I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.
Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.
This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.
So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.
The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.
People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.
I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.
So there’s been a bunch of replies to this to the effect of “Boo hoo you can’t draw porn anymore, cry me a river.” They’re so perfectly proving the points I wanna make that I couldn’t possibly try to invent a strawman argument more perfect than the real people in the replies.
Here’s the thing: censorship always starts with a group of people whose ideas make others uncomfortable in some way. Sluts are an easy target. It’s the kind of censorship you can easily sell to middle America. It’s sinful, dangerous, harmful. You get to frame it as “for the children’s sake!!!” (as if our government cares about protecting children when it lets the police murder them on the reg). Even people who don’t see sexual content as bad per se still don’t see it as worthy of defending. It’s frivolous, rude, unnecessary, silly.
So the censorship laws pass. Two things happen. First, we discover that these laws are targeting people with a very broad brush. The laws never tend to define pornography, as Supreme Court Justice Stewart’s famous “I know it when I see it” statement shows. It’s up to others’ discretion, with many people getting swept up in it who tried to follow the rules, or who even undeniably did follow the rules, but with little to no appeals process, the accusation, even if mistaken, might as well be a guilty verdict.
Secondly, we have just moved the goalposts from “the government must not censor freedom of speech or expression” to “the government can sometimes censor freedom of speech or expression.” Now the precedent of censorship has been introduced and accepted. Now it’s easier to censor other things. Things that you may hold dear.
Because again, these sites aren’t just banning sexual content because they want to. They’re not just doing it because of advertiser pressure or app store pressure or financial company pressure (although we must also assign some of the blame there). This stuff started really ramping up after the government passed FOSTA/SESTA, barely over 3 years ago. These laws, under the guise of stopping sex trafficking, harmed sex workers in countless ways while driving actual sex trafficking deeper underground where it’s harder to find now. There have been so many studies about how FOSTA/SESTA had the opposite impact on helping trafficking victims, but again, this was never about protecting people. This was about introducing censorship in a palatable way.
“But there’s still porn on the internet. Just go there.” Ah, yes. There is still porn on the internet. As someone making adult content, who knows more sex workers than most people, these giant corporate megasites are a very similar experience to working for Wal-Mart or Amazon. They take a huge cut of your earnings, upwards of half. Onlyfans “only” taking 20% is pretty low, but again, in the wild west early days of the internet, you could have your own site and keep 100%. And yeah, there’s free porn everywhere. Fuck you for not paying the sex workers who get you off. Pay sex workers and tip them well!
It also means porn becomes more homogenized. It’s marginalized people who have the hardest time competing within/against big porn companies, and marginalized people deserve to see their sexuality portrayed the way cis, het, white, able bodied, fit people get to see theirs. Tumblr was host to a lot of queer, trans, poc, disabled, and fat people making erotic content featuring people like themselves. It was host to a large audience of people grateful to see people like themselves. It is so much harder to find that now. Nobody cares about protecting marginalized people, and nobody cares about defending porn. That combination means the sexualities of marginalized people gets even more stigmatized, secretive, fetishized, demonized. TERFs are usually SWERFs, and both have a lot more in common with the far right than they do with feminism or progressive justice.
You’ve been duped good and hard if you get up here in 2021 on Al Gore’s internet defending censorship when it’s a steamroller two inches away from your own heels. You’re can’t wait until your life gets fucked up by it to say something. The sluts have long been the canaries in the coal mine.
If you enjoyed my words and want to support my adult work, I am on a shadowbanned Patreon at patreon.com/RosalarianXXX and a pretty decent OnlyFans at Onlyfans.com/RosalarianXXX. I post 3 different adult comic series on Patreon, and I post both comics and surreal nudes on OF.
