Women will keep making and consuming porn, but the sense of community Tumblr fostered will disappear.
Hi Tumblr! I’m not on here much any more, but in case you are in the mood to fulminate the adult-content ban, here’s me talking to sex educators and Tumblr porn makers about why this space was so important to women, and what we’ll lose when the ban takes effect.
This article is really good, and you should read it. TL;DR of that and the below: it is so important that there be, in the words of the article, a space where “women are allowed to talk about what they want, freely, without being shamed or intimidated.” And the fact that Tumblr let that happen freely mixed with women talking about and consuming non-sex things, made explorations and expressions of women’s sexuality feel natural and safe in a way that we desperately need and that hardly exists anywhere else.
There was a lot of garbage misogynistic porn on here, like on the the whole internet. But overall in my experience it was much easier to find erotic and sensual content that was a lot more female-friendly or that actively catered to women here than most places, and to engage in discussions.
Some people aren’t comfortable with those topics. Those people had the ability to block people, unfollow people, use safe mode, filter tags, and use extensions to engage in even more granular control. Or, barring that, use fucking Facebook. LJ. Neopets forums, I don’t know. But the ability to access material and have discussions you couldn’t have on other platforms – faretheewell, I guess. This was place was literally built by courting and cultivating NSFW content to drive traffic. Now that it’s worth money, all that, including women who want to talk about sex in a positive, open, communicative environment, and the safe harbor that provides to other women who feel shamed for their sexual desires, or who never see their desires reflected through a woman’s gaze as opposed to catered to men anywhere else, can go. You can imagine my opinion.
But I’ll tell you anyway. Our culture’s perpetual low-level assault on women’s bodies includes a constant assault on things that let us explore and take ownership of our sexuality and sensuality, a process that requires information, open discussion, and sunlight. And yes, a lot of porn is toxic, but some of it and almost all erotica, which is also going to be thrown out with the bath water here, is an incredibly valuable tool for discovering your own pleasure, which is a critical step in being able to seriously demand that your partners help you achieve it - and that they treat you well. It’s just a whole fucked up thing, man.
Adults need their own spaces where they can consume and talk openly about sex, which is a huge and hugely important part of a healthy, whole, fully embodied life for most people. And those spaces need to not be sex-only spaces. The compartmentalization of sexuality and sensuality from all other adult life is a neurotic cultural pathology. Healthy sex is not shameful or dirty or bad; it’s part of a full and complete adult life for most of us, not a dark secret we need to hide in a dark corner. Dark corners are where abuses can be hidden, and where no one can tell you things can and should be better. And without a sense of who people are in addition to sex, which naturally arises from a platform where sex is just part of a mix of things, the sense that it’s a normal part of a whole life for normal people, an important message that our culture does not push, is lost - and so is the ability of women to become credible messengers to each other about what it’s fair to demand for ourselves. The mix of things here was special and important to.
Reblogging because alllll that ^^^^^
