feedmythrill - Tumblr blog

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Tumblr’s Decision to Ban Sexual Content

I know I haven’t posted in months (years?) and many of my followers (if they still exist) dont know who I am, but if I don’t say this on tumblr it won’t feel right. I am currently a graduate student studying internet media, communication, and identity at a large midwestern university and this is what I think about Tumblr’s decision to ban all sexual content. This is also my “I’m leaving this fucking website” post.

I have had a tumblr for nearly 10 years and, at one point in my life, tumblr was the social media site I used most frequently. My blog has hundreds of archived posts containing original essays, poems, and photographs. The platform is still valuable to me in several ways, but I cannot continue using a site that has launched such a blatant and unfair attack on sex workers and explicit content creators.

I am not a sex worker but I follow many sex workers on tumblr. Their essays and original content have informed my sex-worker inclusive feminist praxis. Though I recognize unequivocally that there is abusive, oppressive, and violent sexual content on tumblr that needs to be moderated, there is also a sizeable community of sex workers and content creators who use tumblr to autonomously make a living. There are marginalized people who rely on the particular network that this platform offers for money and safety. There are queer people who use tumblr to produce and amplify queer and trans-friendly sexual content. There are sexual co-cultures on tumblr that are under-represented or not represented at all on mainstream porn sites. In attacking all of this content, tumblr is responding to sexual abuse by engaging in a sex panic that hurts sex workers and other marginalized people. And I’m not fucking here for it.

I’ll also note that this is a cultural decision—tumblr is “cleaning up” their platform in order to build a new cultural identity and redefine their audience. That move explicitly sends the message that sex workers and sexual co-cultures are not welcome in tumblr’s supposedly inclusive community. That move is drenched in misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic assumptions about what kinds of sexual and political expressions are permitted according to the gatekeepers of virtuality. I wonder: where can sex workers go to safely and effectively make a living online? Where can the sexually marginalized go to build community and organize online? And when will the rest of us stand up against the oppressive policing of sexuality in virtual space?

I hope some of my other friends who have been on tumblr since the dark ages will join me in speaking out against this move. It will do more harm than good.

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Bill clinton

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Nails by Michiko Matsushita, 1999 Matsushita took tiny computer parts and wires and embedded them under clear acrylic. She then took wire and metal and wrapped it carefully around the model’s fingers and hands, as it to remind us that it is not just about the nails…hand care, as well as client care, is just as important in the new millennium.

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. by Alberto Polo Iañez Via Flickr: www.instagram.com/albertopoloianez/

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We have, essentially, chosen cancer as the model of our social system. Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.

Ursula K. Le Guin (via solarpunks)

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Rapunzel Graphite

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Me, a disgraced academic turned farmer, surveying my crops: Finally... I am out standing in my field

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committee in solidarity with the people of el salvador

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