Meanwhile... DeviantArt is mad. Seriously. Someone suggested that maybe there's a group of people just going around reporting Deviations, & i'm inclined to agree, although it'd be nice if the artists were given a moment's notice, maybe to defend their work? Last i checked, we had freedom of fucking speech.

The most recent thing that happened was the deletion of yet another thing that was already under a mature content warning, & marked as sexual. (Question, DA: What's the point of that option if you delete everything with sexual content in?) It was a comic of Calvin & Hobbes, only in the future, with Calvin & Susie making out, & the idea was they were obviously going to do it, but even moreso was that Calvin had obviously lost touch with Hobbes. It was a little disturbing, but really very sad.

Long story short, it got deleted. Now, i understand the whole "minors" thing to an extent, to try & deter pedophiliac freaks, but they get off on a picture of a little girl fully clothed, so. But apparently, one cannot depict a fictional character who never comes of age in the original storyline, or who only does so in the last episode. Which is ridiculous.

Amd let's be honest: the people we consider "minors" are fucking. There it is, blunt & vulgar. Fourteen-year-olds are having sex; wake up. I'm not saying that's completely right or whatever, but far be it from me to police anyone else's life. The fact of the matter is that puberty hits & guess what! That means your body can become sexually active! Imagine that! And when does puberty typically hit? Hm, let's think...

Fine, it makes sense with the pedos. But on the whole, it doesn't make sense in reality. A pedo is going to get off on anything related to their thing, & you can't really police them. There are, apparently, people who get away with posting entirely unartistic photos on genitalia just for the hell of it. Oh, & people who do pictures with masturbation in them that DA doesn't take down, despite their rules. It's like they decide what to ignore or not. Fine, ok, they can't be everywhere; they don't know it exists unless you report that. I know that. My point is, the rash of recent deletions have largely been undeserved. They were tasteful, or not showing anything. The Calvin one-- it was all implied! He wasn't raping her; they were doing it willingly! They looked like high schoolers, & by then, you know, quite a few people have had sex. Older people may still consider someone a child until a certain point, but that doesn't change the fact that, really, by middle school, you're already thinking about certain things, whether you act on them or not. Come puberty, it's largely inevitable that you are going to start thinking about sex, unless you are asexual (& then you don't care).

So really, they're being extremely unrealistic about this whole thing. You can't police the freaks. You can't keep people from having sex. You have to realize that people aren't going to wait till they're "legal" to have sex. Welcome to reality.

And what if someone wants to use it as commentary, how they feel about things? Do they get reported & screwed over (HA) too? Sex & art kind of end up going together; maybe it's just post-Freud thinking, but they're very much intertwined. Not all those nude paintings were pirely artistic; men would buy them & show them to their male friends. Painted porn, essentially. Hence the feministic approach in art of challenging the male gaze. And then there's people who explore that sort of thing, or the nude, & they get screwed over (ie Scott G's senior show), because people can't distinguish, they get up in arms, they can't handle the fact that people do these things. Instead of going after the crude things, they go after the things that really aren't that bad at all.

And yes, i realize that it all comes down to individuals & differences are legion. I still think it's pathetic, childish, & infringes on freedom of speech. To quote Anonymous (they come up with good quotes, don't they :p): "Censorship offends me."

So i've been anxious about this, because am just waiting for someone to report it. And so i probably won't put up Toriko's drawing when i finally send it to her, because of the sexual overtones in that. (My god, it makes us RuFeg shippers seem like such pervs, doesn't it?) Nevermind that it's two consenting adults, it's implied, & you don't see a thing. I could probably put it under a mature content filter & it would still get deleted, & i'd have no opportunity to defend it. Because that's what's been happening. Who cares about the history of art; who cares about it being implied, &c. &c.? Can't take it, don't like it, must censor it, must get rid of it; bad, bad, bad. Pathetic.