Disk Horse

Your characters are allowed to be bad people. Your story is allowed to have no moral lesson.yyour ending is allowed to be sad. The villain can win. The good person can do something unforgivable. The lovers can destroy each other. You are allowed to write the thing that no one asked for and everything that everyone told you doesn’t work and you are allowed to not explain yourself.

The story is called Mother by Philip José Farmer! First published in 1953. I found it in a collection of his stories called Strange Relations while at a big used book store sale and it has this phenomenal cover

I mean look at that thing! And the story was more like the art than I expected! I fully expected the plant to just be a sexy lady at some point.

That being said, I have also found another version of the cover that is uhhhh… more accurate to the story.

purity politics

Sometimes I hate that my "topic I know a lot about so when a YouTuber brings it up that's the moment I realize they don't know what the fuck they're talking about" is pornographic art and fiction.

Some facts to piss off your local commentary channel:

"Pedophile" means you are sexually attracted to children

You can be sexually attracted to children and still choose not to commit CSA (child sexual assault)

The majority of CSA survivors DON'T go on to commit CSA themselves

Assault is more often about POWER than sexual attraction

To wit, the majority of CSA cases are perpetrated by NON-PEDOPHILES

Perpetrators are most often family members, close friends, and authority figures, not random shady strangers

Organizations like The Internet Watch Foundation Hotline and The National Crime Authority have come forward to request the general public please stop clogging their CSA hotlines with cartoon characters. Because the time they waste on false reports could be. Y'know. Spent helping actual children!

This is a big part of why US federal law dictates that an artistic depiction must be "INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM AN ACTUAL MINOR" to qualify as CSAM. That line decides which reports out of thousands deserve/require a tip line's time and resources.

While I'm here: It's not "child porn." The word "porn" implies consent, so the accepted terminology is "child sexual abuse material" or "child sexual exploitation material."

If you didn't know that before now I'm sorry, because I've cursed you to face palm with me every time someone uses the term "child porn" to describe anime art. (First off, it's "CSAM," not "child porn." Secondly, anime cannot be CSAM. Anime is stylized. It's not photorealistic enough to qualify as "indistinguishable from an actual minor." The legal distinction is there for a reason—to protect kids by protecting tip lines, and to protect you by making sure your art, however "pure," can't be mangled into a federal offense by puritanical fuckwits with a penchant for semantics.)

Over 60% of women have had a rape fantasy. If someone tries to tell you your sexual fantasies must mirror your real life desires, by their logic the majority of women must want to be raped. Check out "My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies" by Nancy Friday.

"It’s worth repeating my conviction that fantasy need have nothing to do with reality, in terms of suppressed wish-fulfillment. Women like Julietta (coming up), whose fantasy life is focused on the rape theme, invariably insist that they have no real desire to be raped, and would, in, fact, run a mile from anyone who raised a finger against them, and I believe them. The message isn’t in the plot—the old hackneyed rape story—but in the emotions that story releases." —Nancy Friday, "My Secret Garden"

The human brain is a meat balloon full of electrical wires. We can't expect that shit to "make sense" all the time. It's typical for people to fantasize about scenarios that, if they were to play out in real life, would disgust or terrify them. When you "zap your friend with a laser gun" on the playground you don't (usually) want to kill them for real.

(People always laugh about how us aces and aros "make the best/craziest porn"...right up until we bring up dark fantasies, at which point any ability to separate porn from real life flees their body)

Even when people's sex fantasies DO mirror their real life desires, they can find safe outlets with consenting adults and—again—choose to never act on those desires outside of play-pretend

Loli/shota porn (prepubescent girl/prepubescent boy anime porn) lives under the kink umbrella of power play and age play. "Lolicon" is not a synonym for "pedophile," and "pedophile" is not a synonym for "child molester" or "child sex offender"

The equation of "pedophile" to "child molester" propagates the myth that assault is a side effect of sexual attraction. It helps shield offenders with no attraction to children, and it sends the message that pedophiles are destined to offend (pedophiles can't find help if they don't think help is possible).

There is no link between the type of porn a person consumes and their likelihood of committing sexual assault. This is why the Moms for Liberty: Junior Division types can never seem to cite their sources when they claim "dead dove" porn is a gateway drug.

So what does actual CSA prevention look like? Per the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse: "Community activism to shift harmful gender attitudes, roles and social norms in the general population through multi-year intensive community activities," and "school-based interventions to prevent dating violence or sexual violence, with more effective approaches being longer and focused on transforming gender relationships."

So, BETTER SEX AND RELATIONSHIP EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS, AND DISMANTLING GENDERED POWER STRUCTURES THAT EMPOWER ABUSERS

NOTICE HOW THE CSA CENTER NEVER MENTIONS CENSORSHIP OF FICTION OR ART AS A PREVENTATIVE MEASURE

The actual effects of the campaign to "protect the children" by censoring "bad" pornographic art and fiction:

black and white morality wherein anyone who doesn’t believe/think/live exactly as I do is a dirty sinner Problematic and probably a predatory monster

everyone is a sinner Problematic but true believers people who activist the right way according to my worldview are still better than everyone else, and I will act in accordance to this belief in my own superiority to let everyone else know I’m better than them because I found Jesus am the most woke

casual and fucking omnipresent equations of womanhood with softness/goodness/purity/nurturing to remind every woman who isn’t/doesn’t want to be any of those things that they’re doing it wrong

aggressive desexualization (particularly of women’s sexuality, to the point where it may as well not exist at all) accompanied by pastels [not a criticism directed ace ppl having a right to sex-free content and spaces but specifically targeted at a wider problem resulting from the previous point]

YOU’RE VALID AND JESUS LOVES YOU and neither of these platitudes achieves a goddamn thing

historical context is for people who care about nuance and we don’t have time for either (see: black and white morality)

lots of slogans and quotes and nice little soundbites to memorize but does anybody actually study the source material with a critical eye to make their own informed analysis

the answer is no

I’ve been to bible study groups don’t @ me I know what the fuck I’m talking about

Good Christians™ Nice Gays™ don’t fraternize with/let themselves be influenced by non-Christians those terrible queers

all the media one consumes must be ideologically pure or it will surely harm the children

it is Our Sacred Duty to protect the children from Everything, thus ensuring their innocence/purity/etc until such time as they are idk probably 25 years old

literally just “think of the children” moral panic y’all can fuckin miss me with that

people who don’t conform to the dominant thinking WILL be excommunicated/driven from the social group, and any wrong treatment they suffer will be seen as a justified consequence of their wrong thinking

Let's see, we have:

Our glorious: mommy kink ✅

Their wicked: incest/fauxcest ❌

Our glorious: femboys ✅

Their wicked: sissies ❌

Our glorious: CNC ✅

Their wicked: rapeplay ❌

Our glorious: boys, twinks, femboys, service subs (common theme is that there are multiple of them) ✅

oh no! fanfiction on archive of our own and people who know that censorship is bad and harmful and a fascist tactic (and that fiction is not reality) are now being linked to that monster because they make puritans uncomfortable :(