I’ll get to Tumblr and Facebook but first just lemme take a second to tell you these laws don’t do what they’re designed to do. They don’t stop trafficking, they actually make it harder to find victims. Turns out the easiest way to find victims is online.
These laws were passed in April and we saw a lot of sites disappear overnight. So why are Tumblr and Facebook acting now?
They come into force next month. Next month any website with a US prescence can be sued if it allows, even unknowingly, sexual solicitation.
To my mind, Tumblr saw Apple removing the Tumblr app from their store and went “eh, we needed to ban porn anyway, we’ll just act early.”
Their algorithm sucks because training an algorithm to spot lewd content is incredibly difficult.
Facebook yesterday announced its policy on sexual solicitation. Which is ludicrously overzealous, bans the discussion of anything related to sex, including incredibly vague language like “I’m looking for a good time tonight.”
The reason they’re so overzealous isn’t because they’re screaming “Somebody think of the children!”
It’s because if they miss *one* ad, they can be sued. They know algorithms for this suck, so they’ve decided to overcompensate for that and effectively ban talking about sex.
These laws come into force next month. At that time I expect Twitter to also crack down on sex work. I don’t expect we’ll be warned, Twitter will just remove accounts overnight.
“Why don’t you just start your own website, you aren’t US based, just do that.”
There are a myriad of reasons I can’t do that,
1. Age verification laws are going to happen soon here and I can’t afford to pay for that software.
2. The UK gov is considering our own SESTA/FOSTA laws.
Go to PornHub!
Mate I’ve made my opinion on that hellsite very clear. I don’t need another store front. I need a place to communicate with queer communities and advertise. PornHub fucking sucks.
SESTA/FOSTA is an attempt to limit not only sex work, but queer expression online. Queer relationships are seen as inherently sexual to some. We need to be fighting this, because it’s not just a stick to hit sex workers with.
To my mind these laws were always about stopping consensual sex work, whilist also punching at queer people, and sexual expression. This is a censorship bill.
Yell at your elected representatives, America. Make them realize what this is, because it was sold on stopping sex trafficking. The options on it were so good that all the democrats voted for it too. Liberals are just as much at fault here.
I know there is a lot happening, and it’s hard to keep up with it all, but this is important. SESTA/FOSTA needs to be repealed.
Can I watch a great film knowing the actresses in it were terrorized and mistreated the entire time? Can I watch a football game knowing that the players are getting brain injuries right before my eyes? Can I listen to my favorite albums anymore knowing that the singers were all beating their wives in between studio sessions? Can I eat at the new fancy taco place knowing when the building that used to be there got bulldozed eight families got kicked out of their homes so they could be replaced with condos and a chain restaurant? Can I wear the affordable clothes I bought downtown that were probably assembled in a sweatshop with child labor? Can I eat quinoa?
Can I eat this burger? Can I drink this bottled water? Can I buy a car and drive to work because I’m sick of taking an hour each way on the subway? Whose bones do I stand on? Whose bones am I standing on right now?
On one hand, it’s a privilege to be able to choose to acknowledge these horrors or not–we’re going to acknowledge that privilege. On the other hand, I once attended a lecture by the explorerer-conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s daughter and son and they had a lot of opinions about what we could do to help the environment and the ocean and I talked about how in my country, we have to drink bottled water, because it’s a desert and there’s only salt water all around, but we’re contributing to pollution and all of these things…
And she looked at me and told me not to fall into the trap of “activist guilt.” I couldn’t remember the exact words, but, it was the first time I’d heard the term and it took a weight off my shoulders.
We do what we can. It’s so much better than giving up entirely or not doing anything at all because we can’t do it perfectly. It doesn’t benefit anyone in the end if we just sit around feeling guilty about every little thing in life. I’d just joined tumblr back then (haha, so like, eight or nine years ago at this point?), I was being exposed to way more than I’d ever been before (I was previously just into feminism and animal rights/wildlife conservation/environmentalism since I was a kid), and it was weighing on me.
As long as humans are humans and living flawed lives, many consumed by greed, there will not be anything in this world untouched by evil.
I usually avoid stuff that says it was made in China or other cheap looking knockoffs, out of fear of them being made in sweatshops (now, I know even a lot of big brands use those…), it’s exhausting. Then, I read something about how people who actually lived and worked in those would still buy this cheap stuff and how this shocked the foreigner reporting on it, but they just looked confused like, it’s what they can afford and them avoiding consuming it isn’t going to change the whole system from the ground-up.
… it went on about how “money talks” and choosing where to put your money still feeds the whole capitalist system and is nearly a way of comforting yourself, but you not buying doesn’t mean everyone else isn’t. What needs to be tackled is at a much higher level than any of us can reach.
Of course, I’d still, given the choice, give my money to companies I agree with and I’ll boycott what I know to support awful stuff, but I also feel no superiority over this and know now it’s not as black and white or easy as I thought it was.
This is the same reason that moral purity “you can’t enjoy [x] because it’s Problematic ™” is such nonsense, because nothing is pure. There’s something bad about everything if you dig deep enough. As long as we lived in flawed human societies we’ve got to make the best of what they offer us. If you have the choice and means, please, do support those who do good, but also, don’t beat yourself up over not living up to an unattainable ideal.
No one can. You’ll just make yourself so miserable, you either burn up and stop fighting entirely or you’ll make yourself a non-productive, depressed heap just out of a bleeding heart left unchecked. You can’t make a change to this world if you refuse to engage in it.
you know what actually pisses me off? when I finally start to feel a smidge of confidence in my writing ability and then some JERK POSTS A SINGLE LINE FROM A TERRY PRATCHETT NOVEL AND IT’S BETTER THAN ANYTHING I WILL EVER WRITE NO MATTER HOW MANY MILLENNIA I SPEND TRYING!
Terry was a professional writer from the age of 17. He worked as a journalist which meant that he had to learn to research, write and edit his own work very quickly or else he’d lose his job.
He was 23 when his first novel was published. After six years of writing professionally every single day. The Carpet People was a lovely novel, from a lovely writer, but almost all of Terry’s iconic truth bomb lines come from Discworld.
The Colour of Magic, the first ever Discworld novel was published in 1983. Terry was 35 years old. He had been writing professionally for 18 years. His career was old enough to vote, get married and drink. We now know that at 35 he was, tragically, over half way through his life. And do you know what us devoted, adoring Discworld fans say about The Colour of Magic? “Don’t start with Colour of Magic.”
It is the only reading order rule we ever give people. Because it’s not that great. Don’t get me wrong, very good book, although I’ll be honest I’ve never been able to finish it, but it’s nowhere near his later stuff. Compare it to Guards Guards, The Fifth Elephant, the utterly iconic Nightwatch and it pales in comparison because even after nearly 20 years of writing, half a lifetime of loving books and storytelling Terry was still learning.
He was a man with a wonderful natural talent, yes. But more importantly he worked and worked and worked to be a better writer. He was writing up until days before he died. He spent 49 years learning and growing as a writer, taking so much joy in storytelling that not even Alzheimer’s could steal it from him. He wouldn’t want that joy stolen from you too.
Terry was a wonderful, kind, compassionate, genius of a writer. And all of this was in spite of many many people telling him he wasn’t good enough. At the age of five his headmaster told him that he would never amount to anything. He died a knight of the realm and one of the most beloved writers ever to have lived in a country with a vast and rich literary tradition. He wouldn’t let anyone tell him that he wasn’t good enough. And he wouldn’t want you to think you aren’t good enough. He especially wouldn’t want to be the reason why you think you aren’t good enough.
You’re not Terry Pratchett.
You are you.
And Terry would love that.
I only ever had a chance to talk to Terry Pratchett once, and that was in an autograph line. I’d bought a copy of The Carpet People, which was his very first book, and he looked at it with a faint air of concern. “You realise that I wrote that when I was very young,” he said, in warning.
“Yes,” I said. “But I like seeing how authors grow.”
He brightened and reached for his pen. “That’s all right then,” he said, and signed.
It is not a job. It is not school. It is not a contract. Participation in fandom is voluntary and it is not binding (commissions and paid work aside).
Yes, within fandom you should be bound by some sense of ethics or general decency: don’t steal art and fic, don’t willfully deceive people, don’t be a jerk or a garbage human, and so on and so forth. But everything else? The writing fic and the doing and the participation? It is voluntary.
So if you are writing a fic and you’re seven chapters in and you have eight chapters to go and you’re just tired and you don’t want to do it any more? You can stop. If you’ve been running a blog and writing about every single episode of every new anime show that’s come out and you can’t for three weeks? Don’t. If you told your 5 billion followers you were gonna post a piece of fanart and you’re just sick of it and you don’t want to do it any more? Give it up.
Sure, people will be disappointed and upset and some will complain. But life is disappointing and upsetting sometimes, and it goes on, and no one can sue you for not finishing a fic that they were enjoying the hell out of for free. No one can accuse you of not living up to the terms of your contract when you don’t post that fanart you mentioned three weeks ago. Because fandom is voluntary. It’s something that you participate in because it’s fun or fulfilling or important to you, and when it stops being those things, you should stop, too.
You are not bound by the asks in your inbox. You are not bound by comments on a fic or a piece of art. You are not bound, in fandom, by other people’s disappointments or their expectations.
Fandom is voluntary. Don’t let people pressure you into thinking that it is anything else.
Excerpt from Kató Lomb’s “Polyglot: How I Learn Languages”
!!!!!!!!!!
We should learn languages because languages is the only thing worth knowing even poorly.
If someone knows how to play the violin only a little, he will find that the painful minutes he causes are not in proportion to the possible joy he gains from his playing. The amateur chemist spares himself ridicule only as long as he doesn’t aspire for professional laurels. The man somewhat skilled in medicine will not go far, and if he tries to trade on his knowledge without certification, he will be locked up as a quack doctor.
Solely in the world of languages is the amateur of value. Well-intentioned sentences full of mistakes can still build bridges between people. Asking in broken Italian which train we are supposed to board at the Venice railway station is far from useless. Indeed, it is better to do that than to remain uncertain and silent and end up back in Budapest rather than in Milan.
everything can be magical if you let it be. i remember the first time seeing red-winged blackbirds i was just…enthralled. i watched them for maybe an hour. i thought they made the sweetest noises and were just so pretty. and i found out later on that people consider them nuisances and pests. they’re literally common all over the united states but because they weren’t familiar to me they weren’t a burden or an annoyance but something beautiful. if we don’t let other people tell us how to feel about things, maybe we can just like things for what they are
this is a hotter, deeper take than i ever expected to see from this blog, but you’re so fucking right and i think this is a good ass post and a sentiment everyone should at least think about
it takes years to develop your craft. do not romanticize the idea of an ‘overnight success’. be a student. grow organically. get really good. hate your work. start over. find new ways to express the same ideas. the student becomes the master. your time will come.
I am an old sage…listen closely to my wisdom before my soul withers away…
Teach us, o wise one
you are not an anime character. your actions impact others and do not only exist in theory. nobody is required to stick around for your tragic backstory or to learn the reasons behind your actions. if you treat people like garbage, they are allowed to think of you as a jerk and nothing more. nobody is obligated to analyze you or think twice when you hurt them. similarly, you are not required to stick around to listen to other people’s reasons for treating you like trash. you can call them a jerk, cut them out of your life, and call it a day.
Consulting Witch 