mom is a college professor whose special subject is media criticism and the effects of media on children. Therefore, my parents were extremely focused on moderating our media consumption. We had four TV channels and two of them were PBS. I have never in my life played a video game all the way through. I read the books my mom assigned to her students for fun (“Consuming Kids” was my favorite). My job as I got older was to screen stuff for content considered inappropriate for my younger siblings or other people’s kids. Even when we watched movies or TV or commercials, my parents would analyze them in front of us and encourage us to analyze them ourselves. What techniques are they using in this commercial to get you to buy it? What's the subtext in this scene? What message is this scene trying to convey?

So when I say that antis are Not Doing It Right, I’ve got textbooks and almost 30 years of lived experience backing me up.

There are three major problems with how antis approach media criticism.

#1: Ignoring the concept of individual analysis and multiple lenses.

A key concept in media criticism is that there is no one way to interpret a work. Certainly there's how the author might want you to interpret it, but part of communication (which is what media is) is the effect on the audience member. How I interpret a particular work is going to be influenced by my personal experiences; someone else may interpret the exact same thing differently.

And what you're specifically looking for in a work is also important. The point of analyzing something through different lenses – a queer lens, a feminist lens, a post-colonial lens, whatever – is to look at the same thing from different angles. And even then, two different people might have two different perspectives even within the same framework, looking for the same things. Consider the argument about whether specific Disney movies are feminist or not - they're looking at the same material, but coming to different conclusions based on their interpretation of it.

So you can't unequivocally say "this glorifies violence" or "this promotes misogyny" outside of very, very specific examples (I'm thinking about shit like The Turner Diaries, here). You can certainly make that as an argument, and back it up using evidence, but ultimately, that is your interpretation, not objective fact.

#2: Failing to understand what media criticism is trying to solve.

Whenever someone points out that fiction is not reality, someone always responds that it affects reality, and then will point to something like The Jaws Effect as an example of how media affects real-life things. I'm pretty sure that's what @sweetlavenderdarling is referencing.

Which: sure! I won't dispute that! The issue is failing to understand how and why media affects real-life things.

The first thing is that, barring a few exceptions, the majority of media's influence is in the aggregate. Watching one period drama with a majority-white cast is not going to make you think that all of European history only involves white people. What can make you think that the past was whites-only is if every single period drama you ever watch has an all-white or majority-white cast. Watching one action movie is not going to make you violent. What can make you violent is if the main way you see problems being handled is through violence (regardless of whether the tone is "this is a horrible thing but we have no choice" or "it's totally cool to murder people").

The second thing is that, just as we cannot claim our single opinion is objective fact, we can't claim a 1:1 cause-and-effect thing between "X is in media" and "person believes X," because different people can interpret the same thing differently. There's a difference between me watching, say, an Alex Jones broadcast vs. a longtime fan of Alex Jones listening to the same thing: I'm not going to become a conservative conspiracy theorist solely from listening to it because my perspective on it and preexisting beliefs are very different from those of than a true believer.

And we can actually see this in an example antis love to trot out: Finding Nemo. Antis love to pull out Finding Nemo as an example of people's behaviors changing (i.e. a spike in owning clownfish and blue tangs as pets) based on it being in a popular work. Here's the problem with that argument: the entire point of Finding Nemo is that keeping tropical fish as pets is a bad thing. THAT'S WHY THEY NEED TO FIND NEMO.

The scene where Nemo gets caught is treated like a human child getting dragged into a white van in front of their parents. Home aquariums are portrayed as jails where longtime residents go insane. The little girl with the braces is a terrifying eldritch murderer from the fish's perspective because she shakes them to death. Finding Nemo can't be more obvious in how it treats owning tropical fish as pets: it's not romanticized, and in fact is universally portrayed throughout the film as a very bad thing that no one should do.

And a shitload of people either didn't pick up that message or did but ignored it. Because there's no 1:1 transfer of message to audience.

#3: Failing to provide an actual solution/ignoring the next steps.

Okay, so you've identified a problematic element of a work. And you're concerned that it's going to affect your thinking or other people's thinking! Cool! Awesome! Now what?

A short list of things that you can possibly do to mitigate its effects:

What doesn't help literally at all:

I realize that this is a very long response but I am Sick and Tired of antis pretending that their ship wars are somehow a force for moral good or completely ignoring their own biases to focus on stuff they personally don't like.

Reblogging for excellent points by @wolveria and @bemusedlybespectacled

So like, the Reddit strike going on right now, yeah? I've been seeing a lot of people comment on how they appreciate the protest and then go on to say that this has the notable downside of them constantly looking up questions and not being able to easily find the answers because all of the easily-findable answers are exclusively on Reddit. I am not sure if most of the people making this observation are within the line of thought of "man, maybe this protest isn't such a good idea after all" or "man, it really sucks that we've let the internet get so consolidated," and I'm really hoping its the latter.

Like, all of this? This right here? Reddit making a shitty, anti-consumer grab for money and control over how people are allowed to access the information on their servers, and the website going dark in protest causing tons of people to not be able to access important information? This is exactly what people mean when they say that it's bad that the internet has shrunk down so much and is mostly comprised of, like, 10 websites. It's a fucking problem that one company making one bad decision and causing their website to crash and burn can jeopardize so much of humanity's cumulative information.

This two-day glimpse into the internet without Reddit is the warning shot. Imagine what will happen if Reddit actually goes down for good for one reason or another one day. Imagine what will happen if/when Discord or Fandom bites the dust, or gets rendered practically-unusable without paying an ever-increasing premium because they're owned by blood-sucking corporate leeches.

Another big thing is Twitter clamping down really hard on your ability to DM people if you don't have Twitter Blue. If this goes through, it'll put a ton of artists and sex workers who rely on Twitter DMs for their business operation into a shitty situation. Now, obviously, it's not gonna be the end of the world for them, but once again, it feels like a warning shot to me. Twitter is a sinking ship, and unless something changes and it starts to course-correct, I worry that it'll go under and all of the creators who rely on it will suddenly be in an extremely precarious situation.

These are the sorts of things that we, as the users of the internet, need to seriously think about as time goes on, and if we don't find an adequate answer sooner, we're going to pay for it later. I still hold that the best solution is to start making and using more individual, niche websites. Things like Twitter, Reddit, Discord, etc. have their place, of course, but I seriously think a lot was lost through the death of things like individual forums and the existence of many different wiki-hosting sites.

We need a concerted effort, not just on the side of larger creators, but on the users themselves, to stop exclusively using these larger websites and support the creation and growth of smaller, more niche websites, and prevent a catastrophe before it actually happens. I simply hope that people with larger platforms than my own pick up on all this and start talking about it and swaying people to act sooner rather than later. I know it's possible to correct the problem of the mysteriously tiny internet before a modern Library of Alexandria moment happens, I just don't know if that correction will actually happen in time.

Every few months twitterinas bring back the “carnivores are a problematic element of nature and we should feed them synthetic meat and make it so they don’t eat herbivores. this is completely normal, feasible and won’t have any kind of repercussion on the ecosystem” discourse

First time I saw that was a guy who had as proposition to create fake prey animals with a robotic exoskeleton and covered in synthetic meat that predators would hunt, eat and then the exoskeleton would get up and go to the lab to get re meated. That was funny as hell

Tiger watching skinless carcass it just ate get up and walk away

We joke about the absurdly literal names for spells and magic items and such in Dungeons & Dragons, but let me tell you, after playing a game like, say, Exalted 3rd Edition and finding yourself squinting at a character sheet that's just a block list of thirty different fancifully named special abilities trying to remember whether "Finding the Needle's Eye" or "Hunter's Eye Precision" is the dingus you're thinking of, you start to gain an appreciation for the prosaically descriptive.

On top of this, Exalted likes to write 5 paragraphs of flowery prose with tiny nuggets of what the charm actually does mechanically sprinkled throughout it.

3e is a lot better than 2e was about this, but it still makes you appreciate D&D's clinical approach of "this spell is named Magic Missile. We called it that because you shoot 3 magical missiles that automatically hit and do 1d4+1 damage each."

Well, 3e is better about it now. The corebook was fucking awful about it.

It really was. I remember doing a solar campaign where we'd meet once every couple months and being like "wait how the fuck does Righteous Devil Style work again?" when we got into combat.

ggggods yeah. I never even got to RDS, I checked out when I saw how H&H had butchered the perfectly functional technical language of 2e Phantom Arrow Technique into the 3e mess.

We joke about the absurdly literal names for spells and magic items and such in Dungeons & Dragons, but let me tell you, after playing a game like, say, Exalted 3rd Edition and finding yourself squinting at a character sheet that's just a block list of thirty different fancifully named special abilities trying to remember whether "Finding the Needle's Eye" or "Hunter's Eye Precision" is the dingus you're thinking of, you start to gain an appreciation for the prosaically descriptive.

On top of this, Exalted likes to write 5 paragraphs of flowery prose with tiny nuggets of what the charm actually does mechanically sprinkled throughout it.

3e is a lot better than 2e was about this, but it still makes you appreciate D&D's clinical approach of "this spell is named Magic Missile. We called it that because you shoot 3 magical missiles that automatically hit and do 1d4+1 damage each."

Well, 3e is better about it now. The corebook was fucking awful about it.

It sucks that people are treating the Reddit blackout as a joke or assuming it's impotent rage over a minor decision bc it's Reddit when like. No, a tech company shutting down access to their API by forcing third-party devs to pay completely unreasonable fees ($12,000 per 50 million API requests, which to the largest third party clients would be tens of millions of dollars) and in the process destroying both accessibility apps and moderation tools is Bad Actually

Also, this is the death of forums part 2. Forums died in web 1 because it was more convenient to gather on larger social media platforms, like reddit. Reddit is used by a lot of people to find answers to obscure questions that are written by humans and not advertizers or bot. Now reddit is imploding, and a lot of the useful communities (like the 3d printing one) are moving to discord, which makes it impossible for non members to find the answers they need.

We need to bring forums back in a better way, where they are convenient to use and affordable to host, or we will lose the ability to find humans on the internet with answers

It wasn't just convenience.

My website used to have forums. I had moderators. They were volunteers (I don't have money, so paying them wasn't an option). And they spent all their time squashing increasingly vile pornography dumped by bots.

Even the best screening systems we've been able to find are inundated at all hours by porn bots. Meaning every comment has to be manually reviewed, meaning every time my existing blog has a giveaway or a lively discussion a) it eats hours of my time, and b) people accuse me of censoring them when their comments don't appear instantly.

The mental load isn't worth the dopamine of hosting.

Yeeep. Check @prokopetz​ post over here for more details - forums are just, highly vulnerable to this kind of attack, in large part because of their distributed, individualised nature.

If u want to write a story about a character that's just you but hotter with a dark twisted backstory and magical powers and a pet falcon or something, I think u should just go ahead and do that. Who's gonna stop you? The government?? Fuck the police.

What if someone barges in, points at said character and scream, “Mary Sue!”

Tell them to come back with a warrant

This post came across my dash again and now I am having an absolute blast with self insert hotter me that gets the girls and guys everywhere.

This is the Way

Reblogging because I am very pro-writing whatever the hell you want, even ”bad” things, and also because “tell them to come back with a warrant” BROKE ME

I just remembered one time in like sixth or seventh grade (we had the same teachers and class both years so hard to remember which) somehow we got into a debate of “who is better, boys or girls?” and instead of stepping in to stop it our teacher formalized it and egged us on by providing thoughtful prompts and counters to each side and by the end each group had built a barricade of desks on either side of the classroom and we were throwing balls of paper at each other and screaming about personal hygiene while our teacher just watched and enjoyed a Baby Ruth candy bar.

This was the same teacher that got the cops called on our school like three times and would reward us for being good by spraying our hands with rubbing alcohol and setting them on fire.

He was the best teacher I ever had.

STUFF MR ROBINSON DID THAT WAS VERY GOOD:

One time Mr. Robinson closed the door to the classroom furtively and asked a student near the door to keep an eye on the door’s window in case anyone from the administration was coming.

He explained the next curriculum was one he had been explicitly disallowed from, but he didn’t know how we were going to cover the next portion of our history work fairly without covering it first. He said if any of us were offended by it or felt it threatened our beliefs to be discussing it, please talk to him and he would gladly find alternative work for us to do instead. But he asked if we would be okay not broadcasting too loudly to the administration (our parents were fine) about it.

At this point we’re on the edge of our seat. Forbidden curriculum? YES PLEASE.

“All right, do I have a promise from you you won’t tell on me to the principal?”

We, of course, promised.

“Good. Then let’s talk about World Religions.”

-

(A side note here, if you ever have a not-forbidden courseload you want your students to really enthusiastically consume, I think pretending it’d forbidden will up interest levels immensely. The work was informative and we loved it, but the Secret Agent-ness of doing a SECRET ASSIGNMENTS and having SECRET PROJECTS and LOOKOUTS FOR THE FUZZ upped our investment in the material beyond description. Even if you DON’T have secret coursework, PLEASE DO THIS WITH YOUR CLASS SOMETIME. IT’S FUN.)

-

At the start of the Great Gender Debate when someone would try to say boys and girls aren’t different and they can do whatever the other does, he’d super respectively ask them if they really thought that, or if they were saying it because they thought that’s what they were supposed to say, and encouraged us being honest about how we actually felt about the difference between between boys and girls and who was better.

Then lots of super fun shouting and throwing paper at each other and making desk barricades and more yelling.

(Keep in mind, this was 1999/2000. A lot of people didn’t even have internet at home. This was a small conservative town. Being trans or nonbinary wouldn’t have even been an option we knew about.)

Then he eventually stepped back into the fray of the Great Gender Debate and made us break down our points, which he had been taking notes of, on the white board and then had us carefully and intentionally refute or discuss them one at a time. Until we had reached a real and honest consensus that actually we’d been tricked into thinking gender was anything at all. Now when we said we thought neither was better than the other and being a boy or girl didn’t mean anything about what you could or couldn’t do, we fucking meant it.

One of our male classmates started wearing nail polish the next week and we told him it looked rad.

-

One time it was a nice day out and even though we weren’t doing trig at that point he was like, “Wanna learn something cool? I’m gonna show you how to calculate how tall something is using shadows” and then we went outside and learned how to find out how tall things are by measuring their shadows and measuring the shadows of stuff we knew the length of, and then for fun we also independently worked out the world was round and how big it was.

-

One of the times the cops were called on us it was because we were having a Hot Air Balloon making contest and people thought there were UFOs or spy planes.

-

Another time we were just setting off dry ice bombs, lol.

-

They changed the milk at lunch and we hated it and Mr. Robinson may have given us ideas about civil disobedience and direct action that led to the lunch room sit-in the schoolchildren ended up staging until they would switch the milk back. At the time it felt like he was being really cool, and he was, but thinking on it he may have also been using us as props to prank the administration and also give himself an afternoon off while all the administration tried to get a hundred 11-12 year olds to leave the damn cafeteria while we chanted about milk.

-

We grew up in a town that was about 2% black. It was not uncommon for people living there to not know any black people at all.

One day Mr. Robinson told us we were going to be having a very important speaker come talk to us, and that he expected us to treat her with respect and deference. That she was one of the most important people we could be learning from, and we were honored to have her come to us. We all sat up, wondering who this important woman could be.

And he opened the door and it was one of the ladies who worked the front office, accepting our tardy slips and making us wait for the school nurse. A black woman, one of the only black people you’d find in the school.

She then sat down with us and talked to us about the racial history of our town. Explained to us what a Sundown Town was. Explained to us the racism she experienced growing up there. Explained the mistreatment of the police.

She wasn’t even that old. It struck us all. But you’re not even old. Is this still happening? Why didn’t you leave? Did anyone help you?

It was an incredibly powerful day.

When I went home to talk to my parents about it, they had no idea about any of it, even though this was the same town they had grown up in.

-

Mr. Robinson would occasionally repeat this habit of special guests were not academics, just people who had lived in our town for a while, bringing in a lunch lady or a janitor, making us talk to them, learn our town’s history, learn to respect their jobs, learn manners and deference for the working class.

-

One time he gave us bread, water, and ziploc bags and set us loose on the school to rub the bread on stuff, drip water on it, seal it, and watch what mold grew. The kid that got the grimiest piece of bread with the most enthusiastic mold would win.

We learned that many of the surfaces we consider the most dirty get the most regular cleaning, and so are in fact the least likely to produce mold. While many of the surfaces we eat off of and touch regularly are nasty as hell.

-

Similar to the Great Gender Debate, one time he let class go wildly off course while we debated hotly for over an hour about The Lion King. I do not, for the life of me, remember the substance of this debate. I think The Little Mermaid may also have been a point of conversation? I just remember it got HEATED, and Mr. Robinson always thought these heated debates were REALLY ENTERTAINING and would quietly sit back and egg them on.

-

One time he gave me detention and I cried through the whole thing thinking my parents were gonna kill me when I got home and instead when I got home my mom hugged me and told me how he’d called her and said I’d been really honest and showed moral fiber in standing up for a friend and taking the detention in the first place and she was really proud of me for being a good person or whatever and idk if he actually was impressed with my actions or if he saw that I was stressed about my parent’s reactions and wanted to mitigate that, but that was such a good move.

-

IDK. I just have a hard time thinking of any teacher I ever had both as capable of chaotic dry amusement and completely upright righteous anger. He modeled for us what it was like to evaluate things based on merit rather than based on rules and expectations, and you felt that energy constantly.

-

Plus like getting to set your hand on fire for good behavior is a way better reward than whatever dumb stickers or candies or whatever it is teachers usually use. “Behave and we will play with fire” is the BEST incentive.

I tend to avoid armchair diagnosing celebrities with things, as they are strangers, I don't know them, and it's honestly weird to me when people DO do that, but occasionally, this quote from a 2022 Christian Bale interview pops into my head...

...and I'm just..."dude, that is not neurotypical behavior, but also, interesting strategy."

if i say "the queer community", i am referring to the community of self identified queers. if you're not a self identified queer, then i wasn't talking about you!

"i don't like to be called queer because it hurt me!" cool, fine, whatever. the word gay hurt me, i get it. but see, i didn't actually call you queer, i was talking about, and this might be difficult to follow; people who like being queer! that's why i said "queer community", to refer to the broad community of queers.

"but i'm gay/lesbian/bi/ace/whatever and i don't like it being used as an umbrella term!" okay, cool. if someone forces you under an umbrella you don't like that sure does suck! i hate being forced under the "LBGT+" umbrella myself. i absolutely loathed "trans*", i get it, trust me. i would like to draw your attention to the fact that i just said "queer community", which explicit in text and implicit in meaning, refers to a community of people... bare with me here.... people who are queer. if you do not consider yourself queer.... then it wasn't about you. it was about me and my community.

"but i know what group you're talking about and it applies to me too!" okay but you see that, you see that you're putting yourself under the umbrella there right? and then complaining about it, right? it's not my fault you decided it was about you? you're always going "it's okay for you to use, but" and then attack us when we do use it for ourselves, by shoving yourself under an imagined umbrella of your construction, hurting us in the shove, and then screaming like you were forced in here.

"but it's a--" listen.

listen to me.

you might think i'm being obstinant and maybe i am a little! but i'm trying to illuminate a point here. you've constructed an idea in your head of "us" as a monolith, a singular group that you want covered by a singular umbrella with a singular term; and you've decided that this "us" group - including you - is who i'm talking about right now, and then you've gotten shitty at me for using a word you don't like for an idea you projected over my words.

but here's the secret: there is no singular group like that. there is no monolith. there is no singular cohesive "us". there's just people, individuals with infinite experiences and selves and sexualities and genders and loves and all these beautiful things, and sometimes when we're similar enough we band together into groups and pick labels; gay, trans, queer, rainbow, whatever. these are just names, names for imagined groups, imagined groups with fake made up boundaries! people will argue there are definitions, gay means this, lesbian means that; but people will always disagree, so the names expand and the groups get broader. msm, wlw, bi, pan, genderqueer, rainbow quiltbag alphabet soup!

and you can expand and contact and refine and broaden but you will never cover everyone. at some point, you have to just accept letting people self define, and decide if they want to be in the group. if you have a "gay" group, the socially straight msm will get shitty at being called gay and it's not the fault of either the gays or the word "gay" that they're not included! people will expand and stretch and redefine and shrink, all these groups and labels will ebb and flow as different people have different needs and want to include - and exclude!- different people for their communities.

but some of "us", many generations ago, got sick and tired of constantly redefining labels and groups and decided to pick a nice word for ourselves and welcome anyone who liked it to use it, and that's queer. maybe it was already a slur that we reclaimed, maybe it was already our word before it became a slur, maybe it was just common slang for someone a little unusual and oddball and we liked that! historians both academic and communal disagree! it doesn't even matter, it's our word; "our" being anyone who likes it. if you like "queer" and want to be queer and respect the existing queers, you're welcome. and generation after generation, we pass it on for anyone to use, to say: it's okay not to box yourself in, it's okay not to define yourself down to the molecule, it's okay to be free, to come and go, to love and be whatever. it's our sanctuary. you are queer if you want to be queer. that is the gift that was given to me by the queers that came before me, i will gift it in turn to anyone that wants to carry it forwards. not everyone has to be queer, but we chose to be.

and you motherfuckers.

you motherfuckers keep smashing through the windows of our sanctuary, declaring it to be your umbrella, scream about slurs like we've never been hurt in our lives, and then hurl violence and vitriol at us because you personally hate being inside our sanctuary and want the entire structure destroyed and rebuilt for you.

fuck you.

i suffered through years of torment and abuse being called gay and having it spat at me with hate, being berated in church for questioning love, being screamed at and beaten by family and classmates and having them spit - literally - the word gay at me. i suffered through it, i survived it, i flourished to spite it and was embraced by queers who taught me love for myself and gave me safe sanctuary in this beautiful, ambiguous word, and you don't get to take that away from me.

if i say "us queers" and you come at me about how it hurts you and start yelling about umbrellas and slurs: 1) i wasn't fucking talking about you, 2) you're not part of my community and don't get to tell me what i call it, and 3) you are the fucking problem here, you are the one doing the hurting right now.

when you come into my community of queers and tell me that our sanctuary is "a slur", you are indistinguishable to me from the people spitting "gay" as they beat me.

if you're gay as in happy, you're free to be that and i won't stop you or tell you your whole core is a slur. you pick whatever umbrella you want to imagine for yourself, and i'll probably chose not to stand under it.

because i am queer. as in fuck. you.

and you will have to kill me to stop me being queer

the r/curatedtumblr -> tumblr migration is so funny to me. it's like going to the zoo and enjoying it so much you climb into the enclosure to live with the monkeys

this reply evokes such an incredible image in the mind’s eye

Allow me to assure you, as a librarian, that if you as a concerned citizen present us with a list of Books that are Bad and should Not Be In Our Collection and which you Require us to Remove At Once, we will scan it for titles that we don’t have yet to add to our purchase list.

Ah, the “limiting access to information is okay if they’re takes I object to” squad has begun to appear.

This is your helpful reminder that:

a) There are legitimate information access needs even to bad information (one cannot, for example, study and deconstruct erroneous information about climate change if you don’t know what people are saying) and it is actually part of my vocation to provide ACCESS to even books I vehemently disagree with. Sometimes I even get to bond with the person checking it out over how appalling it is! Sometimes the reason they’re checking it out is because they need to read it but don’t want to buy it.

b) The presence of a text in a library collection does not imply agreement with or endorsement by the library as an entity; it just means for one reason or another it fits in our collection management policy. Often it’s based on patron requests from community members.

c) The absolute last thing you EVER want is your librarian to be empowered to decide whether your information need is Good Enough to be “allowed” access to the text. You, personally, even you reading this who knows you share the same values as me, do not want your access to be subject to my judgement as to whether or not your information need is “valid”; to be subject to my assessment whether you can be trusted to have access to a text.

I’m not your mom. I’m not even your teacher. I’m your librarian; it’s my job to help you access information YOU need, and YOU decide what that need is. If you ask for my help then sure it’s also my job to help you assess it based on my training and experience, but it is not my job to ARBITRATE your access to information based on my decisions about the legitimacy of your reason to seek it out.

So yes even when that list of books has books on it I think are full of lies I’m probably checking to see if it’s something someone in my community might need access to without having to buy it or expose themselves to the malware risks of pirating.

Because while I kinda hate him Jordan Peterson’s bullshit is RELEVANT to understanding a lot of shit going on today. And you do NOT want to live in a world where it’s my job to test and see if you have a good and pure enough reason for wanting to check his book out.

I’m ages late but:

Excuse me a coworker caught me making a warding sign at fuckin’ Ted Cruz’s piece of shit book the other day, I feel very called out right now.

The World Of Becca Blake

Art by Dan Schkade

In any world, please don't put anything but clean water in your eyes. Milk is effective, yes, effective at washing out tear gas but also effective at causing infections in your eyes. Just. Use. Water.

Very Brief Guide to [tumblr], for Reddit refugees

Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:

Basic Features of the Site:

Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:

General Etiquette:

Tips:

Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!

She,,,, hat

URGENT: 🚨🚨EARN IT ACT IS BACK IN THE SENATE 🚨🚨 TUMBLR’S NSFW BAN HITTING THE ENTIRE INTERNET THIS SUMMER 2023

April 28, 2023

I’m so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this

The EARN IT Act (s. 1207) has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country.

This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims "protects children and victims against CSAM" by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate "best practices" that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These "best practices" would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can't already do that. These "best practices" also create new laws for "removing CSAM" online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don't follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.

Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It's the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren't responsible for what users upload online unless it's criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can't publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)

This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.

NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an "anti-trafficking" organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being "against trafficking" while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That's how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.

The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.

EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from "grooming and exploitation", is how they will successfully censor the internet.

As long as state legislatures can tie in "fighting CSAM" to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.

This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.

This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.

Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn't care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.

One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.

(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)

The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.

I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.

EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.

This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.

(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don't know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.

2. Sign these petitions!

Link to Petition 1

Link to Petition 2

3. SPREAD THE WORD ONLINE

If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don't fight back.

Here is a linktree with more information on this bill including a masterpost of articles, the links to petitions, and the call script.

DISCORD LINK IF YOU WANT TO HELP FIGHT IT

TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven’t seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.

Actors and Animators should go on strike next tbh. Especially cgi animators. Put the fear back into Hollywood

Animators? Yes. Actors? If youre talking ppl like RDJ or Jamie Lee Curtis or what have you. They have more than enough fucking money. Take a look at one production cost and see how much these people are paid.

My dad is an actor/playwrite. He has to constantly search for new gigs to make ends meet, and even then ends up doing retail or lyft or doordash a lot of the time between gigs.

And my parents don't live in a huge house in New York or LA, it's a tiny townhouse in a really small city. My mom's the one who really pays the mortgage with her events organizer and house manager jobs at local theatres, and even then they struggle to afford living expenses. They used food stamps when I was a kid - not every month, but enough that I see it as a normal thing to do.

And when he does get gigs, especially like big tv gigs, working conditions are CRAP. He nearly got severe hypothermia once for having to jump in a freezing cold river in early winter from 11pm-3am, repeatedly, for a shot they didn't even end up USING.

Scheduling is abysmal, overtime is never properly compensated for, the jobs are DANGEROUS (mostly on a physical fatigue level), and work is contractual by nature. Are there some contracts that are ridiculously good? Yes, that's how contract-based work tends to happen for a lucky few.

But getting a contract like that is like winning the lottery, and even then they can be really exploitative if you don't have a kickass agent and/or a really good entertainment lawyer. There aren't really steady 9-5 full time acting jobs with benefits the way there are with other jobs. It's difficult to get any gigs in the first place, I cannot emphasize enough how much it is a constant job search.

And that's not even getting into the horrendous conditions and disrespect for voice actors. Actors should ABSOLUTELY go on strike

I fucking hope RDJ and Will Smith and everyone on top strike too. You want a real impact? Let's see what happens when top names refuse to work until the people on the bottom are compensated fairly too.

Being able to pretend it's just some uppity character actors or commercial actors lets studios distract. When there's no star for the best blockbuster to be, they can't ignore the demands.

The top-paid members of an industry strike in support of better working conditions for their coworkers, not for more money. Neil Gaiman and George RR Martin aren't striking because they want or expect to be paid more, they're striking to support the entire rest of their industry because they care about it.

Not to mention, even the big names are often treated like absolute shit.

Kate Winslet nearly got hypothermia on multiple occasions whilst filming titanic because, despite the fact that the whole thing was happening on a carefully controlled set and thus could have the water at whatever temperature he wanted, James Cameron wanted to take the "acting" out of acting and he had the water set to be as cold as possible without it being frozen. He called it method acting. He didn't bother to see if Kate could ACT as though the water was one-degree above freezing; he just called it right from the go and was like, hey, what if I make my lead actress spend several days getting in and out of BORDERLINE FREEZING WATER, so that it will look realistic.

Her chattering teeth and whole body tremors? Yeah, not acting. That was her body on the edge of actual real life hypothermia.

And look at the way they treat men these days with making them fast and dehydrate to the point of collapse, just so the director can get two seconds worth of a shot where their muscles and veins are all bulging unnaturally.

When he was filming Logan (I think it was Logan) Hugh Jackman literally DID collapse. One of the scenes of him all bare-chested and muscly and roaring angrily? Is a much shorter scene than it was supposed to be, because that's all they managed to get out of him before he LITERALLY PASSED OUT.

And these are the big name lead actors who are getting treated like this. If THEY are being treated so appallingly, what hope in hell do the smaller actors have of not being worked into the ground?

YES, the actors should go on strike. Yes, including the biggest-name stars who've never been mistreated and who get the cushiest most comfortable jobs. They should go on strike too because they support the improved conditions and pay for all those in their industry who ARENT treated well. Which is most of them.

"You don't need to understand someone's identity in order to respect it" is often framed as a compromise with intolerance, like it's conceding that it's okay to think someone's gender is bullshit as long as you don't say that out loud, but frankly, I think it's more concerning if someone believes they can understand the full spectrum of human identity. Doing mental gymnastics to cram everybody's lived experience into a familiar analytic framework isn't what respect looks like.

#I think my skeleton is getting employee of the year among my various tissues#you alone have not failed me