i didnt really want to have to touch this post again but theres been some bad faith interpretations of it thst i kinda wanna clear up. i understand why bc this rant was largely made in the heat of the moment and i definitely came off hot in my tone. so let me clear some things up now that my thoughts have settled! (youll probably have to scroll a bit far down after clicking “keep reading” since this post is so damn long sorry)
1. this post is not ageist or adultist or whatever? i understand that i talk about minors in kink here a lot and my tone came off very frustrated but let me make this clear:
there is nothing wrong with minors having curiosity and interests in their sexualities and kinky stuff. not a single thing! it’s healthy and normal and kind of unavoidable in the environment of the internet where it’s so easy to stumble on things and have new feelings about it. that’s fine! teens should be able to express their sexualities in healthy ways and safe environments.
HOWEVER! this cannot be online, public, or on social media! im sorry, it’s just not safe. im not sure why we’ve completely disregarded the basic principles of internet safety here in the name of being woke and “not adultist”, but minors should not be in adult or adult adjacent communities where they are vulnerable to predation. i should not have to say that.
and it’s 100% reasonable for adults to feel frustrated when after they’ve tried to express this and put them on the right path, that they choose to disregard it entirely and create new communities that give them an excuse to engage in their interests “discreetly” while not really changing anything at all. unfortunately, putting “sfw” in front of a few tags does not make your community safe. it doesn’t give you a magic shield or bubble that protects you from bad actors and people misinterpreting your community. in fact, it makes you and the people in your community even more vulnerable when you put up a big red blinking sign that says “minors here! sfw only! dont sexualize!”.
it’s even more frustrating when people come on here and make entirely bad faith and uneducated statements on this subject when they have no idea how these communities even came to be. the sfw agere community was invented 10-11 years ago after SO much discourse and minors trying to push their way into the cgl community. before inventing “agere” these minors tried REALLY hard to have a spot in kink communities because “they weren’t doing it sexually, so it’s fine for us to share spaces.” there was no distinction between the meanings of SFW and nonsexual, which led to the widespread use of tags like “sfw cgl” and “sfw littlespace.” obviously the cgl community wasnt having it. there were years of discourse over this and tired kinksters having to defend their community and say “no, just because you’re not getting sexual gratification from it doesnt make it not a kink. and online kink spaces arent for minors. kink cannot be sfw even if it is nonsexual.”
and thus led to the creation of one of the first (if not the first) “sfw agere” communities. cglre. just cgl, a kink tag, with “re” for regression slapped onto the end. this community was made by minors (and some adults) in kink who defected from “sfw cgl” which was obviously under fire for not being real or a safe place in the slightest. they defined their community as a branch of “sfw, non-kink cgl” (??? which doesn’t exist?) open to minors. nothing changed from the shift to “sfw cgl” to “cglre.” nothing at all. they encouraged and allowed the usage of kink terms like littlespace and little* by minors to describe their “regression”
*“little” as an identifier not connected to any mental health communities, i know “little” is a shared term but they borrowed it from kink in this specific case.
again, nothing changed. just minors in kink who now had a brand new shiny scapegoat to hide behind. minors using the same old kink tags and language, posing in kink gear for photos, having power exchange relationships with their caregivers, etc. absolutely no functional difference was created. except now they could say that they were “age regressing” instead of ageplaying, even though ageplaying and age regressing were never mutually exclusive to one another. they were quick to realize this and soon enough deployed mass amounts of misinformation about kink and age regression (“ageplay is only ever just “pretending” for sexual purposes, regression is never sexual or kinky at all, ageplay cant be nonsexual, age regressed people have the same capacities as an actual real life child”, etc etc). this same misinformation is still so prevalent to this day and has done SO much harmful revisionism to these communities, it’s not even funny. of course we are frustrated.
so when i say that agere “ripped off” ageplay, yeah, i mean it. because i was there and saw it happen as an impressionable minor who also got swooped up and misinformed because of these people. everything i just told you is a firsthand account of events. unfortunately tumblr fucking sucks and the porn ban nuked everything, including the agere community. (funny how even tumblr made no distinction between ageplay and agere communities and wiped both of them. almost like there is no real difference). so yeah, finding real and accurate info about this is going to be hard. it’s no wonder all this revisionism really got out of control.
and the amount of cognitive dissonance is amusing to me, because the agere people will convince themselves that they’re entirely divorced from ageplay, that they have nothing in common with ageplay, that their community and what they’re doing just “naturally appeared” one day. because that’s not true and that’s not how it happened. sfw agere and the concept of age regression as we know it now would not exist without ageplay. their community was invented after years of deliberation and discourse about the ethics of minors in kink spaces online. anyone who’s been around these spaces and communities for the last ten years would tell you this directly to your face. but they don’t listen to us. they refuse to engage with us at all or believe us because the majority of them still see ageplayers as moral failures and unsafe people. for doing the exact same thing they do. of course it’s frustrating and of course we’re all tired.
and one last tangent so theres not even more bad faith interpretations of what ive just said:
i don’t care if you want a nonsexual space to regress or play with your regression or whatever. while i do believe that most of you would be better off just being nonsexual ageplayers, i understand theres a discomfort around mixing these feelings and spaces with one another. sure, whatever, fine. you can have your boundaries and protect your vulnerable space.
i do have problems when you pretend that your interests and community have nothing to do with ageplay, because that’s not true. you wouldn’t have your safe space if it wasn’t for ageplay. even if it makes you uncomfortable you still need to acknowledge that. i do have a problem when you’re doing things that are functionally no different from ageplaying while holding internalized anti-ageplay sentiments and spreading them throughout your community. i do have problems with your communities allowing minors to engage in what is indistinguishable from ageplay on the internet. (saying “nonsexual” and putting a banner on your post doesnt change the material reality of what you’re doing. without any of those things people will just assume youre ageplaying. please remember that.) i do have problems with the belief that your community is inherently safer than adult communities that do their best to keep them adult-only.
thats all. and i understand i should’ve taken time to collect my thoughts and feelings about the situation beforehand instead of posting a heated, very personal rant that could be taken in bad faith. i want our communities to not be so afraid of each other, and i want there to be more objective facts and history about the origins of these communities. it would do both sides so much good to mend the relationship here. most importantly i just want everyone to see ageplayers as people, to be more normal about us, to stop pedojacketing us, and to realize we’re more alike than you think. i know it’s unlikely to happen but we can all take steps to make things better and clearer for everyone.
if youve taken the time to read all of this you dont know how appreciative i am towards you. even if you don’t agree with what i have to say. listening is the first step. so thank you! and byebye again
