Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

I then ask, "what would it be like if you could simply give us feedback, have us graciously receive it, reflect, and work to change the behavior?" Recently, a man of color sighed and said "it would be revolutionary."

I ask my fellow whites to consider the profundity of that response. It would be revolutionary if we could receive, reflect and work to change the behavior. On the one hand, the man's response points to how difficult and fragile we are. But on the other hand, it indicates how simple it can be to take responsibility for our racism."

Because as I've mentioned before, homophobic violence and institutional oppression is not unique to Russia. All it takes is one look at gay bashing statistics of both Canada and the United States (where both players spend a significant amount of time) to realize that and get very depressed.

Shane isn't going to get arrested for being gay, but there is definitely a non-zero chance of getting beat up for looking at someone too long in the showers.

And yes, of course, this isn't going to actually happen in a light-hearted romance novel. But Ilya getting arrested and sent to the gulag is also not likely to happen in a light-hearted romance novel. But for some reason, while Ilya's fear is acceptable and textually established, the idea that Shane might have a fear of homophobic violence apparently goes against romance novel genre conventions.

That said, the other thing that annoys me about that argument is that it completely ignores the idea that SHANE could be afraid for ILYA's safety. Not so much in episode one, I admit. At that time, he and Ilya are practically strangers and only just getting to know each other. And Russia has not passed the really scary anti-gay laws yet.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56143249-tumblr-porn

Now if you’re wondering why I felt the sudden need to dredge up this post from 2022, it’s because of a couple other posts I won’t go into now that reminded me of it.

This post is a prime example of how casually and insidiously we can re-write history. When the OP made this post so many people in the notes nodded along, acting as though it were an obvious, incontrovertible truth that Tumblr in the late aughts/early ‘10s was a wholesome safe space for children, and it was therefore normal and natural in the tumblr culture of that time to treat adults as unwelcome interlopers.

But that’s not an obvious, incontrovertible truth.

It’s a complete rewriting of history.

It’s a brazen, boldfaced lie.

Or it would be, if I thought OP were lying intentionally. But actually I don’t thing they were. I think this might actually be how OP (mis)remembers tumblr. OP painted a pastel colored soft focus filter over their childhood memories without even realizing that’s what they were doing. And it’s fine if the way you like to remember something is different from the way it actually happened. But it stops being fine when you start using your fabricated whitewashed sanitized memories as “evidence” when crafting an argument, thinking no one will bother to fact check you.

I’m bothering.

And john green was clearly trying to connect with the teens here, because they were the intended audience of his fucking novels. he didn’t come here to hang out with adult sex workers

Also to be clear people back then did argue that Green was wrong for being in a space for teenagers, but they didn’t mean tumblr, they meant him being a YA author with a fanbase of teenagers, and they used that as evidence of his nonexistent pedophilia as well as the fact that there’s a laughably non-explicit sex scene in The Fault in Our Stars. The nerdfighter fandom has always been populated by teens because John Green is a YA author and he and his brother intentionally kept their content all ages, that’s also what they meant by youth spaces, their own fan space which they weren’t even involved in to an abnormal or unhealthy degree.

(If anyone is curious the evidence against Thomas Sanders was that he once accidentally shared some slightly sexualized fan art of him—something he did I believe on a separate 18+ account with other fans on the condition that they’re adults, which I think is perfectly fine, creators shouldn’t have to pick either 100% kid friendly or 100% 18+ for their content—because the fan in question did not tell him their age and once he found out it was a minor he took the art down and blocked that person, which is all that can really be expected, and also that he did outreach with his former highschool to help the drama students learn about acting and creating videos. One is an unfortunate mistake and the other is just a good thing he did?? But both were used to drum up pedophilia accusations which again, were cover for the true reason people hated him, he didn’t hate ace and aro people.)

People also accused Green of being weird about women for writing Paper Towns because there’s a girl who’s a manic pixie dream girl so obviously he’s a misogynist….but the book was directly and explicitly deconstructing and critiquing the manic pixie dream girl trope and the way men often see the women they’re attracted to as objects and not people—like I can point to the exact passage in the book that is just Green looking at the audience and saying “women are people and you don’t own someone because you like them” I have it highlighted—so anyone claiming that the book was the opposite just can’t read but even then, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t true, it could be used to paint him as a monster so it’s fine to lie about something as blatantly false as this.

The only real valid criticism I ever saw was that The Fault in Our Stars was antisemitic for the bits about the Anne Frank house, which I agree with, but that was heavily drowned out by the pedo stuff so not only did this movement nearly destroy a man over fucking nothing, it prevented a genuine criticism of his writing from being brought up and addressed. It was unfair to Green, who should be made aware of this and be given a chance to apologize and make it right in any way he can, and to his jewish fans, who deserved to talk about how they were harmed and have that harm addressed, but it all got ruined by a bunch of bigots being assholes for no reason.

Also this was ableist harassment on top of it all, John Green has never been secretive about his struggles with OCD and accusing a man with FUCKING OCD of being a pedophile when you know you’re lying is horrific ableist violence. That’s part of the reason he left and as someone with OCD I genuinely think people chose this to attack him with because they knew it would do the most harm to him professionally and mentally. It was extremely ableist and as far as I’m concerned the only person who should be able to make jokes about what happened is him. Everyone else should stop treating this situation like there was anything even remotely funny about it because there wasn’t, it’s not funny to harass a mentally ill man and YA author with false accusations of pedophilia, that could have legit ruined his career and life. I’m glad it didn’t.

So anyway, aside from the one extremely valid complaint that got ignored, the real reason people suddenly hated John Green was that he was an ally to aro and ace people and back then being an ally was a social death sentence, especially on tumblr. The reason no one remembers this is because former ace/aro exclusionists have done a marvelous job of convincing everyone that “ace discourse” wasn’t a big deal and didn’t really hurt anyone, especially not anyone irl, but that’s a blatant and bold-faced lie designed to protect them from the consequences of their actions and further erase ace and aro people and our suffering. We do not deserve to be remembered, and everything done to us and our allies was just dumb teenagers being silly and not a coordinated campaign of queerphobic violence designed to completely eradicate the existence of ace and aro people and anyone who supported us, and thus no one who took part in that coordinated campaign deserves to be held responsible for what they did.

TL;DR The cock monolog was the culmination of an attempt to destroy a man’s entire career for the crime of being a good ally and saying things that are true like ace and aro people are valid. I don’t even think he said they were queer I think he just said they were valid and he welcomes ace and aro fans, but even that was too much. The idea that it was just teens being teens is untrue, plenty of adults were joining in, tumblr has never been a space only for teenagers, and that wasn’t even the reason people were harassing him, it was because he was a good ally, and on top of all of that a genuine issue never got addressed because people cared more about destroying him than they did actual marginalized people.

Artfight Attack #6!

Featuring Razey by Axiang369!!

Artfight Attack #8!

Featuring Peter Permian by MireyaDC!