Ever since FB announced the overhaul of sexual restrictions in their TOS, I log on every day wondering when the hammer will drop on me. Over time, I’ve been repeatedly punished for sexually-oriented content, sometimes getting suspended for a day or a week, sometimes for 30 days. Now I’m wondering if I’ll get a slightly different note — one saying I’ve been permanently banned. After all, I maintain a lively business page and an equally busy timeline. My content is tailored specifically to an audience of consenting adults. That means sex history, sex news, sex education, sex tips, sex jokes, and sexual health stories — in other words, everything that FB could, under its new rules, ban. As it stands, the new TOS gives FB the right to ban anything sexy at whim and without explanation.
In “Can Sex Culture Survive?” author and educator Race Bannon tells the story of one man’s censorship on FB and wonders how people like us will survive such sex purges. Race takes a long, sobering view of the challenges that confront LGBTQ, BDSM and other marginalized sex communities in the face of this historic social media censorship. He granted me permission to lift a chunk of it to include here:
Close on the heels of Tumblr’s announcement, Facebook appears to be following through on much tighter restrictions on sexual content. There have been reports of users having their posts removed for even mentioning sex. While interpretations vary, the revised standards seem to seek to squelch any mention of sex, even when such mentions are inherently benign.
These two high-profile events should serve as notice to any of us who navigate within LGBTQ, leather, kink, or any other culture in which sex is readily discussed that if it comes down to a company’s profit or our sex lives, they will toss our sexualities onto a dung pile of repression in order to maintain their bottom line. This is a wake-up call.
In an era during which our physical gathering spaces are shrinking we have turned to online mechanisms to connect, organize and discuss our sexualities. We’ve tended to utilize the few big social media platforms, especially Facebook, to foster our leather and kink communities, promote events, and discuss topics of concern and interest. All that is now at serious risk.
How the TOS have changed. I was recently reprimanded by FB for something I posted 5 years ago where light traces of (male) pubic hair were visible above loose shorts. No nipples, no bulges, no “nude is beautiful” attitudes, and now penalties for pubes. OK. Their platform, my pics, their rules. The glory days on FB when people could run explicit erotic art or sparsely-clothed porn gods and goddesses without penalty are done and unlikely ever to return.
Still, I can’t talk about vaginal health without talking about vaginas, or discuss male sexual performance without mentioning penis, I can’t recommend masturbation and orgasms without saying those words, and I would not even be me if I didn’t write about BDSM/Fetish, which are now on FB’s list of taboo topics. So I have no idea if they will let me continue or will blot me out. Only their algorithms know what comes next.
Beyond the social, on a personal level, censorship of speech about sex is like a knife in the heart. It’s infuriating, unjust, and demoralizing. I’ve seen artists and writers who dropped taboo subjects or stopped working because the censorship struggle was too depressing and impoverishing. I’ve known more, though, who have persevered and refused to be silenced by small and frightened minds. They are my heroes.
Ironically, getting censored makes one part of a notorious elite of writers and activists, thinkers and teachers, who have been punished for our embrace of sex and gender diversity, our commitment to social progress through humanism, and our sex-positive view of life. It includes ancients such as Ovid and Chaucer, 20th literary giants like Flaubert and James Joyce, my old friend, Allen Ginsberg, who taught me a lot about the pain and frustration of censorship (lessons which sustained me as a BDSM writer who’s dealt with frequent censorship herself), and contemporary women writers you may not even know about.
Wear your sex-censorship with revolutionary pride. The world may be too ignorant to understand the vital role you play in moving humankind forward or to grasp that you are necessary to human progress. But me and all your fans and followers love you.
You can survive censorship on social media.
Don’t despair: prepare. Here are 3 quick tips to do NOW to prep in case that terrible day comes.
1. Have at least 1 other social media platform where you feel your life story is safe from deletion. An informal poll of my kinky FB friends showed that the majority have their networks in place on FetLife. Others are migrating to MeWe. Alternately, consider opening a website or reviving an abandoned blog to use as your personal message board to the world and serve as your true “permanent” home on-line.
2. Make sure the people you seriously like know how to find you, either by email, chat, or a web presence. When you spent months or years building your network, losing them all overnight is traumatic. Worse, if you have hundreds or even thousands of friends/followers, many of them may not even realize you were banned and think you’re just too busy to update. Pick a couple of friends who agree to update mutual friends on your status and agree to do the same for them. It’s on you to rebuild your network, and a small team of friends covering your back and updating your mutual friends will help.
3. Download a list of all your friends on FaceBook. This will come in very handy if you open another Facebook account and want to invite everyone to connect with you again. Here is a very handy video that explains how.
You’ll always find me here. It’s the one place where I know I won’t get censored. 🙂
