I'll get around to those fanfics. Someday...

Back before this site banned porn, it was all tagged with whatever clear label matched it. If you wanted to search for, say, bdsm, you could type that in and find exactly that. And, crucially, it meant you could filter it out, too. Meaning that people who wanted to find that content could do so with ease, and people who wanted to not find that content on their dash by surprise could also ensure that with ease.

But then tumblr banned porn thanks to pressure from the Apple App store, and ----- did porn go away? Nope. It just stopped being labelled as porn. There's still all the same raunchy content on here as there was before -- its just not tagged, or its tagged with euphemisms, or tagged with creative tags that circumvent the bans, or tagged with completely unrelated should-be-innocuous tags like "oceans" or "photography" or "flowers" or etc.

Which not only makes it harder to find, but also, more importantly, makes it harder to avoid.

Nowadays I can be scrolling my dash and get slapped suddenly in the face by a post that is decidedly not G-rated, and its because neither the OP or the person who reblogged it has tagged with anything, meaning my blocklist (which I have in place so that I'm not surprised by a raunchy gifset while I'm scrolling my dash in the work lunchroom, surrounded by colleagues) hasn't caught it and filtered it out.

And the same thing is going to happen on other platforms. If you ban porn, the outcome is never "there is no more porn" -- the outcome is just "porn is harder to find now and simultaneously harder to avoid."

This post was prompted by a random post i saw earlier today which ive since lost, but which was an advert for some """fishing gear""" that looked pretty much like a dildo. And who knows, maybe that item WAS some kind of obscure fishing gear. But it made me think of how, with the censorship and purity culture infecting every corner of the internet, it means we ARE going to wind up with sites that are selling sex toys that are labelled as innocuous everyday items.

So imagine youre a kid and you get suddenly super into fishing, and you're looking into building a christmas wish list, so you research a bunch of fishing tackle. And there, nestled amongst the lures and weights and lines and tackle boxes, is a bunch of sex toys. None of them are labelled as sex toys. Theyre labelled as miscellaneous fishing tackle. Because, unbeknownst to you, the sex toys companies -- no longer able to advertise their wares honestly -- have started labelling their dildos as fishing lures and their whips as fishing poles and their butt plugs as fishing weights. And those In The Know are aware that to purchase sex toys, you need to look up these Regular Non-sexy Products, and you'll find the raunchy products youre after.

But meanwhile, anyone who wants to find ACTUAL fishing lures and poles and weights suddenly has to contend with mislabelled sex toys showing up in their search results.

i feel like the problem with this question is best illustrated by a conversation i had with a friend a while back, where i said something like, "i feel very safe with you because you don't do subtle hints and you are always very straight-up with me about what you are thinking and feeling."

Their mother picked up after them. They were not required to take plates the kitchen or do the dishes or anything like that.

My mother, who would tell you she is for equality, came home one day, sighed at the mess of dirty dishes scattered about, and said, "Gayle, help me pick up."

"Those aren't my dishes," I said. "I picked up my dishes."

My mother sighed again. "Just help me pick up."

"No," I said again. "I didn't make that fucking mess."

She never approached my brothers and said, "Boys, in this house, you take your dishes to the kitchen." She did not tell our dad, "Hey, tell the boys they need to pick up after themselves."

It was, "Gayle, pick up the dishes."

And when I refused because it was not my fucking mess, I got lectured about being difficult.

See also: My brothers--in a classic dick-move of all siblings--figured out they could pop the lock on the bathroom door and throw it open, and I would freak out because I was in the shower and trying to get five fucking minutes of peace.

When I tell people this, they always, ALWAYS, assume I have sisters. They say shit like “oh I’d love to do that, but I have boys” and when I tell them I only have brothers, “oh you must have eaten a lot of burned dinners then!”

Like, no. To both of those statements. Sure we burned stuff when we were younger but we all learned to cook before 13, that was just the age where it became a scheduled chore. You know who did burn everything? My MOM. My Boomer dad did all the cooking because my mum didn’t want to and he was the one to help when we needed it, though my mum did help with prep/chopping things.

Fast forward to now, middle brother can make the best risotto I’ve ever had and my youngest brother is vegan and makes almost all his own meals because his partner isn’t and he doesn’t expect her to make two meals so he can eat.

The worst part of this social conditioning is how bullshit it is. I know this is not ingrained, I know people are teaching their sons to be assholes, and I look at my middle brother in his immaculate apartment with tasteful decor that he picked out himself and I look at my youngest brother who does all the clothes shopping for him and his partner because she struggles with it and it makes me want to just start biting people.

BUT

Also because it's actually necessary to do just to engage with other humans at all or what they make - to be capable of overlooking small gripes, mistakes, errors, even microaggressions to some extent, to not be someone that assumes the absolute worst of every situation and person, and is capable of extending openmindedness and tolerance.

And yet not to be so absolutely naive and enabling to, when someone has repeatedly shown they are unworthy of respect or tolerance or a second chance, that they are either malicious or so sufficiently ignorant it's indistinguishable from malice, keep extending undeserved respect/tolerance/"we all make mistakes"/"all of us can come off creepy/weird in some way sometimes"

Like, there's "yeah, if I turned over all the rocks in this garden I might find snakes, but I see no snakes, and I'm here for a garden party, not a snake hunt."