1. You are responsible for your own media experience.
2. There is such a thing as a healthy level of avoidance towards topics that make you feel unwell or even (in a real-life clinical definition of the term) trigger you - but you are the one to actively take care of what you view.
3. Avoiding does not mean policing others.
4. You have no right to tell artists to censor themselves - you may criticize what others do, you may dislike it, that’s fine - but actively asking for censorship when you could easily unfollow or block a person just makes you look incompetent in your use of the internet.
5. Do not give people on tumblr or /any/ website the responsibility for your emotional well-being. Because these people do not even know you so no, you have no right to ask them to take care of you.
6. Content creators are not your parents and owe you nothing, not even a breakdown on why their content isn’t problematic. You don’t get to demand a dissertation denouncing any and everything unhealthy in a piece you don’t like. Move on.
7. Tagging is a nicety but not an obligation. You can message people, politely, and ask them to tag things, and many people will, but understand that it’s their blog and they aren’t obliged to say yes. Unfollow and block when you need to. Circling back to number 1, you are responsible for curating your own experience.
8. Don’t be a jerk. Remember at the end of the day, there are actual living, breathing people behind each screen name. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face in real life.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to remember this.
So anarkiddies on Twitter are deciding that with the anti-trans right going in on “rapists”, “groomers”, etc. that the riot grrl-90s elder types throwing around “kill your local rapist” slogans are enemies, or at least unsafe, and so as these things go to be mass-harassed and purged.
The “nah I’m just kidding but someone on this site would say this” meme is abusive and gaslights people who don’t have the resources to read posts all the way to the end.
The experience of whiplash people undergo is unsafe. It invalidates longer posts with meaningful messages. Plus Hiding tonal shifts can cause harm nah I’m just kidding but someone on this site would say this
i woke up in a cold sweat last night thinking about this post
Has anyone made a hot take that anti-shipping helped cause online fandom to be heavily dominated by mentally ill people who are Like That? Every anti-shipper I met online was the sort of mentally ill person who never took their meds or went to therapy recently, even if they weren’t outright sexual predators. The mentally ill people who actually take care of themselves either avoid fandom entirely or are hardcore pro-shippers.
Is kinda funny when people slather on the vulnerability or righteousness to request something unusual or inconvenient around here these days and get passed around for tens of thousands of notes to laugh at, and you’re like “yes, ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ is one of our culture’s foundational myths!”
Welp, another beautiful day, gonna take a break from sitting on my phone acquiring an effectively limitless supply of goods and watching the esteem and influence of all the bad people recede in real time and go out to apply my newly polished sense of focus to permanently increasing the quality of my environment in a way that both makes me more attractive and earns the esteem of my neighbors!
A big part of getting through the last decade for me was reading your posts about how it was going to turn around and get better. And it did! I've been able to start pulling my scene back together because you said it was time. And it was!
i do wish people would relearn the ability to think things are dumb without making up reasons why they’re also evil actually. personal taste doesn’t always have to be a moral stance, the personal isn’t that political. i told my friend i didn’t care for selena gomez the other day and he asked me what she’d done. i don’t fucking know bro i just think her music is boring. im tired
I think old people deserve a fair hearing, one they aren’t afforded all too often in the multimedia era. I believe that the elders aren’t always wrong and the young aren’t always right. Growing up, we were lied to about all this, ironically by the people who are now old. The “never trust anyone over 30” boomer generation inculcated a sense that youth is just a form of incipient correctness. The future is theirs, so therefore they will be right about the future. Inevitably though, the young, while dictating the future, will ruin it in some glaring way. They’re human, it happens. And keeps happening.
Worse than Twitter’s baseline tone is just the omnipresent, reflexive demonization and collective will to hurt outgroup individuals. Connected to that is a panicky willingness to buy into emotionally charged stories that you don’t dare question your in-group on. Did we all become Deadspin? No, Deadspin wasn’t like this in 2008. But, if I’m honest, it was probably one more step to wherever we are. And this current place, perhaps a hell and perhaps a purgatory, is an ever-changing but seldom evolving shit show. It’s been one big refutation of the once-ballyhooed idea that we should all be speaking to each other, constantly.
What the boomers missed, however, was how they created this generation. They promoted an aesthetic of rebellious gatecrashing, then pulled up the ladder once safely ensconced. Moreover, they demeaned their privileged perch out of a moralized pique, all while ceding no purchase. This food is terrible, and such small portions, but none for you. No tradition was upheld because no tradition was offered.
So the younger generation responded in kind, not with tradition, but with an all-out assault on it. They beat the establishment, then beat themselves, and in the end, almost nothing endured.
What makes you think the flip is coming any time soon? I was convinced it was as well, but between Dobbs and then the GOP nominating a fleet of circus clowns it feels like it's been stopped in its tracks. A lot of the people I thought had decent heads on their shoulders have suddenly flipped 100% woke and the rest have self-destructed James Lindsay/Jordan Peterson style. Where is the flip coming from?
No the thesis doesn’t have a late comeback and beat the antithesis, the flip is to the synthesis; get on building that early, let them spend themselves staking out positions and slapping each other, by the time you’re established none of it matters
This is how it happens. I’ve been saying for a while that the next turn involves a revalorization of inegalitarian sexuality, this is part of it coming together.
The ‘90s Clintonian Silver Age was about taking a pause to reenchant American normalcy by #including the 60s… and it took. Standing up for post-counterculture cultural norms is now authentic American conservatism.
At the same time, the '80s had intervened. You had the cultural backlash, “family values” reassertion of child-protectiveness, you saw the Supreme Court invent the idea of “child pornography” as a category their last decades didn’t leave constitutionally protected, also the “campus rape crisis”, Take Back The Night, the broader almost proto-2010s original “political correctness” culture and canon wars PCU riffed on.
And in reaction to that, as a threat environment to be navigated if not particularly a change of heart to be internalized, the '90s didn’t push the presumed-sexual-access-to-inferiors line. Maybe even postured against it, y'know, Ben Affleck in Mallrats, who’s trying to fuck the girlfriend in a very painful place that’s not the back seat of a Volkswagen, would-totally-fuck-high-schoolers bad guy of the first movie where Kevin Smith was working for Harvey Weinstein from jump…
And yes, Weinstein and Hollywood, #MeToo, Epstein and the national elite, hell, Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky, remember that one?, it appears that if the Boomers with a shot gave up on trumpeting it they didn’t on doing it…
How much of “nice guys”, “MRAs”, was about about guys noticing the gap here? “The world you are to inherit is in the rock-and-roll tradition of Woodstock thru '80s keg parties, the men who don’t go into domestic seclusion have a steady stream of satisfying partners, and all of this comes through a vernacular popularization of second-wave feminism!” Okay, but the last doesn’t really produce the prior.
(“Woodstock '99 was a rape fest!” well okay '94 seemed better, but by modern standards how much enthusiastic consent really was there in the mud of '69?)
Gone Girl I keep coming back to, but the book was really about the gap, about it collapsing on men in a way that was, if extreme in its particulars, rooted in the way it largely would in the 2010s.
But the thing is, “oh no these cads publicly mouthed feminist support while sexbezzling in private, now that that support has pumped feminism up enough they’re no longer safe!” has a parallel waiting, among the people who grew up with 90s culture. “Oh no feminism mouthed pro-sex Sixtiesism while building towards Puritanism in private! But now that we’ve been pumped up for counterculture sex-positivity… ::cracks knuckles::”
Like, what, they wouldn’t? Go read those responses OP referenced.
Add that to the way yammering about pedos and grooming marks you for avoiding by anyone worthwhile as a chud or at least anti now…
Also add the back-to-the-city thing. '80s teens-and-malls “suburbs” were really like, the San Fernando Valley, or Long Island, or relatively close-in Chicagoland. Now, in the parent-chauffeured exurbs the few outside adults an adolescent might get involved with are like, “sports coach” and “youth pastor” so I’m not sure exactly how a return to unsupervised intergenerational mixing would affect things, but it’s a change.
people say, like, this person “made a post defending [something].” & they stop right there. & its like… well… dfgdsfgds… did you read the post?? what do you think?? maybe they defended it successfully!
it’s kind of deeply depressing that there exists this entire vast subculture of progressive-learning 15-19 year olds online who are legitimately filled with anxiety over their media consumption diet and closely monitor themselves and others to make sure nothing they consume is Problematic™ lest they be ousted from their social circles. at the exact age where it’s actually good to have a varied media diet and be able to critically engage with harmful elements, too
straight up if you are high school or early university aged and you’re spending time feeling significant guilt and anxiety about what you choose to read or watch because of your online peers and shaping your media diet based on fear, you do not have to be around those peers anymore. there is a vast world outside this kind of person
How much is your “vibe shift” tag just you fantasizing about the return of 2000s hipster culture with the sexual sleaze dialed up to 11? Do you really think that many people want Terry Richardson and Gavin McInnes back?
Yeah, I am kinda rubbing my hands for an indie sleaze comeback. Dov Charney is exactly what we need rn.
