I really wish I had had this article a couple months ago. I help run a (pretty small, pretty queer) discord server for authors of fan and original works inspired by a specific manga, and we instituted a 18+ rule not only for reasons of discussing sex and abuse and everything else that comes with the territory of the specific work we're fans of, but also because well, like, teenagers are often kind of cringe! and there's a desire for a kind of adult discussion, especially because it's mostly people in their late 20s and 30s.
I'm a 25yo trans woman, and it turns out that a young trans woman from Eastern Europe who had joined was 17: she'd simply missed the part where the server name and rules had said 18+. and she really obviously desperately needed the community but when she accidentally let slip that she was 17 I ended up pressured to remove her basically for everyone else's comfort. There's more there but it's not important. Things have shaken out where I have a little more power and say now.
Unfortunately the winter is usually hard for me anyways and I didn't have the words, at the time, to make the case for why she should be allowed, and I wish that I had been stronger in that moment. she's owed more from all of us than exclusion for everyone else's comfort, and she's owed more from *me* specifically. I don't want to let myself be weak like that again.
This is a good article and it hits very close to home. thank you.
Thank you for this, Devon. Deeply and sincerely, thank you.
I look back fondly at the anime groups and kink-friendly spaces that helped me understand and revel in my own proclivities. There was such a lack of shame, ridicule, guilt and fear in those spaces in the aughts. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that I was confronted with blocks, bans, blacklists and the like for having an unpopular ship or not having the right virtue signal phrase in my bio. It’s so strange to be fully in my 30s and feel the need to tiptoe around increasingly censorious social codes. If I’m feeling the creep of Purity Hypervigilance I can only imagine how a middle schooler feels.
It cannot be understated how nefarious and powerful the advertiser-friendliness aspect of this whole deal is. When I worry about kids online today it’s not because of any NSFW content they might see — it’s because their brain development is linked inextricably within a digital context that is built to maximize extraction of their time, resources and money. We all grow up influenced by manufactured consent under capitalism to some degree, but the opacity and omnipresence of the sculpted realities kids are subject to freaks me out.
On a relateted note, I recently moved to a rural area and have wanted to do some organizing, particularly youth outreach for LGBTQ+ kids, but have no idea how to attract the attention of at-risk youth without raising the suspicions of hostile parents, pastors or other adults who would accuse me and my trans/queer friends of scouting out kids to corrupt. If anyone has any youth organizing ideas, specifically in conservative areas, I’d love to talk about this.
Rural queer organizer who ran a queer youth program here. I don't know if any of this will be helpful, but in case it is - our queer community organizing started up through the local domestic violence shelter. There was a queer advocate and they advocated with the executive director for 2SLGBTQIA+ people to have more support around domestic violence and sexual assault because unfortunately, rates of experiencing both of those are higher in our community. That led to getting a grant that allowed us to offer services specifically to queer teens and start a queer youth program. Unfortunately that almost certainly wouldn't be an option right now (it was a federal grant), but it might be worth thinking about unlikely allies or orgs that are already helping vulnerable people and how to partner.
We started having Pride celebrations about 10 years ago. The first one was private, invite-only, and in someone's backyard. Now it is public, well-known, and well-attended. We blossomed into our own nonprofit when it became clear that having most organizing on the queer DV advocate's plate was way too much.
We haven't done many posters about the queer youth program, mostly because they have gotten ripped down in schools. Word of mouth amongst teens has been somewhat effective. Having one queer youth in each local school who is an "ambassador" with little cards with the meeting and contact info on them is something that we are trying. One of our best ways to reach folks has been through a private 2SLGBTQIA+ community Instagram. We don't post a ton but there is so much great content that can be reposted. We note that as per Instagram's guidelines, you're completely allowed to make a burner account that doesn't tie to your name or identity in any way. It is all-ages but we do require all new follows to confirm ground rules via message when they join. So far it has stayed a safe space. This idea was from a local queer youth who said this was the best way to reach and share information with youths in the closet. That was a few years ago and might have changed, but the Instagram has great interaction with the stories still and many youth followers. Recently, we finally put together a website for our organization. We made sure to create an "escape" button that immediately takes you away from the site and makes it look like you were on the google homepage (it doesn't clear your history tho, that's much more complicated coding). This possibility was also learned from domestic violence advocacy sites. :)
We also put copies of a 2SLGBTQIA+ sex ed zine around our community. Beware, there was a censorship challenge (we won) when it was at our local library. But this zine was made by another queer domestic violence advocate and team of social work students and has amazing content put together in a really compelling way!
One of the awful side effects of seeing men as inherently predatory toward children is that it further offloads the responsibility for caretaking onto women! Nobody wins from this! Aside from patriarchal overlords who want to see everyone kept in their place, I suppose. Thanks for your comment.
This does such a fantastic job of expressing feelings I’ve had for a long time!
I particularly find it both irritating and demeaning when I see people vehemently describing anyone under the age of 18 as ‘a child’. Like, you’re 25, and of course you’ve done a lot of growing since you were 17, but you talk about it like it was a different universe. At 17, were you honestly unable to make informed decisions for yourself? Unable to interact maturely with adults? Sexually uninformed and ‘innocent’? Come on. How can you claim you wouldn’t be offended if someone called you a child at 17? Or even 16?
I’m 20 now, but at 16 I had so many life experiences under my belt — I’d come out as trans and changed my name a year earlier! I’d long since read all of Sarah J Maas’ books and developed a sense of sexual identity. And truly, nothing changed on my 18th birthday. We are constantly underestimating and undervaluing teens and young adults.
(Apologies for the essay of my own, I love this perspective and I’m so grateful to see it written down!)
Beautifully written and engaging piece as always, Devon. Cindy Gallop of Make Love Not Porn is doing important work in this space, teaching young people what natural, consensual sex looks like. I've recommended that she read this piece. <3
I am so excited by your child liberation work. Thanks so much.
I have come across this exact issue IRL lately, a debate about ‘stranger danger’. Grown men are often scared to interact with children strangers for fear of being seen as suspicious. But if all adults are scared to talk to children they don’t know, and children are scared to talk to adults they don’t know, how can the children learn how to talk to strangers? How can they get a sense of a safe interaction? Your story of the creepy photographer is a perfect example. You were protected by your experience of healthy relationships with adults.
Wowww, I am seventeen myself and this is the first time I have seen "minors" be called an oppressed class but everything said was so true to my experience I have also lied ab my age 😂 👏.
Thank you for this. It's all helpful to reflect on. I think you're touching on something important when you say: "Like many white Americans, I’ve often foolishly seen freedom as the complete absence of responsibility. For the longest time I believed independence was the only way to escape all that I’d been made to do, forced to be, and prevented from being when I was young."
Freedom and safety are two concepts that get muddled up so easily; and often to the detriment of those who have the least access to freedom and safety.
This really coalesces a lot of thoughts I’ve been having for a while!
Particularly since moving to Asia — which obviously, each country had its own many problems — but it’s really highlighted how we talk about and treat kids in North America. Just the disgust people have for them.
I get why some women do it, since it can be a way to distance themselves from those incubator/babysitter expectations, but on the whole it’s fucking awful vibes.
Children are treated like such a blessing here. AGAIN, problems, caveats, etc., but the vibe is truly so so different. If you got annoyed at a kid crying and said something derisive about eg. ‘crotch goblins’ people would think something was wrong with *you*.
And it’s also always boggled my mind how people seem to forget what it was like to be a teenager?? They just seem to dismiss what they remember instead of seeing themselves in the children and teenagers around them. I think, while I was growing up, the oppressive assumption that i was going to have children was far more harmful to me than all the gay porn i read/watched, yaknow
Thank you for writing this! I have never given much credit to the adults I learned from as a kid online, but if I had been blocked from tumblr, wattpad, habbo hotel, etc I would have lost a valuable lifeline. My friends and I would co-write our own strange, borderline sexual fiction stories as early as middle school, and even as a then-asexual kid I found it fun and interesting to explore those themes. The adults in my life would have been horrified to know that in high school I was reading and watching gay smut/porn in my room, but I would not know myself the way I do now if that access was blocked. I knew how much was being hidden from me irl, so ofc I took it upon myself to search for the taboo.
I hope I can support the next generation of queer kids! 💖
I was lucky to have grown up prior to bandwidth that allowed for pictures (and obviously before video). It was all text, and unless you disclosed your age it never came up. The early years were 300bps modems, with the upgrade to 1200pbs and 2400pbs modems being huge advancements.
There is so much I learned because of this. I don’t mean so-called “adult” content which Protestant ideologies tie to sexuality (which they barely want Adults to be able to talk about), but basic things like politics, religion, or even detailed technology information which otherwise wouldn’t be considered “age appropriate”.
As someone who was apparently Autistic, I could never make sense of oddball gender or age silos — and had no interest in blindly fitting into either.
Thank you for posting this – I’m a bit horrified by how bad things seem to have become.
I love this! I was very active on a body modification BBS and a feminist BBS in the late 90s and early 2000s as a teenager (we even had IRL meetups!) and my relationships with adults there gave me strength and depth to my politics and gender identity.
Right before this piece dropped, I saw a post from a trans guy on reddit who was autobanned from an all ages trans group (can't remember which one - may have been r/ftm but unsure) by an automod that bans users who have either 1) have posted their own porn/porn links 2) have EVER INTERACTED with porn on reddit. It's not like these users are soliciting sex or posting porn links TO these spaces where they're getting banned - they're getting banned for being or interacting with sex workers. (Kind of a wild journey for me to go from seeing that post, closing reddit, and then opening my email and seeing this essay.)
Devon, I'm so happy Natalie Hanson sent me your essay, because a) it is brilliantly observed and insightful, and b) as Natalie correctly surmised, 100% in line with what we're doing at MakeLoveNotPorn and MakeLoveNotPorn Academy. For years enlightened parents have been buying their teenage children subscriptions to MakeLoveNotPorn, because, they tell us, "I want my kids to see what happy, healthy, loving sexual relationships look like." In the past year those messages have become increasingly desperate, and relate to 13 year old sons whose mothers have discovered are watching Pornhub, and who want them to watch MakeLoveNotPorn instead. We are fully legal at MLNP, but our policy is that parental judgement trumps the 18+ - a parent knows what's right for their child, especially in current-day circumstances. MakeLoveNotPorn Academy is our effort to take education and awareness as far upstream as possible for children and young people, as well as for parents, teachers, schools and all adults - we're building a 0-18 and beyond aggregator hub for the best of the world's sex education content, easily searchable by age-appropriateness, cultural sensibility and personal comfort level. I shared your essay with my MakeLoveNotPorn team asking every member to read it, because it aligns so much with everything we are trying to make happen. Thank you so much for writing this.
Hi Devon. This brought so many feels for me as a mexican nobinary queer parent (my kiddo is a teen!) I grew up in the MySpace era (I met my co-parent on MySpace in 2004 🫠) and my exploration and self-discovery of queerness was heavily policed by my foster parents- IRL. The Internet as we know it was virtually a new concept for them at the time and so I spent countless hours online reading anything i could find about every day gay and queer humans living life in our world. Irl, I could hardly imagine that world existing because I was part of such a small religious community that was so stifling, judgemental, and oppressive to me (and, I imagine, to many other kids)
so it was life-sustaining to learn about and witness, even if only through my giant desktop monitor, queer life, queer existing and surviving, and sometimes even, queer thriving. What a concept!
Some of the ppl I met online as a teen (roughly 2004-2010) were not forthcoming about their age/ intentions, and I did not know how to tell the difference. Or what to do when receiving unsolicited dick pics. Or when kids started rumors about my bff and slut-shamed her to the whole school, which led to her developing an ED and SI. No parent/guardian, school staff gave us any tools on what to do about this, which made me feel so alienated and helpless. I believe having those tools to protect ourselves would have made a difference in how we experienced the internet.
As a parent, I try to always keep this is mind. I want to be the best guide for this young autonomous human that I'm growing with in life. I encourage them to be curious and question literally every single thing about our world, including me. The internet is a vast space of knowledge- and sometimes this can be scary to navigate with no guidance, so I do my best to show my kiddo online etiquette i follow: fact check what we read online, dealing w trolls or bullies, recognizing that online ads are 24/7 trying to sell you crap and will try to make you question your values, body, identity, in order to do so, and recognize grooming techniques that some adults use to manipulate young people. All of this is general irl practice, but online it can look different.
I mess up as a parent sometimes. I didn't have examples of a caring and accepting parental figure growing up. I am trying SO hard for my kiddo to have a different, better experience than I did.
I've worked with middle schoolers for years, and have learned important lessons about empathy and solidarity from witnessing their interactions w each other, and my goal is to foster these qualities so that they never forget that this is how we survive all that life throws our way, with empathy and a burning need to protect each other, despite the enraging fact that our individualistic capitalist society will try to convince them otherwise.
p.s. Thank you for this article ! Is there a free way to read Feel Broken for Not Wanting Kids?
I know for a fact that if I didn't have adult online friends to mentor me and just be there for me I'd be in a far worse position than the one I ended up in.
If instead of talking to me about sexuality and all of that jazz, my trans friends shut me out for "not being developed enough" I most likely would've continued suppressing my transfemininity.
Just in general, if I was excluded from adult spaces and topics, I know for a fact I would've done far more foolish and irresponsible things due to not having anyone to talk about them with.
Something else I'd like to add is that I find it absurd how even among radical leftists and queers ageism is still rampant for the most part. It's incredible how entrenched and normalized it is in peoples minds.
I really wish I had had this article a couple months ago. I help run a (pretty small, pretty queer) discord server for authors of fan and original works inspired by a specific manga, and we instituted a 18+ rule not only for reasons of discussing sex and abuse and everything else that comes with the territory of the specific work we're fans of, but also because well, like, teenagers are often kind of cringe! and there's a desire for a kind of adult discussion, especially because it's mostly people in their late 20s and 30s.
I'm a 25yo trans woman, and it turns out that a young trans woman from Eastern Europe who had joined was 17: she'd simply missed the part where the server name and rules had said 18+. and she really obviously desperately needed the community but when she accidentally let slip that she was 17 I ended up pressured to remove her basically for everyone else's comfort. There's more there but it's not important. Things have shaken out where I have a little more power and say now.
Unfortunately the winter is usually hard for me anyways and I didn't have the words, at the time, to make the case for why she should be allowed, and I wish that I had been stronger in that moment. she's owed more from all of us than exclusion for everyone else's comfort, and she's owed more from *me* specifically. I don't want to let myself be weak like that again.
This is a good article and it hits very close to home. thank you.
Thank you for this, Devon. Deeply and sincerely, thank you.
I look back fondly at the anime groups and kink-friendly spaces that helped me understand and revel in my own proclivities. There was such a lack of shame, ridicule, guilt and fear in those spaces in the aughts. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that I was confronted with blocks, bans, blacklists and the like for having an unpopular ship or not having the right virtue signal phrase in my bio. It’s so strange to be fully in my 30s and feel the need to tiptoe around increasingly censorious social codes. If I’m feeling the creep of Purity Hypervigilance I can only imagine how a middle schooler feels.
It cannot be understated how nefarious and powerful the advertiser-friendliness aspect of this whole deal is. When I worry about kids online today it’s not because of any NSFW content they might see — it’s because their brain development is linked inextricably within a digital context that is built to maximize extraction of their time, resources and money. We all grow up influenced by manufactured consent under capitalism to some degree, but the opacity and omnipresence of the sculpted realities kids are subject to freaks me out.
On a relateted note, I recently moved to a rural area and have wanted to do some organizing, particularly youth outreach for LGBTQ+ kids, but have no idea how to attract the attention of at-risk youth without raising the suspicions of hostile parents, pastors or other adults who would accuse me and my trans/queer friends of scouting out kids to corrupt. If anyone has any youth organizing ideas, specifically in conservative areas, I’d love to talk about this.
Rural queer organizer who ran a queer youth program here. I don't know if any of this will be helpful, but in case it is - our queer community organizing started up through the local domestic violence shelter. There was a queer advocate and they advocated with the executive director for 2SLGBTQIA+ people to have more support around domestic violence and sexual assault because unfortunately, rates of experiencing both of those are higher in our community. That led to getting a grant that allowed us to offer services specifically to queer teens and start a queer youth program. Unfortunately that almost certainly wouldn't be an option right now (it was a federal grant), but it might be worth thinking about unlikely allies or orgs that are already helping vulnerable people and how to partner.
We started having Pride celebrations about 10 years ago. The first one was private, invite-only, and in someone's backyard. Now it is public, well-known, and well-attended. We blossomed into our own nonprofit when it became clear that having most organizing on the queer DV advocate's plate was way too much.
We haven't done many posters about the queer youth program, mostly because they have gotten ripped down in schools. Word of mouth amongst teens has been somewhat effective. Having one queer youth in each local school who is an "ambassador" with little cards with the meeting and contact info on them is something that we are trying. One of our best ways to reach folks has been through a private 2SLGBTQIA+ community Instagram. We don't post a ton but there is so much great content that can be reposted. We note that as per Instagram's guidelines, you're completely allowed to make a burner account that doesn't tie to your name or identity in any way. It is all-ages but we do require all new follows to confirm ground rules via message when they join. So far it has stayed a safe space. This idea was from a local queer youth who said this was the best way to reach and share information with youths in the closet. That was a few years ago and might have changed, but the Instagram has great interaction with the stories still and many youth followers. Recently, we finally put together a website for our organization. We made sure to create an "escape" button that immediately takes you away from the site and makes it look like you were on the google homepage (it doesn't clear your history tho, that's much more complicated coding). This possibility was also learned from domestic violence advocacy sites. :)
We also put copies of a 2SLGBTQIA+ sex ed zine around our community. Beware, there was a censorship challenge (we won) when it was at our local library. But this zine was made by another queer domestic violence advocate and team of social work students and has amazing content put together in a really compelling way!
Link to read online (welcome to post anywhere): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jIzqHexhXzRWfNyMFxhxKnXGrnbNLyUt/view
Link to print (also welcome):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cvWR-ZRA4yCINNJOXDEdbAXn1X2vsgMH/view
Best wishes in your endeavors supporting the rural queer youth!!! <3
This is Increadible and exactly what I’m looking for. Thank you so so so much for taking the time and sharing these tips!
This is an excellent piece on an important topic.
I am a cisman, in his 40's, never married, no kids
and a certain point I stopped interacting with children and
youth under 20, really, becuz of other "adults" and their
juvenile understanding of human relationships.
I used to be a care-giver professionally, and a very good one,
and I quit, really, because of the idiotic interpretations other
men and their childish lack of understanding of gender as
a social construction were imposing on me.
I was not worried about what they "thought" of me, I was worried
about what they would "do" with the entirely
fictional scenarios their skewed sense of biological appropriateness.
And I was right to be worried about them. Anyway,
nice work, I have no idea what you can actually do about it, though,
the masculine need for righteousness is so entrenched, ya know?
One of the awful side effects of seeing men as inherently predatory toward children is that it further offloads the responsibility for caretaking onto women! Nobody wins from this! Aside from patriarchal overlords who want to see everyone kept in their place, I suppose. Thanks for your comment.
This does such a fantastic job of expressing feelings I’ve had for a long time!
I particularly find it both irritating and demeaning when I see people vehemently describing anyone under the age of 18 as ‘a child’. Like, you’re 25, and of course you’ve done a lot of growing since you were 17, but you talk about it like it was a different universe. At 17, were you honestly unable to make informed decisions for yourself? Unable to interact maturely with adults? Sexually uninformed and ‘innocent’? Come on. How can you claim you wouldn’t be offended if someone called you a child at 17? Or even 16?
I’m 20 now, but at 16 I had so many life experiences under my belt — I’d come out as trans and changed my name a year earlier! I’d long since read all of Sarah J Maas’ books and developed a sense of sexual identity. And truly, nothing changed on my 18th birthday. We are constantly underestimating and undervaluing teens and young adults.
(Apologies for the essay of my own, I love this perspective and I’m so grateful to see it written down!)
Beautifully written and engaging piece as always, Devon. Cindy Gallop of Make Love Not Porn is doing important work in this space, teaching young people what natural, consensual sex looks like. I've recommended that she read this piece. <3
I am so excited by your child liberation work. Thanks so much.
I have come across this exact issue IRL lately, a debate about ‘stranger danger’. Grown men are often scared to interact with children strangers for fear of being seen as suspicious. But if all adults are scared to talk to children they don’t know, and children are scared to talk to adults they don’t know, how can the children learn how to talk to strangers? How can they get a sense of a safe interaction? Your story of the creepy photographer is a perfect example. You were protected by your experience of healthy relationships with adults.
Wowww, I am seventeen myself and this is the first time I have seen "minors" be called an oppressed class but everything said was so true to my experience I have also lied ab my age 😂 👏.
Thank you for this. It's all helpful to reflect on. I think you're touching on something important when you say: "Like many white Americans, I’ve often foolishly seen freedom as the complete absence of responsibility. For the longest time I believed independence was the only way to escape all that I’d been made to do, forced to be, and prevented from being when I was young."
Freedom and safety are two concepts that get muddled up so easily; and often to the detriment of those who have the least access to freedom and safety.
This really coalesces a lot of thoughts I’ve been having for a while!
Particularly since moving to Asia — which obviously, each country had its own many problems — but it’s really highlighted how we talk about and treat kids in North America. Just the disgust people have for them.
I get why some women do it, since it can be a way to distance themselves from those incubator/babysitter expectations, but on the whole it’s fucking awful vibes.
Children are treated like such a blessing here. AGAIN, problems, caveats, etc., but the vibe is truly so so different. If you got annoyed at a kid crying and said something derisive about eg. ‘crotch goblins’ people would think something was wrong with *you*.
And it’s also always boggled my mind how people seem to forget what it was like to be a teenager?? They just seem to dismiss what they remember instead of seeing themselves in the children and teenagers around them. I think, while I was growing up, the oppressive assumption that i was going to have children was far more harmful to me than all the gay porn i read/watched, yaknow
Really excellent piece Devon
Thank you for writing this! I have never given much credit to the adults I learned from as a kid online, but if I had been blocked from tumblr, wattpad, habbo hotel, etc I would have lost a valuable lifeline. My friends and I would co-write our own strange, borderline sexual fiction stories as early as middle school, and even as a then-asexual kid I found it fun and interesting to explore those themes. The adults in my life would have been horrified to know that in high school I was reading and watching gay smut/porn in my room, but I would not know myself the way I do now if that access was blocked. I knew how much was being hidden from me irl, so ofc I took it upon myself to search for the taboo.
I hope I can support the next generation of queer kids! 💖
I was lucky to have grown up prior to bandwidth that allowed for pictures (and obviously before video). It was all text, and unless you disclosed your age it never came up. The early years were 300bps modems, with the upgrade to 1200pbs and 2400pbs modems being huge advancements.
There is so much I learned because of this. I don’t mean so-called “adult” content which Protestant ideologies tie to sexuality (which they barely want Adults to be able to talk about), but basic things like politics, religion, or even detailed technology information which otherwise wouldn’t be considered “age appropriate”.
As someone who was apparently Autistic, I could never make sense of oddball gender or age silos — and had no interest in blindly fitting into either.
Thank you for posting this – I’m a bit horrified by how bad things seem to have become.
I love this! I was very active on a body modification BBS and a feminist BBS in the late 90s and early 2000s as a teenager (we even had IRL meetups!) and my relationships with adults there gave me strength and depth to my politics and gender identity.
Right before this piece dropped, I saw a post from a trans guy on reddit who was autobanned from an all ages trans group (can't remember which one - may have been r/ftm but unsure) by an automod that bans users who have either 1) have posted their own porn/porn links 2) have EVER INTERACTED with porn on reddit. It's not like these users are soliciting sex or posting porn links TO these spaces where they're getting banned - they're getting banned for being or interacting with sex workers. (Kind of a wild journey for me to go from seeing that post, closing reddit, and then opening my email and seeing this essay.)
Devon, I'm so happy Natalie Hanson sent me your essay, because a) it is brilliantly observed and insightful, and b) as Natalie correctly surmised, 100% in line with what we're doing at MakeLoveNotPorn and MakeLoveNotPorn Academy. For years enlightened parents have been buying their teenage children subscriptions to MakeLoveNotPorn, because, they tell us, "I want my kids to see what happy, healthy, loving sexual relationships look like." In the past year those messages have become increasingly desperate, and relate to 13 year old sons whose mothers have discovered are watching Pornhub, and who want them to watch MakeLoveNotPorn instead. We are fully legal at MLNP, but our policy is that parental judgement trumps the 18+ - a parent knows what's right for their child, especially in current-day circumstances. MakeLoveNotPorn Academy is our effort to take education and awareness as far upstream as possible for children and young people, as well as for parents, teachers, schools and all adults - we're building a 0-18 and beyond aggregator hub for the best of the world's sex education content, easily searchable by age-appropriateness, cultural sensibility and personal comfort level. I shared your essay with my MakeLoveNotPorn team asking every member to read it, because it aligns so much with everything we are trying to make happen. Thank you so much for writing this.
https://www.makelovenotporn.academy/
https://makelovenotporn.tv/
Hi Devon. This brought so many feels for me as a mexican nobinary queer parent (my kiddo is a teen!) I grew up in the MySpace era (I met my co-parent on MySpace in 2004 🫠) and my exploration and self-discovery of queerness was heavily policed by my foster parents- IRL. The Internet as we know it was virtually a new concept for them at the time and so I spent countless hours online reading anything i could find about every day gay and queer humans living life in our world. Irl, I could hardly imagine that world existing because I was part of such a small religious community that was so stifling, judgemental, and oppressive to me (and, I imagine, to many other kids)
so it was life-sustaining to learn about and witness, even if only through my giant desktop monitor, queer life, queer existing and surviving, and sometimes even, queer thriving. What a concept!
Some of the ppl I met online as a teen (roughly 2004-2010) were not forthcoming about their age/ intentions, and I did not know how to tell the difference. Or what to do when receiving unsolicited dick pics. Or when kids started rumors about my bff and slut-shamed her to the whole school, which led to her developing an ED and SI. No parent/guardian, school staff gave us any tools on what to do about this, which made me feel so alienated and helpless. I believe having those tools to protect ourselves would have made a difference in how we experienced the internet.
As a parent, I try to always keep this is mind. I want to be the best guide for this young autonomous human that I'm growing with in life. I encourage them to be curious and question literally every single thing about our world, including me. The internet is a vast space of knowledge- and sometimes this can be scary to navigate with no guidance, so I do my best to show my kiddo online etiquette i follow: fact check what we read online, dealing w trolls or bullies, recognizing that online ads are 24/7 trying to sell you crap and will try to make you question your values, body, identity, in order to do so, and recognize grooming techniques that some adults use to manipulate young people. All of this is general irl practice, but online it can look different.
I mess up as a parent sometimes. I didn't have examples of a caring and accepting parental figure growing up. I am trying SO hard for my kiddo to have a different, better experience than I did.
I've worked with middle schoolers for years, and have learned important lessons about empathy and solidarity from witnessing their interactions w each other, and my goal is to foster these qualities so that they never forget that this is how we survive all that life throws our way, with empathy and a burning need to protect each other, despite the enraging fact that our individualistic capitalist society will try to convince them otherwise.
p.s. Thank you for this article ! Is there a free way to read Feel Broken for Not Wanting Kids?
Sure, here's the free link https://humanparts.medium.com/i-feel-broken-for-not-wanting-children-7c33b9eb5e44?sk=049441621ecb838581282d2c755dc99f
Thank you
I love this!
I know for a fact that if I didn't have adult online friends to mentor me and just be there for me I'd be in a far worse position than the one I ended up in.
If instead of talking to me about sexuality and all of that jazz, my trans friends shut me out for "not being developed enough" I most likely would've continued suppressing my transfemininity.
Just in general, if I was excluded from adult spaces and topics, I know for a fact I would've done far more foolish and irresponsible things due to not having anyone to talk about them with.
Something else I'd like to add is that I find it absurd how even among radical leftists and queers ageism is still rampant for the most part. It's incredible how entrenched and normalized it is in peoples minds.