Val Webber

@publicpubics.bsky.social

2752 Followers 492 Following

Public health, porn OHS, SW labour & debanking. Working with PASS and the SHaG Lab. He/him flavoured. Previously naked on the internet. https://valwebber.com

Val, a shorn white guy in an elastomeric mask and grey sleeveless t, is sitting at his zine table reading a copy of Cam Girls Wanted. The table is covered in a corn-patterned tablecloth and a variety of cool zines.
A photo of a few of the zines Val will be selling at the Zine Fair, laid on a table cloth patterned in a photo montage of corn on the cob. The zines from left to right include Cam Girls Wanted, 5 Fake Cum Recipes from a dissertation on ga porn written in 1975, Push My Buttons: a zine to and by online sex workers circa 2004, and The Wuzzles Made Me Queer.
Poster for the Halifax Zine explosion, April 18 10am - 4pm, 2535 Robie Street. It shows a drawing of lil guy detonating a cascade of red and blue electrical waves, suggests bringing cash, and notes there will be HEPA filtration and masks provided.
Screen cap of a light blue report cover with black text that reads 'Account Closed Without Notice: Debanking adult industry workers in Canada.'
screen shot of cover page that reads 'brief to the senate standing committee on legal and constitutional affairs regarding bill S-209, an act to restrict young persons' online access to pornographic material. by Val Webber and Jean Ketterling, dated November 3 2025.
Beyond these harms to the broader culture, vague guidelines that conflate actual abuse with fantasy and fiction have a devastating impact on the livelihoods of creators – especially those who do not create vanilla, heteronormative content. Like most platforms, sex workers and other sexual content creators were some of the first to adopt Bluesky and played an enormous role in building it up. I urge you not to be yet another platform that throws them under the bus the second you catch a whiff of ‘reputational risk’. To read my research in this area, please see the following: link to the article "The definitional creep: Payment processing and the moral ordering of sexual content" in Sexualities journal and link to the article "‘This is fucking nuts’: the role of payment intermediaries in structuring precarity and dependencies in platformized sex work" in Porn Studies journal.
that the violence being portrayed neither harmed the actual performers nor is a simplistic endorsement of acting out said violence ‘in real life’. Denying this complexity to sexual content by conflating fantasy and reality actually reinforces cultures of sexual violence. Sequestering sexual content and devaluing it reinforces classist, whorephobic rhetoric that sexual culture is ‘low culture’, and therefore the purveyors and consumers of it do not deserve respect and dignity. This is one component of the attitude that exploitation of and violence against sex workers and other sexual labourers is justified. Additionally, when we undermine people’s ability to enact and consume fantasy material (whether those fantasies are portrayed in animation or by real humans), we are denying them the right to exercise bodily and mental autonomy. For a culture of sexual consent to exist and grow, people need to be able to both refuse the sex and fantasy they do not want to engage in AND be able to assent to the sex and fantasy they do want. You cannot have one without the other.
I am a postdoctoral research fellow who has researched the role that payment processors exert on platform terms of service and community guidelines, and the way these terms impact content creators and other platform users. My primary concern with the proposed Bluesky community guideline updates is their failure to distinguish between content that documents actual expressions of non-consensual violence (i.e. video footage of a sexual assault), and content (whether featuring animated characters or real humans) that depicts the consensual portrayal of those themes, acts, and fantasies. Specifying that ‘Consensual adult content’ is permitted in 5.B.i is potentially in conflict with clauses 2.A and 5.A.ii. Historically, when the rules are vague, the regulation of adult content always errs on the literal and conservative side. Consensually created, fictional adult content is held to wildly stricter standards than fictional content featuring ‘non-sexual’ forms of violence. With non-adult content it is understood
Sexualities journal article titled the definitional creep: payment processing and the moral ordering of sexual content, by Val Webber and Rébecca Franco
screen cap from the report that reads, the number of persons with disabilities at Dalhousie has grown over the five years. By 2022, 19% of students, 8% of academic staff, and 15% of other staff identified having a disability. Senior administration included 13% persons with disabilities, and 14% of Senate identified as such. While these numbers show progress, ongoing work is needed to create more inclusive and accessible environments.
The “really? Right in front of my” meme. The disgruntled character is holding a calendar that has a white woman with big hair in a pink bikini on the cover, and it says “really? Right in front of my the girl next door Atlantic Canada’s best ladies as seen in the auto seller 1995 wall calendar?”
A selection of books laid out on a grey bedspread: Dis/Consent edited by KelleyAnne Malinen, The Color of Kink by Ariane Cruz, Trafficking Harms edited by Katrina Roots Ann De Shalit and Emily van der Meulen, The Social Safety Net by Nora Loreto, The New Sex Wars by Brenda Cossman, Never Whistle at Night edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C Van Alst Jr, Body Shocks extreme tales of body horror edited by Ellen Datlow, a zine produced by spank chain called Hors d’Oeuvres, Moving Politics by Deborah B Gould, Luttes XXX by Maria Nengeh Mensah Claire Thiboutot and Louise Toupin, Working It edited by Matilda Bickers peech breshears and Janis Luna, and Your Body is Not Your Body by Tenebrous Press.
Cover art for the podcast Public Health is Dead, featuring an anatomical drawing of a skull in a shade of purple-pink over graph paper. The title is written in a combination of typewriter text on torn paper and bright green ransom note style cut and paste.
Visual summary of the COVID-19 resources Canadian forecast for September 23 to October 6, showing every province ranked as very high or severe rates of infection, long covid, hospitalization, and death.
Embroidered patch of yellow thread on brown background depicting a jaunty fella with their head tipped to side and a lil smile on their face.