There is no etcetera

I am so going to regret posting, I can feel it in my bones.

There's this raging debate in vidder-dom about warnings on vids and Vividcon. And I probably should stick to my silence because although I'm a vidder and I have had vids play at VVC, I've never premiered there and I've never attended, and I've never attended any fan con, so I really don't know what I'm talking about.

But me and yhlee will probably take some lessons from this for the next round of festivids, and the outcome of all of this probably will inform how I post vids in the future, so...

I can't help but feel that some of the conversation on warnings is being obscured by the phrase "warnings for sexual assault, self-harm, etc." Which opens up to all kinds of issues about what to warn for, and will this create a stigma, and aren't all vids violent (answer: yes - tishaturk posted a while back asking for recs of vids that had no violence, and basically could find maybe one or two. Which is a whole interesting and different conversation).

We aren't a community of combat veterans. We aren't a community of alcholics or former drug users. I have no doubt that there are, in fact, combat veterans and alcoholics and former drug users in our community, but this community generally, and VVC in particular, is unified in that we are majority-women who like vids and like action and science fiction television and usually like to write and read porn about them.

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but my perception is that for this community, it's about sexual assault. And possibly self-harm. I have no doubt that people in the community have other specific triggers - I saw someone post about one in particular - but the common triggers here, the ones that (a) don't come up with such frequency that a warning would be functionally useless because it would touch 90% of the vids; and (b) are likely to be relatively common within this community, seem to be sexual assault, and possibly self-harm.

And I wonder if the positions would be far apart if we framed the question in these specific terms: Ticky boxes for sexual assault, and possibly graphic self-harm. That's all.

If I ruled the world and I controlled VVC, I'd probably have ticky boxes for sexual assault, graphic self-harm, and maybe something like "strobe lights or white flashes in a substantial portion of the vid and/or as a persistent visual theme" (in order to distinguish unusually migraine-triggery vids from the ones that have that shot of Buffy and Faith dancing in the Bronze that time).

And there would of course be a choose not to warn option (I don't think the con can fairly be characterized as currently all choose-not-to-warn; I've been submitting vids for a few years now and have never experienced myself as choosing not to warn - also, if you submit to a show, there is no box or space or anything to include even a summary of your vid, much less a warning). And there'd be a box where you could type in additional warnings as an option, so that vidders who wished to do so would be able to provide a more nuanced explanation of the contents of their vids. And the warnings text box would be a separate box from the "summary" box and it would be available for all uploaded vids. And the warnings would be available on a separate sheet of paper so that those who don't need them and don't want to be spoiled can avoid them.

So, we shouldn't leave this decision to the activist courts

or, apparently, to the elected representatives of the people:

Hawaii's governor vetoes same-sex civil unions

Hawaii's governor vetoed legislation Tuesday that would have permitted same-sex civil unions, ending weeks of speculation about what she would do with the contentious, emotionally charged issue.

She said voters, not politicians, should decide the fate of civil unions.

Of course she did.

I can't believe that we're at the point where...

...if I were to put a thermometer in my mouth, the temperature would go down.

Big Bang Rec

Dictionary for a Dead Language. Post-apocalyptic, Wincest, what happened after Sam said yes. Riveting.

(Oh, also? I am choosing to read so much more stuff on Dreamwidth rather than LJ these days just because of the expand-the-cut-tag feature. It's like a revelation.)