WHY DEFEND FREEDOM OF ICKY SPEECH?

POSTED BY NEIL GAIMAN

https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008.....peech.html?m=1

Yeah this sucks and sad everyone feels like they need to do this to stay on this site. :/

It fuckin sucks that the largest hub of furry art isnt owned by the fandom itself in a coop arrangement or some such.

Honestly, the argument of "protect IRL minors" just ... doesn't make much sense.

But it's just weird seeing how attitudes on the site have changed over the years. And I wouldn't be surprised in the least if feral NSFW gets the next strike to appease some loud mass. :/

i sent a ticket in about my mew picture and they said that one was fine.

Everyone is allowed to have their opinions, I do not fault them for it so no worries.

Cp is a really offensive term for a lot of people because porn is suppose to be consensual and children under no circumstance can consent to sexual activities. Most use the term CSEM "child sexual exploitive material" when taking about sexual content with real children.

artwork about fictional characters is not CSEM.

Endless sadness.

As for FA, they've been railroading to shit decisions for years. I wasn't surprised with this change, i was sad, but wasn't surprised.

The rightwing has gotten emboldened and more active. We see Nazis in the streets, armed vigilantes at drag shows, attacks on abortion clinics, Christian conservatives gaining power in the financial world and using it to deny banking access to porn sites, moral panics, over trans people being groomers, over fictional content and porn art galleries.

They are trying every tactic they can to find a weakness to exploit. Before they could attack Roe head-on, they tried to enforce unnecessarily tight medical standards on abortion clinics. They tried to attack the Furry community head-on and it didn't work, so they settled for weak spots to create division through using emotional responses.

Their arguments against fictional content centers around "it's disgusting" and never have I seen them establish exactly how this protects animals, or children, or whatever else.

Medically speaking, attractions - no matter what they are - are not addressable. You cannot shame or moral-up or therapy someone into ceasing to be attracted. This principle is established to exist in harmony with not offending IRL because there are plenty of people who participate in BDSM because they have rape fantasies or gore art because violent evisceration during sex gets them off and there is no reason to start creating special category exceptions other than ignorant misunderstanding or willful malice. The latter is what's driving this.

The issue that leads to real problems is impulse control, which is what gets addressed in therapy sessions with offenders, or with would-be offenders. Usually there is an underlying condition such as schizophrenia or narcissism that leads to the sex abuse, but you won't hear the puritans talking about this because they're content with just putting up a caricature narrative about how sex abuse happens. Which btw is why movements that claim to be against these forms of sex abuse NEVER talk about prevention: in their world, child sex abuse is something that just happens and then we must deal with how harshly to punish the perpetrators, much like the gun lobby will tell you that mass shootings just happen and prevention isn't ever discussed.

There are a number of nations that have outlawed such art, some - and regrettably I say some very civilized liberal nations even - are even prosecuting the art with the same punitive regime as if real children were involved. It pains me to see that so-called secular nations who are supposed to understand what standing up for minority rights means have nonetheless internalized a Christian view of morality when it comes to sex and are using panic to justify criminalizing swathes of non-offending people just because they're "weird". Canada even had the gall to attempt a UN resolution to adopt this insane standard, a standard that got a horror novelist in Quebec who wrote two friggin paragraphs in a novel in which an underaged was raped by her father, they busted him down SWAT-style in the middle of the night to and searched his home for CSEM. Ruined his reputation, and the judge even remarked that the law - which forbade ANY FORM of depcition for ANY reason - even prevented rape victims from uttering recounts of their abuse!

Across the world in recent years the right - even in liberal nations - has taken notice of how the think-of-the-children fallacy can be used to spread a lie and panic fire faster than fact-checkers can put it out, and use this to smear porn sites with panics about children accessing content or being in content - Australia has internalized the "it's not what you are, it's what you look like" mantra of the FA AUP 2.7 so much so that it's banned small-breasted actors in porn. Think about the message that sends to people, where you have a petite adult of no choice of her own being shamed for looking in a way that "attracts pedos" or that her relationship with another man is "pedophilic" because of how she looks.

It is working, and they are getting porn sites encumbered with ID verification laws - further absurdly shifting the responsibility of what the kid is accessing online away from parents and to the sites themselves.

They don't care.

They don't care about preventing abuse - remember abuse under their mindset real instances of abuse are not preventable, it just happens - they don't care about "cleaning" the Furry community of "dangerous individuals", they don't care about anything but destroying these platforms, these communities. They at most draw a handful of misguided or tokenized abuse survivors to put up front as "voices" advocating for this change from within, in the same vein as Clarence Thomas or Herschel Walker are supposed to be Black voices supportive of Republican politics.

They are fighting on many fronts, including slandering individuals. A few months back Charem was the target of such an attack. More have followed and will follow. They are trying to whip up a panic over the Furry community similar to how they did over the Trans community child genital mutilation and bathroom creepers panic, to stir up strong emotions and demonize an entire population. Their real aim isn't to "clean something out", it is to "expose" the community as something evil to its core that warrants total destruction.

These kinds of movements don't stop. They won't stop.

They won't stop at abortion, they will go after IUDs, IVFs, contraception pills, now they're pushing for abolishing no-fault divorce, and will not stop until women are nothing more than walking incubators.

They won't stop with trans sports participation, or gender-affirming care for children, they will outlaw hormone therapy for adults, and in Russia - where a big part of the war IS against the LGBT cause - they've outlawed sex change surgery altogether. They are pushing for trans people registries and laws forcing trans people to be outed and trans children to be taken away from their parents. They will not stop until trans people are dead.

They won't stop with cub art, they won't stop with "appears too young" art, they will move on to feral art, they have already attacked several people as "zoophiles" for what they draw and favorite, they had a group dedicated against "-phillias" in the Furry community(look up the web archive for TAPS_Society on Twitter, they wiped now but during the 2.7 policy update they were calling people left and right pedophiles and posed as furries who want to make the community the best it can be by removing "degenerates".

We have heard the "degenerates" line countless times in history everytime people wanted to exterminate a populace for liking or doing what they don't like, in their privacy, the concept has literally not had any other use. The "decadent" West is Putin's talking point and it was Hitler's. There is an "enemy" that is "degenerate" and must be "cleansed" lest society "collapse". Wake the fuck up people! THIS is why we set our legal standard that unless there is REAL harm involved, we don't go out to get people no matter how "weird" they are.

The people driving this force are psychopaths, they love destroying people's lives, being cruel, causing suffering, causing death. The moment the rightwing designates a target of "weirdos" as "socially acceptable to hate on", they will move in as "vigilantes", outing people, slandering people, harrassing people, and destroying their lives.

Consider that Furry is the predication of "we find animals sexy, but animals cannot consent and fucking an animal is harm so we made fictional animals that we can fuck". Now replace "animal" with "child" and you will immediately notice that the exception being carved out in fiction and expanded by AUP 2.7 is - at its core - UTTERLY INCOMPATIBLE with what Furry is. It currently stops at where it is purely out of an arbitrary reason, the reason being that "for now this is enough". But its logical conclusion is only that Furry as a whole is wrong. Thus, it WILL come back, with evermore moral demands. As I've said, they will not stop until the Furry Community is destroyed.

The people who are today weathering this storm out and are hoping it will end once there is a "balance" and the people making demands "have had enough" and learning to live in this new world are LYING TO THEMSELVES. This will NOT stop. I've already clarified why they will not stop. These are continued conquests in an incremental war that is being constantly fought and that will not stop until the warmongers have exterminated their "enemy".

Have a serious goddamn discussion at community level about this force and what it's doing, and stand by the side of your scat fetishists, your diaperfurs, your plushophiles, your "weirdos". They come in and pick off the most vulnerable, and if nobody says anything, they'll move on to a broader target. These people are NOT your friends. These people are NOT "just asking questions". These people are NOT attempting to carry out a legitimate conversation. And YOU'RE next!

I wish people would read this and understand. I keep trying to explain to my friends why we need to defend the "problematic" artwork and creative works. It's just so disheartening to see FurAffinity leaning into this as an entire community when it should be a representation of everything AGAINST censorship!

The sad part is that the people who NEED to read this the most are likely the people who won't, because they're the ones screaming off the top of their lungs "no no no icky get it away!".

The furry community is - or at least was - a living testament to uncompromising, unapologizing, unashamed, wild freedom. It rejected the Burned Furs movement at the turn of the millennium, it refused to disappear over threats from angry parents to disown or kick out their kids for being furries, it refused to be any less weird to the slanderous, mocking news coverages it was getting, it refused to exclude people of different sexual orientations, people who indentify as other animals, and it repelled its last major moral panic which was animal welfare organizations disavowing furries as a gateway into animal sex abuse, it did not bow down to the attacks from the right, we were either ALL into this, or we weren't.

That strong spirit - and ONLY that strong spirit - has changed the world. The world, monopolized by a Christian conservative set of acceptable standards, began to morph and eventually acceptance was carved out. Now we see Disney films and corporations like MSI pandering to the Furry crowd. Something was won, but not all progress has been even. Some parts of the fandom mired in more prejudice have been slower to assimilate.

It is utterly unconscionable then, that a community that has tolerance and acceptance so deep in its DNA, and that knows first-hand the many pains of having to fight against an oppressive gatekeeper that decides what is or isn't accepted in society - that instead of continuing to push until this system is dismantled - they take the shortcut and ally themselves with it, throwing a part of their culture - and their entire welcoming-to-all creed - under the bus in order to more quickly make bedfellows with the gatekeepers for short-term gains.

I've cried over this, it is such a perversion. We do not owe our existence TO the gatekeepers, we owe our existence IN SPITE of the gatekeepers!