A lot of people don’t understand how difficult it can be to know you are asexual for sure, and to be confident that the label is true on you. You spend years asking yourself, “How can I know if I feel sexual attraction or not?”
Trying to prove you DON’T experience something is actually ridiculously hard especially when you are nowhere close to understanding what it is you’re trying to disprove.
It’s a lot like playing a game of Where’s Waldo, but you have no idea what Waldo looks like and you rely entirely on the partial description of him you get from other people.
Take this image, and find “Jeremy” in it:
At first you’re like, “Who tf is Jeremy? That’s a thing?”
And then from discrete descriptions you hear in the hallways, you find out Jeremy has a red shirt.
And so you point to everyone on that picture who has a red shirt like, “Hey hey, red, THIS could be him. Certainly one of these is him!”
But, alas, you’ve gotten it confused with someone similar, but not him at all. This happens when you mistake romantic attraction or aesthetic attraction for sexual attraction or, if you’re aro, platonic attraction for romantic attraction. You’ve misidentified him because he was wearing the same color shirt and looked somewhat like what others were talking about.
You go online and ask for more descriptions of Jeremy, and you may gleam a few details. People are like, “Oh no, Jeremy has stripes on his shirt, and a funky…I don’t know, over the shoulder scarf thingy. Look, it’s really hard to explain. Trust me, if you have seen Jeremy, you would KNOW him.” Which is like ??? confusing, although it is true.
If only you could prove Jeremy isn’t on your board you would know you’re ace//aro, but it’s hard to ever be 100% certain he isn’t there when you have no clue what he looks like.
Which is why it is important for aces//aros to just, forget about trying to be 100% certain and just identify anyways. That’s what helped me the most, knowing that I didn’t have to prove something, I could just assume, “Yeah, if I had felt sexual attraction, I would know. I don’t have to prove without a doubt I don’t in order to use the word.” It’s okay, you give yourself your own validation.
its gonna be unreal funny when absolutely nothing happens tomorrow
Ive watched about 30 mutuals legitimately commit social suicide by either:
Exposing dirty ass fetishes that their followers did not like
Shoot their shots @ other blogs that bashed them and got their followers to swarm them
Few just deadass deleted their accounts
Others moved to twitter and pixart or whatever
One figured out that his faceless porn blog was being followed by his irl brother who didn’t know who the owner of the blog was cause he was faceless until the brother posted a full body and face nude since “tumblr is dying anyway” and recognized him
One “lesbian” artist came out straight and lied about being abused for lesbians and gays to give her sympathy money
One asked me where I lived and idk wtf they were planning with that info and thats not even all of what Ive seen in just the few times Ive logged in periodically since the 10th.
Im entirely sure more shit went down than I was able to catch too so if after all that it was just a prank… 🙃
This is like a dry run for whenever we discover an asteroid is coming straight for us
Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.
Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).
Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.
So what is changing?
Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.
Why are we doing this?
It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.
Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.
So what’s next?
Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.
Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.
Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.
Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.
Jeff D’Onofrio CEO
So, it’s not enough to have the nerve to claim that you want to foster artistic expression, while deliberately banning sexual artistic expression. You have to go further by writing out the decision in a way that actually BLAMES the existing NSFW users for your own failures, and blatantly claims that with those users it’s a “worse and more negative tumblr?”But you don’t even stop there.
“in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture”
Which is saying that those people who are expressing themselves in any explicitly sexual way, to connect with other adults interested in such expressions of individuality, is preventing you for taking your place in the culture?
And how does bringing child pornography into it even factor, when that activity is already ILLEGAL and everyone knows you can’t just get away with putting that shit on a public channel like tumblr. Shoving that into the discussion is the same as claiming FOSTA/SESTA had anything to do with protecting victims of trafficking.
”…we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets.”
In other words, whether or not there is an inherently negative impact in anything sexually explicit, we have decided to treat it like there is.
“…became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.”
Just not anyone who wants to express themselves in images that could be deemed sexually explicit. A term that no one in their right mind claims can be universally defined. Is Hysterical Literature sexually explicit? There’s no nudity, and no visible indications that any form of sex is taking place. But it is. So, does it only count as explicit if the book they’re reading from is erotica? But if written erotica is allowed, then what? And why is written erotica allowed, when it can be a thousand times more explicit than a photo showing a woman’s nipples - I write it, I should know. For that matter, why is it ONLY women’s nipples you’re banning?! So, topless photos of men, that are intended primarily for titillation, that’s fine? But if it’s women’s nipples being observed, that’s so much more explicit, and must be removed.
“Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.”
You love Tumblr, just not the huge numbers of people who use your service, and enjoy using it for the purpose of sexual expression - regardless of how much a role their played in your service even still existing anymore, since most other forms of social media passed it by a decade ago. And you deem anyone who is providing adult content to be creating a negative experience for others on Tumblr, regardless of the fact that the adult community on Tumblr is blatantly telling you otherwise.
Congratulations, you didn’t get this anywhere close to right this time either You are blaming a part of your community, who has supported and defended you, a blight on your community. Everyone tells you that the real problem is porn-bots, but because you can’t fix that problem, you’ve decided to not just ban everyone else involved in explicit imagery, but to blame them for bringing the porn-bots in, because they helped to make Tumblr a place where people felt safe sharing their sexual expression! Victim-blaming 101.
The fact is, you don’t want to put in the real effort, money, coding, etc. that it takes to properly moderate your site and keep adult content from the view of minors. So, instead of owing that, you paint a narrative where poor Tumblr has been held back from it’s place of greatness, by all the “whores” clogging up your website with their deviant imagery. And no, that’s no exaggeration. Because it’s also NOT a coincidence that sex workers, adult performers, etc. use this site, and that (aside from the porn-bots) the bulk of the content you’re looking to ban is coming from those (primarily female) users, AND that this decision comes in the same year as the passing of SESTA/FOSTA. So, good job supporting the puritanical political narrative, that says anything which allows for freedom of sexual expression is inherently being used to exploit women and corrupt children - and so any argument against banning that form of expression is seemingly nullified by how appalling it is that anyone would NOT want to protect women and children from being exploited or corrupted.
Your Appeal to Emotion, Poisoning the Well, Kafka-trapping and other various forms of logical fallacies are duly noted.
I mean they’re right. And in response to the staff post:
Why you gotta ruin it for everyone, @staff ? I was able to figure out who I am and I managed to make friends and discover fandoms here. I connected with all sorts of people and find all sorts of lovely artists (sfw and nsfw alike) and here you are being a bunch of cucks. Get rid of the porn bots and nazis. Do your fucking job. Or better yet, let someone else buy the damn site and run it. There are better people out there who can do it much better than you.
I will continue to post whatever I want and you can’t fuckin’ stop me.
