#exsjw

A bit of a clickbait-y title, but one that is completely true, and an article we should have written long ago.

Tumblr is a form of tumblog. 

Tumblr did not invent this form of blogging, called tumblogging, a form of short, multimedia blog posts. Twitter is a form of tumblog, as is Wordpress. It is generally a public, more casual form of blogging than previous formats such as livejournal and dreamwidth.

Tumblogging, however, was popularized by Tumblr, whose name is obviously inspired by the original term. Tumblr’s company set out to create a platform where an artist’s original content could easily be shared and spread. The entire website’s design and code ethics are primarily built to help spread someone’s content far and wide, much farther than was previously possible on the internet. It worked by promoting your content to others who might like it, allowing you to tag it for finding in a search engine, and for your fans to easily share it with others. All without the trouble of having to save images to your hard drive and repost elsewhere. This was like something never before seen on the internet -- effortless boosting of your work.

And Tumblr still functions, and sets out to function, for this sole purpose. Tumblr’s design ethics have always been focused on promoting artwork and artists. It’s login screen shows artwork from promoted artists, the dashboard is suggesting new artists you might like, and there’s no privacy features to speak of. I mean, why would there be? This isn’t facebook.

But, if you are like any other user, you know that tumblr isn’t just use to promote artists. If you were like our mods, you long used tumblr as a sort of personal -- yet public -- diary. Even like an instant messaging platform. And if you’ve been here a while, you remember how much of a struggle it was -- and still is, to get the tumblr staff to acknowledge how people Actually use the website. We had to use extension, and still do, in order to make the website bend to our will -- to make it function how *we* wanted it to function.

But Tumblr was never meant to function how we wanted it to function. 

Discourse. We’ve all seen it, and unless your mutuals are the ones making the discourse, then the posts you’ve seen on your dashboard have likely piled on tens of thousands of notes in the span of a few days. That’s exactly what the platform was meant to do -- boost posts.

But no one in the tumblr staff expected it to be a weapon of political war.

If you have an opinion, and you post it on tumblr, how much it’s seen by other people is directly correlated to how many followers you have to begin with. Even tagging it doesn’t really help. Post an opinion that is as well planned and thought out as one with 10k notes? If you only have 5 followers, it doesn’t matter. Your words are essentially meaningless without the sheer numbers required to get it airborne.

So on this platform, no matter your opinion, if you have the follower-base, you will be heard. That’s what this platform is for.

Or, say, you make a post. A deeply, personal post. On a sideblog with 2 followers. And someone manages to find this blog... and reblogs a post to their blog with 5000 followers... one you meticulously tagged #do not reblog.

It’s now being seen by 5k+ people. All at once. No matter if their followers think it was messed up that they reblogged you. They’ve seen it. There’s no unseeing your personal, private post. Even if that person apologizes for reblogging it and deletes the reblog. But there is no undoing that reblog. People have seen it. It will always be seen.

There is no true privacy features on tumblr to speak of. Nothing to the depths and levels of livejournal, and now even twitter has far more robust privacy features than tumblr. An yet... Tumblr’s users expect privacy, because they expect the entire world to be good just for them, to respect their privacy... and if they don’t, it’s not the fault of the person who posted these things on a website built from the ground up for the publication of content, not the opposite.

And this has had dire consequences.

While of course there are many adults using tumblr, adults who have had the experience of the internet before tumblr -- a time when privacy was something we acknowledged was personal responsibility, and there were websites with intensive privacy features such as livejournal if we wished to speak privately -- we must keep in mind that many of tumblr’s users, are in fact *not* adults. People who have grown up where tumblr was their first major social media site. Even people who their first friends were made on tumblr.

People whose entire worldly experience of socializing is a website where there is no true privacy. People who have never known that there is any alternative.

And I feel this is where a lot of anti-sjw discourse or ex-sjw discourse falls flat. Many people, most of these being adults, do not stop to think what of an astounding impact this website and its blogging format is having on young minds still forming. They chide them for being stupid and not knowing better -- but how could they know any better?

How could they know any better when their introduction to the world’s social stage was a website where no one can expect true privacy, and not only that, users actively deny it to each other?

I’ve seen popular blogs reblog posts from private blogs without their permission because they, in their minds, thought they were doing the right thing. That because this post contained something they disagreed with, they were allowed to go against their morals for the greater good.

Tumblr’s youth have built a surveillance culture.

A culture where trespassing into other’s personal space is deemed as holy and pure because of some other reason they could have possibly just made up. And many children here don’t know that there is any other alternative.

Back when facebook was new, it was heavily criticized for the increasing information it demanded from its users. Personal information that you would not give to a stranger on the street. And back then, people laughed it off. Of course facebook wouldn’t go very far, demanding such personal information from its users. People were smarter than that... right?

Fast forward half a decade later. I’m remaking my facebook account, because one day I accidentally logged out, and when I tried to log back in, facebook decided to permanently lock my account unless I coughed up my social security number so they can prove I was a real person.

My social security number. One of the most vital and personal pieces of information I have. To a website, who demanded it so I could continue to speak to my family members online, because facebook had become the only place I could easily contact them. And when I told my family about this, they had just shrugged and said facebook had done the same to them, and they just complied.

Extreme? Yes.

But at least facebook doesn’t demand a list of every single one of my mental illness diagnoses, my genetic racial makeup, my sexuality and gender identity, my opinions... in order to feel safe from other users while using its website.

Tumblr’s youth expects you to carry a detailed form of ID to even be allowed to form an opinion on specific topics.  Tumblr’s youth tells you that privacy is of utmost importance -- unless you say something that upsets them. Then you’re free game.

Most of this could have been avoided if Tumblr had had privacy features built in from the get go.

You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you. - The Oatmeal

7 Ways Social Justice Language Can Become Abusive in Intimate Relationships

February 17, 2016 by Kai Cheng Thom

There aren’t a lot of things I know for certain in this life, but there is one thing I have known for a long, long time: What lives at the heart of abuse is fear – and the power to turn that fear into violence and control.

When we live in fear, when all we have known for all our lives is fear, we are capable of transforming even the best causes and ideas into weapons of abuse – even the cause of social justice.

Let me tell you a story to show you what I mean: A few years ago I took a deep breath, looked one of my closest friends in the eye, and told him that I thought he should stop beating up his boyfriend.

He blinked at me in surprise. He shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what I was saying. Then he said, “But it isn’t abuse if I hit him. I’m more oppressed than he is.”

It was my turn to shake my head in disbelief as I struggled to get a grip on what was happening, what was true, what I believed, what my responsibility in the situation was.

It was true that my friend was, on a systemic level, “more oppressed.” He was racialized, and his boyfriend was white. He was raised in a working class family, and his boyfriend was upper middle class.

Like me, my friend had grown up knowing trauma after trauma as a result of systemic oppression, while his boyfriend had lived a life of relative privilege.

In feminist and social justice communities, intimate partner violence, or domestic abuse, is usually understood as the violent use of power by one partner to control and terrorize the other.

Feminism, anti-racism, queer and trans advocacy, and other kinds of social justice-based thinking also recognize that people of certain identities – for example whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality – are given greater power and privilege in society.

Because of this social power imbalance, social justice communities tend to believe that it is much easier for men to abuse women, white people to abuse people of color, and so on. Social statistics on intimate partner violence support this belief. And this is what I have always believed, as a feminist and activist.

But in that moment with my friend, I was forced to wonder, does this mean that a “more oppressed” person can never be responsible for abusing a “less oppressed” person? Can a woman never abuse a man, or a racialized person a white person?

And how many times had I, in moments of fear, terrified of being abandoned yet again by a white, cisgender male partner, resorted to using the only power I had – the language of feminism and social justice, words that had given me strength and saved my life when no one would – to try and seize control of my relationships?

“If you leave me, then you’re just as racist as all the other white gay boys. You don’t want have sex with me anymore because you’re transphobic. I’ll scream at you and call you whatever I want – don’t tone police me.”

The thing is, I believed those things when I said them, believed them with all my traumatized, terrified trans girl of color heart. A part of me still does.

Because it’s true that social oppression plays itself out in romantic and sexual relationship. Too often, privileged people hurt and exploit their marginalized partners and are never held accountable for their actions.

But there is a difference between expressing oppressive relationship dynamics in order to expose privilege and incite self-reflection, and manipulating the language of social justice to win a fight with your partner.

There is a big difference between pointing out that your partner is more privileged than you and using that fact as an excuse for hitting them.

This conversation is so, so complicated and scary to open up, because it forces us, as feminists and activists, to question the foundations of our beliefs about identity, power, and violence. It forces us to question ourselves and what we are doing, in the world and in our bedrooms.

But I think we need to go there.

We need to look at abuse through a more complicated lens.

We need to learn to understand what is happening in our own relationships not just by ticking off identity boxes, but by deeply and carefully examining specific behaviors and the motivations that can lead to violence.

We need to start looking at the ways in which social justice ideas – the same ideas that liberate and empower us – can also be used to harm and dominate people.

So let’s begin.

When I left SJ I was riddled with anxiety, fear, and most importantly, anger. Anger for the community that had made me whole-heartedly believe it was the sole safe and correct way of life, only for me to eventually begin to unravel it’s long thread of winding hypocrisy. 

When you go through a loss, and leaving a community you once believed was genuinely your family is certainly a loss, you go through several stages. These stages are well known as the ‘Stages of Grief’, and one of the major ones being a stage of anger. You are rightfully angry, as you begin to process the abuse and manipulation of the community you left, of how it radically altered your perception of reality to one very fearful and aggressive. 

The stage after, but as I found, can also happen during, is reflection. Where you start to truly begin to process what you had experienced. And during this... it is not uncommon to seek out the other side, the forbidden fruit so to speak -- the opinions of those that the SJ community deemed as overwhelmingly impure, people you were never allowed to even consider the opinions of as a mere thought experiment.

And I did just that. Angry, isolated, silenced, I sought out many anti-SJ blogs as I could dredge up. And some of these people were complete opposite of my political views. Not only did I seek out anti-SJ blogs, I began to consume and digest the opinions of people who were SJ but had the polar opposite opinions of me.

And it helped. It genuinely, truly did help. Seeing the opinions of the other side allowed me to level out my own sense of reality, my own balance, and find the gray area in between political morals. But during the phase of anger... I became susceptible to the opinions of people who had a strong and fiery hate for SJ or those who had hurt me. Here were people who listened to and agreed with me, people who were genuinely shocked and taken aback by the abuse I experienced. People who listened more than the people back in my own community who claimed they would listen to me.

During this time of anger and reflection, I found my opinions doing complete 180s, seeming as if I became a different person over night. And I lost friends because of it, people who weren’t completely SJ, but more shocked about... how I had completely flipped my opinions in such a short span of time.

And I don’t blame them. I regret it, but I understand why it happened. And it took me many months to eventually work out of that anger stage. To realize... the community I went to was the same thing but with different scenery. That the only reason why they listened to me is because my experiences could be used to fuel their own very black and white hate of the other side.

And that is the danger of the anti-cult. It’s a common phenomenon for people leaving cultic communities to catapult into a cult developed around hating the cult they came from. It happens in all sorts of cults, religious, political, social, etc. It is the result of the anger stage of grief.

That is why this blog leans so heavily on the fact it would prefer to stay politically neutral. While I feel that reading the opinions of the opposite side is a very IMPORTANT part of recovery, you must be careful to not fall back into your same behaviors with the same kind of people under the opposite flag.

If you have ever stepped into the tumblr SJ community, no matter how deep, you may have noticed a common trend -- everyone involved (even only tangentially) needs to be an activist, at all times. Everyone needs to be promoting the beliefs, values and laws of whichever SJ clique they are closest to. To themselves, to each other, to the uninitiated, to those who even beg neutrality and to not be a part of it.

SJ communities are most often made up of demographics, that, for some reason or another, have a reason to be angry for their mistreatment. And these communities develop when they seek solidarity online with one another.

All of these communities start with good intentions. Humans are social creatures, we wish to relate to one each other, to comfort and be comforted. But anger is contagious. Fear spreads like wildfire. And the community that once existed to allow an outlet for venting their frustrations becomes a very rigid social hierarchy, with expectations of behavior and conformance. 

Like many other teens, I was personally attracted to tumblr due to the ability to relate to others my age about my own personal problems, mental health and demographically related. We would share stories, opinions, insights, ideas, news articles, etc, about the relevant topics. But then there came a point... and honestly, it was such a gradient, like a frog being boiled alive in a pan, that I could not tell you exactly when the change happened. But there was a point that I found myself incapable of escaping the always-on, always-angry dialogue of my specific demographics. And not only that, if I were to not also promote the information through discussion or reblogs, I was being... well, bad.

The anger, hate and fear of other demographics began to spread to my own bubbles of SJ. Me, as a “higher” demographic (and if we speak moral hierarchically, i was technically lower to them), was expected to reblog and boost information about an event and the empowerment of a demographic i could not relate to without my consent or thought to my well-being, or i’d be considered against the demographic that was currently morally commandeering my blog, my thoughts, my energy, as if my own personal space was a rentable billboard for whichever troubled demographic demanded it.

Heaven forbid I needed to take a break from this always-on activism and discourse boosting. I couldn’t escape it online, and I couldn’t escape it offline either.

Discourse commandeered my brain. I could not watch a movie, play a game, talk to someone offline, etc, unless I was always hyper analyzing every piece and word of it, giving disclaimers with every instance that I did not support such thing, or needing to correct someone, etc. It was stressful to everyone around me, but more so, it was stressful to me.

My anxiety was at an all time high. If I found myself enjoying a show that had dark humor that, in one scene, made fun of some demographic, I would be riddled in guilt for days for even watching the show to begin with. People I enjoyed for one reason or another became people I could not be around mentally due to some problematic word in their vocabulary or associating with some impure media or video game.

I could not escape the activism of my blog. The activism that the SJ community forced upon me. I had developed compassion fatigue, and going on my dashboard daily to reblog discourse felt like a chore, but a required one.

And this is all... ironic to me, in retrospect, because even now I fail to cope with day to day life as a mentally ill adult, even past all this discourse. 

Tumblr SJ expected the legs of a marathon runner from those too weak and tired from their own disabilities and demographics. To expect everyone to fight for them, no matter the status of their own mental or physical well being.

No matter if the only thing these people want is to simply exist without being noticed. But now, none of us can go stealth without entirely shedding and burying our beliefs and opinions.

This reads very much like a Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd: Grandma email, but it describes a very important phenomenon and was linked to me during my recovery from someone who witnessed my abuse in the SJW community. I have since begun linking it to other friends who are also leaving.

The post describes the development, function, and effect of culture-based shaming, and while most of it is written with the family model in mind, tends to imply to any group or culture you feel afraid to ‘betray’... the SJW community fitting into this category quite well.