Web-14? Web-MA? NSFW? It's all very confusing

"right at the moment, this country's draconian and wholly superstitious laws in regards to child-friendly internet content are proving themselves to be incredibly and stiflingly inconvenient... ._."

A couple days ago, I posted that to my Neocities microblog. I'd said it originally in regards to a little PostIt sketch I did while a datahoarding operation was in progress and I wanted to post it on my hidden diary page, but didn't want to use the suggestive content tictac. My project lately has been preserving #The Cohost Global Feed (Horny), which is progressing quite nicely despite the fact I have to do it all manually in SingleFile. I figured I'd waste more time writing a userscript than it would take just to download everything by hand, one page at a time. But that's not relevant right now. I've been sitting here for the better part of 2 days, downloading this stuff, and realising more and more that cohost was, if nothing else, a platform where trans people could post horny pictures of themselves without needing to feel any kind of shame or like they were in danger of being censured, called out, doxxed, or swatted. Moreover, visual artists (usually transgender themselves) were able to publicly explore their own kinks, as well as everyone else's, and post any kind of furry art they wanted. Sure, the Horny Global Feed attracted the occasional cis dude looking to start a polycule, but in the large part, it was a place of trans pride. Apart from loads of visual art, there's also ASMR, roleplay voice-acting, text-only hornyposts like the ones I personally made, and stuff about queer sex-ed that the author felt was necessary to hide behind the "NSFW" label.

At its core, NSFW is an initialism for "not safe for work", which could have a spectrum of meanings, but the original intent was to mark what some commentators would call "pornographic" content without using a singular word that could be picked up and filtered out by nanny software. Of course, this didn't last long, and now "NSFW" is synonymous with "porn".

I guess, I got to the breaking point when I encountered a very detailed description of the changes that oestrogen makes to your brain from a trans woman who had been on it for 10 years. For want of a better term, here is a Queer Elder, offering her guidance by discussing her personal experiences, and it's locked behind the Porn wall. Teenage eggs need to hear this stuff! Especially eggs who aren't even aware they're eggs yet. Even I, personally, have done this, locking my own 1-year anniversary post behind a pink tictac on my very own website! I know it's basically on the honour system whether you obey the rules or not, but in the United States, putting explicit content of any kind on the internet as an adult where a person aged 17 and below can find it, and they do find it, is a federal crime. I'd estimate half the names on the sex offender registry are people who were caught talking about sex with a child who wasn't their own. I'm not talking about the archetypal grody cishet dude or lascivious middle-aged woman coming up to a kid on the playground and talking about "all the things [they're] gonna do to you when you're older" or whatever copaganda shite came to your mind just now—I'm talking about teachers, uncles, aunts, reference desk librarians, trusted adults who children seek out for information. These are the people the pearl-clutching old church lady passing by in the corridor calls the police on, spinning a wildly-embellished yarn that's only 2 steps shy of rape. Just enough to secure an arrest, not enough to be called to court as a witness.

The United States' federal laws about what constitutes "child-friendly content" is not only draconian, not only rooted in superstition, but often contradictory, often conflicting, and impossible to define in statute. "I can't define pornography, I just know it when I see it." Well, A) you're not trying hard enough, and B) it's your JOB to define it, Senator! The fact is, there is no obscenity, there is no pornography, there is only neo-evangelist superstition and rampant queerphobia. Homophobia, transphobia, you name it, you'll find it enshrined in the United States Code.

Let's reduce our scope for a moment, though. I've recently been made aware of a set of self-imposed content warning labels that Neocities and Nekoweb creators are employing on their homepages to define a certain age-range that their content would be suitable for. The ones I know about are Web-PG, Web-14, and Web-MA; somewhat like American V-Chip ratings on new-millennium TV broadcasts. While I appreciate these labels' raisons d'etre and I understand how people want to curate their online experiences independently of an all-knowing algorithm, I feel like this is just leading to further pigeonholing of the internet. What it's done is to create 4 clearly-defined categories that all new-web sites fall into: PG, 14, MA, and a mysterious "unrated" category, which is seen more or less as a wild west free-for-all. I've already had someone reach out to me with a concern about my website's content in relation to a strictly Web-PG category; I had to tell them, if you're helping your audience curate their online experiences, then definitely don't link to my site. I can't guarantee even marginal adherence to a PG label, especially since I don't censor my profanity very much (I give all types of fucks and shits on this site). I'm less profane here than in my day-to-day speech, but, talking of curating one's online experience, this is the place I curate my own.

And thus, I find myself in conflict with the current US federal government's understanding of "child-friendly content". Without going into how much of this so-called "child-friendly content" is actually chronic infantilisation of the internet at the behest of large corporate sponsors, I'll just say that my website's current form fits quite solidly within Web-MA. It's not got any nudity on it, or spicy fanfic, or whatever other porny type of thing one typically associates with that label; but if the spud fits, wear it. Am I going to affix that label to my homepage anywhere? No, because if I do that, I might as well close down the 15 Essential Games section, the Resources page, and delete half my blog, because the people who would benefit the most from that information would no longer be coming here to view it.