Tumblr - is it really like this for young women?

[D0do]

Just read a most disturbing thread on Twitter about Tumblr. threadreaderapp.com/thread/1032397873793708032.html

I don't use Tumblr and have adult children, so have no clue about it. Are young teenagers really seeing violent porn as a matter of routine? It explains an awful lot if so. So grim.

What on earth can we do about this?

Unless they choose to seek out and follow porn blogs then no. However, tumblr does seem to harvest people with a very twisted view of reality and present this as the only way to be. Tumblr isn't a place for children.

So do modern parents monitor what their parents are doing online? When mine were in the early teens, we had one desktop PC between the whole family and my children spent very little time online, mostly using it for homework related stuff and occasionally gaming. It must be so much harder now with smartphones, tablets etc etc.

It's not my experience of Tumblr but like any social media site you create your own experience by who you follow. I would say that most of the girls who write the kind of slash fanfic described in that thread are straight - people identifying as LGBT are generally more respectful in their writing. There's actually a fair amount of discourse about the way that straight women in fandom fetishise gay men. There's also increasing amounts of femslash but it's smaller by dint of the fact that there's so much fewer shows that centre on multiple women than there are for men. If a popular show you like has four main characters and they're all men, it doesn't leave much room for writing m/f or f/f.

And yes, I monitor my teen's social media use. Less so as he gets older, but occasionally something comes up where he either needs guidance or it starts a conversation we needed to have. I wouldn't want him on Tumblr, but that's mostly because it's where I am - I don't think it's inherently more risky than Twitter which is his usual hangout.

There is a lot of very strange stuff on tumblr... I did a general google search about sex during pregnancy. It brought up a tumblr page that was full of photos of pregnant women, pregnancy porn, masturbation on to women's bumps. It was vile and I couldn't believe it just popped up like that. I think I typed in 'sex positions in pregnancy' - the page doesn't exist anymore. Not sure whether it was removed or the owner shut it down...

Before this I always thought tumblr was a fairly tame blogging site...