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[[ Please remember this blog takes no specific political stance but we are reblogging this due to the very important phenomenon it describes. ]]

Just something that’s been on my mind. Tumblr has this specific way of handling communities. These are just the ones that come by on my dash, I’m sure there are plenty more examples.

First they start out nice, tolerant, willing to listen and learn.

But they quickly become too nice and tolerant. Rather than simply accepting group X, they begin to overglorify them. They make them into something more special than people outside of group X, and coupled with their compulsive need to belong and feel special, desire to be a part of it too.

In comes the appropriation. If they can’t be a part of it, they’ll make themselves a part of it, one way or another. And is someone in group X not acting the way their fantasy version of them acts? Call them out on it!

They become so fanatical that they begin to talk over, or drive out the original people of group X.

And then finally they manage to become so hateful, their initial tolerance has turned into cold, terrifying intolerance. Calling gay/trans men privileged over white straight cis women, telling transsexual people to die, purposefully triggering people they dislike into panic attacks, defending Muslims to the point of calling the attack on Charlie Hebdo justified. And sending death threats to anyone who dares to disagree.

Being excluded from a group or community because you don’t belong there is not oppression.

It simply means that group does not describe or fit you as an individual.

If you can’t accept that, you have far deeper issues than your imagined ‘oppression’.

Inb4 tons of hate messages and death threats.

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Tumblr - The Social Media Platform Everyone Used Incorrectly, and How This Has Impacted Mental Health World Wide

A bit of a clickbait-y title, but one that is completely true, and an article we should have written long ago.

Tumblr is a form of tumblog. 

Tumblr did not invent this form of blogging, called tumblogging, a form of short, multimedia blog posts. Twitter is a form of tumblog, as is Wordpress. It is generally a public, more casual form of blogging than previous formats such as livejournal and dreamwidth.

Tumblogging, however, was popularized by Tumblr, whose name is obviously inspired by the original term. Tumblr’s company set out to create a platform where an artist’s original content could easily be shared and spread. The entire website’s design and code ethics are primarily built to help spread someone’s content far and wide, much farther than was previously possible on the internet. It worked by promoting your content to others who might like it, allowing you to tag it for finding in a search engine, and for your fans to easily share it with others. All without the trouble of having to save images to your hard drive and repost elsewhere. This was like something never before seen on the internet -- effortless boosting of your work.

And Tumblr still functions, and sets out to function, for this sole purpose. Tumblr’s design ethics have always been focused on promoting artwork and artists. It’s login screen shows artwork from promoted artists, the dashboard is suggesting new artists you might like, and there’s no privacy features to speak of. I mean, why would there be? This isn’t facebook.

But, if you are like any other user, you know that tumblr isn’t just use to promote artists. If you were like our mods, you long used tumblr as a sort of personal -- yet public -- diary. Even like an instant messaging platform. And if you’ve been here a while, you remember how much of a struggle it was -- and still is, to get the tumblr staff to acknowledge how people Actually use the website. We had to use extension, and still do, in order to make the website bend to our will -- to make it function how *we* wanted it to function.

But Tumblr was never meant to function how we wanted it to function. 

Discourse. We’ve all seen it, and unless your mutuals are the ones making the discourse, then the posts you’ve seen on your dashboard have likely piled on tens of thousands of notes in the span of a few days. That’s exactly what the platform was meant to do -- boost posts.

But no one in the tumblr staff expected it to be a weapon of political war.

If you have an opinion, and you post it on tumblr, how much it’s seen by other people is directly correlated to how many followers you have to begin with. Even tagging it doesn’t really help. Post an opinion that is as well planned and thought out as one with 10k notes? If you only have 5 followers, it doesn’t matter. Your words are essentially meaningless without the sheer numbers required to get it airborne.

So on this platform, no matter your opinion, if you have the follower-base, you will be heard. That’s what this platform is for.

Or, say, you make a post. A deeply, personal post. On a sideblog with 2 followers. And someone manages to find this blog... and reblogs a post to their blog with 5000 followers... one you meticulously tagged #do not reblog.

It’s now being seen by 5k+ people. All at once. No matter if their followers think it was messed up that they reblogged you. They’ve seen it. There’s no unseeing your personal, private post. Even if that person apologizes for reblogging it and deletes the reblog. But there is no undoing that reblog. People have seen it. It will always be seen.

There is no true privacy features on tumblr to speak of. Nothing to the depths and levels of livejournal, and now even twitter has far more robust privacy features than tumblr. An yet... Tumblr’s users expect privacy, because they expect the entire world to be good just for them, to respect their privacy... and if they don’t, it’s not the fault of the person who posted these things on a website built from the ground up for the publication of content, not the opposite.

And this has had dire consequences.

While of course there are many adults using tumblr, adults who have had the experience of the internet before tumblr -- a time when privacy was something we acknowledged was personal responsibility, and there were websites with intensive privacy features such as livejournal if we wished to speak privately -- we must keep in mind that many of tumblr’s users, are in fact *not* adults. People who have grown up where tumblr was their first major social media site. Even people who their first friends were made on tumblr.

People whose entire worldly experience of socializing is a website where there is no true privacy. People who have never known that there is any alternative.

And I feel this is where a lot of anti-sjw discourse or ex-sjw discourse falls flat. Many people, most of these being adults, do not stop to think what of an astounding impact this website and its blogging format is having on young minds still forming. They chide them for being stupid and not knowing better -- but how could they know any better?

How could they know any better when their introduction to the world’s social stage was a website where no one can expect true privacy, and not only that, users actively deny it to each other?

I’ve seen popular blogs reblog posts from private blogs without their permission because they, in their minds, thought they were doing the right thing. That because this post contained something they disagreed with, they were allowed to go against their morals for the greater good.

Tumblr’s youth have built a surveillance culture.

A culture where trespassing into other’s personal space is deemed as holy and pure because of some other reason they could have possibly just made up. And many children here don’t know that there is any other alternative.

Back when facebook was new, it was heavily criticized for the increasing information it demanded from its users. Personal information that you would not give to a stranger on the street. And back then, people laughed it off. Of course facebook wouldn’t go very far, demanding such personal information from its users. People were smarter than that... right?

Fast forward half a decade later. I’m remaking my facebook account, because one day I accidentally logged out, and when I tried to log back in, facebook decided to permanently lock my account unless I coughed up my social security number so they can prove I was a real person.

My social security number. One of the most vital and personal pieces of information I have. To a website, who demanded it so I could continue to speak to my family members online, because facebook had become the only place I could easily contact them. And when I told my family about this, they had just shrugged and said facebook had done the same to them, and they just complied.

Extreme? Yes.

But at least facebook doesn’t demand a list of every single one of my mental illness diagnoses, my genetic racial makeup, my sexuality and gender identity, my opinions... in order to feel safe from other users while using its website.

Tumblr’s youth expects you to carry a detailed form of ID to even be allowed to form an opinion on specific topics.  Tumblr’s youth tells you that privacy is of utmost importance -- unless you say something that upsets them. Then you’re free game.

Most of this could have been avoided if Tumblr had had privacy features built in from the get go.

But most of this could also have been avoided if people had realized the Tumblr staff’s main goal with the website from the beginning.

[ex-sjw-resource]

[[ This blog is back from a hiatus. We were @’d a lot and we are slowly going through them. ]]

[ex-sjw-resource]

They assume because they genuinely believe that their exact specific way of believing things is the one true RIGHT way, the one true correct and good way of living.

Just like every other political faction on this planet.

when i say i’m against “hate speech exceptions” to free speech isn’t bc i think hate speech is valuable in any way, it’s bc i’m certain that if we let the government start putting restrictions on free speech they will not stop, and i honestly don’t know why anyone is assuming they will. 

why do you think that the government will ONLY criminalize things that are hate speech by your definition of hate speech? why do you assume they share your definition? why do you assume they won’t expand the definition of “hate speech” to whatever is convenient for them?

why do you want to give them this precedent? for people who hate this government you guys sure seem to trust it a lot tbh.

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sometimes tumblr feels like an elaborate parody of the left written by a republican. all the stereotypes are true here. 

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I’m really tired of seeing people broken up into labels of absolutes.

People are not just “good” or “bad”.

People are not a list of labels. 

People are complex, situations are complex.

I know, that makes it a lot harder when you want to just write off everything someone’s ever done as bad – but that’s not how people actually are, and it would do everyone good to stop pretending they are.

I am tired of hearing about the fear people have in putting themselves out there. And it is a scary thing! Putting yourself out there means subjecting yourself to people who want a really good reason to tear you down, who will jump at the first chance to feel “good” by labeling someone else as “bad”.

I reject this. I reject the idea that there should be fear in speaking up and talking about experiences and trying to reach an understanding of a situation.

I’m unhappy to see people spitefully urging others to cut off ties with their friends under the guise of “well, that person’s just inherently bad, so if you talk to them you’re bad too.” That is fucked up. You definitely have the right to let the friend know you don’t want to hear about whoever troubles you, but you do not at all have the right to decide who their friends should be. This includes guilt trips.

Anyway, just try to be more aware of others. Everyone else is a person like you. They might not have the same experiences as you. They might not understand how their words are harmful, or how what they’re doing is wrong. They certainly won’t if you never tell them.

Most people are trying to be good, but they’re going to mess it up sometimes. Try to keep that in mind. Even when people do really fucked up shit, sometimes they are trying to do good. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” and all that.

Nothing gets solved, no growth happens when you put people into a box from which you’ll never let them escape.

Yes, you absolutely must be careful about people who have tendencies and patterns that are harmful to you. Sometimes people try to overcome those patterns and they fail, and you have to distance yourself from them: that is the sad reality of life. Sometimes though, they can overcome it. But they certainly won’t if the first thing you do is write them off after a fuck up. 

Be sincere. Use your best judgment.

[ex-sjw-resource]

Our blog has nearly 400 followers. It is a pretty small selection of people, but the people who have reached out to us to express how much this blog has helped them has motivated our efforts to maintain, update, and write original essays for it.

We commonly get new followers who are beginning to or have long questioned Tumblr’s abusive community. People of all ages. And knowing that it has helped so many people process and put words to the pain and trauma inflicted by this site is more than enough reward on its own.

What is this blog about?

Ex SJW Resource is a completely political neutral blog dedicated to discussing the abusive sjw community on tumblr. The intent was never to present polarized opinions under a spotlight, but rather reveal the dysfunctional architecture that supports any abusive and cultic community, no matter their political or moral standing. The ExSJWR mods understand that presenting any of our particular personal opinions on this blog would completely defeat the purpose of the blog itself -- and thus will never be a focus. Everyone and anyone, of all political and moral stances, are welcomed here, and everyone’s opinion on the issue at hand, if relevant and empathetic, is deemed equal to anyone elses.

And through this, we distinct ourselves as *not* an Anti-Social Justice blog. ExSJW Mods firmly believe that Social Justice has its place in the world, but acknowledge that it has largely become an unproductive, narcissistic cultic community that does more to undermine and reverse sociopolitical progress than anything else.

How can you help?

If you or someone you know are looking for, or would benefit from, a genuinely neutral blog that dissects and discusses tumblr’s abusive community, then we would deeply appreciate if you shared a link to this blog. We also appreciate if you to leave a link to the blog in a location that people who need it might see it, such as a public comment thread that discusses these ideas and concepts. 

It is very important to understand that leaving the link to this blog is not for the person you are commenting to or discussing with -- it’s for everyone who is lurking and silently reading the conversation.

Many of those who have reached out to us to express thanks had stumbled upon the link as a lurker. SJWism is so effective and dangerous due to the fact it naturally has the effortless ability to shame and silence its victims. So many people in need of this blog are not the ones who yell and scream, but are instead the silent onlookers, too afraid to speak up in fear of being the next target of ostracization and witch hunting.

Reblogging and signal boosts are greatly appreciated.

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This website is so bad for your mental health.

I think I might have mentioned this several times before but I’ll talk about it again. Someone who has a supposedly normal worldview can easily be turned into a paranoid mess who over analyzes the hell out of anything just so they have a sense of being “aware” about social issues. If you don’t nitpick at everything and cry sexism, racism, ableism, or any -ism possible, then you’re not “aware” or ~**~*~educated~***~**~* enough. Anyone who isn’t like that is ostracized until they can make themselves aware under Tumblr’s standards. 

The frequent posts about how women should fear men, how all white people must have a vendetta against “poc”, or how anyone ‘oppressed’ should just be skeptical about anyone ‘privileged’ makes it worse. The more you see these posts, the more you start to believe them. It ultimately fucks with your self esteem and makes you miserable. 

It’s funny because people on here like to talk about being empowered. I don’t see empowerment anywhere; it quite the opposite actually. There’s nothing empowering about constant paranoia and isolating yourself from people who think differently. 

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Nu Age Political Conservatism. Women must be controlled. Minorities must behave under the political party’s morally-correct behavior policy. - Mod D

For a website filled with feminists, the people on here sure love to infantilize women more than anything. They assume they know whats best for all women and that women have no agency in relationships they deem problematic (i.e: the man dressing up her girlfriend for a week). They never take into account that she enjoyed the experience. But no, she was completely miserable because it just so happened that her boyfriend was dressing her up. 

If a woman’s beliefs don’t align with theirs, then it must be self-hate or social conditioning by the “heteronormative patriarchy”. No way can they make informed decisions on their own. 

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“Progressives”: Fuck respectability politics!

“Progressives”: Since you’re part of a marginalized group you’re supposed to hold a particular set of political beliefs, blindly agree with our way of reasoning, and behave in a way we deem acceptable for you to behave. If you don’t, then you have internalized *insert buzzword*. 

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This website is so bad for your mental health.

I think I might have mentioned this several times before but I’ll talk about it again. Someone who has a supposedly normal worldview can easily be turned into a paranoid mess who over analyzes the hell out of anything just so they have a sense of being “aware” about social issues. If you don’t nitpick at everything and cry sexism, racism, ableism, or any -ism possible, then you’re not “aware” or ~**~*~educated~***~**~* enough. Anyone who isn’t like that is ostracized until they can make themselves aware under Tumblr’s standards. 

The frequent posts about how women should fear men, how all white people must have a vendetta against “poc”, or how anyone ‘oppressed’ should just be skeptical about anyone ‘privileged’ makes it worse. The more you see these posts, the more you start to believe them. It ultimately fucks with your self esteem and makes you miserable. 

It’s funny because people on here like to talk about being empowered. I don’t see empowerment anywhere; it quite the opposite actually. There’s nothing empowering about constant paranoia and isolating yourself from people who think differently. 

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7 Ways Social Justice Language Can Become Abusive in Intimate Relationships

February 17, 2016 by Kai Cheng Thom

There aren’t a lot of things I know for certain in this life, but there is one thing I have known for a long, long time: What lives at the heart of abuse is fear – and the power to turn that fear into violence and control.

When we live in fear, when all we have known for all our lives is fear, we are capable of transforming even the best causes and ideas into weapons of abuse – even the cause of social justice.

Let me tell you a story to show you what I mean: A few years ago I took a deep breath, looked one of my closest friends in the eye, and told him that I thought he should stop beating up his boyfriend.

He blinked at me in surprise. He shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what I was saying. Then he said, “But it isn’t abuse if I hit him. I’m more oppressed than he is.”

It was my turn to shake my head in disbelief as I struggled to get a grip on what was happening, what was true, what I believed, what my responsibility in the situation was.

It was true that my friend was, on a systemic level, “more oppressed.” He was racialized, and his boyfriend was white. He was raised in a working class family, and his boyfriend was upper middle class.

Like me, my friend had grown up knowing trauma after trauma as a result of systemic oppression, while his boyfriend had lived a life of relative privilege.

In feminist and social justice communities, intimate partner violence, or domestic abuse, is usually understood as the violent use of power by one partner to control and terrorize the other.

Feminism, anti-racism, queer and trans advocacy, and other kinds of social justice-based thinking also recognize that people of certain identities – for example whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality – are given greater power and privilege in society.

Because of this social power imbalance, social justice communities tend to believe that it is much easier for men to abuse women, white people to abuse people of color, and so on. Social statistics on intimate partner violence support this belief. And this is what I have always believed, as a feminist and activist.

But in that moment with my friend, I was forced to wonder, does this mean that a “more oppressed” person can never be responsible for abusing a “less oppressed” person? Can a woman never abuse a man, or a racialized person a white person?

And how many times had I, in moments of fear, terrified of being abandoned yet again by a white, cisgender male partner, resorted to using the only power I had – the language of feminism and social justice, words that had given me strength and saved my life when no one would – to try and seize control of my relationships?

“If you leave me, then you’re just as racist as all the other white gay boys. You don’t want have sex with me anymore because you’re transphobic. I’ll scream at you and call you whatever I want – don’t tone police me.”

The thing is, I believed those things when I said them, believed them with all my traumatized, terrified trans girl of color heart. A part of me still does.

Because it’s true that social oppression plays itself out in romantic and sexual relationship. Too often, privileged people hurt and exploit their marginalized partners and are never held accountable for their actions.

But there is a difference between expressing oppressive relationship dynamics in order to expose privilege and incite self-reflection, and manipulating the language of social justice to win a fight with your partner.

There is a big difference between pointing out that your partner is more privileged than you and using that fact as an excuse for hitting them.

This conversation is so, so complicated and scary to open up, because it forces us, as feminists and activists, to question the foundations of our beliefs about identity, power, and violence. It forces us to question ourselves and what we are doing, in the world and in our bedrooms.

But I think we need to go there.

We need to look at abuse through a more complicated lens.

We need to learn to understand what is happening in our own relationships not just by ticking off identity boxes, but by deeply and carefully examining specific behaviors and the motivations that can lead to violence.

We need to start looking at the ways in which social justice ideas – the same ideas that liberate and empower us – can also be used to harm and dominate people.

So let’s begin.

[ Click here to read entire essay ]

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You know you’re getting old when you find yourself complaining about kid these days but…

So many tumblr teenagers are bizarrely conservative. It’s surreal to see teenagers acting more puritan than my Republican grandma about ~innocent children coming across Bad Influences on the Internet~. Like,  teenagers are demanding to be infantilised and treated like delicate flowers who cannot be trusted to read Dangerous Fiction lest it upset them and sully their pure minds? It’s like that cow from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe who wants to be eaten.

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An excellent breakdown of a form of morally-centered interpersonal abuse that is unfortunately very common in the tumblr SJW community.

Rarely discussed forms of abuse: Abusive debate

This is a form of abuse I’ve both experienced and witnessed.

I will be using “partner” as short hand for the victimized party, but, as mentioned, this can happen between platonic friends and roommates as well.

Content warning: graphic description and discussion of emotional and physical intimate partner abuse.

Keep reading

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You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you. - The Oatmeal

A comic explaining the backfire effect. Click through to read.

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You managed to find the most personal and opinionated self-post on this blog, as stated in the warning, to point out the fact this post is opinionated and personal.

Our blog’s general theme is to discuss the toxic and maladaptive behaviors that saturate any community, often due to the flaws of human nature. However, the blog is largely themed about the SJW community, as it is where our mod team has personally come from, and it is specifically the group we’d like to address and reach out to.

Do keep in mind that not everyone got a chance to develop a sense of “bad people” or develop a better taste before falling prey to the predatory behaviors of personality cults. Even if “bad people” is an obvious demographic to you, many of us were and still are deceived into viewing them as good.

Entitlement To Your Peers: Manipulation, Control, and the Assumed Authority to do so

[This is written in a more experience-snippets format, as I’m not entirely sure how to approach the subject abstractly, without being personal – as the topic is focused on personal reality.]

A disturbing behavior I don’t often see discussed, or even noticed, is the assumed authority of active control over the personal lives and opinions of your peers.

It’s something I notice often. Friends trying to control whom their friends are being friends with. People assuming authority of people’s harmless headcanons in fandoms, or what they choose to draw or write about. People feeling as though they have the authority to degrade others on opinions that don’t entirely line up with theirs over even the most benign subjects. 

And I personally was guilty of all of the above at one point or another – it’s encouraged in SJW culture, and ties heavily into the concept of Purity. I felt personally threatened by the opinions, hobbies, and friends of my peers. I felt as though it was a direct attack on myself to allow themselves to continue in this manner. And the SJWs around me encouraged action on this – to control the language, opinions, hobbies and friends of my peers with the active overhanging threat of exile from the community.

I was completely unable to separate someone else’s life, their reality, from my own. I was completely unable to see their context due to only being able to focus on my own context, for all the things and events in my life that lead to me being who I was. And I was so focused on my own context, that I dehumanized the people by feeling I had any right to have control them.

People don’t do the things they do in a vacuum. I act the way I do, I have the opinions I have, due to my life experience. Every tiny thing that happened to me made me who I was. And yet, a community that claims so aggressively to want to honor the lives of everyone and promote understanding and coexisting has only succeeding at doing the polar opposite.

It took a really long time to unlearn this way of thinking. I began to realize how selfish it was to feel I had any right to control people around me. I had been blinded by my own life, my own experiences, that I never stopped to consider what life or experiences other people have had to make them who they are.

Like, hey, maybe that person is friends with someone I don’t like because they genuinely, truly get along and enjoy each other’s company. Who am I to make the decision for them on whom they should or shouldn’t like? What made me think I had any right to dehumanize others and decide this in the past?

And maybe that person ships a character or two in a way that I personally find insulting, but I’m not them. Who am I to demand someone to muzzle and gag their own life experiences, opinions, interests, and sexual orientation to appeal to someone whom isn’t them and they cannot personally understand?

Thinking back on all of it, it comes off as completely absurd how self centered I was in assuming that my reality had the right to affect anyone else’s at all. It was difficult to set down my sense of entitlement and take responsibility of my own well being. Demanding the change of my peers to suit specifically MY NEEDS, MY OPINIONS, MY REALITY, is the most selfish thing I had ever done.

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We’ve been calling tumblr activism “Left Wing Conservatism” due to all of this.

When you take away the rainbow paint and glamour, it’s behaviors and dysfunctions are more or less exactly the same as right wing conservatism.

There is a political theory that describes this phenomenon as Horseshoe theory.

baffling how much of this site is just conservative protestantism with a gay hat