Sure thing.

-Don’t bully or allow/ignore bullying kids. This one sounds obvious but in practice, people are like, weirdly excited to shit on kids that annoy them. (More on that later.) You shouldn’t bully people in general, but it goes doubly for kids.

-Keep porn/gore away from kids. If you’re on tumblr, this is relatively easy; tag things accordingly, and/or say you don’t want minors following you because you post that, and if you do realize a kid is using your blog to access that stuff, block them. It’s not like it’s going to insta-solve the problem, but it’s a pretty decent step 1. Additionally, if someone specifies “X blogs don’t rb” or whatever, and you’re an X blog, don’t reblog it. (This isn’t just kids and kink blogs, this pretty much is just common decency.)

-Interact with kids appropriately. It’s not appropriate to talk to kids about porn or kinks or sex in general unless you’re their parents, teachers, or have like…talked to the parents and gotten permission. I know that kids are curious about sex and teenagers are like, generally horny, but if you’re hanging out with a kid (irl or online) and the topic comes up, you need to either insist on changing the topic or like, leave. Sometimes online you don’t know how old people are, but if you’re not sure you could ask or check their blog. Same protocol applies to other shit kids shouldn’t talk to adults they don’t know about, tbh. If you’re not sure how to be appropriate, you can always just block them. Again, this isn’t foolproof, but it would still go a long way.

-Be critical of the media you consume, promote, share and create. And here is the one people are actually mad about/assuming this post means, mostly. Look, child porn DOES include teenagers, it DOES include written/drawn child porn, and if you create or distribute it you’re a pedo or a pedo-enabling shithead. Period. Same thing goes for stuff that romanticizes or fetishizes rape, abuse, incest, etc; this isn’t exclusively harmful to children, but it is exponentially more harmful because kids and teenagers really don’t have the life experience/brain development to consume that stuff critically as adults are supposed to be able to. Being surrounded by that shit and treated as though it’s normal and fine because they’re surrounded by a thousand “ship whatever you want! antis are toxic!” and the general idea that anyone who tells you you’re doing something wrong with your ~fandom~ that they’re AUTOMATICALLY free-speech censoring, pearl clutching Puritan “morality police”. *There is totally grey area here. The #discourse is frequently dumb and opportunistic, and just telling everyone not to consume anything “problematic” is not, like, a good plan in general. Art depicts evil and is supposed to; the existence of a rape scene in a piece of media does not make that piece of media pro-rape. However, there are other considerations: is the rape scene described, drawn, or shot in a way that’s meant to seem sexy and appealing? What’s the metatextual reason for this happening? What’s the context and what happens later in the narrative? This is why you’re supposed to critique the media you like; the most productive thing would be to change the response to “thing is problematic” from “fuck you and leave me alone” to “let’s discuss it and whether it’s ethical to consume/how to consume it ethically”. AND STOP!! BITCHING!!! ABOUT “ANTIS””!! Every time this comes up, every “fandom” blog forgets how to goddamn read because yall have made an environment where everyone who criticizes ANY fandom content is an “anti”, and yall demonize “antis” to a fucking ludicrous degree. E.g.:

(dasjfsaldfda;lka;lj WHAT!! “antis” call out people who are like…legally considered predators as well as reylos or whatever!!! what the FUCK do you MEAN)

-Call out people who endanger kids. I don’t mean just abusers and pedophiles (although it’s difficult enough to get people to do even that much), because you can also endanger kids by being irresponsible and selfish in the ways I’ve described. You don’t need to make a call-out post and start a huge fight, but if your mutual is doing the thing, you ought to point out that they’re doing it and that they shouldn’t. Like…DMs work for this.

-Don’t be a cunt in general. Like…just look at some of the responses I’ve gotten to this:

You know the thing that really surprised me about these people? On the by and large, people aren’t saying “Fuck you for thinking I’m hurting kids” -which is the pushback that I would’ve expected. On the by and large, the pushback I’m getting on this post is “Fuck you for saying I should try not to hurt kids”. Ranging from as mild as “I’m not your babysitter” to “you’re an entitled parent (lol) for saying this” to literally dehumanizing kids by calling them “crotch fruit” or “someone else’s problem”, talking about how much they hate kids, saying “fuck em”, etc. I only grabbed the few most recent screenshots cause I’m ready to be done with this post, but as the months have worn on and I’ve seen the backlash to this post, the outright vitriol people have toward kids is bizarre, and somewhat shocking. It’s normal to not like being around kids, but jesus, people really like to be shitty to kids when they step out of line, when they’re not just going “lol not my kid not my problem”.

That attitude is like, 90% of what I was broadly referring to when I first made this post, and the reason that I keep replying to people on it when I know it’s a waste of time. This attitude toward kids, irl and online, hurts them because it normalizes abusive behavior -or, in the case of Fandom Spaces (which is the direction this post has been taken by self-proclaimed “””anti-antis”””), normalizes abuse, incest, pedophilia, etc. When it’s normal and accepted to say “lol i hate kids, i’m not responsible for how i affect kids online”, it’s way easier to be actively shitty to kids and/or just be fucking irresponsible, which can be similarly harmful in the long run. 

TL:DR: Taking basic steps to be responsible around kids is NOT “parenting” or “babysitting” them, and it’s PART OF BEING A FUCKING ADULT. It doesn’t MATTER that it’s more difficult online; you don’t need to solve the whole problem, you don’t need to stop making porn or never talk to minors online, you don’t need to refuse to interact with any “problematic” media, but you DO need to at least admit your actions have an affect on kids and, well…

Lena: I’m just like so stressed. I can’t figure out this science problem but I really think orgasms would help clear my head...

Your outsize power is inherent to your American citizenship and enfranchisement; so long as it’s a possibility for you to vote in American elections, you can’t disengage from that power. For you, for everybody your choices affect, a nonvote and a vote are actions of equal consequence. No categorical distinction exists between the two’s contribution to the outcome of the process.

y’all should watch Pose. It’s legitimately well-written, it’s filled to the brim with black and brown actually trans actresses and gay actors (and they’re all glorious) and it’s genuinely fun but also moving and it narrates important parts of queer history and queer experiences in the 80s-early 90s, especially for trans women and generally queer culture.

And if you’re at a restaurant and three other tables are having conversations you don’t just automatically absorb everything they’re saying?

AND THE FUCKING THING ABOUT -THAT- WHICH I NEVER HEARD ABOUT BEFORE is that ADD symptoms can resemble or be misdiagnosed as pure anxiety or depression because negative stimulation is stimulation all the same so an ADD brain looooooves to contemplate the mortality of your loved ones and everything wrong with you and wrong with the world and hypothetical future disasters and what people “really” think of you and even that one embarrassing thing you said to a cashier twelve years ago.