A year ago this month, I wrote a blog post about the deviantART page that I created twelve years ago for posting my feminization art and how it had, a few months earlier, suddenly been threatened with termination unless I removed certain mature artwork from my gallery that contained characters who were underage. Although I can't begrudge the site for not wanting any adult content featuring persons under 18, I can't say I was happy, especially since they unhelpfully refused to clarify which drawings needed to be removed, causing me to exercise what was perhaps an overabundance of caution and purge a number of drawings that I think were quite tame. I wouldn't even call most of those pics erotica, though I may have muddied the issue somewhat by posting erotic artwork alongside non-erotic pics.
Even when I stick to only drawing adult characters, it's no guarantee that a lot of my femdom fantasies won't be deemed too problematic by sites like deviantART (and probably also Patreon), since they mostly involve a lack of consent to one degree or another. That includes feminization, where I'm mainly drawn to the "forced" variety. Besides feeling like it's easier to imagine someone being reluctantly dominated and also feminized if he's not yet an independent adult and not in a position to extricate himself from the situation, I will admit that, for whatever reason, I often also personally find that there's something more exciting about such scenarios when the protagonist isn't yet out of his teens. That said, I hope it's obvious that I don't condone fetishizing minors. I feel like I'm just expressing certain fantasies that I might have had myself when I was the age of those characters. If you see a feminized male in my art, whatever the age, that's just the character with whom the viewer is meant to identify.
Anyway, after I bent over backwards to make sure I was in compliance with deviantART's rules, I was totally blindsided shortly afterward when I was informed that the second part of my "Pinkness" series (stupid name, I know) had been removed because someone in charge supposedly thought that the guy in it was underage, despite that never having been my intention. I always saw him as being the age of a college student, i.e. late teens or early twenties.
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| I guess the blond guy sitting in the tub really pushed the limits of decency. /s |
To be fair, I can maybe understand why someone might be confused. The unnamed woman in that series treats the blond guy sort of as though he were a juvenile, plus he's considerably shorter than her, but it's absurd to think one can judge someone's age based on height. By that logic, in any sexual relationship between two people of differing heights, the taller person should be arrested for statutory rape. Sorry, Erin Darke! I tried to contest the piece's removal, but not too surprisingly, my complaint fell on deaf ears.
The reason I'm bringing all this back up now is because earlier this week, out of nowhere, I was shocked to receive a notification that yet another piece that had been in my gallery for over a decade with no problems, an illustration based on Chapter 8 of Swiss Miss Sissy, had also been removed after dA's "moderation team" came to the conclusion that "a character or characters" in it met "one or more criteria for being considered underage." This was even more ridiculously unfounded than the previous piece's removal. There's nothing about any of the characters in that pic that suggests that any of them are underage; I didn't draw them to be underage; everyone in the story upon which it's based are all over eighteen. The automated note they sent didn't even explain what the so-called criteria they use for deciding a character's age are or how they think my pieces meets even a single one of them, which makes me very suspicious. Are there really any criteria or is that simply something they made up? It honestly seems like some petty moderator arbitrarily based their decision on their own "gut feeling" or some crap like that.
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| If I hadn't added the dialogue from the story, they probably would have less cause to delete the piece, though the deletion was unwarranted anyway because everyone here is an adult. |
A couple people have suggested to me that this could be a case of transphobia rearing its head, which is possible. I mean, you don't have to be trans to be adversely affected by transphobia (e.g. cis women being harassed in public bathrooms by Karens). However, it feels presumptuous to claim myself to be a victim of transphobia, especially when, as I've occasionally talked about, I worry that artwork and stories about people being feminized against their will is not the kind of representation that the trans community necessarily appreciates (though I have gotten some positive feedback from trans people who have said that my art helped them when they were finding themselves, which is gratifying to hear). And it would be a mistake to say that "sissies" and trans women are the same thing (though I guess someone might start off as a sissy before realizing they're trans). On the other hand, it's not like some anti-LGBTQ+ bigot would make any distinction. With so much distressingly rampant anti-trans craziness in the world nowadays, it's not that difficult to believe that deviantART might have some small-minded assholes working there who are abusing their position to persecute anyone who posts content that doesn't conform to a totally heteronormative worldview. It's strange that some people seem to get away with posting blatantly pornographic material on that site while harmless feminization content gets targeted.
That thought made me all the more reluctant to try contacting customer support, which they don't make easy to do because they don't provide a direct link to the customer support page and when you find it, among the list of questions/topics to click on, of course, none of them are related to asking about why your upload was removed. At first, I just didn't think contacting them would do any good, like when this happened before, but now I'm also paranoid that complaining might invoke reprisals.
I dunno, looking at that piece again, did I draw Charles'/Cheryl's head a little too big and is that what gave someone the idea that that character is younger than they're meant to be? Even if that is the case, it feels like a very nebulous detail to seize upon in order to declare definitively that the character is not an adult. Some people don't look their ages and you're going to tell me that you can tell the age of an imaginary cartoon person who is made of a few brush strokes?
The whole thing still just feels very Kafkaesque to me. Even when I've done nothing to break the rules, some faceless rando secure in their anonymity can make up their mind that they know more about my work than me, punish me for something I didn't do, and there's nothing I can do about it. "We're not going to tell you exactly what we think you did to violate our terms of service, but don't do it again or you'll be in trouble."
I was actually trying to work on some new feminization artwork recently, but I don't know if I even feel comfortable posting it to deviantART. If any of it leaves any room for doubt about a character's age, that'll apparently be all the excuse some jerk moderator will need to torch my account. It's too bad there don't appear to be any better websites for sharing and viewing artwork, since deviantART seems to keep getting more and more inhospitable for artists. As someone said to me, deviantART would probably prefer it if I forgot about art entirely and instead devoted my time to cranking out A.I. garbage.
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