There is a particular take on the destruction of Tumblr that I keep waiting for someone to write, but no one has yet. Which means I apparently need to do it myself.
The take is, essentially, that not only should adults have access to adult content – in itself, valid and true – but also it is important to cultivate SOME social spaces where the overtly/explicitly sexual overlap with the non-sexual. (Not all spaces; I still think it should be illegal to have sex on the sidewalk. But SOME spaces that enable the sexual and the non-sexual to exist side-by-side)
Part of what I think leads to the dehumanization of sex (and subsequently allows the stigma and shame to cling so heavily to it) is the complete bifurcation of life into SEX and EVERYTHING ELSE and never the twain shall meet. When we – at every turn – put all aspects of human life into one sphere, and sex into another, we dehumanize it. We remove the full subjectivity of people from it, which is a problem.
I think we need to actively cultivate spaces LIKE before-time!Tumblr where we can be people, and talk about what happened at work today, and the funny thing our dog did, and how our parents make us crazy during the holidays, and how dare they do X thing on Supernatural, and here’s a great version of that distracted boyfriend meme, and ALSO be able to talk about being horny on main, as the saying goes, and find the right porn clip to fap to. Or post nude selfies. Or hunt down that sweet, sweet NSFW Symbrock fanart.
Having spaces where the explicitly sexual and the non-sexual overlap is important to humanizing sex and, subsequently, de-stigmatizing it (which, it should go without saying, is particularly salient for marginalized people who often suffer way more heavily from sexual stigma)
This. As someone who is half French half British I’ve forever struggled with the frankly pretty Puritan British attitude towards sex and our bodies and the open French attitude. I know which is healthy and which isn’t from personal experience. People not discussing sex, nudity etc in a safe environment leads to so many issues around lack of education, understanding and future deep emotional and physical issues for young adults trying to figure life out. It can last our entire lives if not addressed.
My friends and I got naked in front of each other as teens to change like it’s no big deal and yeah on occasion we looked and compared bodies, it’s thanks to this that I know that my nipples which I hated for being so huge are actually not that weird. My friends all have completely different body shapes and it made me comfortable in mine knowing it was ok to not look like a model/porn star and be different because we all were.
I’ve learned so much from tumblr just from discussion and I share this with others, it’s embarrassing how little people know about their own bodies due to a lack of a forum to discuss it. This is such a good place for it and I’m so sad it is so niche already let alone if that now collapses.
Due to lack of discussion of sex and just human bodies someone close to me didn’t address the pain he had every time he had an erection until he confided in me as an open friend and it turned out he needed a medical circumcision. He went 10 YEARS with this pain (and not having sex) because he had no one to talk to about it and nowhere to look it up. Fucking ridiculous.
So yes, even for non trans / queer folk it’s so important to have an open forum somewhere regarding these things let alone how hugely important it is for these communities.
While at the same time I’m also angered that sex and nudity is villainised while nazism and it’s ilk is fiiiiiiine.
This . Is . Wrong .
“also it is important to cultivate SOME social spaces where the overtly/explicitly sexual overlap with the non-sexual.”
This.
One of my favorite things about rl kink communities? That we also went to munches (get togethers at restaurants) and just hung out, and sure we’d probably casually mention/joke about being huge perverts at some point because it was safe to do so among people we knew wouldn’t be offended, but the nice thing was just being able to be around people and talk about anything.
God, yeah. I remember being wigged out at first when I got on tumblr and it was just this free-wheeling place where someone would complain about their bad day and their next post would be a reblog of pornographic fan art with graphic comments in the tags.
You can follow people who make nsfw content (photos, fic, art) and get to know them as people. You can follow people that aren’t content creators and get to know their tastes in kinky shit. You can have friends you met because you liked the same kind of porn and find out all the other stuff you have in common and become real friends.
I don’t talk about my sex life on fucking facebook (other than in very locked groups, lol). Hell, I’m not sure I’ll do it on twitter unless I start a separate one for that (which….tbh I might; I liked having a sideblog here for me to post nudes and sexual tmi).
I’m really gonna miss the way that stuff was all mixed together here.
This is why Mr. Fry will always have a seat at my table.
Amen.
I was having a conversation about religion with this guy and he asked me what I would do if I got into heaven and had to sit next to God. I told him I wouldn’t take the seat.
Like – the ability to just watch things, invisibly, with no one knowing you’re there or interacting with you.
It wouldn’t have to be creepy. I don’t have any particular desire to go lurk in people’s houses. The thing I want is to be able to be in a public space, where people know they might be watched, but without the possibility of anyone trying to interact with me/noticing me/judging me.
I don’t think this is actually impossible, just socially impractical to arrange – it would suffice for the thing I want, for instance, if there were a social convention that if you wore a specific black outfit then you “didn’t exist” and everyone should just pretend you weren’t there.
There are a couple of things this would be nice for.
First, sometimes I’d just like to avoid anyone interacting with me. This I can mostly achieve through body language: if I can’t handle Interacting With People but need to be out in a public space for whatever reason, I can usually signal No, I Don’t Want To Talk hard enough that people won’t try to strike up a conversation. But it would be nice to have a guarantee, because even being-on-guard-for-the-possibility uses up energy I don’t have to spare when I’m in that state.
Second, sometimes I’d like to do something mildly unusual in a public space without anyone commenting on it/coming over to see if I’m OK. This comes up most in locations I have anxiety about: if a particular place makes me anxious, it would be helpful to be able to approach it on my own terms, go in for just a minute and then go out again, sit around in it reading, lie down in it and take deep breaths, that sort of thing. But if you do that in most public locations, people are going to notice you’re acting weird and come ask if you’re all right, do you need help. (Which is sweet of them! But is the last thing I need under those circumstances.)
Third – and this is probably the main one – is more or less the same thing I often use internet-lurking for. Just about any community (internet or not) has a whole bunch of norms which are non-obvious to an outsider.
On the internet, I can reduce my odds of coming off as a buffoon by lurking the community for some time before I speak up, getting a sense for what the norms are. If I’d like to hang out on a forum, I can go through the archives and read hundreds of old threads, figure out what the normal writing style is, what topics inevitably cause flamewars, what clueless questions every single newbie asks, what pet peeves the regulars complain about; and then once I start actually commenting, I can avoid those. (And I do this, by and large, any time I’m thinking about actually talking in some internet space.)
In real life, on the other hand, you can’t really do that. When (e.g.) I wanted to join a new fencing club, I couldn’t first spend several sessions sitting on the bleachers watching the social dynamics. I couldn’t go in having already figured out who was socially central, who was universally acknowledged to be a jerk, who had some quirk that made them come off unpleasant at first but was actually super sweet once you figured that out and compensated for it. I couldn’t come in already knowing what would get on the armorer’s nerves and how people addressed the coach and how serious people were about being punctual.
Instead, I had to show up (how early should I be there? will they think I’m weird if I’m super early? will they think I’m disrespectful if I’m late?) –
– and introduce myself to people right away (who should I be trying to remember? are you a regular or a one-time visitor? should I be matching your social register or does everyone else think you’re a weirdo? do you dislike me or is that just how you come off?) –
– had to try and figure out the norms about equipment-borrowing (is this club more ‘bring your own, it’s okay to borrow the club’s once in a while but all the time is annoying mooching’ or ‘use the club’s by default, showing up with all your own is show-off-y try-too-hard’?) at the same time as I was figuring out where the equipment was –
– had to guess at the norms for open fencing (do they mean it when they say ‘open,’ or is it structured? when they offer to let me stay on when it’s my turn to switch off, are they being polite or do they mean it? am I hogging the strip if I fence all the time, or am I slacking if I don’t? should I be tracking points for a bout, or are we just fencing casually until we want to switch up?) –
– and so on.
Probably to some degree the solution to this is “don’t sweat it, everyone does clueless stuff when they’re new.” But it’s overwhelming, it’s a lot of new things at once, it is very high-anxiety – and that’s in addition to the default anxiety of just not knowing what to expect. It would reduce my anxiety about that sort of thing a lot just to know what the room looked like in advance, so I could picture it better. But that’s often not easy to arrange.
Probably, also, if I went to the coach and said “hey, can I sit in on a few sessions before I take part, anxiety stuff,” they’d be cool with that. But that isn’t exactly lower anxiety than just sucking it up and dealing with it. Everyone would notice and think I was weird, people would want to know if I was okay, they’d offer to let me join in and it would be friendly and they’d mean well and it would add to the stress so much. And then once I did feel ready to join in everyone would be all weird at me, even if they were trying to be nice about it, because I’d be That Anxiety Person. (Not to mention, like, if it took me a while to get to where I felt ready to join in, they’d all be wondering what exactly I was observing for so long.)
It would just be so nice for there to be some way I could come in, unobserved, and watch silently until I had a sense of How Things Are Done in any new group I’d like to join.
Some groups will let you do that, to some degree; but most of them try to Welcome The New Person – which is great and nice and would be super helpful if I could just get them to start doing that once I’m ready for it.
Even when you can do it, people will notice and draw conclusions from it – and even when those are nice charitable conclusions, like “she’s shy,” it’s actually really frustrating, because I am not shy, I am the opposite of shy, if you treat me like a shy person once I’m ready to start interacting it will be frustrating for both of us.
So I’m just left wishing this were somehow magically A Thing, either through literal invisibility or a social convention that people who mark themselves a certain way Do Not Count and you don’t acknowledge they’re there or draw any conclusions from that.
I wouldn’t mind being on the other side of it at all, either way; I mean, it would be weird if people were lurking in my house, but that’s not the thing I want. (The internet equivalent would be, like, reading people’s PMs, which of course you can’t do.) I wouldn’t be at all bothered by people in public spaces quietly observing, with other people knowing that there might be lurkers but not whether one is watching at any given time. Nor would I mind at all if someone wanted to lurk and watch meetings of various clubs I’ve been in, until they were ready to join. (Obviously, again, that could be creepy if it were a very intimate group sharing things they didn’t want strangers to know; but in that case you just do it somewhere private, that’s fine.)
Unfortunately this is all completely impractical to arrange in real life – even if some real-life group decided to enable a “lurking” option, it wouldn’t really work, part of what makes it work in theory is being ubiquitous and socially-acknowledged-as-normal. So I am left fantasizing.
An important part of making this work (for me anyway) would be to preserve the ability of observees to maintain privacy-through-moderate-obscurity and also to be able to mask things like subvocalization. Readmores, “don’t reblog"s, and yelling at the screen without anyone knowing are important parts of what makes this hellsite work. But yes, this.
I won’t speak for all liberals, but I’d like to see a future where it isn’t a big deal for a woman in full modesty garb to sit next to a drag queen in NYC. It’s become a bit of a sensation, but her and I were just existing. The freedom to simply be yourself in a sea of people who aren’t like you is a freedom we all deserve.
The central irony is that this isn’t some hypothetical future–it’s just present day reality. This is a picture of two ordinary people going about their normal lives despite how haters want to politicize it lmao. So the underlying message is not “future liberals want” it’s “people conservatives want to eradicate”
the underlying message is not “future liberals want” it’s “people conservatives want to eradicate”
I have so many mixed feelings about “Positive Thinking.” It’s the type of thing that I see as useful at the personal/individual level but douchey on an interpersonal level and potentially exploitative or dystopian at the institutional level.
The takeaway: It’s okay to read positive thinking books.
I’m never going to tell anyone else to.
I probably could use a bit more of it at a personal level but have encountered far too much of it at an institutional level and I maaaaay be a bit allergic at this point.
i love how safe it feels when you are only surrounded by women
Can’t relate. Not a paranoid sheep.
Can’t relate, have been hurt more by women than men.
Can’t relate, the last time I was surrounded by just women I was sexually harassed and very close to raped for “choosing” not to be lesbian and then harassed at all hours of the day for DARING to be a trans guy who likes men (DOUBLE BRAINWASHED BY PATRIARCHY WHAMMY!).
Can’t relate, went to an all girl’s school for 2 years where I was bullied viciously (one girl actually tried to set fire to me), then went to a mixed school where I was bullied by girls and befriended by boys.
Like, I am not discounting that some people have had enough bad experiences with dudes that they don’t feel comfortable around them. That is very much a thing. What bothers me is the idea that a) women are inherently safe, b) all women are/should be afraid of men and c) anyone who is uncomfortable or downright afraid of women is a misogynist or dealing with internalised misogyny. If you personally feel safer around women, that’s fine. But it is not a logical reaction, any more than my intense nervousness whenever groups of teenage girls get on the bus is.
Yeah, I’m not big on dissing the OP for talking about their experiences, but I can’t relate either. Men are often more direct and say what they mean, even if it’s “I hate your dumb face.” Women more often do these weird things where they completely make you despise yourself and then when you say “stop it” are like “lol stop what?”
Both forms of cruelty have their own unique harms.
I think we really need to reaffirm now that no amount of homophobia can be acceptable in our culture. There is no such this as harmless or victimless homophobia. All homophobia contributes to violence against us. You can not “disagree” with lgbt people’s “lifestyles” without supporting the rhetoric and legislation that puts us in very real danger.
Homophobia isn’t that black and white though. You can hate the sin and still love the sinner.
OK, as a queer person who grew up in a genuinely loving, caring, utterly wonderful, and still deeply homophobic Church, let me try to fill in what you’re not understanding about this whole “Love the sinner” deal.
When we refer to people like you as “Homophobic” I want to be clear what we’re saying here. This is not a judgment of your intent. We are not describing you as a hateful person, as an aggressive or violent person. But we are saying that your actions and your attitudes participate in and reinforce a system of rhetoric that encourages violence against LGBT people, and, far, far more importantly, that forces millions of LGBT people to live in shame.
That’s really what this comes down to. Not hate. Not violence. Shame.
Consider the point purely theologically. Jesus tells us that to desire a sinful thing is as bad as to act on that desire. My lusting after another mans wife is as bad as actually sleeping with her. My genuine desire to hurt someone is as bad as actually hurting them.
So when you tell me that loving another man is a sin, you’re not just talking about physical acts of intimacy. You don’t get to draw the line there. You don’t get to pretend that I can be bisexual so long as I never actually physically act on it (which is already a terrible burden to place on someone). You’re saying that every time I look at a guy and imagine how soft his lips would be, or think about how beautiful his eyes are, I am sinning. I am a sinner every time a dude walks past me with a tight sweater on that shows of his arms. Every time he has nice hair or a nice smile.
My love, according to you, is a sin. That is the burden you are forcing people to live under. That burden forced me so deep into the closet that I didn’t even know I was there. It forced me to repress every genuine feeling of sexual attraction for other men, and to live for years with those feelings straining to get out, whilst I struggled with the constant guilt and shame that came from having those thoughts.
And I am one of the lucky ones, because I’m alive to have this conversation. Because for many, many LGBT people that guilt and shame manifests as self-harm, substance abuse, low esteem that leads them into abusive relationships, and very often suicide.
You tell yourself that you’re one of the good ones because you don’t hate us. You only hate what we “do”. But what we “do” is living. It’s being alive and whole and a part of this world, and if you genuinely believe that we can’t have that then you might as well put the gun to our heads and pull the trigger. Because you’re already doing that, you just don’t have the guts to admit it.
“You only hate what we do, but what we do is living” Wow. This is beautiful and so well written
reblogging for perfect commentary and future reference
*valid does not mean healthy, or good, or to be privileged above common sense and kindness
A distinction for anyone who is young and hasn’t figured this out yet:
You are allowed to have whatever emotions you want. No one can control your emotions. Emotions are healthy responses to things.
You are not allowed to have behaviors that are harmful just because you have certain emotions. Your behaviors are what you can control, and they are far easier to control than your emotions.
You can be jealous about someone or their talents until you turn green, but it is harmful to yourself and to that person if you try to sabotage them because of it. You can be so angry you can literally feel your temperature rise, but this does not give you permission to rage at others.
Your emotions are valid. They are always valid. You are a person of value. However, you behaviors are not always justified just because of those emotions. You may not be able to control you emotions, but you can certainly control your behaviors.
This.
person a: that’s not fair!
person b: LIFE isn’t fair!
person a: life isn’t a conscious being that makes deliberate choices within a personal moral framework and a socially constructed value system. you, on the other hand, as a human being acting consciously and non-randomly within both of those frameworks, should be able to come to a conclusion based on reasonable moral standards about what the most equitable and respectful course of action is in any given circumstance, and act accordingly. it is especially incumbent upon you to do so if you are in a position of authority or otherwise have greater ability to determine the outcome of a situation than those who will be most affected by it.
person b: what
person a: I said you’re full of shit
Omphaloskeptomai 