Multiply queer, multiply disabled, mentally ill, anti-capitalist, white, cat mom
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incredibly weird to see "intersex" used as a porn genre. how did this happen?? that describes real people and it doesn't mean "girl with a dick"
this chost and its comments are a breath of fresh air which I'd needed for a long time, actually - I've felt for a substantial period of my life now that I'm just screaming into the void
People took "herm is a slur" to police people that used it self-identifyingly and then made it that "intersex" should apply to everything, or something?
you don't call real people "herms" because humans aren't hermaphroditic! it's totally reasonable to say about a fictional character! it's bananas to then use the real-people word as a fantasy category auuhguhghughughug
It -was- an intersex slur as recently as the 90s. Then us dual-wieldy types claimed it for a couple decades, idk how much actual offense or overlap there was... then... yea, what Tayruu said
This trend ... is way more offensive we -ever- were as dragons, hypers, chakats, etc. 🙄
i've been under the vague impression that there's been a push for awareness of the word "intersex" specifically because real people want to get away from the "herm" confusion, but i can't actually back that up. if it's true then this sure is a slap in the face though
"Someone can't be a girl and have a dick, that's impossible!" -Uncreative Person
Also mildly unrelated but: outersex.
best I can gather, E6 was caught with some real bad policy regarding trans characters, so in an attempt to not abandon the "tag what you see" policy they invented some just really awful tagging guidelines. It's like weird in that the tags aren't explicitly transphobic so much as just, extremely clueless chaser energy. weirdly clinical terms like "andromorph"
"intersex" is a big part of it because they insist on tagging something as trans requires it being explicitly stated somewhere that an artist meant to depict a trans subject.
omg does this seriously trace back to e6. i think the timeline kinda lines up. oh my goddddd
i don't know that i love using "trans" as a porn category either (cements this idea that "trans woman" means "conventionally attractive woman also she has a dick" which is not the case or the end goal for a lot of folks) but i don't know why they don't just do "girl with a dick" as a fuckin tag, it's not like they don't have other common tags that are phrases
e6 really really really loves using "umm its called tag what you see" as a shield from having to actually engage with the way their tags shape the way the website's users and thus a kind of massive swath of the furry fandom relate their fetishes to real life contexts. It kind of becomes this infuriating tautology of "well I see a herm so it's a herm" or whatever and it's like... yeah. that's the issue. I really wish e6 wasn't one of if not the best sites for searching aggregate furry content, because its weak points are very often at the expense of minorities and because they're more preoccupied with finding their porn easy than actually having standards of any kind, suggesting changes to the "tried and true" systems they already have is made to be as huge a pain in the ass as possible.
yeah my spouse had all their art taken down (there was a lot) after one of their pics was tagged "male" for containing a girl-w/-wang. i get it, people are looking for the bodies they're attracted to, but boy howdy it sucks to have a developed world and your main characters get reduced to "Looks like a dude" by some people who are roleplaying being an authority when the thing they run is basically hot-or-not for sparkling art theft
for real. i remember the crushing disappointment of seeing whyega go "lol i dont care" when reggie got placed as the central example of the weaknesses of the "tag what you see" policy (which I cannot overstate enough how deeply bullshit and hypocritical it is and ALWAYS HAS BEEN). like. on one hand it's real neat that reggie is genderfluid and whatever, but that was kind of our shot, it felt like. no one who actually has a point to make on that front is gonna be in that same position of relevance to the entire furry fandom again, at least not anytime soon. ugh. I really wish e6 was not as fundamental and central to the culture of the furry fandom as it is. It's just not up to that fucking task
e6 has done nothing to help the issue but I would be willing to bet that "intersex" as porn genre instead of body descriptor could also be found prior to that -- not just older furry sites like VCL and AGNPH but also just like, non-furry porn. it sucks but fetishizing conditions/attributes (sometimes to the extent that those conditions/attributes are popularly known first and foremost as "a sex thing", crowding out essential info and resources) is sadly not new
hmmm i feel like i only started seeing "intersex" as a furry tag in recent years, and i've never heard of it used outside furry stuff (except when literally true). but also i don't do a ton of active porn browsing so this is anecdotal at best
Same, plus I'm not super acquainted with any post-2000s stuff outside of furry work, so I'm out of my depth on it.
Did some digging and it seems at least a few may have been using "intersex" to tag in 2009 [cw of course for anything one might find on e6]: https://e621.net/wiki_page_versions?search%5Bwiki_page_id%5D=383 but this doesn't necessarily reflect a history of the term's use in this way. Either way, as noted in the comments, it's still a raw deal for intersex people.
It's like weird in that the tags aren't explicitly transphobic so much as just, extremely clueless chaser energy. weirdly clinical terms like "andromorph"
Some trans people1 made enough noise that they changed it. Last we checked all the slurs / misused terms are still supported as redirects. Of course, they vehemently opposed fixing the actual issues at hand, only changing the labels rather than rethinking their ridiculous classification system.
—🜂
Almost certainly intersex people too, but I don't specifically remember. Intersex people definitely got a much rawer deal from the whole thing, swapping from a slur to a misappropriation.
the comments here are weirdly talking around the subject it feels like. best I can tell it was taken as "when you're playin with sex that's intersex it means ur mixin n matchin" which is. very incorrect, but the internet has never once given a flying fuck about what the terminology for real minorities actually is.
Folks have proposed "altersex" to describe what e6 and smut in general describes as "intersex" but people largely ignore that because they have a word that works whats the problem why should they change ugh thats so annoying and hard who gives a shit etc etc
i could go on but that would mostly be very frustrated very angry ranting that amounts to "i will never get along with what seems like the majority of online furries because they seem to prefer shallow entertainment and escapism over the lives of real people that aren't literally in front of them"
i suspect there's an underlying tension also, where the actual goal is "i want people who fetishize this body type to be able to find my art", but no one wants to say that out loud because it sounds a wee bit gross
(of course people may want to find the art for other reasons too, like relating to the body type, but this use of "intersex" is actively detrimental to that!)
Yes!! and also frankly, that shouldn't be an issue. Aliasing is a thing e6 does and I'm sure other websites could manage, and just having "intersex" alias to "altersex" for a few years and then phasing out that alias so that actual intersex art can be tagged as such doesn't seem like it'd actually take all that much involved change to the infrastructure, you'd just have to put up with a bunch of quite literally grumpy wankers for a bit while the community adjusts.
Have the disclaimer I put on all of my NSFW writing (universally featuring trans characters, because my NSFW writing has first and foremost been my processing my own transness through the lens of cryfucking):
"Please note the following when it comes to this work's keywords: For the purpose of search tagging, I use a number of terms for people's genders and anatomies which you really shouldn't actually be referring to those people by, but which I believe do help those people in trying to find works which have characters who represent them. I've been trying to cover every base by including every term I could think of, but just be careful about the way you might use any of those terms in discussing this work now."
People said to stop using herm cause it's bad. Then they said to stop using futa cause it's also bad. they also said to stop using dickgirl/cunt boy (yeah that one is obviously pretty objectifying).
I haven't heard anyone ever say altersex until I saw this comment section. Every single term we used to use has been called a slur I (and I assume others) started tagging intersex in attempt to be respectful. And clearly that isn't working either.
I'll gladly use altersex if that's good, but get the feeling it's only so long until somehow a problem comes up with that too.
Altersex was specifically concocted as a term that is meant to categize fictional bodies such that terms historically used as slurs or clinical descriptors for real bodies are not employed to describe fetish work. This sets it apart from the history, because the words used thusfar all already had issues and were picked up from places where those issues had always existed, they just didn't get the full backlash until later. It's not a case of "every word is eventually bad," the problems with previous terms were there before they were pointed out.
The only issue I can forsee with the term altersex is the actual act of fetishizing body types, which isn't actually a problem with the word, but what it's describing. I'm sure that will get horribly mangled and conflated in that drama, should it ever arise, but personally, I'm a proponent for having the language to describe the extant realities whether or not those realities are actually "good" rather than just demanding "bad" things not exist and have no language with which to invoke them
basically, if "altersex" is ever used to describe a real person then some kind of klaxon should go off
It's the never-ending discourse which is always going to be a problem whenever sexual fetishes and the subsequent objectification come into conflict with peoples' identities which overlap in superficial ways with said fetishes.
