Raphaelle Peale’s “Venus Rising from the Sea — a Deception”, found in the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s American Collection. It’s a commentary on the acceptability of portraying nudes in public (note the resemblance of the “towel” to a handkerchief.)

So, I was planning on entitling this piece “Exiting the Horny Jail” or some such, in reference to a popular meme and Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (an essay that I still feel was poorly written but hides a pearl of real wisdom,) but this was vetoed by my writing partner, who obviously didn’t want to promote something with that title.

Which is fair – Edgar’s piece on the difference between portrayal and approval, entitled “Portrait of an Invisible Line” is a companion piece to this one, or a map of an adjoining territory, and I wanted to make sure that this meshed. What I want to discuss is the weird changes in online pleasure-politics and how they’re spilling out of their appointed places (which is to be expected: pleasure is a [metaphorically] liquid thing, always has been. I can’t really explain this insight, but it’s not material to the discussion at hand.)

Before I begin, I wish to state that not only is asexuality real, but there are non-asexual people who have very good reasons for not wanting to hear or think about sex. This feeling is valid and those people’s experience is very real. This piece is, at best, only marginally for such people. That being said, I still consider this topic to be one worth discussing, because it shapes much of our online lives.

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The original facebook logo. If we’re using the framework of the western genre, the appearance of this logo marked the arrival of the locomotive at the end.

Central to this object of examination is that observation that online spaces are undergoing a process of capture, and have been for the past seventeen or so years. Before that, much of the internet was in its “wild west” phase – it was a frontier with no settled rules, and so it could be understood as a place of innovation and experimentation. After that (which I’m pegging to the introduction of Facebook – one of the modern internet’s apex predators – in 2004) it began to grow more and more sanitized and standardized, largely because there were fewer and fewer terms of service for an individual to keep in mind and obey, which meant that they could be enforced in a more and more draconian fashion.

People attempt to preserve small bubbles of the “frontier” internet with closed Facebook groups, private twitter accounts, and closed discord servers, but this is a fundamentally different thing from what was going on before: the default has changed, and all deviation from the default is marked, doubly so on the internet, which is a massive surveillance system (everything you put on there is logged – it’s more a question of whether an actual human is going to take the time to look at it and make a decision.)

This might seem like an odd thing to note, especially for older readers – I would highly recommend reading the incredibly enlightening book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch, because it explains this (it also, helpfully, explains why older people insert unnecessary ellipses into text messages, something which will eventually be an incomprehensible artifact of the New Tens and Twenties.)

Of course, we can never assume that the contemporary infrastructure will be permanent – even permanent in terms of the internet – so things will shift and fundamentally change going forward.

I want to examine a case study. Let’s look at a smaller social media network.

Just as an aside: I will be using “discourse” in this piece to refer, principally, to discussions between people who don’t know one another in person, and which generally gravitate around political (though rarely electoral) topics. “Discourser” will be someone who principally uses a platform to engage in discourse – and it should be noted that any very online person is, at one point or another, a discourser. I certainly am.

The original(?) Tumblr logo. For a good overview of pre-porn-ban Tumblr culture, (almost wrote “Cultr”) Edgar suggests reading this piece from Ellie Kovacs’s “You Don’t Need Maps”, though they’re a bit more Nagle-ambivalent than we are.

One of these changes happened in December 2018. In that month, the social media platform Tumblr, attempting to conform to the App store rules from Apple and Google, banned all adult content. As a result, Tumblr dropped from over 500 million monthly active users (as measured from a high water mark in 2016) to about 400 million in August of 2019, to about 327 million now (these statistics are cobbled together from a variety of sources.)

So, we can assume that something changed over the past 5 years to drive off 35% of the platform’s users. The adult content ban was one of the larger ones, but it also changed hands several times (Yahoo and Verizon both lost a fantastic amount of money on the platform. Total losses among various owners are now over a billion dollars, something the user base is proud of.) However, I think that the adult content ban is the biggest reason for exodus – not simply because users who had been producing, aggregating, and principally viewing pornographic material, but those who were explicitly and openly against this material existing.

Let’s talk, for a moment about “jouissance”. This is a fairly complex term from Lacan, and I haven’t really read Lacan, so this will be a brief and wikipedia-driven discussion (sorry to those theory-heads greater than I, this is the kiddie pool.) Jouissance means “pleasure” or “enjoyment” in French, but in translation of certain books on philosophy and psychology it’s left in French to indicate a special usage. This is a specifically transgressive enjoyment – it’s something you want but you’re not supposed to want, and in fulfilling this want, in pursuing this desire, you do not achieve pleasure, you end up causing yourself pain and suffering. The key thing here is that this doesn’t dissuade the person from pursuing the source of jouissance: the pain becomes the point.

Online discourse, for me, has always had a whiff of jouissance to it: it never goes anywhere productive, it’s just about two people, separated by dozens, hundreds, or thousands of miles, enjoying the argument so much that they hurt themselves for it. It’s an expression of hate elevated to something like mutual desire.

Tumblr, I feel, is a place where this thrived. It was the Gomorrah of online discourse. The discourse is still there, but when the adult content ban happened, it didn’t just drive off the adult content creators, it drove off the people who were mad about the adult content. The ever-flowing spigot of jouissance had run dry, and they had to go elsewhere.

My belief is that it’s mostly Twitter – I have no way of proving this, not being able to do the deep longitudinal search that I would have to do for this (though I did put together a poll for it. Results here. The sample size is too small for it to mean anything, though.) That being said, the similarity between the Tumblr Bone Witch and the Twitter Grave Dirt Thief incidents gave me pause (I’d say “first as tragedy, then as farce”, but it’s always been a farce.) The characterization of the bad-faith actors on both tumblr and twitter, though, is remarkably similar – minute age differences being used as grounds for accusations of pedophilia, for example, or simply mis-characterizing what someone said for purposes of continuing the argument.

So, now, without the porn-positive and porn-negative elements, Tumblr is left with just the porn-ambivalent element, and its users are generally happier for the discourse to be gone. Or at least that discourse. It’s a platform made for niche disagreements, so there will always be discourse on Tumblr. Even after Tumblr is gone, there will be discourse on it.

This is in contrast to the analysis of Angela Nagle, the supposed scholar that Zer0 Books paid actual money to for the garbage heap Kill All Normies, which equated 4Chan and Tumblr as opposite poles in an online culture war that led to the election of the former president. This, more than anything else, is absolute horseshit, and Nagle should not be taken seriously by anyone. — This is in contrast to the analysis of Angela Nagle, the supposed scholar that Zer0 Books paid actual money to for the garbage heap *Kill All Normies*, which equated 4Chan and Tumblr as opposite poles in an online culture war that led to the election of the former president. This, more than anything else, is absolute horseshit, and Nagle should not be taken seriously by anyone.

The presence of adult content was viewed as the problem by the owners of the platform, but the negative user experience, if I understand things correctly, was driven principally by “the discourse.” This is because Tumblr had something of the opposite character of Facebook or Twitter – content was (and still is, if you work the settings properly,) presented chronologically and while it has a robust tagging system, content is never forced upon a user – they only see what is shared by the people they follow, and even then only if something isn’t blacklisted. Adult content was easy for the average user to filter out – “discoursers”, however, would often seek out people to harass or attempt to convert to their point of view (despite the view that Tumblr is all neon-haired nonbinary teenagers, there were a fair number of TERF, fascist, right-libertarian, and simple nutbar discoursers that you had to block by hand if they noticed you.)

My purpose here is not to write an exhaustive history of Tumblr as a platform – something which will only be interesting to people who use tumblr, which we get very little traffic from – but to use this as a data point in a larger argument.

In short: discoursers were attracted to Tumblr because it was essentially a digital rat’s nest, and there were many things there which could lead to outrage and which they could then use to spark discourse. When that raw material vanished from the platform, they left. Just as the capitalist seeks a new horizon of extraction to pull value from, so the discourser seeks the object of anger to extract jouissance from. It’s a parallel process, because we tend to organize our behavior along the same lines on the micro and macro level in a cargo cult fashion.

This was driven by pressures from the apple and android app stores, something which now is being repeated after a fashion by the current legal battle over the inclusion of an Itch.io widget in the Epic Game Store, which is carried by the Apple App store. So three nested stores, each with more permissive rules than the next largest one, is leading to Itch (where we sell one book, and intend to sell more,) which is favored by indie and queer creators, and which thus features a fair amount of adult content, being a point of contention between two larger corporate entities and becoming a kind of legal hot potato.

I wish I knew who made this image — if you know, please contact us.

I haven’t been following this one terribly closely, but the parallels are fairly obvious. A megacorporation (and Apple is a megacorporation,) in an effort to further increase profitability, institutes rules to prevent it from suffering government censorship or having to fight same. This cascades down through subsidiaries and dependent corporations and forces changes in their policies, even if they’re not really at danger of violating the rules that these policies are set up to preempt.

This leads to communities whose behaviors and media are categorized as “adult content” (whether it actually is – pornography, etc. – or not – queer people existing – doesn’t seem to matter,) being driven from platform to platform in search of a digital “home” of sorts. The fact that when these people appear on a platform they face resistance might be partially driven by the fact that the appearance of these users generally leads to crackdowns by the agencies managing the platform.

We can understand what happened to Tumblr, and what is happening to Itch as a kind of online gentrification (the offline version of which Edgar and I have experience with and thoughts on). And it’s a mistake to think that it won’t happen in other spaces as well: eventually, OnlyFans will probably be full of people putting out videos of them playing piano or doing stand-up comedy, and the sex workers who built the platform will be marginalized. While I don’t use OnlyFans, I recognize that it’s been a way that many people made a living over the pandemic and it would be especially shitty to throw these people out to the curb – largely because there are already other platforms that these other performers can put out their work through.

Now, I understand that queer people and sex workers aren’t identical (it’s a venn diagram, there’s overlap, but I can’t speculate about how much overlap there is,) but their interests are often aligned based on having the same people attacking them (thank you, Phyllis Schlafly.) The drive to make the whole internet “family friendly” and “child safe” is madness – not everything needs to be safe for children or built for their consumption. I’m reasonably certain that the drive to make the sanitized image of childhood the standard image for the world has a fascistic element – seeing the world as an array of simple binary oppositions, without room for nuance or the idea that some things simply aren’t for you.

This brings us to the “horny jail” and “horny police” memes. These memes are especially common in closed facebook groups, because these groups tend to be left alone if adult content is not shared in them – because if it’s shared, then it can be reported, and this can sink the whole group. Thus, you have communities of young adults who view any expression of physical desire, no matter how chaste, as potentially dangerous because it could unwittingly destroy one of their main venues of socializing.

Given that it is almost impossible for young people to socialize offline, this takes on a panicked quality. They seek to preempt any expression of sexuality, and this becomes reflexive. Expressions of sexuality become signs of danger.

Don’t argue with me, argue with the graph. Ultimately from Mother Jones, but found via Forbes. — Don’t argue with me, argue with the graph. Ultimately from *Mother Jones*, but found via *Forbes*.

I have no proof of this, but I think this might be related to the decline in the amount of sex being had by each generation – there’s been a marked decline in the number of sexual partners had by Millennials and Generation Z (which I’m using here as a stand in for demographic periods, but which I am turning the corner on as a concept, despite my earlier writing on it.) Though this might also have to do with the amount of lead poisoning the “baby boom” generation suffered leading to greater risk-taking.

Of course, it could also be unconnected – I haven’t done the research to establish any kind of causal link. However, I will say that I think that corporate policies to police the expression of people – especially young people who are still figuring out the sort of identities that they’re building for themselves – are bad actually, and that despite these policies never really being strictly enforced, I think that it’s not a good idea to have them on the books to begin with.

Because – shockingly – I think it should be acknowledged that there are good and positive expressions of sexuality, and while it is necessary to acknowledge predation, the fact that we have overemphasized predation in our discussions is a bad thing, because people who are learning to navigate that territory (whether they’re young people or simply older people who never managed to make it work previously,) become skittish and repressed as a result.

What is needed, going forward, is for us to learn to navigate these discussions as real adults. I say “real adults” because it seems to me that the models of adulthood we’ve been given are largely shaped by misogyny and homophobia (remember – it’s systematic if the results still disproportionately harm one group more than another even if no prejudice exists in the individuals within the system.) We have only this image of what an adult should be, and we have to figure out how to behave that way when we have no real guide.

But, I think that tolerating an expression of desire from someone is a good start. This doesn’t mean tolerating something awful. But it does mean confirming that it’s awful before you do.

Also, I think people should go back to using forums instead of Facebook groups. That’s a technology from the frontier days of the internet that hasn’t gone away, and which provides much the same functionality as a Facebook group without letting a megacorporation dictate terms to you.

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Problematic for the People: On Digital Gentrification and the Joy of Discourse