One of the issues about Tumblr style of discourse is the watering-down of words.
Cultural Appropriation went from wearing Native American Headdresses and bindis as a fashion statement to eating with chopsticks, wearing flower crowns, learning another language, even wearing sandals makes people raise an eyebrow if it is cultural appropriation.
Shoes.
What this does is that it water downs the actual harmful issue of cultural appropriation.
Like pedophilia went from finding attraction towards children to…A woman wears a bow? She’s being pedophiliac! John Green writes a YA novel with teenagers kissing and having sex? He’s a pedophile!
NO
We need to stop treating powerful terms like abuse, fascism, pedophilia etc like it is some candy machine you can put in some loose change.
Words have power and words have consequences.
This does not mean that you should not call out or at least discuss, but be careful with the word choices that you make.
It is creepy that Melanie Martinez has a childish aesthetic, but she is still a grown woman and does NOT look like a child. She’s not being a pedophile.
It’s also worth noticing that tendencially psychologically speaking a pedophile is not gonna get attracted by MM due to her aestethic, because they search the adult in the child so a child/early teen dressed like an adult (or an extremely childish-looking body-wise adult) who behaves sexually is more likely to attract them.
It is an important distinction because thinking otherwise may lead to whole campaigns and sabotaging of one act, while not even noticing other factors going around.
Exactly like Tumblr is so focused on noticing men committing the slightest mistake in fiction to yell “abuse” while completely overlooking many many acts of way more abusive nature female characters get away with because, due to years of writing women as sheeps now behaving like wolves gets labelled as badass.
Like the problem is not only that tumblr bastardize and belittles words but also that they do such a thing without actually thinking about what abuse/pedophilia/racism look like most times.
I was actually just thinking about this before I read this post. It seems that the fixation tumblr has with ‘moral purity’ has given birth to a whole new brand of cyber abuse: people see something/someone they don’t like > they find something they consider ‘problematic’ about them > they use the ‘calling people out’ tactic to get other tumblr users against them.
Like the whole gang of people who suddenly decided asexual people have no place in the queer community because they are ‘problematic’ and ‘steal queer resources when they don’t need them’ (which is, as anybody with a brain may immediately understand, utter and total bullshit.)
Or the ‘if you want to write about abuse, you have to publicly prove you’re an abuse victim’ gang. They hide behind this façade of righteous indignation, when they actually just a) don’t want you to write what you want to write; b) are a bunch of bullies of the worst kind who have ABSOLUTELY no moral ground to stand on.
Or, my very favorite kind, the ‘You have your opinion, I have my opinion, and it’s cool. Except it’s not and I’m now gonna bombard you with anonymous messages until you admit your opinion is shit, and tell you you’re trying to silence me when you lose your patience” group.
Tumblr seems to be the perfect place for these kind of tactics to work, since people latch on to the most popular opinion, and they accept stuff without fact-checking.
“due to years of writing women as sheeps now behaving like wolves gets labelled as badass.”
This is super important – I’m not going to condone behaviour in a woman that I’m going to condemn in a man. And somehow Tumblr has forgotten that fiction is, like, fictional? Characters in fictional works get condemned for doing bad acts as if it’s not OK to tell a story about bad people doing bad things. I got incredibly riled when I read something about how women shouldn’t read Lolita because it’s so terrible to a female character? Uhh… didn’t we have this argument 100 years ago, when Oscar Wilde made the statement that “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.” And it just so happens that Lolita is a brilliantly written book, about a character who commits acts that are not portrayed as anything other than deeply immoral. It’s ludicrous to deprive yourself of rich cultural experiences because they depict things that are bad! What century is it?! Give people (and, in particular, women) enough credit that they can figure out nuance for themselves, and make their own judgements.
suchasinistergame 