Y'know, some people do have a strong crying response to stress, and they might cry (even against their own will) when faced with an upsetting situation and that doesnt mean they are “gaslighting” or “manipulating” you.
There are people who use crying as a manipulation tactic? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean that every person that cries during a heated argument is trying to get under your skin. They have their own emotions and issues, and frankly, not everything other people do is a personal attack on you.
do y’all remember before direct messages tumblr had a dumbass ask limit of 10 per hour and communication was impossible until they introduced dumbass fan mail and we were basically sending telegraphs back in forth trying to communicate those were…dark times
Do y'all remember when they finally gave us direct messages and instead of doing it normally, they gave it to a few people at a time and we had to infect each other with it like a virus
remember when any post with more than like 6 people talking was unreadably smushed except for the last few additions remember when any post of over 500 characters became a link back to op’s blog readmore style remember when video and audio posts had about a 10% chance of working when you click play
As a recent user I love finding out shit like this from older users. What the fuck guys???? Why were you USING IT AT ALL?!??
believe it or not, we liked that more
Tumblr allowed pseudonymous accounts and porn.
That’s why we used it.
I don’t think people who arrived after the porn ban understand, but tumblr was BUILT on porn, it was advertised as a porn-friendly social space. It was famousfor its porn.
It was a place to go and be among other adults and enjoy both sexual content and just vibing.
So it attracted people who liked to be open about their sexuality, including but not limited to queers, feminists, trauma survivors, anyone routinely desexualized by society such as the disabled and people of colour.
It attracted artists who wanted to be able to express themselves freely without worrying about arbitrary content bans (photographers especially; the tits out in a natural setting scene was a HUGE thing on tumblr).
The low skill barrier to posting video made it attractive to indie and homebrew pornographers, yes. Arguably, it was for them. But it was also popular for musicians, especially novices looking for a way to get feedback from a robust but not necessarily hyper critical art scene. For performers of all styles who wanted to sing, dance, or compose about messy, graphic, emotionally intense shit and not worry about being taken down.
The relatively low barrier to making written content made it
appealing not just to essayists, comedians and short fiction writers of every niche and style, but to people just wanting to chat about whatever the fuck was going on, whether that was the rollout of cellular data service to their podunk rural nowhere, or the frenemy drama at the glamour-shoot they just did of a coked out urban sex party.
The low barrier to sharing content allowed all those groups to see each other in a way they wouldn’t normally: as vibrant and robustly human. The low barrier to commenting allowed us to interact with each other as peers in a way that fundamentally did not exist (not with that scale, not with that ease) elsewhere.
And all of that, all of is was the direct result of tumblr’s commitment to allowing porn.
Tumblr was a safe space to be sexual, and as a consequence, it grew into a safe space to be fuckin weird.
Weird people make the best art. We have the best conversations. We develop the best intersectional hypotheses.
But it was the porn that built the ~tumblr aesthetic~ we still enjoy today.
And when that ban came around, it was a lot of creeping horror. Because all of a sudden, the entire foundation of the (comparatively!!!) chill, artsy, nerdy, sociopolitically hyperconscious space was torn out from under us, and we were supposed to just like… accept that? As normal?
The weird thing is, apparently, we did. We just accepted that as normal. In fact, many people celebrated it as a good thing. Now people talk about the “new tumblr” as a place that is “returning to nature.”
Every one of the tedious hiccups and user-unfriendly corporate decisions made was put up with because of porn and the fascinatingly complex social spaces it created.
The fact that this can so easily be forgotten is, honestly, just depressing. I know that western culture has backslid into some truly profound anti-sexual nonsense as part and parcel of the anti-science and pro-fascism culture, but goddamn. It’s just so weird to see this blank space in people’s memories forming in real time about something that relatively many of us were definitely present for and still benefiting from.
What’s also interesting- and more than a little horrifying- about this development is the rise of anti-sex rhetoric on this site; seemingly in the wake of, and very likely because of, the porn ban.
It isn’t just young users & users with christian, conservative, and radfem backgrounds who are cultivating anti-sex subculture; it’s often users who are new to this site, who never interacted with the “weird” porn-based social circles, or who are taking advantage of how the tumblr community at large is moving away from that history- both naturally, and in a very intentional way.
The conversations about how Some Ships Make You Bad and Some Kinks Make You Evil have been happening for as long as there’s been reason to have them, sure- but they’re also taking hold more strongly now, with less backlash, because the people, community, and culture that was built around ideas running intrinsically counter to them have been driven (and are still being driven) from the site.
What makes this especially insidious is that Tumblr has cultivated a huge community of queer people, largely because of that foundation around porn. And because the website as a whole is now shifting in this new anti-sex direction, it’s resulting in more and more queer people adopting anti-sex attitudes and promoting anti-sex rhetoric.
And anti-sex rhetoric will always translate to queerphobic rhetoric, because the ideas inherent to it (some sex is wrong and bad even if it’s consensual, Think Of The Children, we have a right to police consensual sex between strangers, thoughtcrime is real) are synonymous with ideas inherent to queerphobia, and almost always weaponized against queer people.
Which means that this is a rare example of a huge queer community existing (even flourishing!) in a space that, suddenly, is becoming more actively queerphobic- and rather than all the queer people recognizing danger and leaving, they are often being persuaded to promote queerphobia themselves.
