Fish Stew

1. Go to https://gist.githubusercontent.com/linuxdemon1/a48530f6ae8a62c89c62/raw/8ba425fc71462ad7a7fdee9d41ae685b329443d4/tumblr_block.js and copy all of the text

2. Go to your blog settings

3. Hit Ctrl+Shift+J to open the chrome javascript console

4. Now paste in everything you copied before, but don’t hit enter

5. Now copy the whole list of blogs you want to block (make sure they are separated by spaces ex: ‘blog1 blog2 blog3)

6. Now go back to your blog settings and hit enter in the console, and paste the list in to the popup box and hit ok

1. Go to https://gist.githubusercontent.com/linuxdemon1/a48530f6ae8a62c89c62/raw/8ba425fc71462ad7a7fdee9d41ae685b329443d4/tumblr_block.js and copy all of the text

2. Go to your blog settings

3. Hit F12 (unless you have Firebug installed - then use Ctrl+Shift+Q, and navigate to Console tab) to open the Firefox ‘Inspect Element’ window and the Console Note: F12 works on Chrome as well

4. Click on the Console tab, and paste in everything you copied before and hit enter (do not put list in this code)

5. A pop-up window appears, titled “Blogs to block”, with a space to enter text and an ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ button below (pictured below)

6. Paste the list of blogs you wish to block into this space, remembering to ensure blog names are separated by spaces

7. Now hit ok, wait about 5 seconds, and refresh your page. These blogs are now blocked!

Is this a troll ask??

i mean this IS Rita Skeeter but I guess that’s what the person is referring to. I think there’s been some other mention of Dumbledore’s brother using “inappropriate charms on a goat” too. I couldn’t tell you an exact quote for that one though

but still, weird ask

-Albus Dumbledore

If CSA rates and loli/shota creation rates are going up at the same time, or particularly with something of a delay but clearly tied together, we really need to consider whether it’s the perpetrators or the victims who are making it. Like. REALLY. Correlation still doesn’t imply causation even if they are going up at the same time or with that delay, but damn.

Yeah. I mean, if there’s a delay from changes in comic production to corresponding changes in CSA rates, that’s pretty damn suspicious. Although we still need to look at underreporting, changes in definitions, and such. But yeah, that would be moderately persuasive.

That article is very misleading and biased in how it interprets the statistics presented in the NPA’s original source, and you should note when the original document says “child abuse” their numbers include all reported incidents of mental abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect. I made a breakdown of the relevant sections of the document here if you care to look at the actual numbers.

If CSA rates and loli/shota creation rates are going up at the same time, or particularly with something of a delay but clearly tied together, we really need to consider whether it’s the perpetrators or the victims who are making it. Like. REALLY. Correlation still doesn’t imply causation even if they are going up at the same time or with that delay, but damn.

Yeah. I mean, if there’s a delay from changes in comic production to corresponding changes in CSA rates, that’s pretty damn suspicious. Although we still need to look at underreporting, changes in definitions, and such. But yeah, that would be moderately persuasive.

That article is very misleading and biased in how it interprets the statistics presented in the NPA’s original source, and you should note when the original document says “child abuse” their numbers include all reported incidents of mental abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect. I made a breakdown of the relevant sections of the document here if you care to look at the actual numbers.

The prospective cosplay drama alone is terrifying, I mean, the fact that Ian Jones-Quartey had this to say as an idealization of a potential Steven Universe con pretty much sums up my misgivings: 

“Yeah, Beach City! Boardwalk style! I really think the best thing for a Steven Universe con would be an open and accepting space, where fans from all sides of the fandom can express their love for it, and there wouldn’t be any in-fighting or judging, or ship wars, or stuff like that. A place where people can all sort of enjoy the show, and everybody can enjoy it in the way that they like the best. And really be together in that love. That’s really important.” 

elentori has gotten into voltron!!

please do not support elentori!!

elentori is a very well known artist throughout the anti ship community (the community that says “hey romanticizing abuse is bad pls no do thnx”)

tw: csa, pedophilia, pedophile apologism, and links to receipts under readmore !!

even so much as boycotting her art means so much to survivors such as myself !! 

if you can, please blacklist her url to prevent her art from showin up on your dash so you dont accidentally rb her art

please inform ppl if you see them rb her art

Even if I didn’t already know Elentori to be pretty cool, this post would have convinced me that Elentori was awesome. You can judge people by their enemies.

Quick reminder: When someone angrily demanded that I look at their “evidence” of Elentori drawing child porn, none of it was even remotely similar. There were several completely non-pornographic pictures. There was one picture that might have been an adult character jacking off, but it wasn’t Elentori’s work. All of the alleged evidence I have ever seen has been of similar quality. There is simply nothing wrong with Elentori’s work or behavior.

This is, as always, 100% about people abusing and harassing female artists they think are too popular. It is not about her actually being bad, or wrong, or anything of the sort. The anti community is angry kids trying to hurt people so they can make friends, and they regularly admit this. It has nothing to do with protecting survivors. First, antis only attack; they never do anything that is not attacking, and that means it’s never about protection. Second, almost all the people they attack are survivors. The anti community consists of people trying to shame queer and female artists for Not Being Pure Enough. (And if you can find me a single example of antis dogpiling a cis male, let alone a heterosexual cis male, I would love to see it. But I haven’t yet.)

If you “inform ppl if you see them rb her art”, you are engaging in mob harassment. Nothing more. It is not going to become okay, it is not going to become non-abusive.

A FAQ about antis a friend wrote for me.

I went and looked over the ‘receipts’ and a ton of the links go to other people’s blog-posts, instead of direct links to something the accused did or said on their own blog or in direct interaction with someone else. The art in question? Safe-For-Work, albeit of a ship that’s all the rage to hate round these parts (billdip). I’m particularly impressed by the link on the accusation of her vague-blogging going to someone else’s vague-blog. It doesn’t get more absurd than that – if I didn’t know that this was deadly-serious, I’d have dismissed the whole mess as a parody of callout posts. 

But I really can’t be amused, because I started digging and do you know what these little shitstains also did, just half a year ago? 

THEY DOXXED THIS PERSON. 

I should be surprised…. but I’m not. Particularly not when belief that one is In The Right and one is Morally Righteous pretty much allows this lot to resort to GamerGate-level tactics and fucking gloat about it, with absolutely no introspection and no hesitation – because why should one hesitate, if one is utterly convinced they’re Righteous? 

look, author scum, if you write about fucked up things you’re either a good little soiled flower (like a piece of bubblegum that’s been all chewed up and used, poor thing, such a pity) or you’re a pedophile and a rapist looking for victims to corrupt and make impure. 

it’s one or the other, so don’t get all offended when we, the righteous anti-smut tumblr activists, confuse the two on the daily. like no offense but you all look the same from down here on the fainting couch. if you want us to stop, just tell us which one you are, virgin or whore, so we know whether to apologize for how we shamed you, escalate to suicide commands, or do both (we like to do both.)

and remember. we are the good guys. it’s inevitable that we will crush a few innocent souls in the name of the greater good. that’s what good guys do.

Nobody wants it all.

This essay was written in response to a personal friend of mine asking, “but doesn’t fictional character shipping that involves two or more underage characters normalize the idea of seeing children as sexual beings, and lead to an increase of child predation?”

My friend’s identity is not going to be mentioned here.

The following is the raw text of my response to that person.

Okay, so, the first thing regarding the misapplication of “normalization” topedophilies, is that it willfully refuses two things.

First, it refuses to acknowledge the actual social status of people with pedophilic impulses. It’s horrendous. I don’t like looking at little kids, hell, all my Questionable Ships are post pubescent anyway, with kids ranging from 15 and up, and I have literally had police reports filed against me. For reblogging homestuck art on the internet.

That’s what happens to people six levels removed from pedophiles.

Actual pedophiles spend most of their lives waiting to die, because their social standing is unbelievably negative- even if they have never done a damn thing in their life. Even if their pedophilia is readily classed as not one but two different severe psych illnesses in every diagnostic manual since the 40s. Even if study after study have shown that getting pedophiles psych help makes the world safer by reducing victimization rates and teaching people how to control themselves safely.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/16/how-germany-treats-paedophiles-before-they-offend

Literally, normalization of pedophilia instead of demonization, would make a safer world, because people could get help.

IDK if you have any experience with intrusive thoughts, but that’s the defining feature of POCD, the less common of the two pedophilia disorders. Sufferers of POCD have both the lowest rates of child abuse, several times lower than the general population, and some of the lowest quality of life. Because they are pedophiles, because their brains are wired wrong and they literally cannot seek help because the act of seeking help is literally illegal in most countries. Basically the only place where there’s psych laws in place to protect nonoffending pedophiles and let them get help is Germany.

http://louisvilleocdclinic.com/pocd.php

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/culturally-speaking/201212/could-i-be-pedophile-the-worst-kind-ocd

http://www.ocdspecialists.com/pedophile-ocd/

For sufferers of PD, pedophilia disorder, the more common of the two, there are basically two ways that people deal with nonoffenders. The first is sexual therapy that gets them to associate children and subsequent arousal with extreme pain, nausea, etc, through the use of various aversives. This has been shown to work, but at the cost of quality of life. It doesn’t actually teach pedophiles how to deal with their dangerous urges or improve their quality of life, it just makes them “safer” by making them experience trauma reactions any time they are near children.

Imagine giving yourself PTSD specifically so that being in a room with a child makes you suffer a severe flashback or panic attack. That’s the goal of aversive therapy for nonoffending pedophiles. It’s really pretty fucked up. 

Unsurprisingly, rates of self harm and suicide are sky high. (In fact, these are the exact same techniques used in Conversion Therapy, because of course, non-straight orientations used to be classes as paraphilias too, and unsurprisingly, it has the same kinds of violent, traumatic outcomes).

http://www.livescience.com/17519-treating-pedophiles-therapy-challenge.html

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/291419-treatment#d9

And the alternative style of therapy is to practice risk reduction, impulse control, and safe outlets. It’s a group therapy system primarily practiced  in Germany. And it is wildly successful. By giving people supportive environments, psych tools to resist impulses, the safety to freely discuss their lives, and the comfort to associate genuinely harmless articles such as lines on a piece of paper which have never in any way been related to an actual child- a situation in which there is no victim- safe outlets are provided that improve overall quality of life, and make it possible for those impulse control and risk reduction strategies to work.

https://www.dont-offend.org/story/85/3885.html

https://www.dont-offend.org/story/84/3884.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25471337

Now, of course, this entire thing focuses intensely on the people who do an actually nonmajority of CSA offenses. The majority of offenses are opportunists (people who see that children make ideal victims because they have no power to fight back, rather than because of an attraction), and other children/teens. The kinds of people who actually would consume artistic depictions of fictional characters in underage sexual positions make up well under half of offenders.

http://time.com/3486493/preventing-child-sex-abuse-stephen-collins/

http://www.themamabeareffect.org/understanding-abusers.html

http://www.smart.gov/SOMAPI/sec1/ch3_typology.html (Note: Do not confuse high likelihood of recidivism, that is to say “doing it again”, with likelihood of doing it at all, which is significantly lower).

For that matter, some 90% of pedophiles don’t engage with artistic content depicting underage sexual activity anyway:

http://www.fairplayforchildren.org/pdf/1299571820.pdf

The vast majority of such people are people dealing with trauma.

Which brings us to the “shipping to cope” argument. First of all, tagging on a disclaimer that says “oh, except you, you’re not disgusting” is a ridiculous abuse tactic, and I thank you for never pulling that shit where I can see it.

Secondly, this is a mechanism that has been both self prescribed and suggested by doctors for decades, to help explore trauma in a nonthreatening way, and come to terms with it, and it works. Taking those tools away from victims without very very strong evidence is just fucking spiteful. And there is no strong evidence.

http://www.hektoeninternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1896

http://www.amazon.com/forum/ptsd?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx62GYT1V24VKV&cdThread=Tx33CSP68UPC9F0

http://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/334/6/Exploring%20taboo%20issues%20in%20professional%20sport%20through%20a%20fictional%20approach.pdf

Thirdly, by limiting content consumption and creation to only survivors, instead of majoritiatively survivors, as has always been the case, we end up in a situation where there is no supply and huge demand. In addition, we create the notion that the only people who engage with this kind of media are severely broken, which makes the beneficial aspects of it less fucking beneficial. Nonsurvivors and the normalization of “dangerous/bad ships” is one of the things that makes it such a powerful tool for recovery.

That’s not to say it shouldn’t be tagged, filtered and sequestered, but rather, that accessing these sequestered areas should be fucking free and easy, not heavily restricted by a bunch of people who want you to whip out your entire history of trauma so they can decide if you’re good enough.

Which is ANOTHER thing that happens, btw. And another thing that most survivors can’t actually fucking do, because for so many of us, a major component in that trauma is telling parents, teachers, pastors, whatever, and not being believed. Why would we ever tell some fucknut on the internet.

http://www.vachss.com/guest_dispatches/grooming.html

Now, there’s the grooming argument. The claim that people will use porn of fictional characters the child likes, to ensure that the child has sex with them. First of all, there has never been any evidence that this occurs with any frequency. When it comes to grooming, the two most common methodologies are leveraging your power as an adult (because I said so) and bribery (If you play with me, you will get a new toy after).

http://laurelhouse.org.au/?page_id=36

http://www.pandys.org/articles/sexualabusegrooming.html

https://victimsofcrime.org/media/reporting-on-child-sexual-abuse/grooming-dynamic-of-csa

http://www.vachss.com/guest_dispatches/grooming.html

Between those and the fact that the amount of stigma surrounding child molestation means that children are never fucking listened to when we tell “responsible adults” what is happening to us, there’s no need for child abusers to go around scouring deviantart and tumblr for pictures of IDK Steven and Connie fucking. It’s a ludicrous amount of effort for a near zero payoff that could be much more easily achieved by just saying “do what I tell you, I’m an adult.”

I have heard of one, one person for whom fanart porn was a factor in their grooming, and it was only barely a factor as compared to threats of punishment from the adult in the scenario.

By far a more efficient use of everyone’s time, rather than stealing tools away from people who need them to recover from trauma or prevent inflicting that trauma on children, would be to actually listen to children. To actually listen to survivors who need these communities to recover and live with themselves. To listen to doctors who are keeping their patients from destroying children’s lives by giving them safe outreach. By listening to children when they say that their babysitter is making them do weird shit.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/overcoming-child-abuse/201404/10-reasons-why-parents-dont-discuss-child-sexual-abuse

https://1in6.org/men/get-information/online-readings/others-who-were-involved-or-not/why-do-adults-fail-to-protect-children-from-sexual-abuse-or-exploitation/

But instead of doing things that actually reduce rates of harm, there is a strong focus on doing things that look helpful but aren’t.

Oh god I didn’t even get into the “hiding” argument either. Okay, just briefly.

A society that demonizes pedophilia as inherently evil instead of as a disease for which there are effective treatments, and which makes those treatments illegal instead of embracing them as valuable tools, creates a situation in which people who have this disease learn to hide.

They become immensely adept and secreting themselves away in the darkest corners of the internet and never letting anyone know in public.

And that means that when their control inevitably snaps under the severe pressure of the social stigma, the lack of assistance, the drain of their disease, they already know how to hide.

It’s literally making the problem worse, by equipping the people who should have the least access to secrecy and illegal tools, with the greatest imperative to get them.

Okay, I think that’s a brief explanation of everything that we need to get into.

POCD isn’t “just a tumblr thing”

the belief that people should feel safe and secure when seeking treatment for a mental disorder isn’t “just a tumblr thing”

You know what IS “just a tumblr thing?”

harassing people for drawing something you don’t like. sending death threats over fictional ships. accusing people of rape because of a sketch or a bit of writing. Screaming about being triggered and making your panic attacks public, but never taking any measures to help yourself or protect your mental health. the idea that any public website is a safe place for you and you alone. the idea that your comfort overrides anyone’s right to express themselves however they wish without being censored.

As someone who frequents tumblr, twitter, various chat sites, and even reddit, I have never seen anything near the level of hostility and fear that permeates tumblr. I have never seen people become so violently angry over fiction and yet never step away from the computer to calm down.

This is not normal. Tumblr is like a pocket universe. The rest of the world doesn’t act like this, nor is it at all acceptable for people to act like this in the real world.

This culture of callouts and witch hunts and mob mentalities exists within a bubble.

You can ship characters for happily ever afters, sure, you can ship them for tragically-then-happily, you can ship two or three or four or more, you can ship endless combinations of personality types and relationship dynamics

but you can also ship characters under very specific circumstances, or for a certain period of their life but not for all of it, or only in a certain universe. You might say “I ship these characters” and what you mean is you think they are fascinating together and could have a story together. That story could be any kind of story. 

Sometimes it means you want them together for the rest of their lives. Sometimes it means something different than that.

I mean, I don’t know who “we” are, here, but I’m pretty sure we don’t say that all art where a gay woman dies is bad art, and we also don’t say that any writer who writes a gay woman’s death is a bad person.  We just want there to be stories where gay women thrive, because there currently aren’t enough - in particular we want those stories to be large and expensive and distributed in the mass media, because for us those are the stories that count.   We want this in part because representation is important and people need to see people like themselves succeeding in order to believe that they themselves can succeed, and in part because watching the same thing happening over and over again in every show on TV is boring and dumb.   We don’t want every story about gay women to have a happy ending, either, because that would be condescending and othering and unreal, and, eventually, equally boring and dumb.  We are just currently starving for stories that aren’t tragic, and fighting a culture that makes tragic stories the norm.

It’s a subtle point, because of course fiction has moral heft to it, whether it’s a Pulitzer Prizewinning novel or a series of files in someone’s Folder O’Shame labeled, respectively, alsdkjflsk.txt, wtffffff.doc and trash.jpg. But it’s one thing to call bullshit on Disney for serving up the same reheated pap year after year – and quite another to ride herd on some fan artist who isn’t taking oxygen, or for that matter cold hard cash, from anyone else in the room.

The question of fiction depicting acts that are blatantly immoral, by any reasonable standard, is on its face a tough one. (Less so in fandom, where, unlike in culture at large, most of the egregious shit is tagged.) None of us are Free Of Sin, indeed – and when you capitalize those words, you use a meme as a lever to distance yourself from the ugliness that lurks there, the whole thing becomes a joke. But it’s true. We are frail and fucked-up creatures, and the art we create can’t fail to be so as well.

Thing is, once you accept the premise that all art – good or bad – must pass the test of moral purity, you’ve got to commit. You’ve got to throw all the poets out of the Republic. You’ve got to stick your flag in the sand and declare that talking about a thing is on a moral level with doing it. (It’s not. I will fight you.)

I’m not going to stand here and claim with a straight face that fiction doesn’t have an impact on people. I personally fucked myself up right good at a tender age by reading a bunch of deeply misogynistic old-school sci-fi and fantasy, and I’m grappling with that to this day. But if I had a redo, I wouldn’t burn the books – they’re part of the road so far, and they’re precious to me. I learned from loving them, and from being forced to read the things I love with a more critical eye. And for what it’s worth, I believe that this sort of conflict, in a human soul, is the irritant that sometimes produces a pearl.

This is already much too long. But I’d like to point out also that the current round of purges in my own little corner of fandom is giving me some heavy lesbian-feminist deja vu. Have a quote from Leslie Feinberg, who had the temerity to be butch in the 70s, when gender roles were considered deeply, embarrassingly, immorally un-feminist. And one from Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out Of Carolina, who used to get picketed and harassed and doxxed at readings by feminist anti-porn activists.

“They drove us out, made us feel ashamed of how we looked. They said we were male chauvinist pigs, the enemy. It was women’s hearts they broke. We were not hard to send away, we went quietly.”  – Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“The conference was designed to look at a complicated notion of sexuality and the whole design was about pleasure and danger, so they wanted to talk about all of the harm and the danger that exists around sexual issues for women. And they also wanted to talk about why sex and sexuality could be a source of power, authority and pleasure.

Well, this was also 1981 and that was exactly the part of the discussion that was not supposed to be happening. When the Women’s movement was essentially, the —- was the anti-pornography movement. And it was not simply that there was a —- of notions of what you were supposed to be saying about porn or anti-porn or any of that. The dominant notion was that we can’t take care of all that until we take of this problem. Therefore, we can’t talk about lesbian relationships, or incest. Everybody’s gonna have to refrain from enjoying sexuality or women’s pursuit of sexual pleasure, or heterosexual women teaching heterosexual men how to actually make them have an orgasm. We can’t talk about any of that until we stop pornography and stop violence against women. These are the only two subjects we can discuss about sexuality… …It turned into a nightmare. I know people who lost their lives because of that conference. A lot of people lost their jobs. Plenty of people had nervous breakdowns, left town, disappeared. I wrote poems.”