#you are responsible for your internet experience

[luckyshouse]

im sorry if you don't want people traumadumping in your askbox over that post and you dont have to answer if thats the case but i just thought you should know it really really resonated.

i'm 19, as a little kid i was a victim of interfamilial COCSA (of course), but my response to that as a kid was to do it to others tenfold. i only had two instances of being 'the victim' but those two experiences gave me questions and curiosities & i would continue to regularly repeat it to other kids for years because i was smart enough to hide my actions and nobody noticed. i stopped once i grew enough to realize that it was wrong (10 years old) but by that point all the damage was done and there's nothing i can do.

i feel like people say 'the cycle of abuse' all the time but they never genuinely think about what it entails. they want to comfort victims by demonizing the people that hurt them. but the internet as a general collective cannot hold two conflicting truths at the same time, you cannot support victims and also support people who create victims, you have to pick a side. like it's dicourse. but like you said it's victims all the way down. the siblings that touched me first were absolutely just recreating their own experiences, we were family, i know their home life.

so when people want to show support for victims of CSA and they want to prove theyre not predator apologists or whatever, they'll default to saying they wish they could kill all abusers and anyone whos ever crossed a boundary deserves to have their rights stripped and be tortured and all this shit. and it lets me know that if i were to be honest about my own CSA they would see it as a sort of trolley problem and decide that im not worth the risk. so ive never told anyone. there is no neutral support for victims like me, only death threats or fetishization(? is that the right word). other victims who would seek me out because i'm capable of playing predator for their own scenarios. and if anything goes wrong with our relationship then they have the '___ is an actual child abuser' card to play for their callout post.

i don't have a good way to conclude this i guess. i don't even know if my points are relevant with your motivations for writing that post. but it helped me feel like out there somewhere there's a space for people with my specific sexual trauma, that isn't crazy biased in one direction or the other. thank you for seeing the pattern and actually fucking trying to stop it. it gives me hope.

i hope you are ok with me posting this, if not, lmk if you want it deleted.

this is exactly what im talking about and something i think about frequently. while i am not personally someone who did that, i carry a lot of guilt for being overly sexual and inappropriate in a lot of situations, and i care a lot about people who did bad things as a kid who didn't know better. its one of the reasons i bring up the fact that i parented multiple kids- when you help protect kids in very very bad and abusive situations, you see them start developing extremely negative and unhealthy behaviors REALLY early. one of the biggest reasons i delved so deeply into child psychology wasn't for myself but because i needed to know the right things to say to the kids in my family because i was seen as the one to go to for help. this meant dealing with kids who HAVE done bad things, and learning why that happened. they were just kids, man, all of them were, and i had to understand the idea of what youre describing very early.

and this is the problem with the way we treat predators exactly. because it literally leaves no room for anybody, including children, to get better, to recover, to learn better, etc. because everyone is so fucking excited to like you said talk about how much they hate and how much they want to kill predators, both to have some sort of power against people they view as oppressive but also to signal that they are good and not connected to these predators. and it leaves a very weird space for people who have done bad things in the past due to their trauma. because the thing is, theyre going to exist. theyre going to keep living. you can't kill them. im very against the death penalty, i'm also anti prison. i hate both of them. the only thing forced isolation in a violent hostile area does is make things worse. ive been hospitalized enough to know that. my father is a correctional officer, my mother is a felon. it doesn't help anyone. and creating these ideas that we just push everyone to the side whos ever done anything bad is equally as bad as never reacting at all, because it's a black and white solution to a very complex and gray problem. you, people like you, people worse than you, etc, all need help. whether or not something happened doesnt change the fact that you deserve help too, and you deserve to recover and find people who will love you and support you through it all.

[superpixie]

So, just a friendly reminder for anyone who mostly uses mobile and wants to block posts for literally any reason at all. Don't like a show, a blogger, a concept, have a CW/TW...

Use the filter content feature for any reason at all and nobody but you can see this list.

After you make your filter list your feed will look like this: so you can still view a post if you want to.

It's not 100% and some stuff slips through or some stuff gets over-filtered, but for all of this hellsite's flaws the filter system is actually spectacular and makes for a better internet experience.