This tweet had me absolutely flabbergasted twice because I read this and I was like "Dame Aylin? The tall, blonde, supermodel demigoddess? How is she at all outside of the beauty standard? This is stupid" and then I scrolled down and there were a hundred replies by straight dudes who were calling her ugly and talking about anime women they prefer
Two and a half years ago now, I made a 60 second video briefly discussing the lack of variety of body-types in female characters, and I made what I thought was a very gentle and restrained argument. I showed some pictures of Olympic-level female athletes and said "hey, if you're designing physically powerful characters, maybe this is a better reference point to start from than supermodels."
It went... unpleasantly viral, and still to this day it gets a dozen to a hundred comments per day, depending on how much the algorithm is pushing it. And they go basically like this:
I think it's easy to underestimate just how deeply brain-poisoned culture is by the beauty standards that are pushed on us. There is this reflexive and instant disgust response in so many people at the mere suggestion that anything other than the beauty ideal could possibly be desirable. And it is disgust, because nothing else can produce such amounts of venom and moral judgment so fast.
The women that these people are all so offended by look like this, by the way:
From the photo collection Athlete by Howard Schatz, 2002
I thought was making a mild, inoffensive, milquetoast suggestion in my video. I wrote it thinking "okay, what's the broadest, most mainstream acceptable, gentlest, most non-controversial version of this argument I can make?"
But it turns out there is no gentle version of that argument you can make. The suggestion that women in particular could or should be anything other than idealized objects of beauty is a form of totalizing violence, an obscenity, to the sensibilities of a distressing number of people.
The tags are all great here but this one made me look at it for a couple seconds. I donât recall jesus being born an adult im very certain he was also a baby at some point
I hope this helps anyone who's trying to design their oc using a wheelchair, it's not a complete guide but I tried my best! deffo do more research if you're writing them as a character
Porn isnât frivolous or dangerous. Itâs essential to understanding art, history, and human liberation.
As of May 15th, image sharing platform Imgur will be purging its site of all not-safe-for-work and anonymously posted content. As part of the siteâs new terms of service agreement, Imgurâs definition of ânot safe for workâ is concerningly broad: it will be removing not only every upload deemed to be pornography or sexually explicit content, but all depictions of nudity (no matter how artistic or educational they are in nature) as well.
Imgur was created in 2009, and has remained one of the most popular image hosting sites on the internet for decades. Its 300 million active users access content on the platform over 60 billion times per month. Compared to other image hosting sites of the early 2000s, such as Photobucket, Imgur has a reputation for being a place to host niche, originally created works, including memes, personal artwork, image macros, fan art, and yes, highly specific porn and fetish content that caters to small yet passionate communities.
Until 2016, the only way to share images on Reddit was by passing them through Imgur first. If you didnât already have an Imgur account when you were making a Reddit post, you mostly likely uploaded it without bothering to create one, so your image files were posted anonymously. But Imgur is now mass-deleting all images that canât be linked to an existing account. This means that the vast majority of image posts on Reddit that predate 2016 will be completely broken after Imgurâs new terms of service are adopted. Thatâs not just posts with pornography or nude photographs that are getting removed, which would be a sizeable data loss itself, but nearly eleven years worth of digital history.
The impact this mass deletion will have canât be overstated. Reddit has been a crucial hub of information sharing, social networking, and documentation for approaching twenty years now. Over 1.6 billion individual people have made their mark on the site in one way or another â sharing their home renovation projects, posting tattered photographs of long-dead relatives and asking for assistance in getting them restored, pooling together genealogical records, showing off their latest power-washing job, demonstrating how to construct leather harnesses, exchanging theories about their continuity of their favorite German science fiction epics, and far more.
Many of these in-depth Reddit posts are absolutely reliant upon images. And every single one of them that came before 2016 can potentially be ruined following the Imgur purge. Even many posts that were made after 2016 will be destroyed as well, because many Reddit users who upload images to Imgur never create official accounts.
Whenever sexual content is driven from social media, there is little in the way of public mourning. If anything, there is a tepid acknowledgement of the harm that will befall sex workers, alongside outright celebration that at last these sites will be scrubbed of the most unseemly and dangerous sides of human nature, and at last rendered âsafe.â But condemning future generations of queer and kinky people to ignorance and loneliness is not saving them. And exposing someone to sexual content too early in life is not the only form of sexual harm. Denying a person a chance at self-recognition can be equally traumatic, and violent.
Those of us who do decry the sanitization and Disney-Worldification of the internet are frequently likened to predators who wish to expose our bodies and proclivities to children. Our mere existence as adult sexual beings with adult bodies is deemed a threat. Paradoxically, we are also mocked for taking the removal of erotic art so seriously. Porn is somehow viewed in our culture as both frivolously pointless, and profoundly terrifying.
But in reality, sex is not dangerous. And sex is not frivolous. Itâs a rapturous, inevitable, and an essential force in human life. Sex isnât for everyone, but it is one of the most precious ways to experience inhabiting a body, and refusing to acknowledge the existence of sex makes it impossible to fully appreciate human history, identity, or any form of art.
Sexâs removal from public discourse and digital record keeping is a hateful, genocidal destruction of one of the most precious aspects of the human experience. We are right to mourn for it. And we are right to fear what comes next, after our bodies are rendered unviewable and our dreams unspeakable.
the first time i posted this essay link, tumblr removed it for being sexual content and then blurred my account. jesus fucking christ. read the piece, please. our ability to communicate and find one another online is rapidly eroding and this is no light matter
I know itâs not hard to point out reactionaries hypocrisy when it comes to like safe spaces or hug boxes or whatever but genuinely how much of an echo chamber do you have to exist in for you to think this is a reasonable thing to say
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