john green didn’t “deserve” the way that early ‘10s tumblr treated him technically, but I feel like the discussion around whether he “deserved” it or not is completely missing the point. he was an adult in a space that was largely recreationally used by teenagers. why would he not get the substitute teacher treatment. what else did you think would occur here.
Early ‘10s tumblr was the indie porn capital of the internet. Tumblr porn reshaped and democratized the internet porn landscape at the height of the sex positivity movement. There is literally a book about this:
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.
Tumblr was an adult space from its inception. Teens were never tumblr’s primary or target demographic at any point in its existence.
@lierdumoa OP didn’t say it was wholesome and safe? OP said it was used primarily by teenagers and that teenagers acted the way they acted around substitute teachers. There was no implication of wholesomeness or family-friendly shit. And it’s true? Teens were Tumblr’s core demographic. They were cruel in exactly the way high schoolers were cruel. The Social Justice Movement is primarily concerned with the things cruel teenagers care about, like bullying the weak and screaming at each other about fandom, because its architects were all teenagers on tumblr in the early 2010s. Superwholock was all teenagers and Dashcon was attended by teenagers and yourfaveisproblematic was a teenager and Homestuck fans were teenagers. So many of Tumblr’s most famous shit that never happened stories were made up by teenagers who didn’t understand anything about the world to make their story plausible. Teenagers fell for infinite chocolate and teenagers fell for Gan’s Syndrome and teenagers fell for every other fucking thing you can think of. Maybe early 2010s Tumblr was the indie porn capital of the Internet, but it was also the capital of teenager cruelty, built on raging emotions and self-righteousness from people with no sense of scale or proportion or restraint. You’d frequently see teenagers getting self-righteous about the implication they shouldn’t be looking at or writing porn! Like all the time!
Tumblr’s primary audience was teenagers, who behaved like teenagers. That’s it. Anything else about this being sanitized is something you imagined. Tumblr was a high school cafeteria, and there is nothing pastel soft focus about that.
tumblr in the john green age was mostly highschoolers, in fact it was so full of teenagers that it had a perennial problem with child porn in part because these very horny underage teens kept posting naked pictures of themselves on this website. I mean, basically every long time user on this website started their blog while they were minors! source: I was there as one of the horny underage teen bloggers.
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
what a bizarre hill to be sanctimonious on.
So the point here is less about the exact fraction of teenagers to adults and more to point out that this wasn’t purely a kids playpen at the McDonalds and thus John Green being here wasn’t inherently questionable. John Green trying to have a blog for his target demographic didn’t mean he should “deserve to get the substitute teacher treatment”, if that means anything besides “I can say whatever I want about him and you can’t point out that’s cruel”
in the 2010s tumblr was spoken about in news articles in the same breath as twitter and facebook. mainstream political parties, documentary series, movies, etc, had official tumblr accounts. An author having an account here was equivalent to an author having a twitter account, i.e. completely normal.
There was a while where all of the Labour Party’s press releases were hosted via Tumblr
Also if you’re editing your substitute teacher’s statements to make it look like he’s telling the class how much he likes cock and doxxing him to the point where he stops working at your school because you’ve made him scared for the actual physical safety of his family, you should be expelled.
Yeah, this last point is really what is important. Regardless of whether Tumblr was mostly kids, mostly adults, or (more likely) a pretty equal mixture of the two, is absolutely immaterial. The point is that a man was harassed, doxxed, had incriminating false rumors spread about him, feared for his and his family’s safety, all because some people thought he was “cringe.”
The cock monologue was not giving him the “substitute teacher treatment” (whatever the fuck that means), nor was any of the other heinous shit.
#also the cock monologue was just blatantly homophobic too (“haha man who likes sucking dick is soooOOooOo funny!”)#like sorry to rain on y'alls parade but that shit was never funny and was always lame and loser behavior
Also genuinely why everyone claiming it was mostly teens in highschool don’t give ANY citation for that? At least the first reply had a book to show for it.
Yes a bunch of people who still use Tumblr now made their accounts back when they were minors, including me, but also Tumblr was waaaay more mainstream and had adults from the start, and I knew it even back then which is why I didn’t have my age listed until I was older, did y'all really think you were only talking to teens?? Did no one teach you basic internet safety? And all of that to justify bullying a man?
Everyone forget this, but the truth is that John Green’s harassment campaign was a direct result of him showing support for asexuals and aromantics during the early hight of the ace/aro exclusion movement. The minute a mico-celeb showed support for ace and aro people they got accused of pedophilia and harassed endlessly(and the only creators who took part and didn’t have it effect them long term were the ones taking the side against ace and aro people, which says a lot). The same exact thing happened to Thomas Sanders after he was supportive of aro and ace people and his career has never fully recovered, this was a common tactic, because back in the day ace exclusionists frequently argued that asexual people who told kids about asexuality were abusing them because talking about sex with kids is always wrong and the only reason anyone would do it is because they’re a pedophile, and despite that being insane it held sway and worked to convince people that Sanders and Green were both dangerous and deserved the harassment.
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.
It would do us all good to remember that, and if you didn’t know I’m glad I told you, because this is the real truth. It was ableist and queerphobic harassment designed to destroy him which did a lot of harm and 0 good outside of fixing tumblr so you can’t edit other people’s posts which was a weird feature that never should have existed in the first place.
all this is true but also i will circle back to the “Tumblr was mostly high schoolers” and link this post, from 2014, which indicates that 13-17 year olds were a whopping FIFTEEN (15!) percent of tumblr users.
💬 1 🔁 14465 ❤️ 14555 · Age Ranges of Tumblr's Global Audience: Tumblr sees about 150 million global unique visitors monthly. comScore, an
People claiming it was mostly high schoolers are either lying or refuse to fact check their claims. neither of which is a great look.
