Tag: Tumblr

We Should Improve Society Somewhat

~ Kathryn

This is my take on the viral Matt Bors comic. Someone actually said this to me about two years ago, and since then their comment has been living in my head rent-free. With this comic I hereby evict that unpleasantness and release it back into the wild.

I started drawing this comic earlier this year and finished it just to get it out of my drafts folder. In the time since I completed the line art, I made a firm decision to limit the negativity I post on social media. To be honest, most of the experiences that have had a major impact on my life during the past several years have been negative, but I’m not sure there’s any real use or meaning in representing them directly through autobiographical essays and comics. Instead, I’ve found much more satisfaction and catharsis in constructing analogies through the medium of fiction.

Also, I think there are a not insignificant number of people in the world (including the “yet you have a job” person) who tend to latch onto negativity to make bad-faith arguments about topics that could benefit from more nuance. Now that I’m at a stage of my life where I’m considering working on more collaborative projects, I’d prefer to keep that sort of interpersonal drama to a minimum. Thankfully, I’m in a better place now than I was when I started drawing this comic, and I hope the person who wrote this in response to one of my essays is in a better place too.

Still – fuck capitalism.

Best Practices for Dealing with Harassment on Tumblr

~ Kathryn

After almost four years of actively participating in various fandoms on Tumblr, I’ve seen and experienced some awful things, and I’ve finally arrived at a set of best practices for handling the nonsense that I’ve encountered on the platform. I’ve made a bunch of stupid mistakes on Tumblr, and I’ve used those mistakes as a foundation for these guidelines, which are intended to help you protect yourself while avoiding unintentionally hurting other people.

(1) If someone sends you hatemail, report them and then block them. If someone reblogs your post with hateful tags, report them and then block them. If someone tags you on a hateful post, report them and then block them.

(2) If you suspect that a specific person is sending you anonymous hatemail, block them. If it was indeed them, then the hatemail will disappear from your inbox, even if it was sent anonymously. If the anonymous messages don’t disappear, then it’s possible that they weren’t being sent by the person you suspected (although it’s still possible that they were, as there are many ways to mask an IP address). Nevertheless, you should probably keep this person blocked anyway, because there was something about their behavior that made you suspect them in the first place. Trust your instincts!

(3) A vaguepost is a post in which the poster criticizes a type of behavior without specifying who or what has triggered this post. If someone has made a vaguepost that you suspect is about you, block that person. Even if they didn’t intend to hurt you, they intended to hurt someone, and that person ended up being you. You’re not socially obligated to tolerate a hurtful atmosphere, no matter how vague it might be.

(4) If a mutual follower sees someone making hateful posts about you but continues to behave in a friendly manner with that person, unfollow them. They’ve made a conscious choice by remaining friends with the person who has harassed you, and their decision is essentially that it’s okay to harass you. No one who is comfortable watching you being harassed is your friend.

(5) If someone engages in racist, sexist, homophobic, or ableist behavior, or exhibits any other type of discrimination in what they post or reblog, unfollow them. It’s 2018, and they know exactly what they’re doing. Tumblr is a terrible forum to challenge someone’s political position, so don’t try to engage them directly. Even if they seem like a nice person, the best strategy is to unfollow them as soon as they start to make you feel uncomfortable.

(6) Tumblr is a place for people to express their unique interests and opinions, and everyone is entitled to a few vent posts every once in a while. If someone seems to be taking a slow train to Crazytown, however, it’s okay to unfollow them. It’s important to use your best judgment, especially regarding someone you’ve known or followed for a long time, but it’s also valid to unfollow someone as soon as they start to make you feel uncomfortable.

(7) Recognize that mental illness, as well as any other type of neurodivergent positionality, is not an excuse for bad behavior. The assumption that people with mental illnesses and other neurodivergent positionalities are unable to tell the difference between right and wrong (or otherwise unable to control themselves) is not only inaccurate but extremely offensive. Don’t feel that you’re expected to tolerate harassment because of the positionality of the harasser.

(8) This goes without saying, but do your best not to spread hate. Don’t send hatemail, don’t make hateful vagueposts, and don’t reblog people’s posts with offensive tags or comments. If you have to vent, don’t use popular fandom tags to spread negativity. This also goes without saying, but try to stay off social media if you’re drunk, angry and crying, or in an otherwise altered state of mind. If you’re unsure of whether something is offensive, don’t post it.

(9) Do not engage with harassment. Unfollow or block someone, and report them if necessary, but don’t call out their bad behavior on a public forum. This ends up hurting other people, and it never fixes the original problem; no one in the history of the internet has ever stopped harassing people because someone told them it was wrong. As an adult, you’re responsible for demarcating your boundaries, and only you can ensure that they’re respected.

(10) If the harassment you’re experiencing on Tumblr is so pervasive and severe that it’s affecting your mental health, take a break from the platform. There are vibrant fandom communities on sites like Twitter, Discord, DeviantArt, Facebook, and Reddit, and they often don’t have any overlap with communities on Tumblr. The world is wide, and your time and talents are valuable! Don’t let your voice be silenced, and don’t let a bunch of antisocial creeps get you down. Turn your back on hateful negativity, walk away from toxic communities, and keep doing the things that make you happy.

Bullying on Tumblr

~ Kathryn

About a month or two ago I posted a picture of a man holding a pig on Tumblr. It was a cute drawing of a cute anime character holding a cute cartoon pig in a cute way. It wasn’t exactly like the manga cover above, but it was close. The caption I used for the image was essentially this: “Even though this character is a jerk, I like to think that he has a soft spot for animals.”

One of my mutuals reblogged this picture with the hashtag “animal abuse” and then proceeded to reblog several posts about how pigs don’t like to be held and how cruel it is to pick them up. Because this person frequently writes about Steven Universe, my drawing came to the attention of a small but vocal segment of the Steven Universe fandom that has dedicated itself to “calling out” people who post “problematic” things on Tumblr. I ended up being sent a dozen violently angry messages, and I was tagged on several posts featuring videos in which pigs were harmed in legitimately upsetting ways. I didn’t respond to any of this, so the activity faded after a day, but the episode was quite disturbing.

This is not the first time that something like this has happened to me on Tumblr, and it didn’t surprise me. It still took me more than a month to decide how to respond to it, however. Should I unfollow the person who reblogged a cute drawing of a cute anime character holding a cute cartoon pig with the tag “animal abuse,” or should I just accept it as normal and move on?

To anyone who isn’t active on Tumblr, the answer should be obvious. If someone feels comfortable looking at the cute cartoon art you created and calling it “animal abuse,” then they are not your friend. You should unfollow them, and you should probably block them for good measure. Even if it wasn’t personal, and even if they didn’t intend for me to feel (or actually be) attacked, this sort of behavior is extremely unkind. Yesterday I wrote that it’s important to be patient with people who make mistakes on social media, since we’re all figuring out this method of social interaction together, but there is a world of difference between tagging someone’s face on a group photo on Facebook in 2009 and sending someone a message that says YOU DESERVE TO BE SLAUGHTERED on Tumblr in 2018.

The problem is that this sort of thing is normal on Tumblr. Sending someone hate mail or tagging them on a video depicting graphic violence is clearly harassment, but this type of harassment is so commonplace that even sane adults in their late twenties and early thirties seem to think it’s acceptable to do hurtful things if it’s for the purpose of promoting social justice. It goes without saying that harassing someone online has nothing to do with social justice, however, and the discursive atmosphere on Tumblr has become so radical that people’s views of what is offensive are completely skewed. Of course it makes sense to critique something that celebrates or otherwise promotes misinformation or discrimination, but “critique” is so valued by the affective economy of Tumblr that many people go out of their way to find and denounce problematic messages that don’t really exist. In other words, it makes sense to critique real animal abuse, but placing a cute anime drawing in the same discursive category as real harm done to real animals is bananas. To give an analogy, I think it’s fair to say that most rational people would not get as upset about the manga cover above as they would about the sort of cruelty depicted in the film Okja. Unfortunately, on Tumblr, there’s no longer any distinction between the two.

So this was my dilemma. On one hand, I don’t want to be associated with the Tumblr hate machine in any way, and I certainly don’t enjoy it when it targets me. On the other hand, isn’t this just the price of admission for Tumblr? And how can I be sure that it’s not me who’s the guilty party? Maybe it was in fact wrong of me to have posted that drawing? Maybe I should think long and hard about what I did to deserve being sent death threats from strangers…?

I recently started rereading the Harry Potter books, and that ended up being what it took for me to reorient my moral compass. There are a lot of bullies in the novels, and they’re bullies because they can get away with it. Other people see this happening, but they do nothing to stop it. Reading these books for children helped me remember something very simple: Bullying is cruel, and people who are friends with bullies are cowards. In order to be a good person, it’s not enough not to be a bully; you also have to refuse to be friends with people who tolerate bullying. Watching something awful happening and staying out of it because it’s none of your business is not a neutral action. By being friends with people who instigate bullying, or by remaining friends with people who don’t care if other people get bullied, you’re essentially saying that you don’t care who gets hurt as long as it isn’t you.

This is basic schoolyard logic, but this scenario is being played out by adults on Tumblr for the ostensible purpose of promoting social justice, which is why it’s been so difficult for me to recognize bullying for what it is. Nevertheless, I’ve come to the obvious conclusion that going out of one’s way to send hate mail or to leave awful tags on someone’s post is a choice, as is associating with people who routinely do such things.

I’m not extremely active on Tumblr, but I maintain a solid presence there, and I’m starting to get the feeling that the platform has passed its peak. The community has become increasingly toxic, and many content creators are leaving for greener pastures. For most of the writers and artists and genius shiposters I once followed before they left Tumblr, “greener pastures” seems to mean Twitter, which is sad, because… If Twitter seems like a friendly and sane alternative to your social media platform, then you might be in serious trouble.

In the meantime, I’ve been experimenting with PillowFort, but there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of activity there at the moment. More on this story as it develops, I suppose.

A Woman of a Certain Age

~ Kathryn

It’s so strange how Tumblr culture fetishizes youth, like, it’s all about promoting creativity and social justice until a woman is older than 21, at which she should really get a life and stop messing around in fandom. And this is especially bizarre because most of the content creators I know on Tumblr are in their mid-twenties to early thirties.

Instead of trying to fight this attitude, I’ve decided to embrace its weirdness wholeheartedly and start hardcore lying about my age.

From now on I am going to tell people that I am 57 years old and got into fandom when I retired.

…But actually, though. About a year ago I commissioned a drawing from an artist whose character designs I admire, and when I found out (from her profile on Paypal, of all places) that she has an online portfolio, I visited her site and realized that she had worked as a successful commercial artist for decades and decided to only draw self-indulgent fan art once she retired.

That woman is awesome, and I aspire to be exactly like her one day.