When I was 10, my mom made me wear a bra and it felt like a punishment for being different.
When I was 10, I took the bra off when changing for gymnastics and accidentally dropped it in the school hallway. A teacher picked it up and said, “Oh, this must belong to you” and handed it back to me in front of everyone. I quit gymnastics.
When I was 11, I thought maybe the boobs would be okay so long as they didn’t get any bigger than would fit in my hand, so I kept measuring it, but they did.
When I was 12, I started wearing two or three sports bras to smush them down, until one day a classmate said, “Are you wearing two bras?!” while laughing.
When I was 13, a boy told me he wanted to squeeze my boobs “until they popped.”
When I was 14, I got cast in a play as an older character and a classmate told me I got the role because I had boobs.
When I was 17, my mom told me to return a swimsuit because it would be too distracting for my boyfriend’s father.
When I was 21, I got properly fitted for a bra and everyone felt the need to tell me how much better my boobs looked.
When I was 26, I got pregnant and my immediate fear was that my boobs would get bigger.
When I was 28, I got shamed for trying to feed my screaming baby in public without a cover.
When I was 28, people asked me “why are you bothering to use a breastfeeding cover?”
When I was 30, people gave me weird looks that I wasn’t yelling at my kid for putting their hand on my boob.
When I was 31, I avoided going to the beach or pool because I didn’t want to have to deal with boobs in a swimsuit.
When I was 32, I got asked, again, “why don’t you get a breast reduction?”
When I was 33, I watched a 5yo girl get shamed for running around in sweltering heat without a shirt on and had to reprimand a bunch of tween boys who thought it was okay to shame her for doing something they do all the time.
When I was 34, my kid kept patting my breast and saying “Mommy’s squishy breast!!” They will never see me express any shame about tits, because I want them to have a different mindset than I had. Yes, boobs are nice! They’re squishy! They’re fun! That’s the end of that.
I’m 35 and no longer give a fuck. I don’t care anymore. As a teenager my tits were covered in stretch marks. They’ve been engorged with milk. My nipple changed shape with pregnancy. Give it another couple decades and my breasts will probably be all wrinkly. It’s sexual when I’m using it sexually. I don’t fucking care, and I won’t be ashamed anymore.
Every time a policy or cultural hangup treats people with breasts differently, it fucks us over.
Tumblr’s new policy makes an active choice to participate in this culture of shame. By classifying “female-presenting nipples” as explicit material, Tumblr has taken a stance that any chest or breast that differs from a male default is worthy of shame and unavoidably sexual. The idea that breasts are shameful and unavoidably sexual is exactly what fucked me up for so much of my life.
Stop shaming people for having bodies.
*claps until my arms fall off*
we didn’t ask for tits. we didn’t ask for bodies that ‘need’ to be censored. and most of us have been dealing with this in tiny ways and giant ones our whole fucking lives so yeah, okay, we’re getting a little salty at this “female presenting nipples” bullshit because we don’t want to deal with it either.
I don’t know a single woman (whether she adores or hates her tits) that wouldn’t love to be able to be as casually topless as any man without it being some kind of debate or social statement
just being able to goddamn exist in the world like fuck tumblr come on how are you this uninformed??
In response to the NSFW ban being enacted by Tumblr Staff, on December 17th 2018 I propose that we all log off of our Tumblr accounts for 24 hours.
The lack of respect and communication between staff and users is stark. Users have been begging staff to delete the porn bot outbreak, which has plagued the website for well over a year. The porn bots oftentimes send people asks and messages, trying to get them to go to a website full of viruses. They also spam advertisements on others posts.
Users have also begged that Tumblr ban neo-nazis, child porn, and pedophiles, all which run rampant on the site. The site/app got so bad that it was taken off the app store.
However, instead of answering the users, Tumblr has instead taken the liberty to ban all NSFW content, regardless of age. But users have already run into issues of their SFW content being marked as sensitive and being flagged as NSFW, not allowing them to share their work.
Not only does this discriminate again content creators, but it also discriminates against sex workers. Disgustingly, the ban will be enacted on December 17 which is also International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
This ban is disgusting, and while I (and plenty of others) welcome porn bots and child porn being banned, the Tumblr filtration system is broken. It tags artistic work’s nipples as NSFW (when it is art), it tags SFW art as NSFW (when it is not), and does not stop the porn bots, neo-nazis and dozens of other issues.
This ban is discriminatory. This ban is ineffective. This ban is unacceptable.
To protest, log off of your Tumblr account for the entirety of December 17th. Log off at 12 am EST or 9PM PST and stay off for 24 hours. Don’t post. Don’t log on. Don’t even visit the website. Don’t give them that sweet ad revenue.
Tumblr’s stock has already taken a hard hit. Let’s make it tank. Maybe then they will listen to the users.
Reblog to signal boost! We must force change.
In solidarity with the NSFW artists who will be painfully affected by this new rule effective on December 17, I will be joining this Log Off Protest.
“why do we even need ao3/ why won’t they censor content i don’t like/ what’s that money going towards”
it’s going towards not arbitrarily deleting all your fucking blogs overnight because yahoo had a shareholders meeting, that’s what the fuck it’s going towards. if you don’t own it, they can yank the cord whenever they feel like it, for whatever reason, using whatever wobbly catch-all algorithm they want, and that is exactly what the fuck we’ve been telling you. “wellll i’m not a porn blog, it’s not going to affect me,” oh worm?? you sure?? this website is suddenly gonna be capable of censoring posted content with surgical precision? give ao3 ten bucks immediately and get real
I personally don’t have a Pillowfort account yet, but my partner does and she has let me look at her account fully to see what it is like. I’ve also viewed Pillowfort’s demo account which is linked to on their Kickstarter. I am waiting with anticipation when I can make my own account, but right now Pillowfort is in a closed beta which means the only people who have access to the site are ones who have been given special registration links. They were doing waves of free beta accounts a bit ago (which is how my partner got her account), but right now for every $5 you pledge to their Kickstarter you will receive a registration key if the Kickstarter gets fully funded (they are as of today 40% of the way to their $39,900 goal).
Here is why I’m excited for Pillowfort:
If you delete your original posts, every reblogged version will be deleted too. Edit your original post and the changes will appear on every reblog,
The ability to make posts visible to everyone, just followers, just mutuals, or just yourself.
A functional blacklist where you can blacklist a post body & tags or just tags.
A terms of service that explicitly states you hold all rights to your own intellectual property. It also states clearly that it forbids callout posts, doxxing, degradation, harassing, hate groups, spamming of tags with unrelated or offensive material, and slurs against minorities. If there is a user that is doing anything offensive or hateful, it is encouraged and mandated you don’t make posts about it and instead flag it and let the site moderators take care of it. This sort of system cuts down on “dashboard drama” and harassment that sites like Tumblr are known for.
They have threaded comments which means discussions or praise no longer clog up your posts and your blog, keeping things much more organized and clean. We can also use tags for their ACTUAL purpose, tagging of posts for ease of search and organization instead of talking.
They have communities and a more connected user-based and user-led environment.
Posts in chronological order like they should be!
A staff that actually cares about the input of their members and is driven to listen and collaborate with their members to create a site that the users actually want instead of being led by a corporation that has their own agendas in mind.
A staff that wants to avoid corporate involvement, unwanted ads, and selling of user info to fund Pillowfort.
The future possibilities of what the staff can do with the site that we didn’t dream could be possible to have all in one place including accessibility and a functional mobile app.
So far, I’ve seen a lot of good things and I’ve been really impressed with how the staff is handling the site and how they have explained their plans for the future of Pillowfort.
If you say you really want a social media site that actually cares about their users, this is it. This is your chance to have what pretty much all of us want. This new blogging platform is all the best parts of Tumblr (and for those who miss Livejournal this is like a wedding between Tumblr and Livejournal) with all the parts we hate and loathe about the site scraped out of it.
If you can’t support Pillowfort monetarily, then please, please reblog, tweet, share, and spread it about everywhere you can.
This is our chance to have a social media made with us in mind and it’s already starting out so well with 10,000 users in the closed beta. Let’s bring it to the next stage of its life!
REASONS TO JOIN PILLOWFORT!
KEEP IT BOOKMARKED SISTERS, AND WAIT FOR IT TO COME BACK ON AIR
You’re fucking ridiculous if you think tumblr’s porn/nudity ban actually has to do with child pornography. Literally every other site can effectively moderate this issue and tumblr has been actively closing in further on their anti-NSFW move. Many sex workers and NSFW artists were removed starting last month after the iOS app was removed from the App Store. Look at FOSTA/SESTA, look at the moves throughout the year to push sex workers and NSFW artists away, look at the way Patreon, Paypal, Craigslist, credit card companies, etc. have over-policed this issue and forced sex workers away. This is all so obvious.
Also, explicitly banning and calling out “female-presenting nipples” – note there’s an exception if it’s after giving birth or during breastfeeding because OBVIOUSLY the only way breasts and nipples are okay is when you’re fulfilling your goddamn job of being an incubator and not just posting nipples wilfully or for (gasp) money. Because obviously, when we’re talking about the banning of child pornopraphy we must target “female-presenting nipples” and let everyone know that those are the real problem. Nipples are only okay when they’re “male-presenting” and in the proximity of a newborn that is confirmed yours.
Like c’mon… FOSTA/SESTA has been presented under the guise of fighting human trafficking just like these moves are no different. If they wanted to go after these very real issues then they would and they definitely wouldn’t be (dangerously) conflating the issues. Also why can I still look up violent pro-Nazi, antisemitic imagery but not a goddamn nipple??
BTW read into how Apple has been forcefully pushing for this move & how easily they can go after other NSFW-content websites and force them to comply.
SlythKris (tumblr backup babey) 