shipper apologia blog

Casual reminder that sex positivity is the political position towards sex, which says that sex is not inherently more shameful, sinful or worse that other parts of life (and actually not better or exempt from political analysis either). As such, it has no relation to how easy sex is for you.

If you never have sex, or rarely have sex, or struggle to get undressed in front of someone, you haven’t failed at sex positivity. If you’re not comfortable in sex-focused spaces or just don’t enjoy them, you haven’t failed at sex positivity. Just like you are no less a feminist if you worry about how you look, and no less a queer activist if you are not ‘out’ everywhere, you are no less sex-positive if sex is a complicated thing in your life.

Your political position towards sex is seen in how you respond to attempts by respectability activists to de-sexualize LGBT identities, it is seen in whether you defend sex-focused queer spaces when their existence is threatened, it is seen in how you respond to sexual violence, it is seen in how you respond to people who pretend that there is no sexism, racism or rape in kinky spaces, it is seen in how you treat sex workers, it is seen in what you do to de-stigmatize STDs in your community.

Unpopular fact that needs to be said now: if you ignored or worse cheered on the constant encroaching censorship of artists and didn’t speak up because it wasn’t the ‘right’ kind of art (your ~pure eroti ca~ art) that was under fire, you’re 100% part of the problem.

The weird ero artists, the hardcore ero artists, the distasteful ero artists, those gross artists have been your canary in the coal mine and y'all decided it was canary season and now… well we may all be in the grave YOU dug but guess what, you’re here too!

Maybe y'all will learn a lesson. Maybe y'all will stop flinging around false accusations for peak woke points and stop censoring art you find icky and artists that don’t peddle only the purest and unproblematicest of smut. Probably not. But a boy can dream can’t he?

The solution always is to speak out against censorship. “But I’m afraid to speak out–” The rest of us who put our necks out and got burned, how do you think we feel? But we speak out against censorship. We defend ‘icky’ art. Because we know the price otherwise.

And if you won’t listen to me because I’m just some queermo who makes weird comics, then maybe you’ll listen to a professional. 

Some fiction explores the baser aspects of the human psyche and openly acknowledges the appeal of ignobility. “Evil” is traditionally depicted as seductive. If there is truly nothing attractive about it, then there is nothing about it that needs resisting. Fiction can serve as a hypothetical temptation - a dark mirror, a litmus test - that the audience confronts internally. Maybe they reject it. Maybe they don’t. Maybe that rejection is difficult because it sparks conflicting feelings. 

Whatever the case, I don’t think all media exists (or necessarily should exist) in a binary of “explicitly condemning” or “explicitly condoning” ideas - instead, it leaves that job to the reader and silently hopes that they will make the right call. Sometimes they don’t - we all know these people. We often avoid them, believing (perhaps justifiably) that falling to fictional temptation is a red flag for an inability to recognize evil or resist its appeal in real life. 

Kids’ stories are usually explicit in their morals because they serve as training wheels for creating good people. You don’t often get truly complicated ethical dilemmas or shades of gray in these stories because most of the target audience isn’t equipped with the experiences to wrestle with them fairly - and when you do, there’s some moral outrage on the part of adults who don’t think kids can be trusted to accurately discern between Good and Bad. I think it comes down to a case-by-case basis; some children are ready for particular tests that certain adults never will be.

P*rnography, which is seen as without any intellectual or artistic merit, is one of those things that is mass produced but v infrequently preserved at the time of its creation because it is seen as not worth studying or preserving, and in fact there is a tendency towards its destruction. But at the same time, there is a lot to be gained in understanding societies and their socio-cultural mores by looking at just that (along w other forms of “low culture”, i’m reminded of trash tabloid TV or cheap films on weird subjects or even just tabloids in general).

This is to a certain extent what is going to happen as more and more social interactions happen over the internet, or what is talked about sometimes as being a part of Digital Dark Age. These things have to be stored somewhere, on websites that might go down or in this case, they might be expunged from continuing websites. Unlike pulp novels or magazines, these sorts of things just disappear (w the potential exception be if they are saved on computers… that might themselves become unusable in the near future!)

I just… I don’t know how to respond to this with anything other than an infuriated fucking howl, honestly? I’ve checked this and @essayofthoughts has checked this and there’s confirmation that Tumblr is actively banning archival efforts so it looks like this is not a bug.

If you were planning on archiving anything from this website, you’re too late. It is all going to fucking burn. Not only is Tumblr committed to destroying the platform, they are committed to absolutely fucking anyone who is trying to conserve any part of it.

of course, Tumblr has made such efforts impossible, and it’s not clear to me that Quizilla works would even have functioned in wayback.

someone on twitter commented to me that we might lose the vast majority of Homestuck meta if Tumblr finally goes down without being mass-archivable. I’m genuinely not sure how we’d ever even know the extent of our loss here, not just for Homestuck but for other fandoms around various webcomics and anime and so on, particularly obscure shit that doesn’t have a large enough fanbase to sustain archival practices.

apparently Quizilla enabled the creation of uniquely formatted and interactive fanfiction. Tumblr enabled uniquely formatted ask blog fiction, and more fragmentary, nonlinear, downright fucking modernist fanfiction structures.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to crosspost my Potter fic blog to ao3, but I can’t even figure out how to start because while every piece on that blog builds on a single shared alternate universe and all feed into the main narrative backbone story that built Chaos Is A Butterfly, they’re also a) standalone pieces and b) do not exist in any particular chronological fashion

In fact with Tumblr, I could use the formatting to tell a non-chronological story and shape how people read a character and emotionally engaged with them through that in a way that I don’t think can even be replicated on ao3. Neither can I replicate the sense of the blog existing in itself in a contained but sprawling alternate universe where the reader is led wandering through it, rather than following a linear narrative through it.

@themonsterblogofmonsters posts fic everyday, but if you visit the front end of the blog, it’s an entire encyclopedia and “reference book” in and of itself. You can’t get that functionality on ao3 and you can’t get it on pillowfort. Short of designing a website from scratch, I don’t think it’s actually possible to achieve.

And these are just two instances! I’m struggling with how to archive meta or collaboratively created fic or headcanon - how do I file it, where do I file it, how do I attribute the different people who contributed. What do I do when I’ve made a meta that builds on someone whose blog is gone?

Keep in mind that this rhetoric is so similar that TERFs have noticed this and used it to their advantage. (source 1, source 2, source 3, source 4, source 5)

Also keep in mind that, while there may be one or two terfs who favor ace inclusion, there are hundreds who are against it. That shouldn’t be a good sign. And non-TERF exclusionists have in the past shown more sympathy towards TERFs than they do towards ace people. (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5)

The discourse around representation is inherently faulty, in my opinion, because it actually demands positive representation. And what counts as positive depends on the trend of the moment. When people (usually wokesters on tumblr) talk about representation they aren’t talking about visibility, they’re talking about publicity. The kind that makes you want to buy a product by making it look extremely good.

Because if it were about visibility, about giving space for the variety of stories that only the human condition can create? We’d all gladly open our arms to any kind of depiction. The only issue would be if at some point you started seeing X being shown only with a specific color palette, and then the solution wouldn’t be that of censorship, but of encouraging more diverse voices to come forth, to add to the spectrum already there, making it even richer.

When you focus too much on representation at the expense of your imagination you’re conflating fiction with social activism, and I don’t think I need to convince you of the trap inherent in that.

And then more than one year ago: 

Because they have changed ‘representation’ into ‘magical direct projection’, so any kind of conflict and pain you subject your characters to, is actually real life conflict and pain you cause to any person who identifies with them.

Since so many antis are into intersectional identity politics, any media that deals with their identities (female characters, abuse survivors, POC, any non-Christian religion, disability, general mental illness etc) means that they’re the only valid Voice of that media, they decide what can or cannot be done with it, and therefore are free to choose their OTPs and shun away any NOTP with the perfect excuse that it goes against any of their identities. It’s the juxtaposition of fictional plot with real life offense that is the ammo for their movement.

You can often hear the paradoxical messages - “You’re scum because you don’t have enough *insert label*/*insert label* are minor characters/*insert label* are problematic in your story and it’s *insert oppressor label*” ; - “You can write of us but not about us because if you’re not *insert label* then you don’t know shit and you don’t get to speak over us”*; - “You can only write about what you personally experience” ; - “You’re *insert label* like me but you have internalized *insert -phobia* so you’re wrong in not agreeing with me and you’re part of the oppressive system" *And this can reach really absurd levels like claiming that men will never know more than women about, for example, periods, even though any random male gynecologist worth his degree will know more about the female intimate bits than women who have never studied medicine and that specific topic to the extent of making it their job. This is somehow a statement that has to be put into question?

These 4 messages are used at the same time, so that whatever you do, it will always be wrong and oppressive against them. This use of paradoxical messages is actually an abuse tactic and is analyzed in ”Pragmatics of Human Communication“ (another very easy example mentioned in that book is the mother buying two shirts for her son, the son wears one and the mother goes “Oh, you didn’t like the other one?”). It’s all about closing the other in a position where there’s no chance of winning no matter what they do, and this can be done so that the person in the top position has the right advantage to harm the other, or the right position to paint themselves as the victim so that emotional blackmail can take place.

Yikes yikes yikes

stg I wish antis like

thought

Inspired by this post and the fact that I’ve had my DW account since 2009 and haven’t used the site’s image hosting until this year. If you’re familiar with old-school LiveJournal, this is very similar. (New LJ makes image hosting much easier and more similar to how tumblr works.)

Things to keep in mind:

You can store up to 500 mb worth of images on a free account. Once that fills up you’re either going to shell out for a paid account or host images somewhere else.

Images hosted on DW only works on DW. This means you’ll have to host images elsewhere if you want to post the pics on AO3 etc. 

html is your friend.

If you’re planning on hosting your fanart on DW, here are some tips!

1, Go to your Profile and choose ‘Create’ on the drop down menu. The ‘Upload Images’ option is over there. Yeah hosting the image and creating your post happen in separate pages. :’)   

Yikes yikes yikes

stg I wish antis like

thought

Yeah that’s some shit.

It’s rare to see trans-positive radfems, but they do exist, and they’re still radfems.

In this case, the “radfem” part is holding to a strict, segregated, black and white view of gender. Trans women are accepted because they are women, but gender nonconformity from men is still hated and denied.

This, inevitably, has splash damage on basically every trans person: genderqueer and nonbinary people are trapped in a liminal space of “can they or can’t they” where the answer depends on what benefits the speaker most, not on the humanity of the people in question. Trans men are denied access to things that would have been considered “their purview” before, and any attempt to engage with it anyway will be seen as proof that men are the devil. Trans women who don’t know that they are trans yet, or who are still closeted, will have their activity and actions used as proof that they are invaders.

This is to say nothing of the other angles of queerphobia involved, such as denying the long history of queer cis men’s gender nonconformity.

There’s also the misogyny in presenting makeup as women-only, which inevitably goes on to imply that women should know about makeup whether they necessarily want to or not.

To be perfectly frank, I’ve never seen any value in any argument that says “X people are in danger if they do A, so Y people, who are not in danger, shouldn’t be allowed to!” No, the problem here, see, is not that Y people are doing A, but that X people aren’t allowed to do A… and if X people and Y people are hard to tell apart but Y people have privilege over X people, Y people doing the thing makes life better for X people because it gives them more air cover. Whereas if X people and Y people are not hard to tell apart, maybe Y people doing the thing doesn’t help X people any… but that’s still very poor justification for saying Y people aren’t allowed to do it, when the problem is that X people should be allowed to do it.

I’ll make an exception if Y people doing it literally makes X people look bad. The issue with dreadlocks, for example, is that if you do not have hair that will properly make dreadlocks, and most white people do not, your hair will get matted and nasty if you try to dread it, and then people will assume that black people’s dreads are also matted and nasty, which is not true. However, this still shouldn’t mean “white people should not wear dreadlocks” but “people who have the wrong type of hair should not wear dreadlocks”; people who identify as white who have the right type of hair are rare, but not impossible.

The Official “Log Off” Protest F.A.Q! 

The “Log Off” protest is in response to the recent NSFW ban announced by Tumblr. The ban flags all content the filtering system detects as NSFW, reducing visibility to the community. The system has proven time and time again that is inefficient, oftentimes flagging SFW material as NSFW. 

This SFW material includes art, memes and so on. This ban directly hurts the community and will not solve the actual problems at hand due to the poor flagging system. Because of this, the entire community will suffer.  

So to respond, I propose that every user on Tumblr logs off of Tumblr for 24 hours on December 17th at 12 am EST. 

Times are listed above depending on timezone! 

This post responds to some very common questions about the protest. So make sure to read it over! 

How to Export Your Blog: 

https://tumblr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360005118894-Export-your-blog

Alternative Sites: 

Pillowfort

Mastodan 

Wordpress 

Twitter 

There is also an official Tumblr blog (ironic, huh?) and Twitter for the protest! It’s at: 

Twitter - https://twitter.com/logoffprotest

Tumblr - https://logoffprotest.tumblr.com/

There will be official updates on each account. Make sure to tag us in any posts, or use the hashtag #logoff2018 ! 

to be Straight, you need to be BOTH heterosexual AND heteroromantic

here is a helpful diagram

[image description: two circles that don’t touch anywhere. one is labelled ‘heterosexual’ another is labelled ‘asexual’.]

the circles, you’ll notice, don’t touch. because you can’t be both Straight (heterosexual & romantic) and asexual. they are mutually exclusive.

saying that ace people, or aro people, or aroace people, are straight due to their LACK of sexual attraction, is pushing heteronormativity. which, it turns out, fucks up the lives of lgb+ people as well.

ace people face corrective rape, and no, that’s not a “lesbian specific term” dear god, like trans, bisexual, and mentally ill people don’t also face corrective rape. also, if your argument against ace people facing corrective rape is to say “that only happens to lesbians” then that’s not much different than reacting to a butch woman getting lynched by saying “that only happens to black people” and it’s as useless and disingenuous and cruel an argument.