#this isnt evil i censored the terrible ones

[cruelsister-moved2]

my feminine woman smashes uhh renee from mew mew power, piper from charmed, morgana from bbc merlin, gwen from bbc merlin, this one gaelic folksinger and radio broadcaster called kathleen macinnes, sandy denny, bert jansch (bert jansch is a feminine woman to me), hayley williams

[trandoshan]

i read journalist jane talia's description of the immolation of aaron bushnell. i saw the still image. i watched her censored video, i heard his screams. i watched the uncensored video and i saw him burn, and then i watched it with audio and saw it all. the description is enough. the still image is as thorough and brutal as any average person may need ("need") to see to understand the suffering he endured in service of his protest.

i'm not by any means an expert, or whatever, in viewing gore or dealing with the psychic harm that it brings. watching the uncensored video satisfied my curiosity. i know what a burning human looks like, i know how his clothes fell, ashes, from his blackened body. i saw him tremble and fall. it did not make me a better person. i am not made more able to help the palestinian people, knowing these things. i already knew they were terrible.

there's value in respecting aaron bushnell's decision to publicize his protest as he did, that video should exist per his demand to be seen -- i would never condemn him for it, i would never condemn palestinians for begging the world to witness their suffering, i would never condemn mamie till for demanding the world see what white supremacists did to her son -- the holocaust is well-documented and those photos of nazi evil and jewish suffering were invaluable, tangible proof that something very wrong is happening in the world -- and i'm not a better person for having seen it. i wouldn't be a better person for turning away. maybe i would feel better and breathe easier if i did.

i won't satisfy my curiosity on this by searching for more details but when i was young i saw photographs of american soldiers raping women in the middle east. they haunt me. i think the photos were used in a legal case regarding these soldiers. this is different from aaron bushnell's video, of course, because those victims were recorded against their will -- a violation on top of a violation. i regret seeing them. i dont know those women but i hope they never experienced anything so horrific in their lives again. i can't imagine they want anyone seeing them in those moments.

i remember 2 guys 1 hammer, in middle school. i remember the time my mom opened a chain email of a man in police custody pulling a gun out of his pants and shooting himself in the head, quick. i remember videos of humans torturing animals: squeezing cats, cutting the fins off sharks, grabbing turtles by their necks, shaking them until theyre dead. all -- isnt this terrible? or course it is.

one of the first posts i saw about palestine since october 7, from a palestinian in the diaspora, was a tumblr user relating their conversations with their grandmother in palestine. the user wanted maybe to share photos of the people already killed, to remember them. grandmother says: their deaths arent entertainment. you know how israelis use our photos when we are killed.

once i told some people to stop using a specific photo for their memes about feeling ganged up on, by whatever abstract concepts of adulting or mental illness, because the photo was of a gay man being beaten by homophobes. they were aiming to kill him with kicks and stomps and he was curled up on the ground. they told me off for ruining their fun, or trying to, anyway.

[itslmdee]

Fic: Female Presenting N8pples

A coffee shop, December 2018

"Female presenting nipples?" Josh laughed, leaning back in the booth with his coffee in one hand. "It sounds like a really weird conference. Or modern art piece. Or a one hit wonder pop band."

Rachel nodded. "It's ridiculous."

"Look I only do Instagram and barely that these days. You'll have to explain this Tumblr thing a bit more. They're banning porn?"

"Yes but it's the way they're going about it. It was a big thing for some subcultures. A safer place than porn sites for many queer people to explore sexuality. And the way they've singled out women. Why should a woman's body be deemed inherently sexual in a way a man's body isn't?"

Josh frowned. "I can go shirtless on the beach but you can't. Is that sexism too?"

"I'd argue yes. But Tumblr isn't a public space. It could have raised the minimum age you need to be to join the site. It could have put in place better ways to filter out adult content. There were other ways to go about making the site safer for young teens than this sledgehammer."

"Teens need protecting," Josh repeated and smirked. "I was reading Playboy at their age. Teens are curious. Anyway, I'm on your side about nudity not being sexual ever since that woman tried to censor the half-scale replica of Michelangelo's statue of David at the local art gallery. So, this female presenting nipple thing; I don't get it. Instagram's the same but I don't look for that kind of thing - not there anyway - so I've never much thought about it."

Rachel took a sip of her cappuccino before she replied. "Most people don't get it. It's not just women's nipples are bad. Anything that looks like a female nipple. Male nipples in some cases. Mountains."

"Mountains?"

"The algorithm is already flagging all sorts of false positives. And while genitals are banned, naked buttocks aren't or at least aren't getting flagged. Artwork isn't supposed to be, so your David statue should be okay, but it's still getting flagged often. And nipples are okay if it's a post about breastfeeding or a mastectomy. I find it creepy, hey your body is offensive unless you're doing your womanly duty to feed a child or you've suffered a terrible illness."

Josh finished his coffee. "What about transitioning? I think I heard Twitter had a thing about that once, a trans woman posting regular updates during their transition and seeing when the ban kicked in?"

"I guess we'll see." Rachel sighed. "I like some of the social commentary on Tumblr, the cute animal pics, the music discussions. I don't even go there for porn but I know some artists are leaving and it's having a knock on effect. The ban isn't supposed to be for text posts but one of my posts about an LGBT hotline offering advice on sex and relationships got flagged because I had it tagged 'gay and lesbian sexuality'. LGBT blogs with no porn on them are getting deleted en masse, while actual porn blogs are still showing up. It's a mess."

"That's social media," Josh said. "Or capitalism. When all social media is privately owned they can censor whatever they want. You'd need a non-profit committed to freedom of speech with a clear understanding of where the definition of hate speech and abusive content lies. One that doesn't think a nipple that's maybe attached to a female body is evil. Seems unlikely right now."

Rachel finished her drink. "You're right. Can we walk back past the library?"

"Sure." Josh got to his feet. "It's a nice day. Maybe I should take off my shirt and show everyone my nipples."

Rachel laughed. "In this weather? You were still wearing jumpers in June."

"In my defence it was a very cold start to June!"

They left the cafe, continuing to gently tease each other, the subject of censorship soon forgotten.

Notes and further reading

The incident with the statue wasn't a direct reference to a real event but I did google for similar examples and found this which is exactly what I referred to, though taking place in Russia https://news.artnet.com/art-world/russians-dress-michelangelo-david-328717

The Tumblr ban came into effect in December 2018. It has been heavily criticised by many.

https://www.themarysue.com/tumblr-will-ban-all-adult-content/ looks at the ban "this sort of adult content is frequently generated by women, marginalized people, and all sorts of creatives struggling in our vicious “gig economy.” They’re going to be hurt the most by the ban." and includes a tweet from someone talking about transitioning " where i post pictures of my bare chest every day while i'm on hrt and wait for the exact point they become illegal"

Tristan Greene at https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2018/12/14/tumblrs-female-presenting-nipples-language-isnt-semantics-its-oppression/ highlights the hypocrisy "if you’re a woman – or any human with “female-presenting nipples” – and you pose for a nude fine-art photograph, and someone wants to share it on Tumblr: forget it. No girls allowed. This is beyond stupid. There is no relationship whatsoever between images of women without a top on, and images that are criminal by their very existence."

This woman's story https://www.quora.com/What-message-is-Tumblr-sending-by-banning-female-presenting-nipples-from-user-content-Why-is-it-so-controversial/answer/Gabriel-Bell-18 shows the ban contributes to sexualising of any woman's body by singling female bodies out as sexual and she writes "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."

The title is given here with an 8 replacing the i; there are many workarounds for writing words that might get flagged including replacing vowels with other symbols and deliberate mis-spellings, hence the rise of the internet slang term pr0n.

[tumblunni]

Man just a random thing that came to mind but i REALLY hate when english dubs remove transgender characters for no damn reason >_> Like man I’m still salty about Crona from Soul Eater being assigned a random gender in the english dub, and how they friggin created their own damn controversy about it by picking the opposite one in the manga and anime. geez fuckin just let crona be nonbinary u fucks. FINAL FANTASY 9 LEFT IT IN OVER 16 YEARS AGO! they didn’t even have any commonly accepted community pronouns at the time, so they went with the super awkward “s/he” and “him/her” but like.. man it means a lot to know that they cared so much about accuracy that they’d leave a character genderless even if it meant an extra difficult translation! (tho still I find it funny how ‘them’ took so long to reach any sort of mainstream acceptance despite being the most logical gender neutral pronoun that already existed in the language anyway...) But also now I’ve heard that they’ve been doing similar censorship with non nonbinary trans characters too?? Like you don’t even have a damn excuse there! even if the excuse was TERRIBLE, seriously, who the fuck looks at something like ‘pronouns are easier in japanese’ and decides the solution is ‘lets randomly make up a gender that the character never had’... BUT ANYWAY the thing i just learned about today and got really sad about is that apparantly this random witch lady in paper mario was transgender in japanese? And like.. a pretty damn negative and bigoted depiction of a trans lady for a game that’s aimed at friggin CHILDREN! Like the whole way they talk about her is ‘HA HA SHE’S REALLY A MAN, ISNT IT COMIC RELIEF THAT THIS MAN IS DELUDED INTO THINKING HE’S A WOMAN, LOOOOOOL’. And her dynamic with her two evil sisters has them being abusive assholes to her primarily because of that ‘really a man; thing, and they’re the ones who constantly and loudly out her at every damn opportunity to complete strangers. Like how dare you fuckin say ‘we’re the shadow sisters’, you’re a fuckin MAAAAAAAAAN.... god its gross and horrible and its even worse for how twee and ~kid friendly humour~ the writing style is.. So yeah I can understand why they’d wanna censor that in english but it is a horrible HORRIBLE even worse solution to censor THE CHARACTER BEING TRANS, instead of just removing the bigoted insults! In english her sisters’s insults are all replaced with various other immature kiddy insults, so this character is just ‘the ugly sister’ instead of the trans one. But like.. because of removing all mentions to the character being LGBT and then that combined with the original source being VERY anti-LGBT about it, this only made the english fandom embrace those damn gross jokes even more. Now everyone who looks up this translation mistake gets to see ‘she’s really a man, they censored that she’s really a man!’ all out of context, and there’s fuckin debates denying that she’s meant to be a trans woman cos she’s really a MAAAAAAN... people who literally only know that one changed line where her sister says ‘you’re really a man’.. gahhh... And it sucks too cos mario kinda had an established history of similar things like this, this was meant to be the whole 'joke’ about Birdo, that she was ~really a MAAAAAAN~ Cos, yknow, cis men commonly ‘want to be called a girl’ and ‘want to change their name to catherine’... godddd... And yeah, again, dub just removes all mentions to LGBT characters existing in the marioverse, rather than removing the bigoted insults... *sigh* I’m just glad that at least nowadays the big nintendo franchises are like.. taking baby steps towards positive trans representation. But its a shame that everyone seems to go easy on them as if its their first time ever doing it, and nobody knows about all the trans characters that already existed as negative jokes in past games....

[fuckblizzardbearlover]

Look the fact is all the doomsayibg ppl are saying is stupid and ignorant. There are more scantily clad women i. Children's shows. I just started the new he man and teela basically isnt even wearing pants. If they were censoring stuff cus' sexy bad "we'd all be dead cus this would mean the universe magically changed to one that didnt exist. Literally no one censors that stuff it just doesnt happen.

Like one of the big censor things is "u cant say kill/dead" but i just watched an evil fem fatale showing tons of skin say they were going to "kill" the enfire village. And if they were going to do this theyd def start from the top.

We know from an interview awhile back that most of the art used in portraits is old pre alpha concept art..

So imagine this. They are making world of warcraft.they have a large team because an mmo is a bigger deal than an rts. Ppl are making art to see what wow will look like and one of fhe many artists who is a 30s male from the 90s (i.e. when the idea of empowered women were "smart and resoectful" or "evil and sexy", when men though women being sexy was Empowering) drew this picture of like an ideal warcraft mage. This person who may be one of many blizz fired for the sexual harrassment working for this small game company who thought wow might be a failure* just made some concept art and made it kinda sexy, appealing yo his own taste** and when thry needed some pngs for some random portraits to populate assets that was one of many images in the files they took from.

And now that they are looking at the stuff these sex offenders contributed , swapping out a shitty ugly 8 bit wide pic no one even notices, that was made in the 90s with terrible resolution, with like some modern art made with modern graphics was a no brainer.

*which we know cua thats their big alstory, about how on release day they ran out of copies and thought the line was for someone else

**i mean the guy who does most of the overwatch art does TONS of nsfw art cus HE thinks its sexy . So its not anything soecial

OR the devs, i.e. the victims in this case of sexual harrassment, are the ones who decided to replace it.

The only other possible explanation is that like the old squirrel models they jusy were always going to replace the these files. I mean the red woman was even replaced by a similar character whos wearing what mages from azeroth ACTUALLY wear.

We def should hokd the EXECS and people in charge for doing LITERALLY NOTHING to address employee demands (blizzardwatch is keeping a running tally of how long its been)

But one of the reasoks we got here was cus a HUGE portion of the fandom are the exact same evil rapey dickhead as alex. The way those guys talked u know they were just like every wow nerd, acting like they achieved celebrity status. U know tons of these guys acting like them replacing a shitty png is the end of the world are the same type whod also use their fame to lure women to the cosby sweet.

And again i think part of the reaction ignores the fact that the ppl making these games are THE VICTIMS. The shareholders or execs didnt replace those files. The workers did

Opinion: I don’t get the fuss over the change from the ‘half-naked sexy lady’  to ‘more conservatively dressed sexy lady’ and ‘bowl of fruit’ paintings. To me they are - were - just paintings; I look at them and move on.

For me, personally, my first thought reading over this discourse wasn’t ‘the takeaway here is that removing the paintings of women and replacing them is regressive and puritanical and it’s telling the girls and women that play WoW that your bodies are bad, showing too much skin is bad, and you should feel bad for wanting to feel sexy’ but actually ‘they’re toning it down not because of the lawsuit but because they’re appealing to younger people that play the game’.

However, I see both sides of the issues…but at the same time I’m absolutely not the right person, especially as a woman, to be commenting on this kind of topic.