Dear Tumblr, you’ve got a problem. A problem with 12-year-olds.
The problem is not the amount of 12-year-olds on Tumblr, how mature or immature 12-year-olds on Tumblr act or what they generally do with their life. Your problem is that you act as if it is was any of your fucking business. Your problem is that you are using the comparison to 12-year-olds as an insult. The problem is that even the parts of you that engage in activism don’t recognize one of their privileges: adulthood.
The discrimination you are engaging in is called “adultism”. Wanna know some adult privileges? Here you go:
- You can sign contracts.
- You are allowed to chose where you live and with whom.
- People will not dismiss what you say based on your age.
- You are allowed to vote.
- You decide what happens to your body.
And if you are adult and want to fight me on this, don’t. Just unfollow me. I’ve heard your arguments before, trust me, and they make me sick.
I basically agree.
It might be an issue what kind of content very young people are exposed to on Tumblr, but that’s true for the entire Internet – and more an issue for the children and their parents.
I also don’t personally follow anyone underage (with few exceptions) because I thinks it’s could be creepy for an almost 30-year old man to follow a teenager who posts selfies and whatnot. (Not that I lust after teenagers, but it might feel/be creepy for the underage user and odd-awkward for me.) But let the 12-year olds have their own corner for tumblr, you don’t necessarily have to engage with it.
Let me quote kiturak on part of this (I guess you are not simply talking about sexual content):
protecting children from internet predators is “ageism” now?
PROTECTION: UR DOING IT RONG
So what you want to do is “protect” children/ young people from predators.
What you do is tell them what they should or shouldn’t do (e.g. not write smut on the internetz) so as to idk … not attract predators? Not being robbed of their agency by the government (“ILLEGAL OMG!!1”)?
Where I’m from we call this little game “victim blaming”. Look it up ffs.
You want children not to be abused by adults? THEN TELL ADULTS TO STOP ABUSING. Do NOT tell children/ other people/survivors of violence what to do.
also i never said children shouldn’t be allowed to have their own sexual identities nor did i imply that all children should be asxeual like where the flying hell did you get that shit from
fuck off you amazing idiot
ALSO PORNOGRAPHY IS CALLED ADULT CONTENT FOR A GODDAMN REASON
WHAT ELSE WOULD YOU LIKE TO CALL IT? FAMILY FUN?
(bolded) – So you seriously do not at all realize any contradiction in what you’re saying here?
I SUGGEST CALLING IT PORN, DOUCHEBAG, AND I SUGGEST YOU ACCEPT THAT A LOT OF NON ADULT PEOPLE LIKE IT A LOT TOO AS PROVEN ALL THE FUCKING TIME SO “ADULT” IS NOT A CORRECT DESCRIPTION
So if you call smut “adult” and tell children/young people who write it themselves to stay out of it? Then you do NOT accept that children/young people can legitimately like that stuff as much as the next person, and you do NOT accept their sexual identity and that what they do is every bit as valuable and fun and ok as when adults do the same fucking thing.
HELL I would have been glad to have known books like this when I was a child,
Colleen Coover or Jess Fink or THE INTERNET instead of any misogynist, cissexist crap that I could sneak a look at because it was FORBIDDEN DIRTY CHILDREN DON’T DO THAT and next thing you know is they stack their stuff somewhere else. It would have been great to be able to read about kink, or about sexuality in general, without being afraid, without being ashamed, without knowing I wasn’t supposed to do that. It would have been great if having sex for the first time wouldn’t have been FUCKING ILLEGAL.
I’m not saying there isn’t evil stuff everywhere but victim blaming’s NOT a solution here.
SO FUCK YOU if you tell other people what to do, FUCK YOU if you can’t even be bothered to think about sexual privilege and adult privilege and how they’re connected for 2 minutes, like how to be a “real” grown-up = respected human being you need to be sexual because sexual = adult = sexual = human fucking being.
FUCK YOU if instead of changing all of this bullshit you run around telling other people not to write smut because they’re too fucking young.
That kiturak-quote does raise good points.
I don’t mean just sexual content, at least not sexual content in general. On tumblr ( as on the internet, as in life,) there’s a lot of terrible, hateful, etc stuff that might be (extra) hard on younger people. I don’t really want to tell people, even young people, what to do. I’m also not a parent. I would also agree that there is a lot of benefit teenagers can get from being on tumblr – including sex, sex ed or other things in that direction.
I just prefer to not follow most of them, in the rare case that they do come across my dash at all. The creepy/awkward part is just one point, I’m also mostly not interested in the life of a 12-year-old (with possible exceptions.) Also, what I specifically mean by the creepy part: There are a lot of tumblrs with .. pretty pictures of .. people, specifically young(er) women, models, etc. When a (in my cases mostly non-pornographic) rather generic pretty-picture-style-“soft grunge” etc blog is .. curated by a underage person as far as I can tell, and includes selfies/other pictures of the blogger, I usually opt to not follow that blog but look at one of the countless other blogs in a similar direction. It’s not that I’m afraid I can’t control myself not to be creepy, or that I lust after teenagers – I just often imagine that the blogger cannot know that I’m a (hopefully) non-creepy 29-year-old man and might feel creeped out by this old German dude following them. And I don’t even consider following more sexually explicit blogs by young teenagers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they shouldn’t post whatever the fuck they want.
But generally I’m pro-12-year-olds on Tumblr! I get a lot out of the blogs I follow etc, and I bet (hope) so do 12-year-olds.
Thoughts?