I woke up still pondering @girlonthenet's lamentation (I think; https://mastodon.social/@girlonthenet/116353766078817354), that while lots of people enjoy her sex blog, few people boost her toots about it.
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I suspect that it comes down to a mix of:
* stigma about sex as pleasure / being embarrassed about what others here might think
* concerns relating to professional expectations and obligations
* sex as being in the sphere of one's private life
I can understand each of these, and why they might lead to a "like" rather than a "boost".
None of them inhibit paying or tipping someone, as a thank you for their work though, which is another way of being supportive.
@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk I know for me there's a combination of some of my friends being sex-repulsed ace, so I'd need to definitely make sure things are CWed appropriately; but this also causes me to second-guess a lot and causes me extra worry in regards to my own issues, which revolve around transfemme nervousness about showing that I have any sexuality at all, because the mere idea of a transfemme having any sexuality is sometimes viewed as predatory.
And with my moral scrupulosity OCD running around with scissors in my head, anything that makes me feel like others might think I'm predatory then raises the question, what if I am? -
@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk I know for me there's a combination of some of my friends being sex-repulsed ace, so I'd need to definitely make sure things are CWed appropriately; but this also causes me to second-guess a lot and causes me extra worry in regards to my own issues, which revolve around transfemme nervousness about showing that I have any sexuality at all, because the mere idea of a transfemme having any sexuality is sometimes viewed as predatory.
And with my moral scrupulosity OCD running around with scissors in my head, anything that makes me feel like others might think I'm predatory then raises the question, what if I am?@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk Fun fact, I never would assume anything like this of anyone ELSE. This is just me, in my head, judging me. Other transfemmes who express their sexuality are AWESOME and AMAZING and GOALS.
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@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk I know for me there's a combination of some of my friends being sex-repulsed ace, so I'd need to definitely make sure things are CWed appropriately; but this also causes me to second-guess a lot and causes me extra worry in regards to my own issues, which revolve around transfemme nervousness about showing that I have any sexuality at all, because the mere idea of a transfemme having any sexuality is sometimes viewed as predatory.
And with my moral scrupulosity OCD running around with scissors in my head, anything that makes me feel like others might think I'm predatory then raises the question, what if I am?> make sure things are CWed appropriately
Yes!
> transfemme nervousness about showing that I have any sexuality at all, because the mere idea of a transfemme having any sexuality is sometimes viewed as predatory
I can understand that, but it is horrible to hear, that you cannot just be safe being you
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> make sure things are CWed appropriately
Yes!
> transfemme nervousness about showing that I have any sexuality at all, because the mere idea of a transfemme having any sexuality is sometimes viewed as predatory
I can understand that, but it is horrible to hear, that you cannot just be safe being you
@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk In practice, the people who hold those opinions of trans women aren't people worth listening to, and the loss of safety is something that should be pushed back against. As an old friend recently asked me,
Do you know the expression "allow yourself to take up space"
And I do. But I'm not much good at it."Closer!" he grumbled, squinting through the dark. "Come closer. I want to see you."
"Light a light, then." said Molly Grue. The calmness of her own voice frightened her more than the fury of the old wizard had. It is easy to be brave for her sake, she thought, but if I begin being brave on my own account, where will it end? -
If you have got this far, perhaps you would welcome some suggestions for fedizens who I follow, who post sex-related stuff.
@girlonthenet: the queen of text and audio smut, with multiple books under her belt too.
@mindpersephone: short form text, often sci-fi and genderqueer.
@JenJen: beautiful hand drawn smut, interspersed with rants about Linux.
@alice: more lockpicking than smut, but smut is there, and especially #AltAfterDark.
Newer to me:
@Jaimieserotica: a relatively new blogger, with a mix of fiction and non-fiction (I think!)
@GoingDownWithSundial: another relatively new smut blogger, also touching on neurodiversity
(And, look, I apologise in advance for the people who I will inevitably omit by accident; it is not personal, I am simply fallible. I have not included people who post nudes because that doesn't necessarily mean "sexual".
By all means add your own suggestions / your own blog / self-promotion.)
@neil @girlonthenet @JenJen @alice @Jaimieserotica @GoingDownWithSundial thank you Neil!
And welcome to the new folk following. Don't worry, I won't be offended if you see a few of my posts and decide I'm not for you and unfollow. I'm not everyones cup of tea. -
I woke up still pondering @girlonthenet's lamentation (I think; https://mastodon.social/@girlonthenet/116353766078817354), that while lots of people enjoy her sex blog, few people boost her toots about it.
I follow and chat with quite a lot of sex positive / sex-related people here, and many have expressed similar sentiments. It must be demoralising.
I don't have good ideas here, but it would be such a shame to lose this wonderful diverse friendly bunch of creative people.
@neil @girlonthenet I want to highlight some experience in exploring fedi and what I settled on.
I agree with your points that sex/porn isn't shared as much by vocal people. Still I got into Misskey.io in search of fan art and local culture of Japanese is vastly different than local culture of other fedi places. Misskey.io follow local Japanese laws so you can guess what is allowed where it's shunned elsewhere, but there a lot of sfw/nsfw art (I have 0 knowledge in Japanese so no clue about written stuff). So really it feels like people are really reserved to share someone else nsfw work because... Some fedi instances not allow that.
I saw my account marked as sensible, so my posts and boosts aren't showing up for many people. What I did was sharing nsfw fan art for game I invested in because... There barely any talk on instances I settled in. So afterwards I just have my Misskey.io as share fan art be it sfw/nsfw while my main is for sharing opinions or trying to promote few stuff I do.So biggest problem my guess is stigma against sex and further muting by fedi instances administration accounts that are both nsfw or boosts nsfw. You only immune to muting if people follow you, but if they don't. Then you will never appear in the discovery.
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@neil @girlonthenet I want to highlight some experience in exploring fedi and what I settled on.
I agree with your points that sex/porn isn't shared as much by vocal people. Still I got into Misskey.io in search of fan art and local culture of Japanese is vastly different than local culture of other fedi places. Misskey.io follow local Japanese laws so you can guess what is allowed where it's shunned elsewhere, but there a lot of sfw/nsfw art (I have 0 knowledge in Japanese so no clue about written stuff). So really it feels like people are really reserved to share someone else nsfw work because... Some fedi instances not allow that.
I saw my account marked as sensible, so my posts and boosts aren't showing up for many people. What I did was sharing nsfw fan art for game I invested in because... There barely any talk on instances I settled in. So afterwards I just have my Misskey.io as share fan art be it sfw/nsfw while my main is for sharing opinions or trying to promote few stuff I do.So biggest problem my guess is stigma against sex and further muting by fedi instances administration accounts that are both nsfw or boosts nsfw. You only immune to muting if people follow you, but if they don't. Then you will never appear in the discovery.
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If you have got this far, perhaps you would welcome some suggestions for fedizens who I follow, who post sex-related stuff.
@girlonthenet: the queen of text and audio smut, with multiple books under her belt too.
@mindpersephone: short form text, often sci-fi and genderqueer.
@JenJen: beautiful hand drawn smut, interspersed with rants about Linux.
@alice: more lockpicking than smut, but smut is there, and especially #AltAfterDark.
Newer to me:
@Jaimieserotica: a relatively new blogger, with a mix of fiction and non-fiction (I think!)
@GoingDownWithSundial: another relatively new smut blogger, also touching on neurodiversity
(And, look, I apologise in advance for the people who I will inevitably omit by accident; it is not personal, I am simply fallible. I have not included people who post nudes because that doesn't necessarily mean "sexual".
By all means add your own suggestions / your own blog / self-promotion.)
@neil
That's quite the list, and I'm honoured to be on it. Sundial correctly points out that @nymphostimtoy fully deserves a mention too.
Yeah - most of my stuff is fiction but there are a handful of true stories too.
Jx
@girlonthenet @mindpersephone @JenJen @alice @GoingDownWithSundial -
If you have got this far, perhaps you would welcome some suggestions for fedizens who I follow, who post sex-related stuff.
@girlonthenet: the queen of text and audio smut, with multiple books under her belt too.
@mindpersephone: short form text, often sci-fi and genderqueer.
@JenJen: beautiful hand drawn smut, interspersed with rants about Linux.
@alice: more lockpicking than smut, but smut is there, and especially #AltAfterDark.
Newer to me:
@Jaimieserotica: a relatively new blogger, with a mix of fiction and non-fiction (I think!)
@GoingDownWithSundial: another relatively new smut blogger, also touching on neurodiversity
(And, look, I apologise in advance for the people who I will inevitably omit by accident; it is not personal, I am simply fallible. I have not included people who post nudes because that doesn't necessarily mean "sexual".
By all means add your own suggestions / your own blog / self-promotion.)
Thank you for the networking!
I'm going to scramble up my timeline now and reboost some of my own blogs for new followers. It seems to be in a mess of me-related-reality stuff and blogs are buried further down
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Hmm... I wonder (I told you that I was pondering!) if there is an added factor here, of the fedi demographic: of older people, perhaps especially men (don't laugh), being self-aware of engaging with younger adults posting sex-related stuff, and coming across as creepy. Perhaps?
@neil speaking as a woman who used to be on Twitter, I learned pretty early on not to mention anything that could be even remotely construed as sexual on the internet because it immediately attracted a lot of the kind of attention I didn't want. Mastodon seems a lot better but I don't know if that genuinely is a platform thing or just that I'm in my forties now so have aged out of the bracket creeps like to hit on. It's shit, women are full human beings too who like sex as much as anyone else and in an ideal world we'd talk about it as much as we talk about our jobs or hobbies or pets, but my early experiences on the internet taught me that if you express any interest in anything remotely sexual a dozen sleazy men will suddenly assume you want to be sexual with them.
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Hmm... I wonder (I told you that I was pondering!) if there is an added factor here, of the fedi demographic: of older people, perhaps especially men (don't laugh), being self-aware of engaging with younger adults posting sex-related stuff, and coming across as creepy. Perhaps?
@neil To add to you thoughts, which I think are very valid: At least in my bubble on early twitter we were conditioned to never RT someones nsfw/hot content. People had many reasons for not wanting their content spread outside of their following and it reguarly caused a shitstorm if someone did.
I will have to unlearn that habit of never hitting the boost button for kinky things.
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@neil speaking as a woman who used to be on Twitter, I learned pretty early on not to mention anything that could be even remotely construed as sexual on the internet because it immediately attracted a lot of the kind of attention I didn't want. Mastodon seems a lot better but I don't know if that genuinely is a platform thing or just that I'm in my forties now so have aged out of the bracket creeps like to hit on. It's shit, women are full human beings too who like sex as much as anyone else and in an ideal world we'd talk about it as much as we talk about our jobs or hobbies or pets, but my early experiences on the internet taught me that if you express any interest in anything remotely sexual a dozen sleazy men will suddenly assume you want to be sexual with them.
> if you express any interest in anything remotely sexual a dozen sleazy men will suddenly assume you want to be sexual with them.
Right there. Yes.
*sigh*
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@neil To add to you thoughts, which I think are very valid: At least in my bubble on early twitter we were conditioned to never RT someones nsfw/hot content. People had many reasons for not wanting their content spread outside of their following and it reguarly caused a shitstorm if someone did.
I will have to unlearn that habit of never hitting the boost button for kinky things.
@kinkypond Ooh, interesting.
I had not considered that angle.
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Hmm... I wonder (I told you that I was pondering!) if there is an added factor here, of the fedi demographic: of older people, perhaps especially men (don't laugh), being self-aware of engaging with younger adults posting sex-related stuff, and coming across as creepy. Perhaps?
@neil speaking only for myself, someone who used to write a sex blog, is a community organiser in the kink community, and not awkward about sex, the reason I don't boost is actually more not sure of where the line is for certain servers and not wanting to be blocked by whole servers or booted off one for boosting something they see as not ok.
So I guess my issue is Autistic lack of understanding of why other people are weird about sex stuff.
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I suspect that it comes down to a mix of:
* stigma about sex as pleasure / being embarrassed about what others here might think
* concerns relating to professional expectations and obligations
* sex as being in the sphere of one's private life
I can understand each of these, and why they might lead to a "like" rather than a "boost".
None of them inhibit paying or tipping someone, as a thank you for their work though, which is another way of being supportive.
> concerns relating to professional expectations and obligations
That is absolutely something I have in mind when boosting anything, especially as the FCA look at social media (though I don't know if they monitor Mastodon specifically). I don't boost anything involving over 18 content, which includes swearing, sex work etc.
It is annoying because the content is legal, but I do not have a sufficiently large platform to take a stand on this.
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@neil speaking only for myself, someone who used to write a sex blog, is a community organiser in the kink community, and not awkward about sex, the reason I don't boost is actually more not sure of where the line is for certain servers and not wanting to be blocked by whole servers or booted off one for boosting something they see as not ok.
So I guess my issue is Autistic lack of understanding of why other people are weird about sex stuff.
> not wanting to be blocked by whole servers or booted off one for boosting something they see as not ok.
Yes, I can see the challenge there.
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> concerns relating to professional expectations and obligations
That is absolutely something I have in mind when boosting anything, especially as the FCA look at social media (though I don't know if they monitor Mastodon specifically). I don't boost anything involving over 18 content, which includes swearing, sex work etc.
It is annoying because the content is legal, but I do not have a sufficiently large platform to take a stand on this.
I too am mindful about profanity in toots that I boost, which can sometimes be a challenge here!
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> not wanting to be blocked by whole servers or booted off one for boosting something they see as not ok.
Yes, I can see the challenge there.
@neil personally I would like to see the Fediverse figure out how to support sex workers and adult content so it's not an issue, but that is something I am not qualified to help figure out!
Maybe someone will discuss it at @fediforum .
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> not wanting to be blocked by whole servers or booted off one for boosting something they see as not ok.
Yes, I can see the challenge there.
idk if being blocked by a server is such a big deal tbh. I would personally prefer to freely engage with the people I'm interested in, rather than hold off for fear that some unknown corner of the internet admined by puritans might not get to see my posts.
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Hmm... I wonder (I told you that I was pondering!) if there is an added factor here, of the fedi demographic: of older people, perhaps especially men (don't laugh), being self-aware of engaging with younger adults posting sex-related stuff, and coming across as creepy. Perhaps?
@neil This is my reason for not engaging, including compliments. (Likes as a "formalized" interaction should be safe.)
re boosting – I'm trying to keep my followers' TLs "SFW or CW". That is, I try not to boost anything sexual that doesn't come with a CW (and an image description of course).
