Direct Action for Hope

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Michaela Joffe (joffeorama.bsky.social‬):

I know that fascist attacks on "obscenity" and "pornography" are a very dangerous threat to queer people and art, but the idea that all expressions of all kinks must be treated as default value neutral, or even good, as a result is absurd. porn is art, and so it is open to criticism.

you cannot have it both ways. if porn, kink and obscenity is worth protecting, and I believe they are, that means you can't whine and cry foul when it is criticized and analyzed. your desires, like everything else, exist in larger contexts, and sometimes they are homophobic, misogynist and racist.

the idea that all expressions of human desire are equivalent, and exist free from any larger historical, cultural, artistic or interpersonal contexts… that is absurd. why would desire alone be unique in that way? why would kink be different from every other human expression? ridiculous.

[The above are stills of Lisa Diamond talking. Transcription follows: "Often, our fantasies involve things that are taboo, things that are forbidden, things that we feel that we can't express in everyday life. That doesn't mean you actually want it in your everyday life. But there's a lot of variability in sexual fantasies, and they don't tell you anything reliable about you. If you have fantasies that disturb you or scare you, and you wonder what they mean, they don't mean a lot. So, don't worry so much about them." ~Lisa Diamond, feminist psychologist.]

The thing is, the "criticism" the person in screenshots is talking about is not criticism. It's censure. They cherry-picked some of the kinks and fantasies that they knew would cause an immediate emotional reaction in their audience, that would cause a knee-jerk disgust, and relied on that to support their argument. They're appealing to your disgust.

Pornography is art, but they're not talking about art when they say "fantasies" and "roleplay". Those aren't art. Those are people's private thoughts and private bedroom activities--which are NOT, actually, open to criticism. You don't get to criticise what people do in their private homes OR the privacy of their own thoughts, because it doesn't involve you.

Be VERY attentive to the words here. Be very attentive to the motivations behind the choices this person is making in their word-choices. They're being VERY sneaky and using several tactics to make it seem like what they're saying is just common sense, that it's NOT fascist, because they've lampshaded fascism in the opening sentence to make you think what they're talking about is Different. They take care to be saying "art" and "pornography" several times to get you nodding along, before suddenly switching to "fantasies" and "roleplay", BUT using words that are an Easy No and immediately provoke strong disgust emotions in the target audience drawn in by the opening sentence, and so tries to get around you noticing they've switched from the word "art" to the words "fantasy" and "roleplay". Pay attention! Do not let your emotions drive the car and that includes Disgust!

This is sneaky and underhanded and it's how the whorephobic Neo-Hays Code fascism pipeline starts! You are being recruited!

Your FANTASIES? Private thoughts that affect only you.

Your ROLEPLAY? Private activities that affect only you and other consenting partners.

These are not "pornography" these are not "art", and therefore other people who are not involved do not get to have an opinion. It does not matter how "uncomfortable" you are with the idea that literally anything and everything is someone's kink--that's a you problem.

Once something becomes art that is public, you are allowed to offer up criticism, analysis, and commentary. But merely offering moral censure--because to be clear, that's exactly what this is--is not even all that valid to do on art. You can, of course; it's just you getting angry at the art, and saying it offends you and then sometimes it means saying it SHOULD also offend everybody else. But that's just your opinion at that point. Until you actually do real criticism, "this is bad and you should feel bad" is still only at the level of analysis as "well I hated that picture". Okay you're allowed. But it's not critical analysis, it's not commentary, it's not applying any kind of actual real critical thinking to the art.

You don't get to criticise what people do in their private homes OR the privacy of their own thoughts, because it doesn't involve you.

TBH your hypothetical situation is ridiculous because YOU WOULDN'T KNOW. You wouldn't KNOW what someone was thinking in their own home unless you were in their home and they TOLD YOU. And then it wouldn't be a thought anymore.

Nobody is telepathic.

Everyone has had thoughts, fantasies, and ideas that are “problematic” one way or another. You simply can’t measure character in a heap of synapses.

You measure it in meaningful choice. Uncoerced choice.

For what it’s worth, I disagree that fantasies aren’t about very much. I think it’s really normal to have fantasies about heavy shit just like it’s normal to watch media of heavy shit.

Rape fantasies? So, so normal, especially in a society that tells people that everything they do and think is wrong. Rape fantasies aren’t to glorify being raped. They’re a fantasy about having access to sexual experiences without the responsibility of pressured choice in a culture that judges every action — and every thought, apparently!

When you start thinking of it that way, a lot more types of fantasies make sense. Some are pressure release valves for omnipresent racial tension. Some are about struggling or playing with bodily autonomy, about letting out a more visceral and primitive side, about freedom and catharsis.

I’ll critique media (porn) all day long, but I’m reminded of this quote from the West Wing:

“President Bartlett, if children can get porn on the streets for five dollars (I can’t remember the specific amount), is that too high a price to pay for free speech?”

I agree that they mean something psychologically to you personally. They do not, however, define you. They are as you say, a way to explore or react to things.

I know people who have the kinks they have because those kinks turn the parts of their disabilities they hate, the parts that take their ability to function, into something their dom wants.

I have a bunch of my kinks in response to not having enough to eat for the first 30 years of my life. I have others because they're me acting out the fantasy of being attractive and perisex. And I even have the very, very, very, VERY common element of rape in a lot of my fantasies, because of the exact same reason a lot of women do: because I was raised with the idea that "good girls say no and don't like sex" while having a libido and all the associated shaming and censure of my actual body I could not control the shape or size of. I have a medical kink because it helps me take control of my medical trauma, which I have a lot of.

But also?

People don't need to have "a legitimate reason" to have a kink. They don't. Your fantasies don't HAVE to mean anything at all other than you wanna noodle around with this idea for a while! They don't need to be justified because they're your private thoughts.

There is a very real problem that has been seeded, fanned, and spread by the SAME small group of moral police since the 80s that people's private lives should be morally censured, that fantasy is the same thing as reality. I watched it happen with the late-stage Satanic Panic and Livejournal Strikethrough of the 00s. I watched it snowball into FOSTA-SESTA and HORRIBLE regression of feminism. I watched it shut down fandom to almost nothing and make everyone feel like they have to Be Good 24/7 and police their every thought.

You can't control your feelings and random thoughts. You can't. Your brain is gonna do stuff.

The only thing that matters is what actions you take that affect other people, and what words you speak or type to other people. That's it. Your toys don't have feelings. Your private thoughts are private. Your sketchbook and your personal documents are private. What you do in your own home by yourself is private. When you get together with another consenting adult and both agree to play the same game together? That's also private and nobody's business but you and whatever other people are playing with you.

The idea that people's private lives should be subject to ANY outside and especially governmental scrutiny and control IS FASCISM. That's literally the definition of fascism!!! In conclusion:

Obviously NSFW material tends to be exaggerated and non-literal, but people can still analyze it and critique it without it necessarily being censorship. Especially depending on if it’s shared appropriately or not. Is the content in it labeled accurately? Is it being shoved at random people? Is it a sincere personal expression or an advertisement?

I’m EXTREMELY critical of the pornbots that flood the lesbian and trans tags. When a porn category of a marginalized community grows so large that the actual community spaces are affected, then that’s a problem! I care and I think you should, too.

It’s worth considering, when it comes to the sexualization of marginalized people, is this sexualization coming from inside or outside of the community? How is it affecting people within the community? Which NSFW materials put effort into being at all comfortable for community members and which ones are exploitative and harmful? Like, is this content stolen and reposted from community members without permission? That is harmful.

And no, these are not always easy questions, but they’re still worth engaging with. Because there are people out there who will take photos of random trans or disabled people and then repost them in fetish contexts without permission and THAT IS NOT OKAY. And a lot of trans people, women, people of certain disabilities, and others have to deal with sexual harassment from random strangers who’ve fetishized them and THAT IS NOT OKAY. And some of this absolutely connects to certain porn spaces and the cultures around them, and people deserve to talk about that without being called fascists.

Yeah, this is a complex discussion, but I think shutting down any criticism is shutting down the discussion and that’s not okay. That also censors and silences many people.

Yeah, you can have as many fetishistic and bigoted thoughts in your own home and thought crime isn’t real. But how do you treat other people in real life? What do you say to other people? What are you doing to make sure your thoughts aren’t biasing you against marginalized people? Like, you can have consensual fetishes that are technically bigoted and be ethical about it, but you do still have to be ethical in how you treat others.

Your own private thoughts are always your own private thoughts. You don’t need to feel bad for them. The question is, how do you treat others? How do you act in public spaces and how do you treat your partners? And this applies to how you act with regards to NSFW desires and materials. They should not be banned, but that doesn’t mean they should never be critiqued.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

Michaela Joffe (joffeorama.bsky.social‬):

I know that fascist attacks on "obscenity" and "pornography" are a very dangerous threat to queer people and art, but the idea that all expressions of all kinks must be treated as default value neutral, or even good, as a result is absurd. porn is art, and so it is open to criticism.

you cannot have it both ways. if porn, kink and obscenity is worth protecting, and I believe they are, that means you can't whine and cry foul when it is criticized and analyzed. your desires, like everything else, exist in larger contexts, and sometimes they are homophobic, misogynist and racist.

the idea that all expressions of human desire are equivalent, and exist free from any larger historical, cultural, artistic or interpersonal contexts… that is absurd. why would desire alone be unique in that way? why would kink be different from every other human expression? ridiculous.

[The above are stills of Lisa Diamond talking. Transcription follows: "Often, our fantasies involve things that are taboo, things that are forbidden, things that we feel that we can't express in everyday life. That doesn't mean you actually want it in your everyday life. But there's a lot of variability in sexual fantasies, and they don't tell you anything reliable about you. If you have fantasies that disturb you or scare you, and you wonder what they mean, they don't mean a lot. So, don't worry so much about them." ~Lisa Diamond, feminist psychologist.]

The thing is, the "criticism" the person in screenshots is talking about is not criticism. It's censure. They cherry-picked some of the kinks and fantasies that they knew would cause an immediate emotional reaction in their audience, that would cause a knee-jerk disgust, and relied on that to support their argument. They're appealing to your disgust.

Pornography is art, but they're not talking about art when they say "fantasies" and "roleplay". Those aren't art. Those are people's private thoughts and private bedroom activities--which are NOT, actually, open to criticism. You don't get to criticise what people do in their private homes OR the privacy of their own thoughts, because it doesn't involve you.

Be VERY attentive to the words here. Be very attentive to the motivations behind the choices this person is making in their word-choices. They're being VERY sneaky and using several tactics to make it seem like what they're saying is just common sense, that it's NOT fascist, because they've lampshaded fascism in the opening sentence to make you think what they're talking about is Different. They take care to be saying "art" and "pornography" several times to get you nodding along, before suddenly switching to "fantasies" and "roleplay", BUT using words that are an Easy No and immediately provoke strong disgust emotions in the target audience drawn in by the opening sentence, and so tries to get around you noticing they've switched from the word "art" to the words "fantasy" and "roleplay". Pay attention! Do not let your emotions drive the car and that includes Disgust!

This is sneaky and underhanded and it's how the whorephobic Neo-Hays Code fascism pipeline starts! You are being recruited!

Your FANTASIES? Private thoughts that affect only you.

Your ROLEPLAY? Private activities that affect only you and other consenting partners.

These are not "pornography" these are not "art", and therefore other people who are not involved do not get to have an opinion. It does not matter how "uncomfortable" you are with the idea that literally anything and everything is someone's kink--that's a you problem.

Once something becomes art that is public, you are allowed to offer up criticism, analysis, and commentary. But merely offering moral censure--because to be clear, that's exactly what this is--is not even all that valid to do on art. You can, of course; it's just you getting angry at the art, and saying it offends you and then sometimes it means saying it SHOULD also offend everybody else. But that's just your opinion at that point. Until you actually do real criticism, "this is bad and you should feel bad" is still only at the level of analysis as "well I hated that picture". Okay you're allowed. But it's not critical analysis, it's not commentary, it's not applying any kind of actual real critical thinking to the art.

You don't get to criticise what people do in their private homes OR the privacy of their own thoughts, because it doesn't involve you.

TBH your hypothetical situation is ridiculous because YOU WOULDN'T KNOW. You wouldn't KNOW what someone was thinking in their own home unless you were in their home and they TOLD YOU. And then it wouldn't be a thought anymore.

Nobody is telepathic.

Everyone has had thoughts, fantasies, and ideas that are “problematic” one way or another. You simply can’t measure character in a heap of synapses.

You measure it in meaningful choice. Uncoerced choice.

For what it’s worth, I disagree that fantasies aren’t about very much. I think it’s really normal to have fantasies about heavy shit just like it’s normal to watch media of heavy shit.

Rape fantasies? So, so normal, especially in a society that tells people that everything they do and think is wrong. Rape fantasies aren’t to glorify being raped. They’re a fantasy about having access to sexual experiences without the responsibility of pressured choice in a culture that judges every action — and every thought, apparently!

When you start thinking of it that way, a lot more types of fantasies make sense. Some are pressure release valves for omnipresent racial tension. Some are about struggling or playing with bodily autonomy, about letting out a more visceral and primitive side, about freedom and catharsis.

I’ll critique media (porn) all day long, but I’m reminded of this quote from the West Wing:

“President Bartlett, if children can get porn on the streets for five dollars (I can’t remember the specific amount), is that too high a price to pay for free speech?”

I agree that they mean something psychologically to you personally. They do not, however, define you. They are as you say, a way to explore or react to things.

I know people who have the kinks they have because those kinks turn the parts of their disabilities they hate, the parts that take their ability to function, into something their dom wants.

I have a bunch of my kinks in response to not having enough to eat for the first 30 years of my life. I have others because they're me acting out the fantasy of being attractive and perisex. And I even have the very, very, very, VERY common element of rape in a lot of my fantasies, because of the exact same reason a lot of women do: because I was raised with the idea that "good girls say no and don't like sex" while having a libido and all the associated shaming and censure of my actual body I could not control the shape or size of. I have a medical kink because it helps me take control of my medical trauma, which I have a lot of.

But also?

People don't need to have "a legitimate reason" to have a kink. They don't. Your fantasies don't HAVE to mean anything at all other than you wanna noodle around with this idea for a while! They don't need to be justified because they're your private thoughts.

There is a very real problem that has been seeded, fanned, and spread by the SAME small group of moral police since the 80s that people's private lives should be morally censured, that fantasy is the same thing as reality. I watched it happen with the late-stage Satanic Panic and Livejournal Strikethrough of the 00s. I watched it snowball into FOSTA-SESTA and HORRIBLE regression of feminism. I watched it shut down fandom to almost nothing and make everyone feel like they have to Be Good 24/7 and police their every thought.

You can't control your feelings and random thoughts. You can't. Your brain is gonna do stuff.

The only thing that matters is what actions you take that affect other people, and what words you speak or type to other people. That's it. Your toys don't have feelings. Your private thoughts are private. Your sketchbook and your personal documents are private. What you do in your own home by yourself is private. When you get together with another consenting adult and both agree to play the same game together? That's also private and nobody's business but you and whatever other people are playing with you.

The idea that people's private lives should be subject to ANY outside and especially governmental scrutiny and control IS FASCISM. That's literally the definition of fascism!!! In conclusion:

There's some people in the comments saying "fandoms have always been like this" and others saying "No, it's worse than it was." And both are to some extent right. Fans (or at least a small percentage of fans, and the larger a fanbase gets the larger a group this will describe) have always been Like That; but they did not always have the level of access to creators and actors that they have now.

The notion that a performer needs to be constantly available to public scrutiny, that their personal information should by default be available to any rando with google, is pretty new. It used to be that actors would only be expected to engage with the public on limited, specific, and controlled occasions, usually with security provided. Now they're being asked to rawdog exposure to the mob 24/7 on their own.

(Also, production companies have always always always been exploitative cowards, just to get that straight; reading the biographies of literally any actress from golden Hollywood years makes that clear. It's just, again, more public now.)

it would be so awesome

it would be so cool

OP turned reblogs off but as someone with a crazy wicked scar that's been called "body horror" a few times, I really wanted this on my blog

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"