The Doctor Is In

I’ve posted this before, but in light of... the fact that this site extremely doesn’t want me to continue using it, here you go:

https://www.furaffinity.net/user/angrboda/

https://twitter.com/doctorboda

https://awoo.space/@angrboda

https://monstrousdoctor.itch.io/

I’m 2/3 of the way through a big renovation to monstrousdoctor.com that is going to add a gallery and a ton of free story PDFs, as well as a catalogue of our pay stuff and links to friends’ pages and galleries. I wholeheartedly recommend that people start looking into making their own sites instead of only using social media. If you do, send me a link and hopefully I can send some traffic your way.

So I'm seeing a lot of people getting (rightfully) pretty upset about the NSFW artist purge that's happening on Tumblr, but a lot of the focus of that anger is on the tumblr staff. You hear a lot of people saying that tumblr is incompetent or that they have a vendetta against porn or NSFW artists. People are wringing their hands wondering where to go and lamenting that any site will inevitably 'turn' on porn, too.

What I don't think folks realize is that the likeliest reason this is all happening has nothing to do with some grand anti porn conspiracy and everything to do with FOSTA-SESTA.

Obscenity laws (the laws that govern the distribution of porn in the US and other countries) are, in general, a shitshow. What does and doesn't constitute 'obscene' porn is and has been pretty vague. This is a problem to the NSFW art community because 'obscene' means 'it is a federal crime to distribute this over state lines, including via the internet'. To give you an idea of how sweeping this designation can be, a lawyer who explicitly created a list of acts and themes for porn to avoid to safely not run afoul of obscenity laws included interracial porn as an obscene topic. This was decided in the far off dinosaur time of... the aughts. For additional reading google 'the Cambria list' or check out our podcast ep on why porn is political.

Garbage obscenity laws are traditionally the reason that payment processors want to avoid NSFW artists. If you've had trouble with PP, it's probably not because of some moral panic, it's because they can't be sure they're not helping you get paid to distribute illegal shit.

Anyway, for years it seemed like this was easing up or people were just assuming stuff was fine and posting NSFW online w/o a care. Then FOSTA-SESTA made it hella worse.

To save you a lot of reading, the core of FOSTA-SESTA is that the law takes away the ability of a website, ISP, app, or service to use the defense 'we can't be responsible for the actions of our users' when it comes to ads for sex work. This used to be enshrined in law, but this protection was explicitly taken away to ruin literally 1 website. It's wild - do some additional reading if you want more info.

Anyway, an additional problem of this is that what constitutes an ad for sex work is very poorly defined. A lot of the porn bots that advertise camming probably run afoul of this law. That means that tumblr is legally liable for all the shitty porn bots, not to mention any real people trying to use the site to find an audience for that sort of business.

Hopefully now you can understand why they're freaking out.

If it seems like the internet has gotten worse for porn in the last 5 or so years, that's because of bad laws passed by people who had no idea what they were doing. This is not unique to the US. The U.K. has an age verification law for all porn coming down within the next year that is likely to be even more of a garbage fire, ESPECIALLY for small sites w/o the resources to comply. It'll also pose a huge security risk for a lot of reasons I won't go into.

Anyway, if you make or consume smut it's in your best interest to know this stuff. Porn is political.

An additional resource I wanted to bring up with folks who are looking for info on how having an unrealizable fetish intersects with relationships is, weirdly, Dan Savage’s columns about vore. Full disclosure, I think Savage is hella problematic for a myriad of reasons (he is... extremely shitty to trans folks), so please take these with a huge grain of salt. That said, these are about as close as it gets to ‘sympathetic’ mainstream covering of niche, unrealizable fetishes.

I listened to his podcast in college (so like... a decade ago, haha) and I remember one ep where he lambasted a caller for being into vore because (and I’m paraphrasing) looking at weird porn on the internet was a waste of time and the guy should’ve been out having ‘‘real” sex. It was a huge bummer, but on the following episode a woman called in and politely and thoroughly laid into him and explained how she would go about IRL play for someone into vore. That was eye opening - I had a moment of being like... oh shit... I could play with TF stuff IRL?!

anyway, here’s some links:

https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=21511425

this has a letter from an 18 year old girl who’s only ever been into vore, asking for advice. Good takeaways: her boyfriend is cool with it, and he wants to play around with it for her sake. I think this does a decent job explaining the having sex while thinking about fetish fantasy stuff angle that serves a lot of folks with unrealizable fetishes decently. Two things I wish he would have suggested: dirty talk and jerking off together.

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/11/16/24695614/savage-love-letter-of-the-day-boyfriend-on-the-menu

This is a question I get asked fairly frequently and that we’ve discussed a lot over several podcast eps, so I’ll condense this to list of suggestions for folks who are trying to deal with the intersection of relationships and TF:

1) make connections within the general kink community. Folks who are active or aware of /participating in kink spaces are more likely to be able to have conversations around what kinks they have and what kinks you have. It’s relatively common practice not to be judgy about another person’s kink even if you don’t share it. There’s plenty of TF adjacent kinks that are fairly popular (Ex. puppy play) so nothing about TF should seem too beyond the pale to someone with kink experience.

2) if you’re in a relationship already, you can still try to establish a vibe of being open and honest about sex stuff. This is so valuable for way more things than TF - making a place for your partner to be honest about their fantasies, kinks, the kind of sex they want, etc. is foundational to having a healthy sex life within a relationship. Model how you would like to be able to talk about your stuff by how you listen to your partner discuss theirs. Try to incorporate what you’ve learned from those convos to make them happy. This is very basic but a lot of relationships are completely missing this element.

Porn is a great tool for this - once you’ve had some foundational convos, try sharing porn with each other. Sometimes you can get a lot of info from your partner just being like ‘‘hey, uh, here’s a hot thing”. The real goal is to be able to talk about why that thing is hot without fear of judgement.

3) [2, but louder] Make a commitment to be honest with partners about your kink. You should not have to spend your life with someone who thinks you are the worst because you like werewolf porn or w/e. Do not!! assume that they will hate you because of the werewolf porn!! and live your life never telling them and secretly resenting them!!

4) Like 50% of furries* are into TF. The furry community is a good place to make friends and talk about kink. Both of my partners are furries. I’m not telling you to buy a fursuit ... I’m just putting this out there.

*five years ago I would have said this was an exaggeration, but it’s increasingly not.

5) Try to be sex positive without being a creep. If you want other folks to be chill with your stuff, be chill with theirs (even if it’s not your thing).*

Monster Manual 2 is finally done and released! You can pick it up here if you’re so inclined:

https://abe-e-seedy.itch.io/morphological-monster-manual-2

This one contains 4 stories:

• The Snow Leopard of the Dancing Lights

• The Goo People of the Great Northern Forest

• The Fighting Minotaur

• The Chimera of the Shattered Peak 

I’ll save your feed - there’s a lot more info at the link. It’s 88 pages, with each story generally being between 5k - 7k words. There’s 13 full page full color illos (9 character portraits including before and after shots, and 4 story illustrations) plus the cover, plus a suite of bonus sketches and character designs.

Shoutout to Kotep ( https://blog.kotep.xyz/ ) for helping us proofread... all of this pornography.

I put so much work into this book, and we’ve already had some lovely feedback on it from folks who dug it. I hope you all do too! 

Literally just finished the cover, haha. I don’t have a date for you, but my spreadsheet says the art is 90% done and we just paid the proofreader to do a last pass on the stories, so it’s not far off. After I finish the art I have to do the layout, which is more substantial for the MM series than most other books.

peach turning into bowser >>> bowser turning into peach