literally, nothing exclusionists do, and nothing you say to an exclusionist, will ever matter. nothing will ever get a response beyond “nuh uh!”
they’ll phrase it different ways every time: “aces are cishet. cishets are cishet. they just wanna be oppressed so bad. they’re literally not oppressed in any way. they don’t experience homophobia or transphobia. they benefit from homophobia and transphobia. they are lying. that never happened.
“you can’t use their tumblr posts as proof. you can’t use studies about them as proof. you can’t use every real-life org including them as proof. you can’t use our community’s own oral history as proof. you can’t use our community’s own written historical documents as proof.
“lmao i’m not a terf, i’m literally an nb lesbian. lmao i’m not quoting terf rhetoric, i’m literally an nb lesbian. lmao i’m not consistently attacking trans women inclusionists, i’m literally an nb lesbian. lmao our movement isn’t full of terfs, we literally called out a terf once. lmao how dare you show me a blocklist of hundreds of terf exclusionists to call out, I’m literally an nb lesbian.
“anyway the community literally started to combat homophobia and transphobia. anyway it’s always been lgbtpn. anyway it’s always been lgbt. anyway cishets aren’t lgbt.”
some of the things that canonically Don’t Even Matter and are clearly Fake News:
(Same study: A higher percentage of trans aces are harassed at work than of trans LGBQ people. A much higher percentage of trans aces have had to quit school because of harassment, than of trans LGBQ people. A higher percentage of trans aces have experienced family rejection, than of trans LGBQ people. A higher percentage of trans aces lack health insurance, than of trans LGBQ people.)
I had no idea about any of these facts. Have so far tried not to get involved but according to these stats it’s a lot more important than I thought
honestly, getting involved in Discourse is probably pointless. It seems like the only exclusionists left are people who are so invested in their beliefs that they can’t or won’t even look at other information; they just insist everything’s all lies, and make fun of it without reading.
But getting involved in supporting aces in whatever ways they need/want, or raising awareness among the rest of us? That’s always worth doing. 💖
i was talking to my bi ace genderqueer cousin about this and pulled up the post again and like….
i just want to highlight this part. This list is all from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which had a sample size of something like 15,000 people. Which is fucking huge for that type of study.
A higher percentage of trans aces are harassed at work than of trans LGBQ people.
A much higher percentage of trans aces have had to quit school because of harassment, than of trans LGBQ people.
A higher percentage of trans aces have experienced family rejection, than of trans LGBQ people.
A higher percentage of trans aces lack health insurance, than of trans LGBQ people.
None of this is because we are trans. If it were because we were trans, then the numbers would be similar to the numbers in the other groups. The difference between the groups is that we’re ace.
I need to point that out, because I’m pretty sure the knee-jerk exclusionist reaction to this would be “but they’re trans, so it is just because they’re trans.”
And it’s not a surprising difference. It parallels what happens when studies of things like suicide, poverty, et cetera, in gay+bi vs straight people, actually separate out the gay and bi people. It always turns out that the bi people have the highest rates of whatever is being studied.
This is just the same thing happening again. The groups that get the least attention have the worst outcomes, gosh gee I wonder how that could be… and then that makes it harder for us to advocate for ourselves, which continues the vicious cycle.
basically, a lot of exclusionists have seized upon Pride Month as a great time to double down on claiming that “aces aren’t oppressed in any way”
this list is my gift to everyone who sees those posts and has to be like, “I mean, we might not die or be kicked out or assaulted for being ace, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy” or “so we should take a backseat, but we deserve to be in the car”
print it out, crumple it into a ball, and throw it at an exclusionist today!
hey, i’m struggling to pay utility bills since my abusive flatmate, who played a part in me becoming the victim of an antisemitic hate crime at the hands of a cishet white goyishe woman, hasn’t paid her share in months (since june, she only paid her share of the bills once, covering for 2 previous months)
And most of the respondents there probably did not stand out in as many other ways. Can’t even figure out what exactly is setting these assholes off most of the time, but it really can be a problem.
(Popping into mind from another context: “cannot distinguish the racism from the homophobia from the sexism”. Throw in ableism to complicate things further.)
Anyway, probably not just imagining there is something not right there, or severely overreacting to minor stuff–along with almost half of people asked.
For me, it’s more likely to be that I am sick/in pain and low enough on spoons going out to begin with, and just do not have any to spare for dealing with totally unsolicited obnoxious behavior from randos. That has been a major deciding factor for just saying fuck it and staying home on so many occasions.
I still don’t feel like I can talk about that much, in case it gets interpreted as all “just” a mental health issue. Including being sick/in pain at all. (Not to dismiss what really are primarily anxiety-driven reasons. I’ve just had too many bad experiences in that direction when anxiety was really not the main problem.)
My partner does not seem big on that kind of approach, or I wouldn’t want to live with that. But, again, enough bad experiences–including with straight up victim blaming–that I would rather have most people think it’s just the physical disability stuff keeping me at home. It all gets frustrating.
A lot of abuse survivors who are like “this obviously abusive content is fine it doesn’t hurt me” have probably seen abuse normalized in their lives. I know I have. It doesn’t mean the content isn’t harmful.
“It helps me cope” that’s not a GOOD thing. I hate this site for saying everything is valid and refusing to look beyond that
not only that but when abuse survivors continue to consume and try to rationalize abuse by saying its fine, it only retraumatizes them and sets recovery far back. “coping” with abusive ships & content isnt real!
Fucking… @autismserenity@fandom-is-for-pleasure, either of you wanna tackle this? I… just can’t. I’m stressed and broken and don’t know where to begin, but I also can’t just let this stand.
I’m gonna go with: when people say that a story about an abusive relationship helps them cope, they mean it’s helpful to:
* see that other people know what it’s like
* see that other people know they exist
* see their terrible experiences reflected in a universe that’s really important to them – because it lets them feel like they could belong in that universe too, it’s not just for those other, valued, un-abused people
* see how characters they admire deal with that abusive situation.
(This covers a lot of things, but off the top of my head: maybe seeing them get sucked into a shitty abusive situation, not even realizing that’s what it is at first, is helpful because if this amazing protagonist can fall into that trap, then the viewer doesn’t have to shame themself for falling into it anymore. Or maybe the character eventually gets out of it, and it’s helpful to see how they escape and start to heal.)
* work through some of the shit it brings up for them
(I feel like a lot of people respond to that last point, or to all of them, with a contemptuous “you should work through that in THERAPY, that’s what it’s FOR, not by fucking around at home with fanfic or anime or whatever!” and like… Yeah, that can be really helpful, if you have a good therapist you can afford, and… these people are probably already doing that?
You don’t get to just have things come up and work through them in therapy, this shit is constant. You go to therapy or counseling to get help processing all the stuff that’s coming up in your everyday life. And having one person, who you’re paying to be supportive, tell you you’re not alone and shouldn’t shame yourself, is not nearly enough.)
A non-sexual, theoretically non-abusive example:
It’s true that this stuff CAN be retraumatizing. It’s also true that that experience can be cathartic.
And that being retraumatized by watching, or reading, something that you know isn’t real, is VERY different from being retraumatized by experiencing more violations in your own life.
Using that term in a way that implies those are the same thing feels very disrespectful of my experiences with abuse. Because no matter how horrible something I read or watch is, it’s not the same experience as having a person in my life who is violating my boundaries. YMMV.
Anyway: I used to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, back when it aired.
It killed Tara off RIGHT after a partner of mine killed himself.
That was extraordinarily retraumatizing. Especially since Willow and Tara had been very rare representation. And I’d really idealized their relationship and wanted them to get back together and do well by each other. Much like I’d idealized my own relationship, and wanted it to live up to my image of it.
I was watching that whole plot arc play out, week after week, while grieving, and raging against my partner and the show, and wishing both situations would magically somehow get fixed. Frequently, I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to keep watching the show.
But despite how hard it was, it was also helping me a LOT. For complex reasons, I couldn’t, at that point, tell most of my friends he was dead. Only one other person in my life knew, and he didn’t know how to respond or show up around it.
Having a similar tragedy playing out in fiction meant that my feelings were validated, by the reactions of other characters. It meant that my experience was, to some extent, validated, acknowledged, by what I was seeing on TV.
When nobody else in my life could grieve or rage for, or with, me, these characters could grieve and rage in parallel to me. I could see what support looked like, even if I couldn’t have it. When I felt like I wasn’t handling it well, I could say to myself, “At least I haven’t suddenly become evil and turned anybody inside-out.”
You could argue that that’s not the kind of content you’re talking about. That that plotline… what? Doesn’t normalize violence against women? Violence against lesbians? Gun violence?
That it’s okay because the villain meets with a terrible end? Even though Tara’s murder is something that does happen in our world, and Warren’s death is totally unrealistic and literally impossible here?
That it’s not an abusive relationship, just a single act of abuse? That you only mean people who watch or read or talk about abusive romantic relationships?
It’s just. If the arguments above make sense, then Harry Potter should be getting it for depicting an incredibly abusive, neglectful relationship, year after year, with the adults in power refusing to even acknowledge it. With the author, IMHO, treating what she’s describing very lightly, as if it’s just sort of inconvenient and rude of the Dursleys to make him live in silence in a closet.
That does get criticized, rightly. But according to this thread, people shouldn’t write or read anything like that, full stop. They’re doing something bad if they read those books over and over because they relate to Harry’s experiences of abuse. Or write more stories about that relationship. Or draw his uncle screaming at him and locking him up.
Or: Nobody should create or watch the US version of Queer As Folk because it depicts an emotionally abusive man in his thirties dating someone who, initially, is 17… even though the 17-year-old realizes, as he learns and grows, that he’s in an abusive relationship. And tries to set boundaries, and eventually leaves, and numerous characters tell the older dude that he’s being incredibly terrible, and that he should end the relationship.
The US version sucks (I haven’t watched the UK original) and there are a million terrible things about it IMHO. I can’t recommend watching this shit, on multiple different levels.
But I also have to recognize that there are people out there who idealized THAT relationship, and stood by it, insisting that it was healthy and fine – and that a lot of them, young and old, eventually figured out, through it, that their own relationships were toxic and they needed help.
And there are people who never got into those relationships, because they saw what this one was like.
And there are people who had no interest in anything like that, who saw people idealizing it and making fanart that idealized it, who reached out to support them instead of screaming at them for being terrible and wrong. And some of those people idealizing it were able to get out of bad situations earlier because they had a supportive community around them.
Idk, I’m pretty sure that the knee-jerk reaction will be to skip reading any of this, imagine what you think I said, and then be a dick about it, but it was worth writing for me anyway at least.
(Note: I called the Buffy situation “theoretically non-abusive” because, of course, we would learn later that Joss Whedon apparently killed Tara off because Amber Benson pissed him off by, basically, setting boundaries.
And also, accidentally killing one person by trying to kill another is legitimately an abusive act, albeit one that misfires. Not all abuse is sexual.)
I am also pretty mad at my uncle and some thoroughly ingrained scapegoating family dynamics after that mail earlier. One of the reasons I hadn’t gotten in touch with him for years before this came up, tbqh.
He’s trying to be nice, and I have never been the Designated Family Scapegoat myself. Just her kid. (I actually thought I might have inherited the role with her gone, especially as bad as I am at staying in touch. But, it’s not sounding that way.)
What got me today was that we were having an only tangentially related e-mail conversation, with him making an effort to get along because he was glad to hear from me. And that thinking is still so deeply ingrained that he had to get in a barely veiled victim-blaming dig at his dead sister anyway.
To make it even better–and more exasperating–a dig that directly echoed some horribly abusive shit my Mamaw said to my mother in front of me when I was 6 and my parents had just finally split. That scene was bad enough that I still remember it pretty much verbatim–and then my mom further got blamed for making her mother that upset 😡
My uncle probably doesn’t even know where he got that specific line of crap, other than Everybody Knows. Which honestly just makes it worse. There’s not a lot of room for reflection or insight, and I just get so tired. It’s not even directed at me, but jfc I do get tired.
Anyway, I know I’m not in the best emotional state, even without that. And I know I’m a little too prone to jumping into anger as a distraction from worrying about other matters. Anger is easier to deal with in some ways. (My uncle is also the same way, whether or not he’s as aware of what’s going on with it. I recognize the pattern too well. Yay, Family OCD Brain on trauma! 😵)
One reason I am just sitting on that message for a while, yeah. Not that I think hollering at him would do much good anyway. Definitely not when it comes to behavior like that.
Besides setting myself up as Unreasonable, of course. I know that pattern too. I’m more exasperated right now because I don’t think he is always even consciously aware that he’s baiting. As was just demonstrated again.
i mean, maybe this is my inner “survivor of child abuse” talking, but I am not going to tell abusive parents that they’re bad at bringing up their children without a bullet proof plan with regards to how I could protect my student from the emotional and physical backlash of that meeting.
Important thing to remember about intervening in abuse in general. Any actions taken by others to hold the abuser accountable WILL be taken out on the victim and not the person doing the confronting. Do not confront an abuser about their actions unless you know for absolute certain that you can protect their victim from the fallout.
I’ve just been thinking how glad I am to not be part of the culty feminist circles I was in back in the day (nota bene NOT ALL FEMINISM IS CULTY AND I KNOW THIS)
Not just because I don’t know if I would have felt okay making the Zamii posts I’ve made, but also because something dawned on me this morning:
We had things we would say, like, “don’t say patriarchy hurts men too, it’s a ‘derail’” and there was even a handy acronym, PHMT. I remember we said something similar about talking about women abusers, though I don’t remember that as vividly. I think it was WDIT, “women do it too,” and it was also “a derail.”
I think people were usually assuming men who trolled would say these things. The kind of MRA who is more interested in starting a fight than in actually discussing. And I do think these people exist. Whenever you’re in an extremist group you attract trolls and Argument People who just want to rile you up. I HAVE A COUNTEREXAMPLE AND I DON’T REALLY UNDERSTAND HOW TO USE IT BUT YOU YELL FUNNY WHEN I WAVE IT AT YOU WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!
But here’s the thing. Both times that I’ve been treated abusively, it’s been by other women.
And it dawned on me today, and I don’t think I’d ever even thought about it like this, that an environment where “WDIT” is “derailing” – talking about my experiences is against social norms. Semi-forbidden, because being frank would mean I just WDIT-ed. Bad move in The Discourse.
How invalidating was that?
How used to invalidation was I that I could be a part of an environment that said that, and *not even notice that that invalidation was already something hurtful to me?*
That an environment that did that was specifically not a good one for me to heal in?
Every time I’m in a feminist women’s safe space and I try to talk about abuse I’ve experienced; people tell me to shut up because I’ll encourage MRAs.
I’m still feminist but I really have to ask myself why, sometimes.
I’ve quite vocal about my criticism of specific feminists or writings from feminists, but here, like on the racism in Brownmiller’s book, I fear that it is not better outside, and that some of the best criticism of those failures comes from other feminists or progressives.
I have found that the best support on these issues comes from other people with disabilities, who may or may not identify as feminist but don’t use much if any critical theory in their analysis of these issues.
Which is not centered around criticising problems in feminism, because it’s not revolved around feminism; we’re coming from somewhere else.
I find the same thing, which is probably why I find a lot of groups oriented around various identities I have (woman, queer, bi, gender nonconforming/trans for certain values of trans, etc.) much less safe or relevant than I find the disability community and related activism.
Yup. Feminism doesn’t have space for women who’ve been abused by women; feminism is reliably pro-abuse as long as the abuser is female. And that’s the one-sentence version of why I’m not a feminist anymore.
I’m also not really sure if I believe in “derails” anymore. Because there’s things that seem pretty clearly like derails but are forbidden to call out, like, “Women ought to have access to abortion services” “Hey, some men get pregnant!” cannot be called a derail without being labeled a TERF.
But “We need to punish men who rape” may not be responded to with “Women rape too” without it being a derail.
It was very jarring to go from being (seemingly) a female victim of abuse to being a male victim of abuse. Especially when it was abuse from women.
Not only you are expected to shut up and stay quiet, but while a female victim is perceived as wounded and fragile, a male victim is perceived as even more dangerous and predatory, because so much of the male abuse narrative is about how “a lot of abusers have been abused in the past and that’s why they do it” (especially when it comes to rape). It’s like you’re a walking ticking bomb.
I am terrified of being potentially abusive in a way that I probably wouldn’t be if I was a woman. And that paranoia doesn’t come out of nowhere. I didn’t get the idea that as a male I was “inherently more dangerous” out of thin hair.
Not a derail to me 😛
Yeah, the differences in treatment of victims based on gender is really horrifying.
What you say has actually sparked me to have some interesting related ideas; that what we see as “abuse” and “victims” is often based on gender, race, class, status, that kind of thing. And part of the problem with this kind of prejudice is to see the ingroup as safer than it actually is. Women think that other women are “safe” more than they ought, Whites consider other Whites “safe” when they really shouldn’t.
Yep. I stayed with an emotionally abusive exgf longer than I should have because my community kept saying “lesbian relationships are wonderful – there aren’t power dynamics in them like there are in heterosexual ones.”
I reframed what was happening to me over and over, because the one thing it couldn’t be was a power dynamic.
When I was going through my whole gender identity thing I kind of thought a lot of the awful treatment I’d gotten pretty consistently from girls and women in my life was because they knew I wasn’t one of them, so they must have been reacting badly to me for their own safety.
And part of my gender identity crisis was caused by the idea of The Sisterhood. Because girls and women had pretty much always treated me like an outsider, I figured that I couldn’t really be a woman, because I didn’t fit in with girls at all. And because I didn’t have the “real woman” experiences of fearing all men. I generally felt safer around men.
The whole attitude about abuse and gender basically really fucked me up for a few years.
My college epiphany actually sprouted from feminism. When my last paper for the year essentially boiled down to “write about oppressed women in America”, I had simply refused to write the paper because I had just been informed we weren’t oppressed at all and then dropped out.
Up until then I had just sort of went through the motions of being a girl, which included feminism. Now I’m a dropout. I’m not necessarily content about it, but at least it’s better than being inculcated into something I simply didn’t believe in.
They had you write a paper about how women are oppressed in America? Wow, that’s not okay in the slightest. I’d refuse to write something that’s pretty much untrue as well if put in that situation.
I think it actually *is* true, but… assigning you a paper and not even allowing you to defend your actual views in it (unless the point of the paper is expressly “argue for a view you disagree with, as an exercise in critical thinking) sounds distinctly Not Great.
If you say ‘men doing x to women is not only bad, but it’s sexist and an example of how society itself is built to oppress women’, how is going ‘wait, but actually it doesn’t seem to be a gendered thing and women do x just as often or almost as often to men, how is it sexist?’ a derail?
the thing that made me go off feminism was finding out that things that i thought were almost exclusively perpetrated by men based on what feminists were telling me were actually super not. and that bringing it up got you shouted at. (even if it isn’t 50/50, if previously i had the impression that it was 1/99 and then it turned out it was actually 35/65 that’s still a big moment of finding out you’ve been mislead).
That particular example wouldn’t be, it’d just be an argument.
I’ve seen a lot of the sorts of derails described, where someone is talking about women on/in a website/forum/group focused on women only for someone to pop up and get angry that they weren’t also talking about men. I watched over the next few years as “talking about men is a derail” moved from those narrow situations where someone actually is derailing a focused discussion to basically any situation where feminism is the topic at hand. Pattern matching is a hell of a drug.
I never really got off feminism for a number of reasons, most of which comes down to a) I never really expected it to be perfect, and b) I’m still firmly convinced it’s done more good than harm, and in particular more good than anyone else at the table. I don’t even think it’s feasible to do more good than feminism at this point, since every viable successor to it liberally lifts tools, analyses, and modes of thought from feminism.
I think it depends what “feminism” is. If it’s “you’re either one of us or a misogynist, and we’ll inform you if you adequately perform ‘one of us’ at a later date,” then fuck it sideways.
If it’s “I actually believe that studies indicating that resumes labeled with female names do get rated lower than the same resumes labeled with male names, and that this is connected to a history of limiting women’s rights which we have made strides to dismantle but is not yet totally gone,” then I am a feminist.
The second thing is why I’m leery of MRAs. I would understand a men’s rights movement if we had clear evidence we’ve overshot and the men’s resumes are widespread getting binned, say, but I… never seem to see that. The closest thing I see are some claims about girls succeeding better in early academia.
Which may be a problem, and there may be things we should be doing about it that we’re not doing, but I don’t feel like I see nearly enough to prove we’ve identified the problem correctly AND weeded out confounders.
Men are not inherently violent, predatory, or dangerous. Any feminist project worthy of the name needs to acknowledge that this behavior is taught. The idea of men being biologically predisposed to being abusers or rapists is actively used against abuse and rape survivors / victims
(does the phrase “boys will be boys” ring a bell at all to you?) and will never, ever work in our favor.
Can we address the fact that people with good parents get super offended when you explain how awful yours were? Saying things like “your parents would do anything for you”, or “you’re lucky they gave you a roof. Be grateful”. Nope. No you are not going to guilt me into thinking abuse was okay just because they met the basic requirements for the care of a child.
It’s wonderful that your parents are great and would do anything for you. But that statistic does not apply to every parent, and it’s so invalidating and dangerous to imply that, so stop. Think, really deeply think about what I’m saying and why.
Totally agree that victim-shaming is disgusting and never okay!!!!
But just an important heads-up: people who get defensive, i.e. uncomfortable, in any way when you tell them about your abusive parents, are abused themselves without knowing it.
Someone who REALLY had good parents would have absolutely no reason to get angry at you for venting about your abuse. Why should they?
The only explanation for people saying things like this is that it makes them extremely uncomfortable, because it forces them to look at their own parents. Another person’s abuse always triggers an emotional flashback to your own abuse. For example, if someone complains how their parents got angry at them for crying, it would immediately make them think/feel of how they feel when they cry, i.e. what their parents taught them about crying through their reaction to them crying.
I know it’s a really unknown fact that most people suffer from emotional abuse, but it really is part of our culture. How people react to your trauma is a good way of telling how much they know about their own trauma (not saying that people who react compassionately to you aren’t traumatised – they either have experience in this (which might stem from their own abuse too!) and/or they already know about their own trauma. Only asking them directly will of course give you the truth.).
But yeah – people with good parents don’t say such things. It sounds like they are just repeating what their own abusive parents would say.
I think it kind of depends. As someone who is disabled I hit a lot of people that deny my BODY is harming me bacause they simply cannot deal with the idea that something like that could actually be out of their control and therefore is a threat to their moral system.
Victim blaming is a thing usually because people cannot accept that if they were in the same situation they would also be powerless. It’s outsourcing your emotional problems to the other person so you can just continue with the same beliefs.
It is absolutely good to keep in mind that it might be denial of trauma but sometimes people are legtimately being abusive dicks about it who are just prioritizing not having to question their world views over not hurting people.
A popular post I’ve seen on my dash a few times now, rewritten by me so as not to perpetuate abuse myths and technophobia:
If you want to meet in meatspace someone you met online, you can ask them to video chat to make sure they are who they say they are. If they’re unable or unwilling to video chat, you can ask them to voice chat and/or send selfies of them doing a highly specific, unusual thing, such as holding up three fingers.
Perhaps more important than the above is meeting in a public place, such as a public park or a coffee shop. Genuinely looking a certain way or being of a certain demographic doesn’t guarantee that a person isn’t out to harm you, but meeting in a public place gives you a chance to look at a person’s body language, etc. before putting yourself in a potentially vulnerable situation like being alone with them. It’s also often a good idea to bring along another person.
If the other person is offended by your taking safety measures, you should steer clear of them altogether. People who don’t think much of your small boundaries aren’t likely to respect your large boundaries.
As you know, we live in a horribly ageist society, and young people have more reason to be cautious than older people. But this advice is relevant to people of any age. Even people 30+ regularly take all of these precautions when meeting up with internet friends.
Some people on the internet are looking for people to harm, so please, only put yourself in situations you feel good about, and don’t hesitate to bail if you’re feeling uneasy. At the same time, remember that you’re far more likely to be abused or harmed by someone who has a close in-person relationship with you, particularly someone you depend on for something (e.g. housing) or someone you can’t get away from, such as a classmate if schooling is compulsory for you. Being alarmist about how “strangers from the internet might be rapists and serial killers!” feeds into abuse myths that cover for and excuse the far more common and dangerous typical abuse situations.
Lastly, I want to say that, particularly if you’re a young person, you might be getting a lot of these alarmist messages. People who don’t have a lot of experience with new technology are often afraid of it, and furthermore, we live in a culture that discourages young people from consensual friendships, and steers them toward the kind of abuse-prone relationships I described above. You might be feeling the urge to forgo safety measures in order to underscore the ridiculousness of this alarmism. That’s understandable, but I just want to say that these are just ordinary safety measures you can use to make you and others more comfortable and safe. They aren’t proof that online communication is less real than offline communication, or evidence for abuse myths. Hell, you probably take analogous measures when getting to know people in meatspace, without even thinking twice about it.
Trust your gut, seek out people who respect your boundaries, and stay safe.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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