Doesn’t matter whether it’s pictures of a struggling teenager or so-called ‘art.’ Doesn’t matter if it’s genuine or staged. It is triggering for a great number of people, particularly on Tumblr, which has a demographic which strongly overlaps with those most inclined to self-harm, and can provoke others into taking harmful actions against their own bodies.

Take it from someone with hundreds and hundreds of individual scars on one arm alone: when you post photographs of people with bleeding gashes across their arms, or their legs, or their chests - even if they’re self-taken and even if you’ve made some cute little gif of you photoshopping away their cuts (which is in itself a dickmove and shows you don’t understand SHIT) - you are provoking people to self-harm.

This isn’t something to glamorise, it’s not something ‘cool,’ or ‘beautiful,’ or ‘artistic.’ It generally forms part of a mental illness, of what amounts to an addiction. When you post five massive, grotesque fucking pictures of a mentally ill man after he has severely harmed himself in multiple ways, you are not sharing his art. You are potentially causing the people who follow you to harm themselves in similar ways. You are tempting them the way offering a scotch to an alcoholic is tempting them. It is cruel and it is unpleasant for everyone.

Even for those who do not have bodies covered in scars of their own, even for those who have never been inclined to harm themselves, it can be deeply fucking upsetting. This isn’t about freedom of speech or expression, this is about considering those around you and the effect your actions and your decisions have on them. Those followers you say you love whenever that one macro comes round for you to reblog. If you’re more concerned about being shocking than giving people fair warning by making use of the ‘read more’ function provided by this website, then I don’t want you anywhere near my fucking blog, nor do I want to be anywhere near yours.

Fuck you.