So I’ve spent a few days thinking about this (prompted partly by someone deciding I’m a racist for… agreeing with the premise that Nazis Are Bad, but in the wrong way or something).
I sad a few pages back that I understand the reasoning (or what I assume is the reasoning) behind the change.
But I also said I don’t agree with the change.
Lets establish a few things first. Despite what certain users here, prone to overuse of tildes and smarmy emoticons, may believe, I am not a racist, nor a nazi, nor anything else. A lot of my more visible actions when I was a mod involved telling people to shut up and filter content they didn’t like. Those people fell into two broad, barely-intersecting groups: the ones complaining about racism and “political” content, and the ones complaining about LGB and “political” content. I spent a lot of time dealing with and banning people for their refusal to accept that these things could exist and be hidden behind filters, and a lot of time deleting their comments.
To each group I was a thing: to one, a nazi, because I didn’t immediately conform to their demands to remove everything they deemed racist and evil and whatever else. To the other, a commie SJW cuck, because I didn’t immediately remove everything they deemed degenerate, evil and whatever else.
What we’re dealing with right here and now is a site that, besides its safe for work content, hosts art of nearly every fetish you can imagine, and it has decided, for whatever reason, that one particular fetish that is otherwise entirely, unquestionably legal, is no longer allowed. That rankles me.
And yes, I am calling Aryanne a fetish object. Nazi aesthetic fetishism has a long and storied history all the way back to early 50s biker culture (which developed into leather fetishism in general, and is a huge chunk of gay culture now, right down to a lot of the iconography). Even to a little before, when some camp survivors began trying to process their trauma by fetishising and sexualising it.
For the record, nazi shit is not my fetish. Not even slightly. Not in a hundred years. There is content on this site that I have defended vigorously, over the years, that makes me die inside a little every time I have to look at it. I’ll even own that, absent all other considerations, I’d delete a lot of it; I even advocated that a few times in the past, until I realised what a hypocrite I was being. I mean, lets face it, I still was and still am for a whole host of reasons, but I have always tried, to the best of my ability, to support the path of greater freedom over lesser.
So that’s where I stand, really. I understand what I believe are the reasons for doing this. I disagree with the decision. My friends on the mod team are still some of the best people I know and this site is still arguably the best site for discovering new fandom artists and new fucked up ways to enjoy yourself.
