Je ne sais quoi

That’s why we used it.

I don’t think people who arrived after the porn ban understand, but tumblr was BUILT on porn, it was advertised as a porn-friendly social space. It was famous for its porn.

It was a place to go and be among other adults and enjoy both sexual content and just vibing.

The pseudonymous accounts contributed to (comparatively) more pro-social behaviour.

So it attracted people who liked to be open about their sexuality, including but not limited to queers, feminists, trauma survivors, anyone routinely desexualized by society such as the disabled and people of colour.

It attracted artists who wanted to be able to express themselves freely without worrying about arbitrary content bans (photographers especially; the tits out in a natural setting scene was a HUGE thing on tumblr).

The low skill barrier to posting video made it attractive to indie and homebrew pornographers, yes. Arguably, it was for them. But it was also popular for musicians, especially novices looking for a way to get feedback from a robust but not necessarily hyper critical art scene. For performers of all styles who wanted to sing, dance, or compose about messy, graphic, emotionally intense shit and not worry about being taken down.

The relatively low barrier to making written content made it appealing not just to essayists, comedians and short fiction writers of every niche and style, but to people just wanting to chat about whatever the fuck was going on, whether that was the rollout of cellular data service to their podunk rural nowhere, or the frenemy drama at the glamour-shoot they just did of a coked out urban sex party.

The low barrier to sharing content allowed all those groups to see each other in a way they wouldn’t normally: as vibrant and robustly human. The low barrier to commenting allowed us to interact with each other as peers in a way that fundamentally did not exist (not with that scale, not with that ease) elsewhere.

And all of that, all of is was the direct result of tumblr’s commitment to allowing porn.

Tumblr was a safe space to be sexual, and as a consequence, it grew into a safe space to be fuckin weird.

Weird people make the best art. We have the best conversations. We develop the best intersectional hypotheses.

But it was the porn that built the ~tumblr aesthetic~ we still enjoy today.

And when that ban came around, it was a lot of creeping horror. Because all of a sudden, the entire foundation of the (comparatively!!!) chill, artsy, nerdy, sociopolitically hyperconscious space was torn out from under us, and we were supposed to just like… accept that? As normal?

The weird thing is, apparently, we did. We just accepted that as normal. In fact, many people celebrated it as a good thing. Now people talk about the “new tumblr” as a place that is “returning to nature.”

Every one of the tedious hiccups and user-unfriendly corporate decisions made was put up with because of porn and the fascinatingly complex social spaces it created.

It isn’t just young users & users with christian, conservative, and radfem backgrounds who are cultivating anti-sex subculture; it’s often users who are new to this site, who never interacted with the “weird” porn-based social circles, or who are taking advantage of how the tumblr community at large is moving away from that history- both naturally, and in a very intentional way.

The conversations about how Some Ships Make You Bad and Some Kinks Make You Evil have been happening for as long as there’s been reason to have them, sure- but they’re also taking hold more strongly now, with less backlash, because the people, community, and culture that was built around ideas running intrinsically counter to them have been driven (and are still being driven) from the site.

What makes this especially insidious is that Tumblr has cultivated a huge community of queer people, largely because of that foundation around porn. And because the website as a whole is now shifting in this new anti-sex direction, it’s resulting in more and more queer people adopting anti-sex attitudes and promoting anti-sex rhetoric.

And anti-sex rhetoric will always translate to queerphobic rhetoric, because the ideas inherent to it (some sex is wrong and bad even if it’s consensual, Think Of The Children, we have a right to police consensual sex between strangers, thoughtcrime is real) are synonymous with ideas inherent to queerphobia, and almost always weaponized against queer people.

And all of that, all of is was the direct result of tumblr’s commitment to allowing porn.

Tumblr was a safe space to be sexual, and as a consequence, it grew into a safe space to be fuckin weird.

like when someone asks "how are you," you don't have to respond with "good," but it also isn't necessarily a good context to go straight to "I keep flipping my shit at people I love because I can't regulate my emotions and I'm afraid of them dying or abandoning me," plus if someone isn't used to broaching that kind of topic at the beginning of an interaction it gives them a chance to develop the kind of comfortability to be able to talk about that stuff. some people will reach that point sooner than others, whether it's over 10 minutes or multiple years.

They were us.

Like literally genetically they were US, just like. A while ago.

Like

Would you trust a TV caveman with a baby? Probably not

As long as homo sapiens have existed, we have had the same emotional and mental capacity as you and I do today. You nailed it. They were US. Even Neaderthals existed alongside and had offspring with Homo Sapiens for many thousands of years.

There's much evidence that cavemen would have had complex spoken language, culture (learned information passed down), symbolic interpretation, and I think they most certainly would have been able to handle holding a baby. In fact I have my suspicisions that an ancient homo sapiens mother may be a more present, attentive, and knowledgable mom than I could be today.

Do not let media trick you into believing we are the pinnacle of humanity. Unilinial evolution theory (google it quick I beg) is BUNK, GARBAGE, and the root of so much evil.

So, I used to do night shift security at a college campus. It was a nice spot and I liked that job. I'd work there still if it hadn't closed.

It was on a large wooded property. In the woods there were loads of berry brambles, and in the summer and fall there were SO many raspberries and blackberries to be had back there. So, during my break, I'd take a bucket and a headlamp and go back there and pick a bunch. My boss and the college knew and didn't care.

What I didn't consider was that this meant, since I worked 11 PM to 7 AM, that at like 2 in the morning there would be a seemingly random ball of light bobbing around in the woods.

Behind the nun cemetery.

Because, yeah, see, this used to be a catholic university run by nuns, and many of them were buried in a little private graveyard back by the little chapel.

So from the POV of the students glancing out their dorm windows when they woke up at 2 AM for whatever, they'd see a random light bobbing erratically through the woods behind the nun cemetery some early autumn nights.

They quickly became convinced that the woods were haunted. It took me like, 2 years to happen to hear one of the students in the dorm lounge telling another one about the nun ghost that showed up as a ball of light in the woods sometimes, and how everyone was too scared to go out and go ghost hunting.

The way I just kinda stopped and stood there awkwardly like 'oh. Oh fuck. Oops.'

Some close-up shots from the artist’s website: