I know smut may seem like a frivolous thing to be upset about, but crushing it is part of fascism. Controlling all forms of sexual expression is fascism. Only allowing certain kinds is fascism. Smut peddlers are always canaries in the coal mines.
It always starts with the smut, and then the list of what counts as "degenerate art" gets longer and longer and longer until the only art deemed "acceptable" is state propaganda.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what you yourself consider to be "pornographic" - it's how the people in power define it, and there's a lot of folks who'd call a children's book about having two moms/dads "obscene" because queer lives are always "pornographic" to them.
My Jr high psych teacher used to post the question of what is normal. We never got past that question until he replied it's what you think is normal vs another. Normal is an opinion!
I feel like this needs to be shouted from the rooftops. Pleasure should not be outlawed. Having fun is what life is all about. Smut is fun and feels good. This is just another attack on our autonomy of our own bodies.
Oh God! I know what you mean. No worries. If I were being mean, I'd appreciate being called out. Especially on here. I'd hate to see the bsky vibe ruined.
Anthony Burgess' novel, "The Wanting Seed" has some very cogent observations on this topic in fictional terms, too.
What, you thought he only wrote "A Clockwork Orange"? :)
...I'm presuming the movie? The movie has a fascinating story of its own, and the book is a bit different... though I can't argue that if you read the book AFTER seeing the movie, you'll see the movie (altered somewhat) play through your head... so I get you maybe blocking. Dystopias gotta Dys!
Burgess always is. For a nonfiction counterpart on such things, historically speaking, you should also read @jysexton.bsky.social 's books - American Rule & The Midnight Kingdom. He's also got a pretty good podcast.
There's a reason the famous Nazi bookburning pictures are of the results of a Nazi-affiliated student union breaking into and looting the research library of the Institute of Sexology.
Fascism cannot tolerate nonconformity and obsesses over 'purity'.
seeing furries & smut online is like seeing bees outside, it’s a sign of a healthy ecosystem, and when they go away it means something Bad is happening
They’re openly passing laws now but everyone in the adult industries has been watching this quietly happen through banks/credit card processors for years. They call it “risk management” but even when it’s stable and lucrative they threaten and shut down the ability to take money from customers.
I would love to hear how because right now they are the ones with billionaires willing to put their money toward social regression and using “morality” as a smokescreen
This is why when faced with "your comic could be more popular if it wasn't smut" I said: no the deviency is the point.
Also most issues include gorey executions of fascists but that's unrelated. I just like drawing it.
It's also worth noting that some of these people consider the words "gay" or "lesbian" inherently pornographic. These attacks on smut cannot be ignored or dismissed.
One of the biggest things the christofascist crowd insists on is that the mere existence of LGBTQ+ people is pornographic. It's the whole central tenet of Moms For Liberty's nationwide book banning push.
Controlling telecommunications in order to "fight pornography" sound like they're creating a problem to get to the solution they really want.
Any platform speaking out against them gets shut down, since there was "porn" on it somewhere.
Trust us on this claim though, since we already deleted it.
I will stand firm in the belief that the ability of the govt to control them has long since passed in the US. They have tried before. They will try again. But they forget at this point the government relies more on the carriers than vice/versa and the carriers answer more to their shareholders.
Even the DoD’s network (outside of tactical/combat comms) is handled by commercial carriers. They may have dedicated circuits, but those are provided by the big backbone companies.
And those companies could easily turn them all off in protest of laws they couldn’t possibly comply with.
But they make a lot of money off the government and certainly aren't responsible for or interested in maintaining the civil rights of their subscribers. Telecom companies have eagerly complied with the rapid decay of the 4th Amendment at SCOTUS and law enforcement, well beyond what's required by law
They make a lot of money off the government but they make more off the private sector. Mass surveillance was never supposed to be discovered and it didn’t impact customers, and it was “comply and get more federal contracts”
It made sense for them to do that…
Censorship is not that. It will immediately make them lose customers to whoever is fighting it, or to foreign hosting that does not care about US law.
Depending on how these laws are written it may be impossible to comply. It is really a plan to seize those companies. They would fight that.
I don't think the majority of their corporate clients are going to go to court to fight government anti-pornography measures. They'll just shrug and say they already outsourced this problem - to the telecoms.
Which is why the christofascists are instead pressuring payment processors to try and restrict smut peddlers and sex workers by pushing them outside of the ability to function in the modern economy.
Business 101: If you can't sell the solution to an existing problem, INVENT a problem and sell the solution.
Yes, that's exactly how a "mob protection racket" works.
That should tell you a lot about how capitalism is rigged to operate. If you can't invent a problem to solve, you're not "productive".
And fascists define all forms of sex that are not patriarchal cis het as smut and deviant. If you are any form of LGBTQIA, your sexuality is considered irregular and they intend to suppress any expression of it.
Even if taking away our smut was their final goal and not a stepping stone to worse things I would say "fuck those fascists" who are they to decide you can't sell smut and I can't buy it, they're supposed to work for us and I don't remember asking for that.
I'd say "give them a taste of their own medicine" because that's how they operate, "rules are for thee and not for me" is their M.O.
The way to defeat it is to make "thee" and "me" inextricably one and the same, so that they can't divide us into "me" and "everyone else".
Also worth remembering they consider trans people existing, gay people holding hands, books about sexuality, and picture books about two penguin dads to be "sexually explicit"
Heck, they consider discussing the existence of asexual people to be sexually explicit. 🫠
Anything that's not active repression or pumping out white babies is sexually explicit. And it's so frustrating how many people aren't getting that.
Reading up on queer history proves this over and over again. I'm sure there's examples from other marginalized groups too that I'm not familiar with, but the hate against queer folk often stems from the harmful idea of queer relationships being "impure" or something that needed "curing/cleansing"
