Sex positivity

Casual reminder that sex positivity is the political position towards sex, which says that sex is not inherently more shameful, sinful or worse that other parts of life (and actually not better or exempt from political analysis either). As such, it has no relation to how easy sex is for you.

If you never have sex, or rarely have sex, or struggle to get undressed in front of someone, you haven’t failed at sex positivity. If you’re not comfortable in sex-focused spaces or just don’t enjoy them, you haven’t failed at sex positivity. Just like you are no less a feminist if you worry about how you look, and no less a queer activist if you are not ‘out’ everywhere, you are no less sex-positive if sex is a complicated thing in your life.

Your political position towards sex is seen in how you respond to attempts by respectability activists to de-sexualize LGBT identities, it is seen in whether you defend sex-focused queer spaces when their existence is threatened, it is seen in how you respond to sexual violence, it is seen in how you respond to people who pretend that there is no sexism, racism or rape in kinky spaces, it is seen in how you treat sex workers, it is seen in what you do to de-stigmatize STDs in your community.

Sex positivity is seen in a lot of your political actions but it can never be measured by how much you fuck or how public you are about it.

Canaries in the Coal Mine: If you cheered on censorship of weird art, you’re part of this problem

Unpopular fact that needs to be said now: if you ignored or worse cheered on the constant encroaching censorship of artists and didn’t speak up because it wasn’t the ‘right’ kind of art (your ~pure eroti ca~ art) that was under fire, you’re 100% part of the problem.

The weird ero artists, the hardcore ero artists, the distasteful ero artists, those gross artists have been your canary in the coal mine and y'all decided it was canary season and now… well we may all be in the grave YOU dug but guess what, you’re here too!

Maybe y'all will learn a lesson. Maybe y'all will stop flinging around false accusations for peak woke points and stop censoring art you find icky and artists that don’t peddle only the purest and unproblematicest of smut. Probably not. But a boy can dream can’t he?

The solution always is to speak out against censorship. “But I’m afraid to speak out–” The rest of us who put our necks out and got burned, how do you think we feel? But we speak out against censorship. We defend ‘icky’ art. Because we know the price otherwise.

And if you won’t listen to me because I’m just some queermo who makes weird comics, then maybe you’ll listen to a professional. 

 "[I]f you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.“ - Neil Gaiman, WHY DEFEND FREEDOM OF ICKY SPEECH?, Dec. 1, 2008

Dawn of the final day and all. Hope next site we all land on you pay attention to your canaries when we speak.

I suppose the problem is this: 

Some fiction explores the baser aspects of the human psyche and openly acknowledges the appeal of ignobility. “Evil” is traditionally depicted as seductive. If there is truly nothing attractive about it, then there is nothing about it that needs resisting. Fiction can serve as a hypothetical temptation - a dark mirror, a litmus test - that the audience confronts internally. Maybe they reject it. Maybe they don’t. Maybe that rejection is difficult because it sparks conflicting feelings. 

Whatever the case, I don’t think all media exists (or necessarily should exist) in a binary of “explicitly condemning” or “explicitly condoning” ideas - instead, it leaves that job to the reader and silently hopes that they will make the right call. Sometimes they don’t - we all know these people. We often avoid them, believing (perhaps justifiably) that falling to fictional temptation is a red flag for an inability to recognize evil or resist its appeal in real life. 

Kids’ stories are usually explicit in their morals because they serve as training wheels for creating good people. You don’t often get truly complicated ethical dilemmas or shades of gray in these stories because most of the target audience isn’t equipped with the experiences to wrestle with them fairly - and when you do, there’s some moral outrage on the part of adults who don’t think kids can be trusted to accurately discern between Good and Bad. I think it comes down to a case-by-case basis; some children are ready for particular tests that certain adults never will be.

In conclusion, I don’t think that it is always the responsibility of every piece of media to deliver unchallenging lessons. This is especially true for adults, who are making real-life ethical decisions on a regular basis in a world where the choices are frequently limited to “probably bad” and “possibly less bad”. 

I figure that this will probably be a more controversial contention than some of my previous posts on this whole subject but like I actually think that there is something being lost even by just the deletion of the p*rnographic content of this website (and perhaps more importantly, the communities surrounding it).in terms of just a historical perspective.

P*rnography, which is seen as without any intellectual or artistic merit, is one of those things that is mass produced but v infrequently preserved at the time of its creation because it is seen as not worth studying or preserving, and in fact there is a tendency towards its destruction. But at the same time, there is a lot to be gained in understanding societies and their socio-cultural mores by looking at just that (along w other forms of “low culture”, i’m reminded of trash tabloid TV or cheap films on weird subjects or even just tabloids in general).

This is to a certain extent what is going to happen as more and more social interactions happen over the internet, or what is talked about sometimes as being a part of Digital Dark Age. These things have to be stored somewhere, on websites that might go down or in this case, they might be expunged from continuing websites. Unlike pulp novels or magazines, these sorts of things just disappear (w the potential exception be if they are saved on computers… that might themselves become unusable in the near future!)

I guess maybe this is because p*rnography is just an academic interest of mine, but I think Tumblr’s model already had a way of creating structural gaps (in the form of blog deletion), but there really is something that could the the site of study that could just disappear soon! Like, that’s not to say that these things are like good or not skeezy or systemically in a weird way wrt ethics (and I think there are limitations to this sort of logic) but they are socially relevant in some way, and I think there’s something being lost in the record by getting rid of all of it. Just because it has v little “social utility” doesn’t mean that there isn’t at least some historical interest, I guess, esp. when the libidinal imaginary features so prominently in many different political spheres and conversations.

TUMBLR NOW BLOCKING THE WAYBACK MACHINE

I just… I don’t know how to respond to this with anything other than an infuriated fucking howl, honestly? I’ve checked this and @essayofthoughts has checked this and there’s confirmation that Tumblr is actively banning archival efforts so it looks like this is not a bug.

If you were planning on archiving anything from this website, you’re too late. It is all going to fucking burn. Not only is Tumblr committed to destroying the platform, they are committed to absolutely fucking anyone who is trying to conserve any part of it.

Fuck you @staff. Fuck you.

Quizilla 2.0

Oh god, please don’t remind me of Quizilla. I’m both incredibly grateful and SAD that I’ve access to my stories posted there.

Oh GOD. quizilla was the first platform I wrote fanfics on. Horrible. Absolutely horrible.

these comments prompted me to do some reading on Quizilla and the story really is similar: years of neglect and mismanagement followed by an abrupt announcement of closure. this of course is a story close to my heart, since it’s the exact thing that happened with the Wizards of the Coast official forums, which were broken beyond useability, limped along for a few years, and were finally shut down with just enough head time for me and a few other people to manually go through the 7-8 years worth of threads in the Storyline and Art forums and save every god damn one of them to the Wayback Machine.

of course, Tumblr has made such efforts impossible, and it’s not clear to me that Quizilla works would even have functioned in wayback.

someone on twitter commented to me that we might lose the vast majority of Homestuck meta if Tumblr finally goes down without being mass-archivable. I’m genuinely not sure how we’d ever even know the extent of our loss here, not just for Homestuck but for other fandoms around various webcomics and anime and so on, particularly obscure shit that doesn’t have a large enough fanbase to sustain archival practices.

apparently Quizilla enabled the creation of uniquely formatted and interactive fanfiction. Tumblr enabled uniquely formatted ask blog fiction, and more fragmentary, nonlinear, downright fucking modernist fanfiction structures.

the loss of such sites is not just the loss of texts but of entire genres and media formats. gone without a trace, gone without most people even realizing that something was ever there at all.

This is one of the things that bums me too because there’s genuinely no other way of crossposting the kind of fannish works Tumblr made possible on other websites, even if you have a similar format to tumblr

I’ve been trying to figure out how to crosspost my Potter fic blog to ao3, but I can’t even figure out how to start because while every piece on that blog builds on a single shared alternate universe and all feed into the main narrative backbone story that built Chaos Is A Butterfly, they’re also a) standalone pieces and b) do not exist in any particular chronological fashion

In fact with Tumblr, I could use the formatting to tell a non-chronological story and shape how people read a character and emotionally engaged with them through that in a way that I don’t think can even be replicated on ao3. Neither can I replicate the sense of the blog existing in itself in a contained but sprawling alternate universe where the reader is led wandering through it, rather than following a linear narrative through it.

@themonsterblogofmonsters posts fic everyday, but if you visit the front end of the blog, it’s an entire encyclopedia and “reference book” in and of itself. You can’t get that functionality on ao3 and you can’t get it on pillowfort. Short of designing a website from scratch, I don’t think it’s actually possible to achieve.

And these are just two instances! I’m struggling with how to archive meta or collaboratively created fic or headcanon - how do I file it, where do I file it, how do I attribute the different people who contributed. What do I do when I’ve made a meta that builds on someone whose blog is gone?

It’s just…this entire fandom nucleus that shaped how we did fiction and meta (writing attached to gifsets, meta attached to gifsets, tag meta) that is basically impossible to preserve on other sites.

Monosexism =/= lesbians/gay men have privilege over bi/pan/ply people

Monosexism = Bi/pan/ply people experience a unique oppression stemming from the expectation that people are only attracted to one gender. This is something that, while lesbians/gay men don’t experience, they aren’t, by virtue of not experiencing this oppression, privileged

tell me why u follow me on anon

Like do people not understand that, if nothing else, when you use TERF arguments on another group, you are strengthening TERFs?? Because when people who agree with you stumble across TERF logic, it’s going to seem reasonable and familiar to them? It’s going to just be building on premises they’ve already accepted?

some examples: “you cannot identify/opt out of privilege” (further reading), “there is an invasion of oppressors coming into our community claiming to be oppressed members of it and They Are The Enemy” (further reading) (especially when you consider that they put as much, if not more energy into attacking those who they perceive as “invaders” as they do against the actual oppressors in question, and they receive hardly any if any backlash from the actual oppressors in question for doing so; if the “invaders” really were members of the oppressor class, you’d think actual members of the oppressor class would get mad at you for attacking the “invaders”, but they hardly ever do, if ever), “all oppression [insert group of people] claims to face is actually misdirected homophobia/misogyny” (including the specific idea that biphobia isn’t real and it’s just homophobia/lesbophobia), “People only have [insert identity/ies] because of internalized homophobia”, mocking/slandering inclusionists as liberals who don’t understand radical anti-oppression theory and class analysis (further reading), especially using the word “kweer” to mock queer people they disagree with, being against the use of the word “queer”, “You just hate lesbians!!!!” (and presuming that it’s necessary to hold their viewpoint in order to be a lesbian / that their viewpoint is the default and/or should be the default for lesbians), identifying with the term “gatekeeper”, claiming that “terf” is a silencing tactic (further reading), claiming that no-platforming is a silencing tactic, claiming that invalidation of personal identity is meaningless (this specifically enables the idea that misgendering isn’t violent),  bonding with right-wingers over hate against people who disagree with you / using arguments originally used by right-wingers, etc.

Keep in mind that this rhetoric is so similar that TERFs have noticed this and used it to their advantage. (source 1, source 2, source 3, source 4, source 5)

Also keep in mind that, while there may be one or two terfs who favor ace inclusion, there are hundreds who are against it. That shouldn’t be a good sign. And non-TERF exclusionists have in the past shown more sympathy towards TERFs than they do towards ace people. (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5)

This doesn’t make all ace-exclusionists TERFs, but as the OP was saying, it makes them enablers of TERFs, which is a form of transmisogyny. Also note that, unless you yourself are a trans woman / transfeminine person, you can’t say “but there are trans women on our side!!!” as a way to argue against this, because that’s basically using the “my trans friend agrees with me!!!” argument. You can’t use that as an excuse to say something’s ok when trans women are saying it actively puts them and their sisters in danger.

— Between a gay and straight place: Bisexual individuals’ experiences with monosexism. Tangela S. Roberts, Sharon G. Horne, William T. Hoyte, Journal of Bisexuality, Oct-Dec 2015, Vol. 15 Issue 4.

I don’t 100% recall who said it (though it might well have been @fiction-is-not-reality2) but someone on here pointed out that what a lot of people want seems to be a thing that’s less about representation and more about publicity. 

You have good memory, I wrote, around 40 days ago: 

And then more than one year ago: 

…life reflects art?

(x)

I remember protesting in front of Parliament to equalize legal treatment of gay relationships. Which meant AoC at 16 instead of 21 and no extra privacy requirement.

Would these kids be counter-protesting?

if it were happening now, antis would be counter-protesting and saying that the AoC should be raised to 21 across the board with no close-in-age exemptions. to protect minors, of course. (”minors” being “any Good Person under the age of 25.”)

Image hosting on Dreamwidth

Inspired by this post and the fact that I’ve had my DW account since 2009 and haven’t used the site’s image hosting until this year. If you’re familiar with old-school LiveJournal, this is very similar. (New LJ makes image hosting much easier and more similar to how tumblr works.)

Things to keep in mind:

If you’re planning on hosting your fanart on DW, here are some tips!

1, Go to your Profile and choose ‘Create’ on the drop down menu. The ‘Upload Images’ option is over there. Yeah hosting the image and creating your post happen in separate pages. :’)   

Keep reading

...life reflects art?

(x)

Anytime an argument is made where the end result is exactly what you’d expect from a conservative Christian fundamentalist, a Nazi, a white supremacist, or someone else who refuses to recognize that all people are human, it’s a bad argument. Rhetoric that enforces gender conformity is bad whether it comes from misogynists or so-called feminists.

To be perfectly frank, I’ve never seen any value in any argument that says “X people are in danger if they do A, so Y people, who are not in danger, shouldn’t be allowed to!” No, the problem here, see, is not that Y people are doing A, but that X people aren’t allowed to do A… and if X people and Y people are hard to tell apart but Y people have privilege over X people, Y people doing the thing makes life better for X people because it gives them more air cover. Whereas if X people and Y people are not hard to tell apart, maybe Y people doing the thing doesn’t help X people any… but that’s still very poor justification for saying Y people aren’t allowed to do it, when the problem is that X people should be allowed to do it.

I’ll make an exception if Y people doing it literally makes X people look bad. The issue with dreadlocks, for example, is that if you do not have hair that will properly make dreadlocks, and most white people do not, your hair will get matted and nasty if you try to dread it, and then people will assume that black people’s dreads are also matted and nasty, which is not true. However, this still shouldn’t mean “white people should not wear dreadlocks” but “people who have the wrong type of hair should not wear dreadlocks”; people who identify as white who have the right type of hair are rare, but not impossible.

A lot of the conversation about cultural appropriation seems to come down to trying to police what the dominant class are allowed to do instead of trying to police what the dominant class are allowed to shit-talk about when the non-dominant class do it. This is putting the cart before the horse. The specific people who like to wear, say, Indian saris while being white, are very rarely the same white people who’d give Indian people shit for wearing saris. The problem isn’t the white person wearing the sari but the white person doing the shit-talking. The goal should be to get them to shut the fuck up, not to prevent the other white person who isn’t shit-talking from wearing the sari. 

A couple years ago I saw someone on Twitter say that straight men wearing nail polish was appropriating gay culture. And I was like… “By that logic, gay men wearing nail polish is appropriation of female culture.”

In other news, people are wild and don’t know what words mean and social justice on the internet is an absolute shitshow.

The Official “Log Off” Protest F.A.Q! 

The “Log Off” protest is in response to the recent NSFW ban announced by Tumblr. The ban flags all content the filtering system detects as NSFW, reducing visibility to the community. The system has proven time and time again that is inefficient, oftentimes flagging SFW material as NSFW. 

This SFW material includes art, memes and so on. This ban directly hurts the community and will not solve the actual problems at hand due to the poor flagging system. Because of this, the entire community will suffer.  

So to respond, I propose that every user on Tumblr logs off of Tumblr for 24 hours on December 17th at 12 am EST. 

Times are listed above depending on timezone! 

This post responds to some very common questions about the protest. So make sure to read it over! 

How to Export Your Blog: 

https://tumblr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360005118894-Export-your-blog

Alternative Sites: 

There is also an official Tumblr blog (ironic, huh?) and Twitter for the protest! It’s at: 

There will be official updates on each account. Make sure to tag us in any posts, or use the hashtag #logoff2018 ! 

Thanks for your support guys. Let’s fight to make Tumblr better. Actually better. 

Again, can’t tell me that someone out there hasn’t done that.

If you are hetero romantic, you! Are! Straight!

no, because you’re fucking ASEXUAL as in NOT HETEROSEXUAL

to be Straight, you need to be BOTH heterosexual AND heteroromantic

here is a helpful diagram

[image description: two circles that don’t touch anywhere. one is labelled ‘heterosexual’ another is labelled ‘asexual’.]

the circles, you’ll notice, don’t touch. because you can’t be both Straight (heterosexual & romantic) and asexual. they are mutually exclusive.

saying that ace people, or aro people, or aroace people, are straight due to their LACK of sexual attraction, is pushing heteronormativity. which, it turns out, fucks up the lives of lgb+ people as well.

nice job shooting yourself in the foot, asshole

By this logic there would be no such thing as a gay ace. You can’t have it both ways. Being ace is a modifier, it doesn’t nullify your other identities. If you’re aroace, you’re aroace. If you’re homoromantic and ace, you’re gay and ace. If you’re het romantic and ace.. you’re straight and ace. Sorry! Being straight isn’t a bad thing idk why y’all are so opposed to calling yourself what you are

being ace is inherently queer. that’s not up for argument. ace people are queer because they face the kind of bigotry that queer people face, under the same systems of oppression. lgbp+ people are all oppressed under heterosexism. so are ace people. that makes them queer, inherently. also, most queer organizations accept ace people. you’re no authority on ace people because you identified as such a few years back. that’d be like me insisting I get a say in lesbian issues because I called myself a lesbian in 2014

ace people face corrective rape, and no, that’s not a “lesbian specific term” dear god, like trans, bisexual, and mentally ill people don’t also face corrective rape. also, if your argument against ace people facing corrective rape is to say “that only happens to lesbians” then that’s not much different than reacting to a butch woman getting lynched by saying “that only happens to black people” and it’s as useless and disingenuous and cruel an argument.

ace people are opposed to being called straight because the vast majority of them are NOT straight. less than 1% of all aces are actually cishet. even if they were straight, it wouldn’t make a damn difference, because they still face heterosexism and allosexism. they do not have access to the systems of power that Straight people have. saying they can’t be lgbtq+ because they’re straight is on the same level as arguing that trans people who are straight aren’t lgbtq+. being straight isn’t a disqualifier. the only relevant qualification you need to be lgbtq is to be rejected by Straight people. ace people are rejected. end of story.