Cathryn (formerly catslash) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
remindmeofthe) wrote2014-12-01 12:37 am
remindmeofthe) wrote2014-12-01 12:37 am
(no subject)
I follow about a dozen people on Plurk (also remindmeofthe, if you want to friend me there), and a few of them frustrate me so.
None of them follow me here, as far as I know, so it's safe for me to vent.
A few of them look down on tumblr and tumblr politics, which I can understand! I know that tumblr politics can be in rigid black and white and how aggravating that can be.
But I also know how young tumblr's userbase skews, and I remember how it was when I was a teenager, how everything was black and white and how I knew theoretically that shades of gray existed, but I couldn't practically grasp their existence.
And I tell you what, I wish like hell that I'd known what a lot of kids on tumblr know now. I wish I'd known about feminism and how racism really works and about transphobia and a million other things.
I understand that these things on tumblr can be chafing sometimes, that they are applied so relentlessly it seems like there's no room for gray, but you know why? These people are kids. They don't know yet. They don't have the life experience yet to understand that shades of gray exist.
And as adults, we need to understand this. They'll get to where we are. Not all of them, I know, some people never grow up. But a lot of people do. They'll get to where we are, and they'll use all the amazing things they've learned, and if we're lucky then we'll all change the world.
In the meantime, there's no point in shitting on them, no point in whining about them, it makes me so angry. But there's no point in my expressing that either. So I do it here instead.
(Note that this is only about people I follow on Plurk. If I don't follow you on Plurk, it ain't about you.))
None of them follow me here, as far as I know, so it's safe for me to vent.
A few of them look down on tumblr and tumblr politics, which I can understand! I know that tumblr politics can be in rigid black and white and how aggravating that can be.
But I also know how young tumblr's userbase skews, and I remember how it was when I was a teenager, how everything was black and white and how I knew theoretically that shades of gray existed, but I couldn't practically grasp their existence.
And I tell you what, I wish like hell that I'd known what a lot of kids on tumblr know now. I wish I'd known about feminism and how racism really works and about transphobia and a million other things.
I understand that these things on tumblr can be chafing sometimes, that they are applied so relentlessly it seems like there's no room for gray, but you know why? These people are kids. They don't know yet. They don't have the life experience yet to understand that shades of gray exist.
And as adults, we need to understand this. They'll get to where we are. Not all of them, I know, some people never grow up. But a lot of people do. They'll get to where we are, and they'll use all the amazing things they've learned, and if we're lucky then we'll all change the world.
In the meantime, there's no point in shitting on them, no point in whining about them, it makes me so angry. But there's no point in my expressing that either. So I do it here instead.
(Note that this is only about people I follow on Plurk. If I don't follow you on Plurk, it ain't about you.))
no subject
Tumblr does frequently drive me nuts - not this aspect, but a shift I've seen in adult fans I know to the same kind of language as the teenagers in ways I can't quite forgive all the time (I can take a fifteen-year-old wailing about a character she loves in ways that wind up ableist more than a thirty-year-old, particularly when the latter is pretending she's superior the former).
But...this on the politics. They'll get there, most of them. Give them a few years.