(Content warning: This is an anxiety driven vent post. I talk a bit about politics and payment processing. Not for the faint of heart).
Hey Yiffit and other instance peeps, currently going through a rough spot mental health wise and could use some sympathetic thoughts. Or maybe even a bap on the snout with a newspaper because I’m worrying over nothing.
For context, due to events I shan’t go into, I’ve been feeling quite bad anxiety. And my anxiety takes the form of latching onto things and just not letting go… Also, due to my neurotype and upbringing, I have difficulty breaking “rules”, even if everyone else is doing it. I also live so much online and need to touch grass, I know.
Anyway, as you can probably guess, this has unfortunately latched onto my enjoyment of adult content. And that is a rich fertile land of things to be worried and angry about.
I live in what I’d describe as a country with an “Americanised European” culture, which I’d assume would be cool with most forms of sexual expression. But not really; BDSM is technically illegal (by way of a law that was only really used decades ago to prosecute gay people) and they banned depictions of the female orgasm until 2019. You also need to provide strict proof of age to look at porn on mobile internet.
They also passed a law recently requiring websites hosting adult content to perform strict age verification. People I trust say that this law likely won’t actually result in anything, but it’s a worry and these laws have been cropping up in many places…
Google requires a credit card to use adult stuff, Reddit is threatening to do it, and I don’t see Discord lasting long once news breaks about the “teenage dating servers” stuff. I can see this sort of thing being normalised, and sites that don’t do it getting shut down one way or another…
I also made the regrettable decision of looking up payment processors which… I don’t recommend doing. There’s so much bullshit there and they have control over so much stuff, especially niche fetish and bdsm stuff.
And commissioners and porn sites seem to both use Paypal and/or Strype in such a flagrant disregard for their terms of use that either they have a special agreement or there’s an unspoken rule that they allow this sort of thing unless you draw attention to yourself in a negative way.
I really hate that and think it’s fucked up. If you allow nsfw stuff, put it in your terms of service.
I sometimes get these “positive intrusive thoughts” of hopes and optimism. I have a habit of pushing them away, but… Well, I want to be optimistic and think that attitudes are warming up to this stuff.
Maybe subscribing to onlyfans and having an ad twitter/masto/bsky is becoming normalised. Maybe all of this stuff is just fascist people fighting hard to get control of the narrative they are losing. Maybe it’s a classic case of the lawmakers being very out of touch with culture.
It seems to me that most major lgbt-friendly fediverse instances are also nsfw-friendly, which is nice. And Subscribestar seems to be promising.
Anyway, sorry for my rambling thoughts. Just wanted to get stuff off my chest. Sorry if it reads rambly.
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I agree, I’m sick of Puritan attitudes about sex and sexuality. They pass hateful laws at lightning speed at the mere mention of “protecting the children”. This usually ends up being about ways to selectively target the LGBTQ+ anyway. Anything LGBTQ+ was until very recently seen as a disgusting kink, and in many places those attitudes haven’t changed. The tracking is especially nefarious because they’re likely biding their time until they can make such things a crime, then use all the data and tracking systems they’ve set up - this happened immediately in the US after making abortions illegal.
It’s nice to briefly hang out online among people who aren’t sexually-repressed, but then I look outside and see my neighbors flying Trump flags and remember that many people IRL would love for me to be punished or disappeared for who I am. I’m tired of fighting just to exist in this world. If we survive climate change and the far-right I can’t wait until all these old bigots die off. I’m a millennial but still got death threats and into fights for being gay when I went through school. One generation later and being gay is something to be celebrated. The youth can’t take over soon enough.
(Special shout-out to lemmy.ml for defederating everyone from Yiffit because their admin couldn’t handle seeing a properly-tagged penis)
That lemmy instance is not known to be the most accepting of differing opinions. Its a shame its one of the bigger ones.
At least with the laws, for now they seem to only be local to states with others going the opposite way. From growing up in a not christian part of the US, to living in a fairly christian area now, its amazing how casually religion is thrown around. I don’t even think people realize they do it.
(Extra content warning: Eugenics)
Thankfully here we do seem to be more friendly to lgb people, or at least in the places I frequent.
Although, our government did pull out an old law to violate sovereigny to block some pro-trans legislation here… So, that happened I guess.
I can kinda relate to the fear of being punished or disappeared though… I’m autistic, and one of the things that the leading anti-autism charities wanted to do is create a generic database in order to screen for it.
Ended up arguing for a week straight with a close friend about how this was completely unacceptable. Arguing for your own existence is not a fun thing to do, especially when you’re not that confident about it yourself… It’s a big part of this mental mess I’m in now…
Anyway, sorry for rambling a bit there. While we’re criticising instances, I’d like to call out madtodon.art for simultaneously claiming to be a safe space whilst also trying to push out trans and furry folk.
It feels like some people need hobbies. They have nothing better to do in their lives than campaign against minorities that have zero effect on their life. I hope we’re going in the right direction but we’ve been backsliding on a couple things recently and it’s sickening to see people close to you that were quietly in support of that. Maybe we need another Pokemon GO phenomenon to remind the bigots that there are other things they could be doing with their lives.
That way of thinking is so foreign to me I can’t quite figure out where it comes from. I know “The Church” has a history of pushing itself around, with many people bragging about their mission trips. To people where “the church” is their identity, it seems their worldview is anyone they don’t agree with is going to hell, and they want everyone but the sinners in heaven. If you try to look at it from that world view you can almost reason out its not hatred, its love. I want to save you. I mean, that’s wrong but its the only way I can see reason in that opinion.
To argue against someone first you have to try to understand where their beliefs come from. I don’t know how much of what I put above is trying to attach empathy to those who lack it, but its the most charitable way I can try to see how they got to their opinion.
I really don’t think it’s “love” at this point. I understand that point of view, but I rarely ever see those types of people anymore. They don’t even necessarily need specific religious litigation to back up their views, and they can pretend that their god “would support them” in their endeavors just as easily. These people want punishment for those they deem “other” because the normalization of “other” challenges their privilege and makes them uncomfortable. I think their fear of these outcomes is the most likely “rational” explanation. Semi-related, the world is not in a good place right now with capitalism running rampant. I think these people are even more frightened at their precarious living conditions and their sense of survival is pushing them to hold onto the privilege and lifestyle they have in any way possible.
My thought process is just so far from that, that I can’t remotely understand that point of view. The best I’ve heard is the 0 sum theory, that somehow they think if things get better for someone else it gets worse for them. Its just something I can’t understand.
It’s half true. They enjoy certain privileges while others are beneath them. By giving others the same privileges they lose what makes them “special”, even though they are not losing anything directly in a zero sum fashion. It’s a greedy and fearful way of thinking, but those properties make it an easy ideology to adopt during crisis. That’s probably the most favorable motive I can apply.
I guess I keep posting these kinds of things, in various names and places, in the hope of finding that one “nugget of hope”. That one piece of information that can prove to me that maybe everything isn’t so bad. That the mental prison I trap myself in isn’t real. That… Doesn’t seem likely with this, and I really don’t know how to handle it.
I need hope, I need coping mechanisms, I need something to stop these unhealthy behaviours. Hell at this point I’ll take hugs or hedpats.
And yes, I do see professional help and I think it works. But at the same time… I do feel like I’m living “paycheck to paycheck” with appointments.
I truly do appreciate the people here who help out and be friendly and give me a nice safe space, so thank you.
I’m not nearly as qualified as your professional help, but there are always bright spots and safe spaces to exist when you’re low. Everyone is exhausted these days, and you’re not going to change the world by dedicating your entire life to worrying about it. Take what you can and fight for what you’re able to, but don’t overexert yourself. Ideally half the fight needs to be done by people who are not the minorities in question - these people have the most privilege and population to actually enact change. E.g., telling the homeless to fight for themselves is not how you end homelessness.
That is something I need to work on, yes. I’m very stubborn and just keep hitting my head against the wall, thinking about things until a problem drops out. Burning myself out trying to find a solution to a problem which I can’t solve. There are people out there with a lot more resources and a lot more energy fighting on my behalf out there, and I should just let them do it.
I still have no idea how people can seemingly be happy, posting memes, enjoying themselves in fursuits and then switch to posting serious concerns about things that directly affect their wellbeing, and then back to posting pictures of their 'sona naked. It feels like people have some kind of magical “switch” in their head that allows them to postpone and not worry about these things, that my autistic brain just lacks.
Anyway, thanks for helping me out, even though I’m effectively just a stranger. I appreciate it.
For me I take an effort to recognize its out of my control. Once I do that and focus on the fact there is nothing I can do about it I can move on. Some things have a little staying power, but once I try and focus on the next thing it slowly fades away.
I can’t comment on fursuits, but I did wear my college mascot costume when I tried out. It was… freeing. Even though it was only a few minutes, and I cringe at the horrible skit I tried to do. While wearing it and performing, I was able to do things I would never have been able to do in front of others without wearing it.
Overall I would say it is a dissociation to a degree. A 'sona isn’t them, its someone else with different goals, fears, wants, and abilities.
Without knowing the events surrounding your anxiety, I can’t really help you there.
I have a very privacy focused view online and would likely use VPNs or other methods to circumvent technical limitations. As for the payment processors, yea they have a history of being hostile to adult topics I think onlyfans was big enough to have negotiating power. Fetlife had to stop accepting credit cards (they might accept them again now) due to processor requirements that would have required them to remove many fetishes. At least with distributed platforms (mastodon, lemmy, matrix…) you don’t have to ever worry about identifying yourself, except maybe to the local admin.
I don’t know what the current general view towards sex is, but then again I watch mostly sex positive spaces where most people do have an AD or just post everything on main. Like everything sexual expression comes in waves. In the mid 1900 hollywood was fundamental in their enforcement of “decency”. It has been a fight for hundreds of years and no signs of it stopping.
Edit: Forgot to mention patreon, they just kicked another kink off their platform.
The more I read about this payment stuff, the more upsetting it is, ugh. I know it’s partly due to liability concerns rather than necessarily puritan stuff, but still.
It really sucks that most adult stuff skirts under the gaze of all powerful companies that control people’s livelihoods.
Maybe in future someone will see the gap in the market for a kink friendly payment processor or bank and make one. But that seems like wishful thinking.
I don’t know how much is puritan vs how much is liability. you always have to think about the brand image and although sex sells, we don’t want our brand associated with it. Crypto was supposed to solve some of the payment stuff, but its just confusing, full of scams, and full or investors turning it into a commodity rather than a currency. There is still cash, and bank transfers, but that only goes so far. I’d be happy to see a more open credit network, but I don’t really think there is a big enough market for someone to try and fill that niche.
