I’m a 22 year old gay guy who plays a lot of video games, has an unconquerable sweet tooth, and loves cooking. You may see me posting about guinea pigs, birds, and fish. I like biking, staying up way too late, and writing awkward about me pages.
Everyone deserves the opportunity to dress their best. That’s why I’m so glad to be able to share Tommy Hilfiger’s innovative #TommyAdaptive collection with you. #TommyPartner
I know this is very important for people with disabilities and such but all I’m thinking is “Oh this is where super heroes get their shirts from.”
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
Tumblr is shadowbanning people and they aren’t even trying to be subtle about it.
Please spread the word.
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…
Hello everyone! So much has happened over the last
week and we want to keep you all updated with what’s going to be
happening over the next few weeks.
Invites
- We’re sending out the rest of our invitations today for payments that
were submitted between Dec 4 at 3:45 PM PST and Dec 5th at midnight
PST. If you sent a payment during that time period or earlier but don’t
receive your invitation by later today, then a) check your spam folder! Yahoo and
Hotmail in particular seem to like to filter our automated emails as
spam, and then b) email us at info@pillowfort.io
if you still haven’t gotten your invite. If you sent a payment after
Dec 5th at midnight PST then we are aiming to send out your invite later
this week.
Pillowfort Now Has Over 25,000 Users!
To put this in perspective, at the beginning of this year we had only
4,000. The positive thing about the recent influx of new users is that
the registration payments have given us more funding for developers and
other expenses, which will result in a more robust infrastructure for
the site in the near future. The unfortunate result in the meantime is
slower load times as the site deals with the unprecedented amount of
traffic. We realize that many users are coming to the site as an
alternative to Tumblr, and we certainly hope that we can meet those
expectations soon! Right now, Pillowfort is still a small team, and we
hadn’t expected to have such a huge influx of potential users arrive on
our doorstep all at once, so it will take us a little time to catch up.
But rest assured we are working as hard as we can.
PR Assistant
- Pillowfort is looking for a part-time public relations assistant to
help us manage our communications with all our new and upcoming users!
This person will primarily be responsible for helping us respond to
inquiries through our social media accounts and email, and drafting our
outreach materials. Pay will be around $15/hr and it is best if you live
in the Austin, TX area. Please contact us at info@pillowfort.io if you’re interested.
Because harassment happens to all genders. But guys get the short end of the stick when it comes to cosplay and consent.I intend to change this. Even if it’s a small change.
Flighting the concept on my personal page, so let me know what you guys think? You’re more than welcome to inbox me your experiences as a male cosplayer, you’ll stay anonymous.
Borrowed from THE INTERNET:
• Avoid using degrading language. This applies to Expo social media as well. Commenting on someone’s body in a way that is derogatory is considered sexual harassment and our convention won’t stand for it. • Rape jokes, or jokes that are marginalizing to someone, are not funny. Please don’t make them, and if you feel that you have been the subject of such harassment, please come forward to Expo staff so that the issue can be dealt with confidentially. • Always be respectful of someone’s physical space. It can be pretty close quarters at the Expo during peak hours, but that’s no excuse for inappropriate behavior. Finally, perhaps most importantly… • Always remember – we are ALL people. Gender, age, ethnicity, orientation notwithstanding – we are each individuals who deserve to be treated as such.
*This is a non profit project done out of the love for people.
All of this is unacceptable
Seriously, no one should put up with harassment; not guys or girls!
I’ve seen plenty of posts about this happening to girls, but this is the first I’ve seen about guys getting crap at cons, and I’m so glad it’s picking up speed. Harassment of any kind is not acceptable, and we don’t need that in our community. Keep cons safe and friendly, guys. Cosplay is not consent <3
Be nice to the creative people, not mean and creepy!
That thing you wrote that isn’t “good enough” to put up on the AO3. You can put it up there! The AO3 isn’t meant to be The World’s Classiest Showcase. It’s an archive. It exists because most other forms of hosting fannish work eventually degrade or disappear. Accounts get deleted. Websites shut down. The AO3 preserves those things. Ten years from now you’ll be like, “Shit, there was this really great tag essay, but the person changed their Tumblr URL and then Tumblr closed up shop…” (look, even Tumblr will die eventually) and your only hope of finding it will be if the page was cached, or if somebody uploaded it to the AO3.
The AO3 exists to preserve ephemera as much as substantial works. You know how valuable it is for archaeologists to be able to read the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii? The little things, the notes, the headcanons, the notfics, the meta, the back-and-forths, are all important too.
YES YES YES THIS.
Tumblr’s likely to die sooner than you expect, and suddenly - it’s owned by Yahoo. (Anyone remember
del.icio.us, later delicious.com?) Yahoo’s trying really really hard to squeeze money out of tumblr and it’s not working, for all the reasons discussed in synec’s post and because a huge portion of its userbase is 13-18 years old and HAVE NO DIGITAL MONEY so can’t buy things online even if they wanted to.
There is no “worthy to be on AO3.” None. The early fics were often really well-written; it was a high-standards archive - not because “it strove for high standards” but because the only people who knew it existed, who cared about a new multifandom archive, were the ones who’d been around watching archives disappear for years; they were veteran fic writers who wanted a permanent place to share their stories. It took a long time for AO3 to have enough server capacity to allow open invites; in the early days, it was friend-of-a-friend for invite codes. (They wanted more people; they couldn’t handle a flood. So they handed out a few codes at a time)
We even talked about it while setting up the original terms of service - knowing that by saying, our standards are less restrictive than ff.net, less restrictive than LJ, we were going to eventually have HUGE amounts of really bad fic. FF.net got the nickname “pit of voles,” and AO3 was going to outdo that… eventually.
And. We wanted it ALL. All the reader-insert Mary Sue “date with hot dude” fic; all the “quiz to find out which power ranger you would be” fic; all the “band came to my home town and their bus broke down in front of my house and they needed a coffee and…” fic. And later, all the meta: the thinky character analyses; the “who’d be best on a first date” discussions; the “why the new movie sucked rocks and should never have been made because they ruined my favorite sidekick” rants.
ALL. WE WANT IT ALL.
AO3 is not about “the best of fandom;” it’s about “the truth of fandom.” And the truth is, fandom is not comprised of 90% well-written tightly-plotted carefully proofread fic. Fandom is comprised of people who love their favorite shows and books and characters and want to share that love with others.
AO3 are not the fanfic standards police. We’re the ones cheering for the “GLOWING BLUE SKELETON DICKS” tags.
Someday, some fandom archaeologist (and yes, there will be fandom archaeologists, isn’t that awesome?) will sift through the badfic, the quick drabbles, the Mary Sues, and write articles for peer-reviewed journals chronicling the complete collected works of some of the 21st century’s greatest authors and how you can see in THIS self-indulgent Protagonist/OC clusterfuck the origin of those characterization tactics and flow of prose that make your subsequent masterworks truly shine as beloved classics, and THIS short character drabble gives THAT story arc in your well-known later story an exceptional poignancy and depth if one considers it backstory.
Also that fandom archaeologist’s teenage daughter will think the self-indulgent Protagonist/OC clusterfuck is the best thing she’s ever read.
GUYS IT’S HAPPENING!
PLEASE POST ALL OF YOUR PROMPT FILL FICS, YOUR METAS, YOUR HEADCANONS, ETC, TO AO3 SO THEY’RE NOT LOST FOREVER! (If you don’t want to spam people, just do it as one big multichapter “Tumblr export” fic!)
THERE IS SO MUCH GOOD CONTENT ON THIS SITE, PLEASE SAVE YOUR STUFF!
The plan for the 17th, when the adult content ban comes in, is to protest.
To do that, we are making as much noise either side of the 17th as possible, and using the site as normal.
On the 17th, dead silence.
People are saying log off but what they really mean is don’t open the site or the app.
But, on the 17th make as much noise as possible on every other platform. Tweet about it and post on facebook and instagram and everywhere else.
What this does is causes a massive dip in ad revenue for one single day. That does not make staff think ‘oh everyone’s gone let’s shut down.’ What it actually makes them think is ‘oh shit people aren’t happy and if people don’t keep using our site we’re out of money and out of jobs.’
A boycott reminds a company that the users (consumers) have the power to make their site (business) worthless with one single coordinated decision.
If you want to join in, here’s what to do:
Do:
Close all open instances of the app and site on all your devices before the 17th
Make posts before and after the 17th on tumblr and other platforms, talking about why this ban is bad
Make posts on other sites during the 17th. Flood the official tumblr staff twitter and facebook with your anger and your opinion
Come back on the 18th and check in
Don’t:
Delete the app from your phone (this doesn’t affect their revenue and since it’s off the store at the moment it’ll be hard to get back)
Delete your account. I mean you can if you want to, but if you keep your account and don’t use it you’re saying to staff that there’s still time to save it. If you delete it’s hard work to come back.
Open the app or website (including specific blogs)
Make any posts (turn down/off your queue and make sure nothing is scheduled)
Go quiet elsewhere. Make it clear that this is just about tumblr, not a mass move away from all social media.
Remember: the execs don’t care about anything but money. Shutting down the site means there’s $0 further income from it. That’s their last possible course of action. If we make it clear we’re not happy, they’ll have to do something or we can do more and more until it becomes too expensive.
Protests take commitment. They’re a defiant action against a business that is doing something wrong. They will try to scare you into not participating, because they’re scared. We hold all the power here, sometimes the execs just need to be reminded of that.
PLEASE PARTICIPATE THIS NEEDS TO BE BIG SO WE NEED TO FOLLOW THROUGH!
the sad thing is is tumblr thought they had to monetize through ads, so they had to do this so they could get reputable advertisers, but
like
if they had just hired some people to actually cultivate a good website and then asked us how we’d like the site monetized? we could have come up with something
on NPR today they were talking to The Guardian, the UK paper. Asking one of their execs how it is, exactly, in the era of dying print media, The Guardian stays afloat without charging to access their online content.
And they explained that when it became clear that the industry was irreversibly changing, they asked thousands of their readers to come in over the course of a weekend and sat them down in groups and asked what they would like the revenue model to look like going forward, keeping in mind that the paper would still need to bring in a profit somehow. The overwhelming response was “I am willing to pay for this to be free for everyone”. So The Guardian is funded by subscribers who pay because they think it’s a worthwhile service, even though all the content is available for free.
Which is also, incidentally, how things like NPR (and Maximum Fun podcasts) are funded. And how Wikipedia is funded. And how many people run their patreons - no exclusives. You just pay because you want to support the product. It’s how a lot of the best stuff in the internet age is funded.
Other online media (whether it’s patreon or podcasts or video games or w/e) offer tiny inconsequential but fun benefits for paying. Maybe tumblr donors get cute options for frames for their icons. Maybe they get access to extra themes. Pay more on this video game for a fun skin for your character that doesn’t change the gameplay. Pay more on tumblr and you can have animated icons. Something different could’ve been done.
I mean, for us to be willing to pay for it, they’d also need to try to build a functioning website. Something they’ve been royally fucking up for years now. Still no easy blacklist, limited search features, limited privacy features, links breaking everywhere…
But if @staff had made a real good faith effort to create a good user experience that prevented bots and protected users and then asked us 1) what kind of site we wanted 2) what income model we’d prefer to support, I feel like we could’ve come up with something.
As it is the site is in a downward spiral and that sucks.
This. Rather than ask users what they want, Tumblr is choosing to tell users what they’re going to get, and if they don’t like it, too bad. And if I want to be dommed, I’ll go back to Fetlifr.
That’s pretty much how LiveJournal was run: a basic account was free, but you could pay for a premium account, which allowed you all kinds of special benefits – extra icon slots, for example, so you could swap your userpic out according to what kind of post you were writing, etc.
I believe this is also how Dreamwidth prices itself. It would work, if they’d asked us.
i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault.
(It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.
Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
I like this last addition.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.
So we did.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.
This thread keeps getting better.
It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over
Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y'all, so y'all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.
You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.
Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.
Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.
Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.
I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”. If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:
A preview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!
I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.
1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)
2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.
3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men.
Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.
Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.
(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)
The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.
Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable.They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.
This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.
History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.
(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)
Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.
He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyone got them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.
There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.
You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.
Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.
It’s been touched on a little before but really it’s hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.
Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didn’t know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.
Also FanFiction doesn’t really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) It’s only years later, reading fanfic history posts that I’ve started to piece together what happened.
Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didn’t even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.
Hot damn, this post just keeps going!
I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and you’ll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblr’s purity crusade.
If you haven’t been TOSsed you really don’t get it, imo.
If you haven’t spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really don’t get it, imo.
Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going “I really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.”
A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we don’t remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.
Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.
I hated - hated fandom back when this LJ shit happened, but I was there. I’m both glad this thread is here, and irritated that it was felt necessary. How many times do we need to learn this lesson?
i dont really… WANT… to leave tumblr. ive been here since 2011
no other platform has the right format for me to just randomly barf actual thoughts, joaks, and genuine creative content all in the same breath. i dont know how to compartmentalize
every other platform you gotta be a real person. Here you are you’re icon and username and whatever your hyperfixation is at the current moment
on tumblr you can make a post that just says “minecraft” and get 50k notes, where on twitter you have to steal tweets and instagram you have to be hot. tumblr is more like a bunch of kids let loose in walmart where there are no rules and the only god is a bald swedish man
I have had 3 mineral posts flagged as adult content today. They contained a tourmaline, a muscovite, and a galena. On Friday I had 3 fossil posts flagged as adult content, including a fossil fish, a fossil tooth from a mastodon, and a Tyrannosaur vertebrae. I’ve submitted appeals for each. This has been getting worse over the past month, apparently most of geology content is now only for adults.
Apparently you can’t get your rocks off on Tumblr anymore.
i am contractually obligated to congratulate you on this reply
