Scribbles and Bits

Today I just realized that All in the Family ISN'T just plain invisible or "Error 404" when people reach it. People see the takedown notice and since I very obviously don't do photorealistic art, kinda the only conclusion to draw is that my work is "Content glorifying sexual violence" or "minors, minor-presenting, or suggested minors in a sexual context."

This is incredibly degrading. This might be more humiliating than getting shadowbanned from Gumroad for Cultiples, and that was pretty damn crummy.

I make mental health work about sexual trauma. It's bad for business to have "minors in a sexual context" as code for "child pornography" anywhere near me professionally, even if you ignore that this is, again, a memoir about how incest fucked me up. The whole point is that it's awful! Josie Riesman called it "one of the most brutal and engaging comics I’ve ever read." Tarun Athmika did a whole fucking paper on the politics of implication in (among other things) All in the Family, and how bans of discussion of oppression supports that oppression! Holy shit, he couldn't have been more prescient had he tried!

I've still heard nothing from itch.io. I ordered my payout a week ago and it's still "in review." I don't know if I'm going to get paid. The idea that I might get pedojacketed, AGAIN, for totally nonsense reasons is...

I don't know what it is.

This never used to happen to me until 2023, and now it's becoming normal to me. This is just life to me now. And I feel stupidly naive that it took this long to happen; it feels like it was always going to.

At least I can take comfort that the Banned Book Sale is going well. But god, I would've way rathered never throwing one.

Okay, so to quickly explain what's going on with itch.io (and Fansly, and Steam, and Patreon, and OnlyFans, and and and...)

So, when you buy something from a website, there's you (the customer), the creator of the thing (the maker), and the website you buy it on (the shop). But then there's the payment processor. The payment processor is a middle-man between you and the shopkeeper.

The metaphor I use is: imagine you go to a store and decide to buy a cookie. You go to the shopkeeper to give them your money, and suddenly a guy jumps out of the bushes and tells you, "NO! You are only allowed to buy pure, clean, HEALTHY food with your cash!"

You say, "Who the fuck are you, a cop?"

"No."

"A politician? Are cookies illegal now?"

"No."

"Are you involved with the shop? The cookie makers?"

"No! We made the cash register!"

( further explanation, but I am not a banker nor all that educated about payment processors )

Mori: Well, today sure been exciting and I ain't even hit the marching band festival yet! (That... might have to wait til tomorrow. Too much excitement.)

I stayed up till 3 AM working on Madgic #4--not advisable, but deadlines are deadlines and that book needs to be done, printed, and on a book fair table in two weeks. I was like, it's fine, Saturday I can be nice and chill and just catalog for the sci-fi library all day, give my neck and shoulders a break.

That is not how my Saturday went.

( Transphobia, bomb threat, and local politics behind the cut. Hold my lunch, MY LIBRARY NEEDS ME! )

Man, and this ain't even getting into the shit me and Rawlin done in headspace at 3 AM! Today is really shaping up to be a banger! But at least now I'm safe in the sci-fi library where nothing worse is going to happen besides Harlan Ellison being rude to some guy.

Rogan: We've been reading Dorothy Allison's Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature, from 1994, and oh MAN is this book exactly what we need right now. Dorothy Allison is a lesbian who fought hard to be a kinky femme Southern lesbian from a poor background, despite the heated sex wars that judged her as "misguided, damaged by incest and childhood physical abuse, or deliberately indulging in hateful and retrograde sexual practices out of a selfish concentration on my own sexual satisfaction" (24). ("Retrograde" seems to have been their version of "problematic." Ditto "male-identified" which means something hilariously different now, at least in my circles.)

She talks about the contempt other lesbians showered her with, how real loves and desires were twisted, shamed, and ignored so as to fit the feminist theory of the time. She talks about how shitty it feels, getting that from your own people over totally harmless desires. This thirty-year-old book still feels so relevant to the sexual purity politics of today, just with the vocabulary terms switched out.

As someone who just got kinkshamed out of my housing (yes, that is why we moved, I'm willing to say that publicly now that I'm safely out), this book is a comfort to me. It's perversely reassuring to know that for my whole life, queers have been sexually judging each other so intensely for the smallest, dumbest things that don't actually hurt anyone. Allison was called a tool of the patriarchy, a shill for pornographers. I was called a child molester. Same song, different verse.

( Sex, desire, and Coming In or Staying Out. Matter-of-fact discussion of kink, sex, and porn behind the cut, plus people's contempt for all of the above. )

Rogan: well, that was unpleasant. Warning: homo/transphobia, racism

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