When I see young survivors of abuse and sexual violence writing death threats to other young people for writing the ‘wrong’ sort of slash fiction and engaging in other sorts of online violence in the name of making everyone have only unproblematic sexual experiences, I don’t see a coping mechanism or a teenage phase that they will grow out of.

I see abuse survivors translating their trauma into ‘I’m hurting so I get to hurt people’ and ‘I feel pain so I am right’. Taking the first step towards becoming abusers themselves. I see a very dangerous process that could be deadly if it isn’t interrupted.

And I can’t brush off this
sex-is-bad-conservatism-dressed-up-as-caring-about-victims bullshit
as something that is just online, far from me. It may have its origins in American puritanism, but it can take root much closer to my home quite easily because our social justice cultures are very Americanized. 

Whatever is happening on Tumblr generally rears its ugly head in my local activist community about two years later. Because surprise surprise, the same
traumatized young people eager to lash out at others to feel better
about themselves exist in my community too and they have Tumblr
accounts.