lupagreenwolf | (no subject)

I just had to ban a couple of people from the Green Wolf FB page for making a fuss about OMGFUR. Granted, they hadn’t gotten particularly rude or aggressive, but it was pretty clear they weren’t going to be changing their minds even after I tried a couple of times to explain a bit more about my work with dead critters. So instead of letting this turn into a big fight, I just deleted the comments and banned the people from the page.

Censorship? Sure. I believe in free speech in the public sphere, but in my private domain I have the right to employ the banhammer as I see fit. I want that to be a place for me to tell people who actually like my art and writing about what’s going on in my creative world. And, quite honestly, I don’t have the time to argue with those who are pretty set in their ways. It’s why I offer information that people can access at their own pace. I don’t like being pressured; why would anyone else?

I also don’t want my spaces to turn into anti-anti-fur-people spaces, and I don’t want my friends, acquaintances, fans, etc. dogpiling on someone with an unpopular opinion. There’s absolutely no constructive purpose to baiting these people. For one thing, it’s disrespectful to their right to an opinion; I don’t agree with them, but I do my best to try to at least understand where they’re coming from. It also doesn’t change anyone’s mind. So it’s a bunch of primarily useless chatter in the end. Don’t we all have better things to do than that?

And it just makes us all look like a bunch of assholes. If our response to someone disagreeing with us is to A) tell them how very wrong they are, and B) to sic our friends on them, then we’re no better than they are for coming into our spaces and lecturing at us. While I haven’t always managed to avoid getting sucked into arguments, it’s an ideal I work toward.

Like it or not, more people are becoming aware of dead-critter art, whether traditional taxidermy or not. While that means some of the people who check out our works will be those who are curious and even interested in giving it a try themselves, it also means that we will have our detractors. How we respond to all of these will form, to some extent, our public image. If we come across as snarly and aggressive to anyone who disagrees even the tiniest bit, then we potentially scare off genuinely curious people who are so afraid of offending us that they don’t dare to ask a question that could potentially be seen as a disagreement or attack. In doing so we lose a potential opportunity to educate.

And, let me reiterate: it makes us look like a bunch of assholes when we argue and dogpile and whatnot. The dead-critter community (such as it is) on deviantArt already has a reputation for drama whoring because a handful of very loud people keep dragging their personal conflicts into the public sphere, to include onto other sites like the Taxidermy.net forums. So we have an established problem with “get into a fight and call all your friends to help you beat up the opponent” within the community; do we really need to also add our detractors to that as well?

Come on. We can do better than that. We can be educators and professionals, keeping our cool and dealing with the facts instead of letting our emotions get the better of us. We can choose our battles instead of releasing the hounds any time anyone questions us. We can think about whether a particular person is going to be a receptive audience, or whether we’re better off just not engaging with them. Use the tools websites give us to ignore and ban people (except in the rare cases where someone is being seriously threatening, in which case DO NOT ENGAGE and DOCUMENT EVERYTHING).

Let’s present ourselves as professionals to the best of our ability. That’ll go further in improving our image to the wider world than arguing and dogpiling.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Censorship on the individual level is sometimes necessary. I - for example - need to remove people who are actively triggery from my journal. Or I may delete someone who simply wants to hate on my art in a public sphere (never happened, but speculatively it will).

My issues with censorship tends to occur when it happens of the community and media and large-scale political level. That's when it's dangerous. You are not stopping anyone from having free speech, you are protecting your individual space. Those people can post as much as they want about anti-fur, but spoiling your business and the comfort of your clients in the process is not something you should have to put up with.