I opened a deviantART account about three years ago. I read the rules, though, and decided that a lot of my art, with the biting, fingering, oral sex and such was too explicit for their standards.
Then I start going through the galleries, and holy shit. Women being shot. Women being decapitated. Women being run through with swords, chopped up with axes, and impaled on huge spikes. I try to keep an open mind about other people's kinks, just as I would like for them to keep an open mind about mine. But... holy shit.
And to say that I can't depict a woman performing cunnilingus on another woman, but I can show her cutting off the other woman's head — well, WTF?!
While it's partly a case of the old "I can watch as much blood and violence as I want as long as they don't take off their clothes" rule, it's also a case of too many perverts, not nearly enough staff to weed this shit out. As such, mods often swoop in on whatever they stumble on while they handle other stuff. So yeah, a guro fetishist with a gallery of horror can suddenly get banned... and a second guro fetishist who's been on the site longer with a bigger gallery remains untouched.
ReplyDeleteOn the plus side, you could easily put up some of your less graphic works and remain A-OK.
I had to look up 'guro'. Damn, I am old and out of touch and completely out of it.
ReplyDeleteI thought I was pushing the limits of acceptability, but now it looks like I could be selling this stuff to Disney.
I dunno. I have a hunch based on nothing that there's a bigger audience for tamer stuff. A lot of people like seeing nekkid ladies and men and don't want to be hit over the head by some harsh fetish.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was about 16 years old, I drew a 'battling amazons' picture that included numerous armored women shot full of arrows. My stepmother found it, and I ended up in a therapist's office for a one-shot visit a few weeks later.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't until a few months ago that it dawned on me that there was probably a direct connection between that picture and my trip to the therapist. Nothing was said about it at the time.
As an adult, if I found a picture like that among my teenaged son's belongings, I would be freaked out, too, especially if I had no catfight kink to help me identify with it. But I grew up to be a responsible adult, and not an abuser or brutalizer of women.
At the time, my concept of violence and brutality were totally informed by the trivialized mayhem of movies and television. People got shot, stabbed, etc., all the time, and there was nothing to it. To my adolescent mind, a woman lying dead with a chest full of arrows was only slightly kinkier than a US 7th Cavalry soldier lying dead with a chest full of arrows in a western movie.
I was shocked and frankly grossed out by art of decapitated women I found on deviantART. But if I were to play devil's advocate in this matter, I would point out that we see Medusa's severed head in classical art, as well as both versions of 'Clash of the Titans', and Xena meeting the same fate in the final episode of that TV series. Again, popular culture tends to glamorize and trivialize murder and mayhem.
As I got older, and had more life experience, I saw the effects of real world violence, and my attitude about sexualizing violence changed somewhat. There is nothing romantic or glamorous or sexy about real violence, to my mind. Real everyday violence is brutal, dreary and ugly.
There is nothing at this stage in my life that could get me to draw art of women killing each other or being killed by men, aliens or whatever.
Gotta agree with SLID. I don't want to feel like I need a shower after seeing some art. For most people a kiss or some sex is a better closer than murder.
ReplyDeleteIt saddens me to say, but that is becoming today's standards. (Saw. I rest my case!) I too have had severe bouts of nausea browsing the sick and twisted, downright perverted garbage that passes for art. To each his own, but that is a truly sad comment on the state of our society.
ReplyDeleteIt saddens me to say, but that is becoming today's standards. (Saw. I rest my case!) I too have had severe bouts of nausea browsing the sick and twisted, downright perverted garbage that passes for art. To each his own, but that is a truly sad comment on the state of our society.
ReplyDelete