Was Cruisin My Tl & This Is So Fucking Important

was cruisin my tl & this is so fucking important

An old and homely grandmother accidentally summons a demon. She mistakes him for her gothic-phase teenage grandson and takes care of him. The demon decides to stay at his new home.

This.

But yes, by all means, talk about historical and societal context. Analyze the nuances of the language, the subtleties of the sexual choreography. I absolutely challenge you to do that—

—and then I challenge you to do it without having a text to refer to.

Good fucking luck, my friend.

This is the most persuasive argument I’ve heard that we need to keep open access to works which many might find offensive or harmful. Sold. And also kind of surprised, because I hadn’t heard it from quite that angle before.

Now, there’s a whole separate conversation about ways to have the debate about those offensive works; about the burden that often falls on marginalized people who find a work harmful to ask that it not to be performed in public or promoted as awesome by influential people or paid for, thereby supporting the production of more, and how that burden frequently compounds the experience of marginalization. Or about the limits of free speech when hosting that speech might directly put at risk the security and safety of people in the community that hosts it.

But those are conversations not related to whether works should exist on AO3 or be findable through tags. And I sense that part of the problem with this debate is that it’s all getting conflated. Which is why I love this post.

the working title of this was “censor this, bitches“ which I decided was maybe was a little undiplomatic so I decided to give it this massive passive-aggressive title instead

yeah, yeah I know I already reblogged “autobiography” earlier today which is basically about a thousand times more exactly what I want to say than any essay could possibly be BUT then I went and actually read what people are arguing here and you know what

SOOOOOOOO

There are two things that are being collapsed in this argument that we really, really cannot afford to collapse. That is:

For AO3 to be a sustainable project long-term, there needs to be a comprehensive policy in place designed to prevent its users from harassment and abuse; and

Some content that people would like to host on AO3 is, to some people, vile or offensive.

Both of these things are true. However, it does not follow from (1) that we need to regulate or restrict the content of the works hosted on the Archive to ensure the content referred to in (2) doesn’t make it onto the Archive. People seem to be taking it for granted that (1) means banning all that stuff in (2), and that’s wrong.

(cw for high-level references to the existence of rape, underage sex, and anti-Semitism; as well as one marginally more specific reference to kinky sex)

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it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.

example: it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of those spaces.

(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)

thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.

the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground - the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.

pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.

so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.

so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.