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MU Peeves Thread
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I think unfortunately rp around sexual or relationship themes and practices regardless of what they are will always be ripe for manipulation and abuse. I find either extreme (more kinky/prudish than thou) to be especially vulnerable to that and seeing lots of ooc public declarations about it on chan/chat/ooc in room will make me avoid either person because its a huge red flag for me and makes me uncomfortable.
I find the considerate people keep everything in the appropriate spaces/stay out of the labeled spaces they know that they don’t want to be in.
If someone isn’t capable of that discernment I don’t find them to be a player I will feel comfortable around. I don’t care what they’re into or not.
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My today MU peeve is the DO NOT ARX. It’s a MU. If someone mentions something outside the thread it usually lives in, it’s gonna be ok
fr fr
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@Snackness I’ll arx if I want to
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In my experience, abusers are going to be abusive regardless of what community, culture, or system they’re in. They will find ways to bend the rules and norms of that setting to their advantage, as well as to blame those they abuse for somehow being at fault for what was done to them. And this is true for any kind of abuse, although sexual abuse is the most egregious.
The key to minimizing this is making it clear from the outset that it’s not acceptable by the broader community as a whole, then enforcing this mandate regularly and consistently when it’s uncovered that oh, hey, surprise, this abusive person is a piece of shit. Officially, yes, but also unofficially, with a general aura of “You fuckers are not welcome here.” that is present from start to finish.
It’s not perfect, not by any means, but no system is and I think it’s the only way to balance the fact that everyone’s experiences, preferences, and desires are their own and that no one else really has the right to dictate that for others, save those who cannot possibly consent for whatever reason.
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the standard on mu* should just be “don’t do weird shit in public” but that will never be enough because social norms somehow go out the window in text and we have to parse everything to death
just don’t do weird shit to people you don’t know, pals
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boners rn
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@helvetica look what you’ve done
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Telling somebody to stop slut shaming isn’t prude shaming. “Vampire is a game with sexual themes baked in, so if you’re not comfortable with sexual themes, you probably shouldn’t play vampire because even the base sourcebook’s pictures will make you uncomfortable” is also not prude shaming.
People shouldn’t play things that make them uncomfortable, but they also shouldn’t try and keep other people from playing those things, as long as they’re doing so in places designated for them, and the existence of places designated for such things is not actually a slight against the prudish.
From my perspective, unwanted sexual attention/pressure on games gets people permabanned faster than anything else. It is a Problem and it is a problem that usually gets dealt with VERY swiftly by even the bad staffers (barring, you know, places like Haven). It is a huge no-no, and consent around this stuff is REALLY important. Yes, there are bad actors. There are bad actors everywhere.
That doesn’t make it ok to slut shame, or to imply that everyone who participates in kink culture is a fucking predator.
If you’re playing in environments where people are competing to show off their kink and flaming people for being prudes, get off Haven. I thought you quit. That shit still ain’t acceptable in polite society, and on normal games it isn’t.
If anyone is dealing with unwanted sexual pressure on a mush, go to staff. If staff do not squish it, leave the game. Now. If you need help or talking points or a pep-talk or anything at all like that, let me know. Let somebody you trust know. I can almost guarantee that no non sexmu* staffer worth their salt wants the kink olympics on their game in public with a side of prude shaming. Like, nobody. Nobody wants that anywhere except Haven or Shang. Even on Shang you’ll get lit on fire for harassment (or you used to; idk what enforcement there is like these days).
the entity previously known as Sunny
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@IoleRae Wait. Wait wait wait. Are we literally talking about sex games in these complaints? Bc that’s disingenuous af.
Understandable, have a nice day.
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Haven isn’t technically a sex game afaik, it’s just got the worst staff this side of the Mississippi that is grossly, abhorrently abusive. Kestrel keeps going back and then making a pikachu face when it turns out to be just as bad this time as it was last time. Idk if that’s the game they’re talking about right now, but since they said they were experiencing this on a mu*, that’s pretty much the only game I know of where the kink olympics shit goes down. shrughands. Oh, maybe City of Hope. Don’t play on City of Hope, gawd. It’s the Dark Metal of the 2010s and 2020s, except replace the cyberpunk with uncomfortable sex.
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So are we gonna pretend MUSHes haven’t seen a parade of race fetishists, 7’0 buff Daddy dom pregnancy fetishists with their tiny pixie subs, furries etc. over the years?
What I’m talking about happens everywhere, online and in real life.
I don’t endorse slut-shaming; I simply think it’s a virtually non-existent bogeyman under the stairs compared to the uncritical normalisation of kink culture in everyday life, and the shaming of anyone who ever has the audacity to criticise it or to simply not want to partake in it.
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All of this feels like such a weird conversation of extremes. And it feels very much like extremes born of personal hurt and a reaction to the shape that particular experience took for individuals.
For one thing, posts have gotten characterized as “pro-kink” that just read to me as people generally wanting consensual exploration of sexual RP to be okay, which to me is not really about being pro-kink or anti-kink.
Abuse on MU*s happens on both ends of this spectrum. When purity culture is more rampant, than victims end up controlled by threats of exposure for engaging in dirty behavior. When extremes of sex positive becomes the norm, then yes, abusers will instead use the idea of “acceptance” to abuse consent. As @Aria said, abusers will use whatever tools are available to them.
I find the idea that we are somehow in a post-slut-shaming society or whatever to be pretty questionable when I see it happen right in front of my face. But, like, I think the only game I’ve stepped foot on that had a high kink or fetish level was Shang, the literal sex game with a literal system to record kinks, and I’ve been in and out of the hobby for a couple decades. It’s not the case that it’s a universal MU* experience to see a parade of fetish on games; it very much has depended on where you’re playing.
ETA: also what did the furries even do
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FWIW I wasn’t talking about sex MUSHes and I’ve never experienced a game where kinks that are being described are happening publically and that wasn’t even my peeve. We’ve gone way off course now though so IDEK what the peeve is anymore lol
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@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:
ETA: also what did the furries even do
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So I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Based On My Personal Experience and That is a Giant Fucking Caveat with Many Asterisks*, both of what @Roz and @kestrel are saying is correct. It’s just been that my general experience has been that slut-shaming culture on MU*s is usually very much conducted in public and kink-shaming culture is usually very much conducted in private, either by the abuser directly or by the circle around them, with latter being something I most often encountered on WoD games.
Like other users in the thread have said that I’m too lazy to dig up, sexuality in general and some level of kink specifically is baked right into the theme of Vampire and has been since in launched in… 1992? 1993? It doesn’t have to be played, but it frequently is.
In regards to kink, and to BDSM specifically, I really do think that the power dynamics of such relationships make them easier to devolve into something that is abusive. They are, by their nature, higher risk. But they are by no means whatsoever inherently abusive and, like I said above, any community, any culture, any system, will have abusers in it that need to be recognized and removed as swiftly as possible. This requirement is doubly true for anything involving BDSM and is very much why the community has to go balls to the wall with consent, communication, negotiation, safe words, contracts. It can be very, very dangerous if you don’t, as we’ve seen in the news several times in the last three years alone.
And that is exactly why, on every game I have staffed on, STed on, or written for, my policy has always been “I absolutely do not care what kind of ‘weird’ sex stuff y’all are getting up to, as long as it’s consensual. And yes, that includes not roping in unwitting public participants into whatever you’re doing because that’s not consensual.” I am adamantly against coming out commenting on kinks in general, and even specific kinks I find weird and gross, because the most important thing to me is people being able to report something the moment they feel abused or unsafe. In public, in private, or yes, even on public channels, where the whole “not roping unwitting participants in to your sexy times” still applies.
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@Kestrel said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:
ETA: also what did the furries even do
I feel like we’re way fucking off course at this point.
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I feel like the peeves thread on a Mu* forum is probably not the best forum for detailed debates over ‘Kink: Good or Bad?’ It should probably be, for one thing, a discussion people are consenting to join and I’m mildly requesting that it …go somewhere else.
as previously stated, good day.
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Yeah, like at this point can it just be split off to somewhere else? Or stopped?
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@Kestrel I’ve been playing since like…1992, minus my recent time out since TR…and your minority/majority experience is reversed from mine. I’m one person, so I’m not discounting your experiences but I’m going to go out on a limb and think that my playlist isn’t the same as your playlist at the very least.
Slut shaming is a huge issue online and RL. People oversexualixing small things is a huge issue rn RL which is why I stated I give it a serious side eye in these discussions.
I’m going to be honest, considering the current way things are going RL, I personally am not going to give in to some perceived prude persecution complex.
Once is a coincidence, twice is a pattern. Fuck nuance, if something happens more than once that you don’t like and you don’t find another place to play, that’s on you.
It’s a solution I hate, but it’s legit been the only 100% working solution going as far back as I can remember. We should always work to improve any community, but there will always be disagreements over what is and isn’t acceptable behavior.
Unacceptable sexual situations has been in public discourse by sociologists since the early 1990’s due to the LambdaMoo incident and hasn’t really been considered ‘solved’ yet. . (See this account and this article)
