What I Do Doesnt Concern You

4 women that had my heart growing up.

someone once told me - actually, many people have - that lgbt content isn’t appropriate for children. any content. not just kissing. i’m drowned in questions: “won’t the parents have to explain it?” “kids shouldn’t be thinking about sex at this age, or do you think differently?” “what will the kids think?”

at six i saw disney movies. people kiss and get married. i didn’t ask “what does that mean.” i didn’t ask “are those people going to have sex?” i didn’t ask anything, because i was six, and no six year old thinks twice about these things. nobody ever “explained” being straight to me, it was a fact, and it existed, and i was fine with that. why would being gay require a thesis, i wonder.

someone once told me that the one of the reasons people hate lgbt individuals is because they can’t see us as anything but sexual. we’re not people, so much as sinners. that they don’t see love, they see sex. just sex. it’s perversion, not a matter of the heart. only of the body.

i think i was in my early twenties before i saw someone like me. 

how old were you, though, before you saw violence? before you saw sexual assault on tv? i think something like that is only pg-13, and if it’s implied, they can get away with anything. i remember watching things and learning about blood, but knowing sex - sex was what was really wrong. sex was always rated r. sex was always kind of a bad word. i was told a lot that i wasn’t ready.

i had a dream last night that i made a site where people could ask any question they wanted about sex and get answered by a professional. it was shut down in moments because 15 year olds wanted to know if it should hurt, if “double-bagging” was a real thing, if this, if that. we shudder. don’t let the children know about that! 

but at thirteen i had seen enough violence it no longer struck me. i couldn’t say “fuck” but i knew that if you break your femur, you can bleed out internally in under half an hour. in school i wasn’t allowed to write about loving girls because what would the administration think - but i could write about wanting to kill myself and people would say how lovely, how blistering.

i have thought a lot about censorship. sometimes people on this site try it with me: don’t write this, don’t be so nasty. some of it is intrinsic. we know as people with a uterus not to complain about “that time of the month”, we know better than to talk about sexual assault (how shameful), we know that talking about a vagina is somehow scandalous. i can say “dick” and nobody questions me. some people only refer to the bottom half of me by “pussy”. they won’t wrap a mouth around “vagina” like it’s poison to them. even discussing this, that the language halts, that there’s an intrinsic desire to say “girls” instead of “women” - feels naughty, illicit. not for children.

the other day someone suggested i make my blog 18+. i said, okay, it deals a lot with depression and other problems that might be for a mature audience. oh no, they said, that’s not it, i think that’s helpful. i said, okay. so what is it then. well, you’re gay. you write about loving women. and i said, i don’t write about sex often and they said. it’s not about the sex. but wlw isn’t for a general audience. teenagers aren’t ready.

oh.

lolita is recommended for high school and up. i think about that a lot. i know girls who love it, who say it speaks to them on a deep level. it’s beautiful prose, after all. that was the whole point of the novel. something that looked like a rose but was intrinsically awful. i think about how if i was a model they’d want me to look young, thin, prepubescent. how my body would be sold and how through the mall i walk by images of barely-clothed women while mothers cannot breastfeed in public without fear of retribution. 

i think about how i can write a novel about violence and it will be pg-13 but if my characters say “fuck” twice it’s inappropriate. i said fuck three times so far in this post, which makes it only appropriate for adults. 

i think about that, and how my identity is something that people suggest lines up with a swear word. that people shouldn’t talk about it. that it’s a vulgarity. bad for children, harsh, confusing.

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans resort to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

“Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans resort to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

TVA cat fight

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This is basically what happened, right?