#perceived age

Decontextualizing stuff makes the job easier on their end, but makes the results worse on ours. This isn’t anything new with platform based censorship, not in fandom and not in trauma recovery.

Decontextualizing discussions of CSA, for example, is what caused strikethrough. Decontextualizing discussions of breasts is a major contributor to this tumblr purge.

Context fucking matters.

But even if you’re drawing explicit porn of, like, Madoka Magica where all the girls are 13-ish and they look it, the Madoka Magica girls aren’t real people and they cannot be fucking injured or traumatized by porn featuring their bodies because they do! not!! exist!!!!

Yes. While many autistic people seem younger than their physical age, there are also many of us who come across as older than we are. Personally, I’ve always been perceived as older than I am while I think largely has to do with the fact that I was always more comfortable around people older than I am so most of my friends were older. Thus I picked up traits of people older than myself and carried myself in such a way that I was perceived as older. 

Autistic people tend to make friends better with people who are either older or younger than themselves. This is typically because there are less social pressures when outside of one’s age group. People older than you are more likely to give you grace when it comes to social mishaps while people younger than you are less likely to notice social mishaps. I theorize that autistic people who tend to make younger friends tend to pick up traits from these friends and are thus perceived as younger and that those of us who make friends with older people tend to be perceived as older than we are. 

Yeah, I know a dude who is like 25 and people legitimately think he’s 12, which is a mess and a half because as soon as he speaks he inevitably says some extremely Cursed™ shit, and like.

It gets out of hand quickly.

There was a post an author I love made on this subject, a full like 5 years ago.

I had asked her something about why she thought that the age of majority in her dystopian future setting would be pushed up to 23 from 18.

She described the fact that people looking to achieve an authoritarian regime will extend childhood further and further, so that the state has more control over their lives. This can be easier in some ways that traditional “security” related authoritarian over-reach, because people want to protect children more than they necessarily want to protect, like, their neighbors.

I remember thinking, “well, that doesn’t sound likely.”

But she was completely fucking correct. People are desperate to extend childhood, and all the stripped rights that it entails, over as many people as possible in the name of “safety.”

We are indeed talking about that.

There’s this persistent belief among censoring types that they have a magical ability to perfectly identify the actual age of a given person at a glance in every possible circumstance, which is total fucking bullshit.

I new a boy in middle school who was 9 years old (that’s elementary school age, which is one of the age groups mentioned in PFio’s staff comments on this TOS change), who was 6 feet tall, exactly, and had the muscles to match. Every boy in his entire family had hit six feet by age ten for as long back as anyone could remember. It was a small down, so this kind of identifiable family trait meant everyone else knew about it too.

God, you know, I’ve seen people say that before too, but just every single time I see it, I’m gobsmacked by how vile it is.

They never do. The same exact argument has been had with Attack on Titan, Sailor Moon, Harry Potter, etc etc.