No way of knowing if FB will restore my account. Probably not. I just wrote an email directly to Mike Zuckerberg at his FB account asking him about the future of censorship on FaceBook.
I've been banned dozens of times in my career as sex writer and sadomasochist. I've experienced bizarre explosions of prejudice, have had people play some nasty tricks on me over the lifestyle, and been censored or banned on almost all the services that went corporate. The more corporate, the less likely they will tolerate my opinions, my shameless admiration for erotica, my candor about all things sexual.
On Compuserve in the late 1980s, my support group's data library kept getting spontaneously "purged" by corporate. They didn't like our BDSM stories (this was before you could upload images!) In fact, they didn't like us. HQ routinely complained to my boss (who fought loyally for us) about "that pervert, Gloria Brame." My website, gloriabrame.com, was greeted with hostility by all the corporate ISPs back in the 90s when I founded it, and when the small one which finally agreed to host us was bought up by a big corporation, I was promptly kicked off.
Dozens of editors have rejected my work (and in one case, fired me) because of my outspoken positions on liberalizing sexuality in America. DOMINA was rejected by several vanity presses (!!) in the day because it was too hardcore; a literary novel I'd written which had some mild SM content was accepted, then rejected by a "hip little press" because, as the editor explained, "I asked myself last night, if I die tomorrow and this was the last book I published, do I want that book to have sadomasochism in it? And the answer was no."
Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Laureate poet and my teacher one semester, once told me to tear up a poem I'd written: its sexual themes completely freaked him out. When DifLove was published, suffice to say that mainstream meda's response (as related by the long-suffering publicist assigned to the book at Random House) was mocking and angry. By then, though, we'd been through the experience of Random House lawyers sending us a 14 page FAX detailing everything that freaked them out in the book, prompting our agent to comment, "They don't even do this to books advocating the overthrow of the government!"
Precisely. I've never written a book about how to build a bomb. Never incited anyone to violence. Never encouraged anyone to lie, cheat, or steal, much less overthrow the government. I just talk about sex. Sex: the most dangerous, controversial subject in human history.
FaceBook is going to have to decide whether it's going to be another AOL (yet another service which ultimately shut down the BDSM chats and a weekly conference I ran there), and pretend to be above all that, even as it promotes every possible form of social sleaze, from fake diets and pills to malicious celebrity gossip? If they haven't already, they are going to have to establish a broader policy on censorship than simply "no naughty images allowed." There are naughty images all over FaceBook and links to all manner of explicit content: are they going to continue to randomly ban people? Will they ban everyone? Or will they, as I would've appreciated, flag an account to explain WHY they are disabling you, and steps you may take to fix the problem.
By the way, in other censorship news: Cleo Dubois informs me that youtube banned her new video about the Academy of SM Arts, and said that Two Knotty Boys had videos disabled by management as well.
Is there something in the air or are these just coincidences? Are people running around the Web and complaining about kinksters? As Kissinger once famously said, "Even paranoids have enemies."
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