I recently saw a video posted on Tumblr by Dimension20 to promote their tabletop streams. In that video, Brendan Lee Mulligan and (I believe) Ally Beardsley joke about not having any inter-character romance, because that would take away opportunities for Tumblr posters to come up with thirsty queer fanart.

That got me thinking – Tumblr isn’t as thirsty as it used to be – as it had a reputation for being, especially for fan art. And I started to think of the causes of why.

Now, the obvious thing to point to was Yahoo (the previous owner) banning all the porn – and I would agree that is something of the root of the problem. However, there’s more to it than that. The Yahoo porn ban, in addition to driving sex workers off the platform, also had a ripple effect in the overall tone of the community, and that’s particularly notable when it comes to the shipping community. And where this is particularly relevant, is where it comes to antishippers and “pro-shippers.”

Anti-shipping, as a term, is somewhat self-explanatory. It refers to self-identified people who are passionately against a particular ship. Enough to engage in harassment campaigns against those who support a particular ship. In many instances, they will cite a particular aspect of the ship that they consider harmful and thus attribute the ship itself to perpetuating that harmful idea, and that those supporting the ship – or worse, the creators of the work – are promoting of that problematic concept. The supporters of that ship are dubbed “pro-shippers” short for “problematic shippers”. This is different from people who are just in favor of shipping (though, considering how wide the array of “problematic ships” can get, it’s reasonable to argue that anti-shippers are indeed fundamentally against shipping as a concept).

Sometimes the problematic concept is, if viewed at a distance, not actually that problematic – age gap romance between two characters who are adults. It’s even been applied to instances where the age gap is as small as a year or two. Sometimes it’s applied to ships where both participants are under the age of 18 or younger (such as in Harry Potter ships), or ships where characters are related (the Winchester Brothers), or have a power dynamic difference (Kirk & Spock). This also included ships that made cis characters trans, or had pairings of trans and cis characters (especially if part of the narrative was a coming out story for the trans character) – with those ships being equated to rape by false pretense. If that last sounds TERFy to you, it is.

You’ll notice that I just put not only major ships as examples, but ships that are formative to fandom and shipping culture. Also, this is big enough of a thing, with a long enough history, that there’s academic research on the topic. So, this has been part of the scene on Tumblr for a long time.

The question then is, how does this relate to the culture on Tumblr with the porn ban?

Well, the short answer is, before the porn ban, there was enough of a venue on Tumblr for everyone to post absolutely filthy fanart on Tumblr – whether it’s their own, or other artists off of Pixiv, or reposting Japanese doujinshi (translated and untranslated), that ultimately those who were against these ships generally got pushed to the margins of the discourse. There were still Nazis that made their way into the bar, but very few made it in, and the ones that did got pushed to the edges, trying to shout “stop having fun” and the people partying it up on the dance floor.

I’m going to pause here for a moment to make a quick note – as writers like Diane Duane and Seanan McGuire have had to reiterate on Tumblr multiple times – it’s okay to create and consume problematic media, so long as no real people are harmed in the act of creation. For example, it’s okay to write fanfic to explore the concept of a teacher-student romance, and it’s okay to read that fanfic to explore those thoughts. Fantasies about teacher-student romance have been part of popular culture for decades (Van Halen performed a hit song about it, written from the perspective of the student). It’s only a problem when the action is carried out in the real world, and even there the fault lies with the people who carry out the act, not the people who wrote the fiction.

So, back to the porn ban. That happened on Tumblr in 2018, and that was also at a time, leading up to the first Trump presidency, where the concept of “purity culture” was on a distressing upswing (a movement that likely led to the ban in the first place). This – combined with how draconian (and harshly implemented) the initial Yahoo porn ban was lead to a mass exodus of fan artists and writers to other pastures. To continue with the “Nazi bar” comparison – a bunch of the regulars left, but the Nazis weren’t among them, and now they had space to thrive – to more strongly dominate the conversation.

Accompanying the rise of this relentless hate came targeted real world attacks against LGBT people from conservative legislators in the US and elsewhere, with the repeated refrain of them “grooming” young people – notable because anti-shippers use “grooming” language in their accusations against problematic shipping. So, people in fan circles started, as an act of self-defense, using “Minors DNI” – Minors Do Not Interact – in their profiles, and blocking minors who did show up in their mentions or likes.

This lead to an unintentional side effect – generally anti-shippers don’t use “Minors DNI” in their profiles. So, a fan who might stumble across a raunchy fanfic or piece of fan-art that might help them explore ideas about problematic relationships and come to terms with how they feel about it, along with understanding the idea that, to quote film critic James Berardinelli, “Life is not PG-13”, and that applies not only with profanity, but sex and sexuality as well. When I was in high school, I knew peers who had sex. There was even a big controversy about a cast party for one of the school plays, where people were having a lot of sex.

With the ever-present threat of mass violence sitting over schools in the US, some of the old comments made in various movies hit with a weird new resonance now – fictional characters, even underage ones, talking about not wanting to die a virgin hits different when the reader or writer just had a mass shooter drill at school, or spent a year or so learning remotely because of a pandemic that threatened their life, their teachers lives, their classmates lives, and the lives of their parents and grandparents. But, when the people who write the fic who might help them parse those feelings have to, for their own protection, cut those readers off, it’s easier to run into the people who want to radicalize them for darker purposes unchallenged.

Automattic, the current owners of Tumblr, have relaxed some of the restrictions on risque content, but not enough. Tasteful nude images – whether art or photography – are okay. Smut is not. Also, the criteria that decide what is acceptable appear to lean more heavily towards nude art and photographs of women rather than of men. And, on top of that, tags that could point towards NSFW content are not searchable – even looking for the word “sex” is off the table.

Things need to change – if we really want fandom on Tumblr, and elsewhere, to get back to the place that Mulligan and Beardsley think it is – if we’re advocating for the abolition of jails, we need to abolish horny jail as well. We need to normalize and make acceptable the creation and dessimination of horny fanfic and fan art – especially with LGBT relationships. Indeed, in this day and age where the Trump administration and other conservative voices are pushing back hard on all LGBT depictions – I’d say it’s a necessary act of rebellion.

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