BOARLORD

@boarlord

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Fat trans dyke, sex worker, porn game developer. Furry for a million years. Formerly everwhere

Writing a book about fat futurity for Strange Light

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BOARLORD @boarlord4/26/2023, 1:05 PM

nys @nys

@SamKeeper4/25/2023, 9:51 PM

I think we need to be more vocal about the simple undeniable fact that ordering society around the priority "it should be impossible and ideally illegal for someone under 18 to see sexual content" is fascist.

@SamKeeper4/25/2023, 10:01 PM

also that "I* know it when I see it" is an absolutely deranged standard for determining what speech is and is not protected by the first amendment. we're not talking about art criticism here gang we're talking about whose books it is legally acceptable to burn, based on some guy's determination of vibes. and it's not going great in this country!

*a judge in a court of law, not an artist, critic, historian, art viewer &c

Shel @shel4/26/2023, 9:10 AM

It's so easy as an adult now to say "well but obviously you can't let the minors see the porn" and forget about all the porn I found online as a teen and that it truly was harmless to me. You used to be and to make a Tumblr account, tell it that you're 14, and just follow hundreds of gay porn blogs and nothing bad happened. And of course even with everything being consolidated into fewer and fewer websites it's all pretty easy to just tell websites that you're 18 and access everything anyway.

Adolescents are young adults and they can handle seeing sex. What we want to avoid is situations of specific adults showing them porn as part of an ongoing relationship of grooming. 90% of the time someone doing this is someone they already know and the other 10% of the time it's still happening in private messages. It's not happening through someone on their own sneaking around looking for pictures of cocks and boobs. As long as they're not talking to anyone I really don't see how it needs to be made impossible for them to find it. It should be their own little private experience but who are we to deny porn to someone going through puberty.

While of course we don't want to be supporting human traffickers, the fact of the matter is that the #1 group being targeted and exploited in the trafficking industry is immigrants and if we actually cared about trafficking victims we would kill the industry at its root by eliminating movement restrictions across the border. If you didn't need to hire someone to smuggle you or your children across the border then there wouldn't be a human trafficking industry in this country at all.

And the traffickers are hardly making porn games, furry art, or erotic ASMR audio files.

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in reply to @SamKeeper's post:

cassie @porglezomp4/25/2023, 11:41 PM

I’ve got a simple philosophy that I think is pretty good. I think it should be harder to see sexual content accidentally, and easier to see it on purpose.

@SamKeeper4/26/2023, 2:08 AM

it's amazing how weirdly exposed and aggressive I feel posting on sites without well constructed content warnings now that I'm used to cohost and mastodon providing them so easily

in reply to @SamKeeper's post:

fictive @artemis4/25/2023, 10:17 PM

honestly though. i struggle to see a world in which my life would have been anything but worse if i'd been cut off from that stuff prior to being 18. add an extra 4-6 years to how long it took me to figure out how queer i was honestly. also add an extra 4-6 years of having a really weird relationship with sexuality and feeling guilty and uncomfortable about having a sexuality at all. you know how i learned about the importance of consent? that it's ok to be nervous about sutff? that shit takes time to figure out and it's ok to be super awkward the whole time? fuckin, reading other peoples' honest discussions about sexuality online that's where. and hot fanfics.

hell i distinctly remember the first depiction of a healthy lesbian relationship i saw with positive relationship dynamics, partners working with each others' struggles of depression, a level of intimacy and trust in a way i had never seen from my own parents because of divorce n' shit. and it was a fuckin' porn comic. that had an impact on how i saw the world and what i considered normal.

not everyone's journeys are like mine, not everyone's journeys would've been made worse without access to this stuff. but there's a lot of other people like me out there.

i dunno what the right answers are. ive thought about this a fair bit and it's a fuckin hard topic that feels a bit beyond me. but whatever the answers are, criminalizing it ain't it.

Amagire @amagire4/25/2023, 10:39 PM

in the current storm of republican legislatures gleefully labeling as "porn" (and then summarily banning) sex education materials as objectively titillating as reading "dick steele" out of the phone book and giggling, the willingness of people even on the nominal left to conflate "making pornography theoretically available to curious teens who look for it" with "deliberately showing pornography to children" worries the absolute shit out of me.

@SamKeeper4/26/2023, 6:15 PM

it's disturbing how much evangelical talking points have completely infiltrated mainstream discourse even in "progressive" spaces (and often utilizing repurposed "progressive" language). it feels like evangelical christianity really did just completely take over the culture in the 2000s and there was just zero will anywhere to roll back that shit.

Amagire @amagire4/26/2023, 9:41 PM

it's incredibly frustrating that fascists build their walls of bullshit out of bullshit bricks and the only thing a lot of people can think to do is point out bricks one at a time. not remove them, just go "that one brick? yes that one, there. it's bullshit." yes! they all are! the whole thing is bullshit! like for example "trans women are women" is a statement of obvious fact, but I see people defending "trans women are women" so single-mindedly that they end up agreeing with the hateful reactionary clowns that a man in a dress, meanwhile, is a bad, dangerous, threatening, culturally-appropriative (?wtf) thing to be. and christ, fuck that.

jackie / roxie @turntechCatfish4/26/2023, 7:13 PM

im just not sure where this hypothetical child who sees weird purrnography and is scarred fur life actually exists except outside the rhetoric of republicans

i mean idk i was online from a real young age and i saw plenty of [redacted] and [redacted] and i think the worst you can say happened as a result of that is i became an adult who still has an interest in [redacted] and [redacted] which is only a purroblem to the type of people who think that anyone that Thinks Weird should be executed

whereas the stuff that actually makes my life harder like neuroses and purranoia and panic attacks and episodes of psychosis are largely a result of what happens to anyone with a mental illness growing up in america

the cat ever @twi4/26/2023, 9:12 PM

:yeah:

Plasma Ring @ring4/27/2023, 1:30 AM

It's actually shocking to me now that obscenity laws as written have ever led to any court outcome that wasn't "if I think it's meant to make people horny, it's obscene." I have no confidence that an obscenity case won't be brought in the next 5-10 years where the judge looks at something you'd find in any indie comic store and calmly hands down the opinion that it appeals to the prurient interest (has horny pictures) describes sex in a patently offensive way (clearly it's offensive by the standards of any healthy American community), and lacks serious literary, artistic, or political value (just a bunch of bad dick jokes) and nobody with political power wants to sound the alarm at the risk of being called a sex freak.

Especially since the outcome of that would probably not be "all porn is illegal now" but rather "is all porn illegal now? we just don't know! make some and find out! you rolls the dice, you takes your chances! Probably don't do anything gay." Pornhub will still be fine, maybe, but that indie comic store is going down hard.

in reply to @shel's post:

Chamomile🐑@chamomile4/26/2023, 9:58 AM

The constant assertion I see from supposedly sex positive people that a 16 year old making an account somewhere to look at porn is wrong is insane to me.

I get that creators of adult content don't want to be held liable for minors interacting with them in an adult space but come on.

Plasma Ring @ring4/26/2023, 8:08 PM

I can see where this is coming from and I don't disagree--I am actually deeply worried about the number of people of all ages who seem to have decided that exposure to sex is by nature a shocking, upsetting experience for everyone that you're only immune to if you've got Pervert Points in the specific class of porn you're looking at. This has definitely become a thing so taken for granted that "it's probably not the end of the world if kids see some weird shit inadvertently" is just off the table in some discussions.

On the other hand, I sincerely don't want children interacting with my work. I can't stop them from viewing it, but putting aside the question of whether it harms them or not or whether it's legal or not--I don't want to be interacting with them. The thought makes me very uncomfortable. My work is not for them and I don't want children commenting on my sexual fantasies. Like, yeah, if I put it on the internet it's out there for people to comment on, but they are explicitly not supposed to be there! I looked at porn when I was a kid, but it was a time before social media and I didn't try to interact with the creators or make my presence known to them.

There is a weird as hell thing that's happened where kids seeing porn is now so normal that I've seen the argument made multiple times that adult creators should just accept that part of their audience will be underage and take responsibility for making sure the content doesn't upset them. This is an age range that's commonly upset by their parents existing near them in public; when I see them weigh in on porn discussions, they are often (predictably) focused on whether the grownups are being cringe. And then other adults will act like it's wild for porn creators to be upset about that, as though the kids are calling them uncool for using old memes and not casually waltzing across the kind of boundaries they should be learning to respect where sharing sexual thoughts and experiences are involved.

This is not even cases where the content is potentially triggering; children simply don't relate to adult perspectives, and work created for mature adults can be uncomfortable or embarrassing to them on that basis alone. I remember getting angry and going on long rants about stuff I wasn't supposed to be looking at and didn't like, but those didn't happen in front of an audience of thousands, the creator whose intentions I misread never heard from me, and it's all blessedly lost to time now that I'm 40 and my opinion on it has changed 100%. A lot of the porn these kids are looking at initially is made by their peers or could easily pass for YA if you skim the easily avoidable sex scenes, and it's normal to have a "what??? no!!!!!" reaction the first time they encounter media that combines the volatility of erotic titillation with characterization and story beats that are intentionally disturbing or disorienting. As a kid, that felt to me like I'd just stumbled on a mean-spirited, malicious joke by someone with no compassion. As an adult, those same themes strike me as poignant and cathartic.

What sucks is that I actually benefited from that--it was good for me to be exposed to more mature perspectives, whether the subject was explicit or not. But the internet really doesn't have a good way of handling this right now, and I think it's totally understandable for a lot of adult creators to just say, "Nope, it's bad for you to be here. Get out."

@SamKeeper4/26/2023, 9:37 PM

yeah I think this is very true even beyond adult sexual content. like, I've been in a fandom where there was a strong split between adult and teenage fans of a thing that had been around for over a decade--people who'd been fans of it when it originally came out and then teens who came to it in archive much later. when new content released that was (somewhat) more adult focused, clearly oriented towards that older part of the audience, a lot of teenage fans had kind of a meltdown about it.

and part of it was some (off screen and implied for the most part) sexual content, but much of the furor was over the dark tone, exploration of issues of abuse and unhealthy relationships, and I suppose middle aged paralysis and ennui. I observed a pretty clear split along age lines in how hostile people were to this content. as you say, it was received by part of the fandom as a "mean-spirited, malicious joke" but by my whole segment of the fandom as poignant and relatable.

all of which feels pretty normal for teens vs adults that are fans of a thing, but now that pretty normal energy can be channeled into violence directed at creators (channeled sometimes by cynical and opportunistic adults...)

I really don't know what the solution is here but SURELY it's not "make an arbitrary list of subjects that art just must not address because it falls outside teenaged experience". it's certainly understandable to want spaces for art discussion and consumption that are very much For Adults.

which I suppose is a long winded way of saying "yea I feel this"

Plasma Ring @ring4/26/2023, 11:12 PM

Yes, this is exactly it. I think one of the really insidious consequences of all this is that we've got platforms banning "adult content" for "child safety" when they actually mean they're banning explicit sexuality for branding or monetization. Plenty of adult content is still there! It just isn't labeled as being for adults and it's implicitly okay for general audiences because it's allowed. I don't even post that much truly explicit work, but I'm only comfortable on sites that allow porn because there are spaces there defined as being for adults. Any time someone responds to a porn ban with, "not every site needs to be full of porn, just go to Pornhub" all I hear is "I have no idea why some movies have an R where the rating usually goes."

I've heard Tumblr is a lot more relaxed now and has a pretty stable userbase, but every time I think about reopening an account there I remember that their official reasoning for the porn ban was that they were curating the community they wanted, and that meant restricting content that was not for all ages. I don't care whether it was really about being on the app store or not, or what is technically still allowed that falls under the definition of erotica; it is way creepier to me to see a site making a lot of cooing noises about what's safe for kids while flattening everything short of pictures of boobs and genitals into that. (I know they're under different ownership, but...eugh.)

Chamomile🐑@chamomile4/26/2023, 11:32 PM

This is a great point and one I hadn't considered. I've frequently run into the typical puriteen who has decided they're an expert on sexual morality, but haven't had the experience of something I made being evaluated by an adolescent like that. I think adolescents will naturally seek out porn and that's not necessarily bad, but the idea that it should cater to them as a result is asinine.

And of course, I totally understand the desire to have a healthy distance between them and you as a creator. I just look at porn, and I don't want to interact with minors in that context either! There's a huge gap in how we're going to process and evaluate that sort of material, never mind the obvious ethical and moral problems.

I don't really know how the internet, and adult content distribution should or could change to acknowledge that. Much like sex ed as a whole, we need to acknowledge that people will be interested in this sort of thing before the age of 18; they aren't innocent chaste beings one moment and full-fledged adults the next. I suppose this is the sort of thing where, in an ideal world, adult guardians with good judgement could help set healthy expectations and boundaries, but as we both know that is not the norm.

Plasma Ring @ring4/27/2023, 3:32 AM

Yeah, it's. really complicated and something I'm not even sure we can work out in the internet's current state in a way that serves everyone. I legit think a lot of the benefit to me came from observing the way adults act in spaces where they aren't thinking about whether children are watching, because I came to understand things about social etiquette and interpersonal boundaries when people form communities around sensitive topics. So I'm inclined to think that a shift needs to happen back toward it being commonly understood that adults-only spaces are good and needed, because a lot of adults could stand to relearn that stuff, too. (I'm also hoping the prerequisite for this is something more immediately doable than the total destruction of capitalism.)

Chamomile🐑@chamomile4/27/2023, 7:18 AM

Definitely, yeah. I wonder if the engagement-obsessed nature of modem social media contributes to this, at all? I grew up in the age when you could mostly just browse social media as a completely anonymous user, and maybe click a "yeah I'm totally 18" button. There wasn't a requirement to have an account to see smut or login walls if you scrolled too far, no constant pressure to engage with things to drive numbers. It's an interesting idea to me that the Engagement Machine could be inadvertently blurring those lines even more.

Of course, I've also heard many, many stories of young people back then getting into online chatrooms or games like Second Life and engaging in sexual roleplay, often with adults. So maybe it's just a matter of this being something people are actually aware of and talking about now.

Shel @shel4/26/2023, 11:41 PM

Oh gd yeah there's a huge difference between minors LOOKING AT porn quietly as their own private little journey and interacting with the creators that's a whole mess of other social dynamics and legal issues 😬

Plasma Ring @ring4/27/2023, 3:47 AM

y e p. I have additional thoughts about the nuance around this, but I just recently saw a truly cursed take where someone was making the case that it's not children's responsibility to not look at porn on Twitter, it's adults' responsibility to make their accounts private. I can sort of glimpse the reasoning there; I think someone is taking the truth that it's an adult's responsibility not to be receptive to a child who is behaving provocatively toward them, and drawing that out to what they think is a logical additional point.

But uhhh it actually very much is a growing person's responsibility to learn what it means when someone lays down a clear boundary around the space they use for sexual expression. It's not safe for them, and Chamomile makes a really good point above about how people are not going from wee innocent babes to fully realized sexual beings overnight; I can just tell that some of these kids are going to have the most fucked up reckoning with their own desires when they're suddenly not in the Blameless Infant demographic anymore.

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