No sex please, we’re online
It’s not just Tumblr, people. This shit is getting ridiculous.
Of course it’s not Tumblr! They came for Craigslist personals first because that’s the oldest trick in the book: Sneakily taking down the ‘perverts’ under the guise of vague, high morality goals and working slowly up from the bottom, picking off larger and larger targets. Few people cared about CL because of the stereotype of scary unwashed creeps trawling for sex online. That wasn’t so familiar or cute so it was fair game.
Tumblr is biting at the ‘artists’ heels and suddenly there is a bit more noise, because artists aren’t supposed to be treated like shit, are they? However even now the hair-splitting over what’s porn and therefore garbage and not-art shows that attitudes are not so different. It’s still the same divisive, dangerous us v.s. them mentality that is so easily exploited.
This is why when people tell me I shouldn’t worry about this because ‘my art isn’t porn anyway’ it makes me angry. It means so much more than drawings or a silly blog. This is about people being slowly phased out of their freedoms, rights and agency. History has shown time and time again that whenever power wants to make a crushing move backwards, it comes for what it declares ‘obscene’ first. People are raised to be scared and ignorant of sex so it’s an easy gateway. When they come cracking down on sex is when we most need to pay very close attention. They are not protecting us.
Yeah. This isn’t about whether *you*, specifically, don’t want NSFW content shoved in front of your eyeballs, it’s about whether the people who want to see NSFW content have the right to see it *at all*.
It’s also about what counts as ‘nsfw’ or ‘pornographic’ content. The article hints at it but doesn’t state it directly, but LGBT content - any LGBT content, even the most G-rated or strictly informative kind - is usually an early target in the name of ‘cleaning up’ a website. (YouTube, for example, is already guilty of doing this.)
