Content, Clarity, and Consent

[Raeth]

I want to expand on what Talon said by pointing out that while issues surrounding Ageplay may have been some contributing factors that created momentum for our discussion, the rules that we’ve settled on are intended to be self-sufficient in terms of the value they bring. Were Ageplay to suddenly, magically not exist, the only change to these rules should be that 2. would become nonsensical.

We did discuss arising legal issues, as well as the concerns and emotions they bring. This is because the legal landscape and the public zeitgeist have seen significant shifts, in countries and communities which represent much of the userbase of Wolfery (and its staff) even just since Wolfery was created. The rules that resulted from this prompt—and others—are not part of a strategy to so solve this, but rather are a product of a complex environment, and an example of our commitment to the core values of Wolfery. If we can ameliorate some of those concerns while improving Wolfery, why would we not? Let’s also remember that every user has always been responsible for understanding and upholding their regional laws and regulations. I know that’s difficult, but let’s try to ensure that our contributions here are not driven primarily by an emotional response to something that is often complex and painful. Instead, let’s stand side by side and look at the problem this may represent together, and search for solutions not in spite of each other, but in support of each other.

By all means, express yourself. It’s okay to say this makes you feel uncomfortable, or you don’t like it. It may be important to understand your frame of reference for your opinion. But let’s be sure that it’s a component of analyzing these rules, and not purely a reaction to the ideas and feelings they surface. No kink should be under attack or defense here. These rules do not attack or defend any kink. They represent a betterment of our communal guidelines in handling topics which are not always inherently safe, as adults, together in a shared space. That they may bring additional tangential benefits is a combination of serendipity and design. That they should exclude tangential harm or unfairness is ideal and a conscious labor.

[Chocobocobobocobo]

Help my posts are being hidden because why???

[Moderation note: User has been messaged regarding adjustments which can be made to unhide the posts in question]

[User note: Nuhuh my messages would remove my signature chocoboco-flare if I changed em]

[FoxLancaster-Okami]

I’d like to address a few of the things in the meta here that I’m seeing as a through lines in the discussion, some of which are, I think, taking the discussion off the direct track, or otherwise need tending.

1. First and foremost, with regard to those who have trauma as a result of CSA, know that not only are we aware of, and closely considering your position, but also that the moderation team, and I am speaking personally here, have exceedingly deep wells of empathy. We understand very directly both those who are harmed by ageplay roleplay, and those who use it as a means of healing. We entirely endorse the reality and validity of both. Sadly, this factor is ultimately lost in the wash because: A, those two groups are, by our estimations, roughly equally sized; and B, the logistical, pragmatic side of the implications are shaped intensely strongly by externalities.

2. ‘This is not a compromise’. This is tremendously common response in all forms of negotiation to a compromise. Most people, entirely subconsciously, weight the values and costs of any policy on their own perspective, even when consciously attempting to consider the other side. It is a feature of human psychology that takes years of training or, and I’m not being glib here, brain damage to overcome. The root of the problem is not in ‘weighing the other side’, it’s in ‘accurately seeing where the other side is’. And on that front is why deliberative consensus, such as we seek in moderation, is effective. Talons is not being placative when saying that we “represent a spectrum of opinions on ageplay content that is about as broad as what is on display in this thread”. This policy is a very carefully crafted combination of concessions either way, balancing permissiveness with tactful avoidance which leaves neither extreme party fully satisfied, yet in our debates sufficiently comfortable to accept it. That is a compromise.

3. The moral standing of Ageplay. We are not here to debate the morality of any kind of ageplay, the epistemic standing of fantasy fictional characters, or the value of extreme roleplay in terms of sexual gratification, emotional regulation, or personal comprehension. Dan Olsen, in his video “A Lukewarm Defence of Fifty Shades Part 2” presents a very open, sex-positive analysis of the ways in which the presentation of fiction can have real-world psychological and sociological impacts outside of fiction. Augmenting that perspective, in Knowing Better’s video “The Social Currency | Gossip”, he discusses the ways in which the human brain is structured to perceive stories (whether real or fictional) as information we use to comprehend the world. Combined, they paint a picture of the way that fictional experiences can influence our understanding. This is apparent to anyone whose life has been shaped by a potent work of fictional literature. This can be positive (a book encouraging someone to change their life for the better) or negative (a powerful film causing nightmares and trauma). The issue at hand is not the inherent morality of the topic, it is that the issue is potent, and therefor must be balanced and regulated. We are not making policy choices on basis of abstract philosophical ethics, but rather the unassailable notion that the existence of the fiction has demonstrable social, psychological, and legal impacts on the world outside the fiction (effects which are acknowledged to contain both positive and negative factors).

4. The moral standing of ageplayers. We are absolutely not here to impose a moral standing on people who do, or do not, engage in any type of roleplay. We are not here to draw a moral equivalence between any form of roleplay, extreme or not, and real world actions. We are not here to debate the psychology of fetish actualization, nor whether, in the abstract, fictional constructs are representatively equivalent to abuse material, regardless of the well those stories are drawn from. That determination is out of scope for this discussion. We are here to address the pragmatic effects of behaviors that happen, regardless of any individual’s stance on that question.

5. That said, the uniqueness of ageplay as a topic. There are two primary angles that do make ageplay a unique slot among fetish topics. From one angle, the fact that ageplay itself is directly a topic which, when parlayed into the real world, has pervasive and aggressive negative effects on an enormous number of people. Many of the other extreme fetishes are, theoretically, capable of implementation, without a doubt. However, the scale and proportion of impact is dramatically reduced along the spectrum of realism. Rape is, sadly, a parallel with similar reflections across the fiction/reality divide. Again, Dan Olsen’s video does an excellent job iluminating the impact of these parallels. What makes Ageplay substantively different in practice is the implications for the internet community. There is a veil of legitimate, safe ageplay activity between consenting adults with perfectly moral motivations, and there is an undercurrent of invalid, morally reprehensible activity beyond that veil which piggybacks on the convenient signal of that legitimate activity. And the latter must be addressed. Because of governmental and social mis-management vastly out of all our collective hands’ control in the physical world, a particular malignancy has developed bedhind the topic of ageplay, and the fact that it is caused by external mismanagement and pressures does not mean that we are free of the obligation to address it.

TLDR;

1. CSA survivors- we hear and see you, and the sad thing is that this issue splits your group right down the middle.
2. This is a compromise drawn from our team’s equally wide range of outlooks on the issue. No one on the mod team is entirely happy with it
3. Debating the moral standing of ageplay as an activity is out of scope. There are measurable pragmatic impacts on people we are examining instead
4. Debating the moral standing of people is out of scope, and drawing moral equivalences between fiction and reality distracts from the practical implications we are addressing
5. Ageplay is a unique topic. It can be made platonically equivalent to other fetishes, but that falls apart when we consider the real world, and that is what we are here to do

[Alexander_Riven]

Yep, you’ve made the point here perfectly. What to one CSA survivor might be a form of reclamation and wresting a degree of control over their own trauma, to another might be the trigger for horrible flashbacks. It’s a very individually dependent sort of thing, so providing a mechanism to keep one person’s medicine from becoming another’s poison is important.

[Yule]

[post redacted by user’s request]

[FoxLancaster-Okami]

I don’t know if this will be satisfying, because the moderation team doesn’t have a unified front regarding the issues themselves. Members of the team range from the laissez-faire approach, through a total ban, and with, frankly, more motivating principles than there are team members, and combinations of opinion on the topic and opinion on the policy which would likely surprise folks. The core principle we all do agree on, and base our decision on, is that a compromising, debate- and negotiation-driven style of management will lead to a better community that can be influenced by all the conflicting principles and interests held by the members thereof.

The less-than-comfortable inference is that what we condone and protect is the existence of a community in which all these influences and outlooks have a seat at the table.

And I assure everyone at this table that refraining from taking an abstractly principled position is not easier, and this direction is not taken with ease, comfort, or simplicity as driving considerations.

[Yule]

[post redacted by user’s request]

[Fain-rar]

@Yule

The thesis of your argument is that ageplay is intrinsically at higher risk of causing harm to children. Rala has already provided her perspective on the idea that real life children are more likely to roleplay as children in an erotic context like Wolfery. I can speak to my own lived experiences and to the experiences of some of the people I cherish who inappropriately engaged with erotic roleplay when they were too young; none of us were roleplaying as children. We all masqueraded as adults, and it took us growing older to realize the wrongness in this choice.

I am sorry this happened to you, and I really do empathize, but this proves my point. If there is a policy in place on an adult roleplaying website like Wolfery that may even make it a little bit easier for something like that to happen, then it needs to be addressed and per the mod team, it seems like it will be, which is a good thing.

@Yule

I think this is reasonable, but I also think it exaggerates the scale of that risk.

In my opinion, again if something can be done in terms of rules to reduce the risk, it should be done.

@Yule

I would also like to challenge the idea that ageplay is about a sexual attraction to minors. This is a misunderstanding of what ageplay is to all of the people.

@Yule

If the presence of such roleplay is intrinsically uncomfortable for you, then I think it is reasonable for you to express your disconsent — as many of your friends and my friends, too, have done — by going somewhere else that better fits your values. I do not want to put words in the moderation team’s mouth, especially given the diversity of thought Talonstrike has described, but current policy and the policy proposed here shows no evidence of an official position forbidding ageplay.

I never said all ageplay is about sexual attraction to minors. I was very clear that I was talking about NSFW ageplay. I really do understand the part about exploring past trauma, I’ve done that before, but that’s only something I needed to do once. I guess I just don’t get why someone who is not sexually attracted to children would want to go there mentally more then once? Again, I’m sorry, that just doesn’t make sense to me.

I would also like to point out that the primary purpose of Wolfery is not to be a substitute for a therapist. I don’t mean that to sound harsh, and I know not everyone has access to a therapist, but if CSA survivors feel like they need a safe environment to meet and explore these themes as well as their past trauma, then I think that should exist. However, I’m sorry, I don’t think that’s Wolfery. I think if anything, it should be its own realm.

I can only speak for myself here, and It’s certainly not for me to say who should go or who should consider leaving, but for me, I come to Wolfery to explore adult themes. I love story RP, but if it turns into ERP eventually, all the better. To me Wolfery is a place to explore said themes and tell compelling stories. Seeing NSFW child characters at all, ruins that for me.
When I see sexualized child characters running around, in the awake list or otherwise soliciting NSFW ageplay, it kills my enjoyment and takes me out of the world and I am far from the only person on the platform or in this thread who feels this way.

Would better filtering tools help? Yes, but that doesn’t solve the legal implications. But really, I think the question comes down to is Wolfery a place for NSFW ageplay or not? I don’t think it is, and I don’t think it should be.

@Yule

I appreciate that you are engaging with this topic empathetically, even though this is a topic that deeply troubles you

@Yule

The thesis of your argument is that ageplay is intrinsically at higher risk of causing harm to children.

@Yule

If the presence of such roleplay is intrinsically uncomfortable for you, then I think it is reasonable for you to express your disconsent

@Yule

by going somewhere else that better fits your values.

@Yule

You have also made a very specific claim that I think you yourself can see the fallacy in, if we just shift the perspective here a little.

What fallacy would that be? You’ve put a lot of patronizing language in your post as well as telling me what I think. While I appreciate your lived experience, intentional or not, I did feel a need to call it out.

[Yule]

[post redacted by user’s request]

[FoxLancaster-Okami]

There is a very fine line between permitting different voices to be heard, and suppressing abusive rhetoric. With a topic as contentious as this one, people tend to have extreme feelings, and also to perceive their own extremity of opinion as natural and median. Further complicating it, there are cases in which people do legitimately hold views which cast others in a negative light by implication, and a listener may be hurt by the implications, though the position of their opposite is not constructed as an attack.

Abusive discourse is, on face value, not allowed on Wolfery- it runs contrary to most of our core, behavioral rules. We do indeed police this sort of attack frequently and aggressively. We also, however, do not mandate on legislating people’s outlooks. Our policy is and has always been, de facto, that if two parties have an irreconcilable difference (an eventuality we see as inevitable in a diverse community), it is the responsibility of both parties to put effort into avoiding one another. It is our responsibility to mediate that peaceable separation, and provide tools to make doing so smooth. This policy is one such tool.

Ultimately, our position on the matter is that it is neither appropriate to condone, nor condemn, from a moral level. It is appropriate to create policies which support a framework of acceptable interaction. In essence, we want to resolve the issue of a community facing demands to justify its existence by creating a means through which the people asking are not delivering the demand, and the people being demanded are not hearing it.

Taking a broad and polarizing stance would be a solution, but it would be a solution that mandates us making a sweeping declaration about the morality, psychology, and sociology of the topic, and that is not our mandate as shepherds of the community. Compatibilism is not welcome from either side, because each side views a compatibility solution as condoning, favoring, or supporting the other at the expense of one’s own group.

What we are attempting is the construction of a framework for a live-and-let-live option. Hearing the rhetoric harms one side, seeing the manifestation harms the other, so our approach is to provide an environment in which these interactions between belligerent members of either community are demonstrably and unassailably deliberate, and thereby both actionable and undeniably violations. It is, fundamentally, a tool to make enforcement of the removal of elements which cause those rules violations more direct, effective, and active.

[Yule]

[post redacted by user’s request]

[FoxLancaster-Okami]

With regards to this post, I do want to make a few statements:

1. Whether CSA survivors need, want, or benefit from ongoing interactions of this sort is not your place to litigate. And ‘I don’t understand it’ does not constitute proof of a logical conclusion. I would ask you to be open to the possibility that even though it is an alien drive, it is not epistemologically impossible on basis of your experience.

2. Vis-a-vis therapy, I agree that a therapist is of incomparable value, but seeing a therapist is not a comprehensive way to come back to life after trauma, and therapists are, for many reasons, not able to engage in all behaviors that would benefit their client.

3. Risk reduction is tricky. Every risk eliminated costs potentials. We have to balance those carefully. Absolute risk reduction leads to absurd positions, and cannot be sustained.

[FoxLancaster-Okami]

‘Being left alone’ is itself a mandate on behavior. For the people who feel strongly about it, it is asking them to tacitly condone, by not speaking up, a behavior they find reprehensible. Asking someone to suppress their moral conscience is a substantial point of compromise.

[Fain-rar]

1. You’re right, I should have qualified that better instead of putting the “I can only speak for myself” in the next paragraph.

2. Also fair, and I understand why that may not be an option for any number of reasons.

3. Agreed.

[Chocobocobobocobo]

“‘Being left alone’ is itself a mandate on behavior”

[Yule]

[post redacted by user’s request]

[Alexander_Riven]

I’m not averse to responding in a humorous manner but I at least attempt to stay on topic and contribute to the conversation when doing so. I’m not saying this as a moderator (which I am not), just as an annoyed participant.

[GreenReaper]

@Raeth

I’m really excited to see if users will have awesome ideas that we might not have come up with.

Make different areas Realms instead, but make it possible for someone to move to another Realm via an exit (and ideally, direct/registered teleport). That way everything is separate, profiles will auto-switch because they’ll be different in the standalone Realm - and characters who do stay in Lamplight almost entirely won’t be viewable on About in Sinder.

In fact, I’d argue that Sinder should be the “safe space” Realm rather than splitting off Lamplight, Umber, etc to start with, since this seems to be in large part about what people mostly hanging out in the park want to see. But whatever works.

@Kookierhondje

And it’s a bunch of work to develop a feature, that literally already exists as a browser addon. Just come up with what words upset you and block elements with them in it.

I’ve got to say, even I don’t think the browser addon idea is realistic (remember that many are on e.g. Chrome Mobile or the equivalent embedded option which won’t allow such things AFAIK). I do think such a blocklist is a reasonable technical request, for the web app.

@Alexander_Riven

Ideally, the solution we end up with makes it impossible to run across that kind of content without seeking it out, which, let me stress, would benefit you. You would lose literally all the heat on you.

There will always be more heat because people find ways to trip over stuff they don’t like, or just argue against it from a moral/legalistic perspective.

Part of this is due to the way core technical features have been designed, i.e. the global Awake list, highlighted as an issue last time we had one of these threads and which will become more unsustainable as Wolfery grows.

If we’re going to tell people “this is maybe not the right place for you”, it has to be open to the possibility that those asking for others to be censored are those who leave. I’d say “do we want Wolfery to be more like Tapestries or FurryMUCK, from an acceptance standpoint, bearing in mind the relative popularity of both?”, but as I’ve said above, it could be both and more, separate-but-linked Realms could be a great solution.

@ZoeThePup

You get spawned in Sinder, it’s a bit tricky figuring out the trains first, and then you’re gonna get punished for asking a question in the square?

This is a great point. As before, separate Realms that you start in, can easily travel to others but have to set up your profile there with a popup of the realm rules might be a solution. A one-time per-Realm onboarding.

@Reno

Chat channels. I love channels, personally. They let people socialize without having to be in the same room. You can pick which channels you’re listening to, so they can be realm or topic-focused.

As an aside, I get the impression that a lot of the motivation for this topic is coming from players arriving from, say, F-chat, where there’s a clearer delineation of topics/interests, and are not prepared for a world where a lot of people are into things you’re not. For some it’s great, for others it’s not.

@Vernon_Otter

I see far too many people here getting hysterical and deciding to try and bash their way free of any and all limits on their freedom to do something that a VERY VERY VERY LARGE portion of the prospective userbase doesn’t want to exist at all.

Is Wolfery for this theoretical, allegedly large but apparently unmeasured prospective userbase, or the community which uses and enjoys it now?

This argument reminds me of the time Furry Network (remember that one?) banned cub because some popular artist came in off of FA and declared that it had to go, dragging all their Twitter followers into the resulting poll. The kicker: they never actually uploaded.

But again, it’s a false dichotomy - we just need to open up to the idea of separate Realms that are still furry, and try to deal with a looser form of linking, of the level you get from whereare elsewhere. For now, switching profile based on the area may suffice, but this is crying out for a technical feature to establish and auto-switch it, rather than rely on people having to do it themselves. Policy isn’t enough by itself because people coming from spaces that are more permissive (i.e. F-list profiles) will just copy those on without a clear prompt.

[Alexander_Riven]

It won’t be all heat off of them, of course, but when things are opt-in enough that you’d have to be looking to even be aware of the content, such people will be the minority - and people who are constantly looking for things that make them mad are usually so unpleasant that they don’t last long in most spaces with decent moderation anyways.

[Vernon_Otter]

@GreenReaper

Is Wolfery for this theoretical, allegedly large but apparently unmeasured prospective userbase, or the community which uses and enjoys it now?

Given the extensive number of ‘I have had so many friends leave here because there was ageplay’ type posts as well as numerous reports of folks leaving for that reason that are NOT documented in the forum, I include those individuals in said prospective userbase because they WERE or would WANT to use the service, but do not feel comfortable doing so.