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Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality
ErosBlog posts containing ""dreams of spanking""
September 6th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
Speaking honestly, I’ve sort of let my #pornocalypse coverage lapse recently. Not much has changed in years; corporate social media keeps tightening the noose, formerly adult-friendly places become less so. On the one hand we still have the old-fashioned open web, with the freedom to publish on adult topics but without much access to traffic or to the financial system. The freedom to sleep under a bridge, right?
On the other hand, we have the infamous five websites, which is where all the people are, and from which they mostly will not migrate nor follow any links.
Adult material and links are mostly not welcome there, on the five websites, except to the extent that that this material is disguised from the machine censors by cutesy emojis and twee circumlocutions. If you’re a “spicy accountant” or a “mattress actress”, a lover of “quink” or a “corn” aficionado, a fan of big eggplants or women whose peach icons sometimes spray cartoon raindrops, corporate social media is very much for you.
So yeah, I’ve grown tired of the #pornocalypse beat, and I’ve let lots and lots of pornocalyptic stories glide by without any of my commentary. But yesterday, Pandora / Blake (perhaps best known to ErosBlog readers as the director and publisher of Dreams Of Spanking), published an open Patreon post discussing their frustration at the recent deletion of their kink education channel on YouTube.
Blake’s treatment exemplifies the recent trend in #pornocalypse behavior by the major social media platforms that I first wrote about back in May:
Increasingly the hot new trend in #pornocalypse is social media platforms banning accounts and people not for what they posted/linked, but merely because of who they are. Biggest example was PornHub getting banned from Instagram despite having a whole team of lawyers and creatives making sure their Insta account broke no rules. It’s frustrating, and it’s why I never have the courage to try anything effortful on adult-hostile social media channels.
It used to be common for porn-hostile platforms to tolerate porn-adjacent people, sex educations, and even sex workers, as long as the platform’s specific TOS against adult material were complied with. For many people, this was workable; they’d ride the ragged edge of the TOS for months or a few years, getting specific posts banned and enduring shadow bans, until eventually (and with great pain) they’d lose an account after too many strikes and have to start all over again. You could make a living that way, if you didn’t tire. But, over time, I started noticing that specific TOS compliance stopped mattering. All over porn-hostile social media, people started losing accounts not for any specific violations, but simply because of who they were. If their public identity was too identified with adult topics, they would be banned without warning or appeal, never knowing which posts gave institutional offense. Thus, Blake’s experience:
I’ve been publishing videos on YouTube since 2014, throughout my campaigns against UK porn censorship and age verification. For the last two or three years I’ve been regularly posting original kink education videos, many of which I’ve accompanied with transcripts here on Patreon. The channel mostly consisted of these fully clothed talky adult education videos on topics ranging across consent, BDSM, porn, feminism, queerness, and organisational and self-care strategies. It also included video podcast style interviews with other educators, interviews with adult performers, political campaign videos, and a few carefully cut trailers for spanking films that showed no sex or nudity, but either clothed character interactions and plot snippets (in the case of multi-performer videos) or excerpts from clothed POV fetish talk videos. I suspect it was these latter videos that fell afoul of the content policy, but I have no way of knowing.
…
None of the videos on my channel included sex or nudity. I avoided posting links to any adult sites in the video descriptions, linking to Patreon and mxblake.com instead. … I’m furious that a channel 90% of which consisted of educational material about consensual pleasure and LGBTQIA issues has been summarily deleted without any option to review or edit the content. Was it just those few talky trailers which YouTube objected to so much, or is the entire project of BDSM education in itself too risqué for YouTube?
My speculation is that the answer is “neither”. Rather, I suspect that one or more videos generated enough algorithmic red flags to fall under human eyes, and the human in question applied the new-ish unofficial #pornocalypse policy that’s been spreading so rapidly throughout corporate social media: “If the entity who posted this is any kind of pornographer or sex worker, nuke their whole stinkyporny channel and get them off the platform. Fuck the terms of service! Those words only mean what we pay them to mean, no more and no less.”
For me, the event that dropped the final scale from my eyes was when PornHub got banned from Instagram. If it ever made sense to go dancing with the social media devil while accepting your periodic lumps from the censorship algorithms, it no longer does, in my opinion. PornHub has a whole professional social media team, complete with content creators, editors, and as much legal support as they need. You can guarantee that they posted nothing that contravened Instagram’s TOS, not by the least jot or tittle. Did it matter? No. Throw them into the pit! You and I? We’re not going to fare any better.
I don’t have any solutions to offer, and anyway Blake explicitly isn’t asking for any. So I’ll leave you with Blake’s powerful summary of the state of the #Pornocalypse in 2023:
I mourn the loss of the open internet that was promised us in the early 2000s. My cyberpunk dreams of open peer-to-peer communication and free expression have been repeatedly thwarted, and I’m so angry about it. Fuck Google, their YouTube takeover, and their long-standing policy of devaluing adult sites in search results. Fuck Elon Musk for turning Twitter into his own personal ego trip, and a hotbed of Nazism and transphobia. Fuck Meta for taking over Instagram and enforcing their “family friendly” policies in a way that forces grown adult sex educators to talk about “s3x”, “quink” and “spicy corn”. Fuck Tiktok too, while I’m at it. I hate that in order to reach an audience we’re forced into these privately-owned silos which loathe everything to do with consensual adult sexuality, and which have the power to remove our access to social connectivity at the whim of a badly-trained algorithm.
All of this, every word.
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February 6th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Let’s be honest: you would enjoy having the kind of friends who might spend a quiet winter evening doing stuff like this. Somehow you just know that hot tea and purring cats are not far away:
What’s going on? Well, it’s a scene from Dreams Of Spanking, where all is explained:
Two topless women are engaged in a sensual game: one plays the canvas and the other the artist. Adele Haze lies on cushions, exposing her breasts and bare back – and it’s the latter that her lover will write on. Pandora Blake uses black ink and a brush to adorn Adele with intricate Greek lettering.
As Pandora’s calligraphy winds around Adele’s gorgeous curves, Adele must stay completely still, hardly breathing to avoid nudging Pandora as she writes her lines. In a Victorian school, ink smudges would mean a punishment for the writer. Here, the responsibility to avoid error falls on the writing surface. Pandora weaves her spell in words, and the magic of the moment mustn’t be broken. For each smudge, Adele will get a stroke of the cane.
When the text is complete — the first few lines of Homer’s ‘Iliad’ — Pandora carefully examines her work, stripping Adele naked so she can admire the slick black script that covers her body. Afterwards Adele bends naked over the punishment bench in the Scriptorium, exposing every inch of her bare skin. Pandora’s found some smudges…
Pandora’s blogging about the photoshoot tells us a bit more about the shoot. For one thing, we learn that Girl On the Net does Pandora’s copywriting (see above) which says a lot about why it’s so consistently excellent. (Great copywriting is an anomaly so rare in the porn business as to approach in this case the true meaning of “unique” in its most absolute hard-mathematical full-Highlander “there can be only one” sense.)
We also learned that Pandora doesn’t necessarily impose a storyline on her shoots at the time that she is shooting them:
I don’t know what story these images might tell. Perhaps we are lovers, or witches; perhaps I’m an artist decorating her for some sort of show, or perhaps she’s my submissive and I’ve set her the challenge of stillness and obedience. Perhaps we are students in some strange alternate universe where punishment lines are written not on paper, but on skin.
I’m still pretty sure there will be cats. And probably a fireplace.
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December 2nd, 2016 -- by Bacchus
I am in the research phase of setting up a Patreon page for ErosBlog, with an eye toward keeping the lights on and building the chance to do more of what I do best. “Research phase” in this context means studying how people I respect are doing it; and thus have I have been reading a lot of compelling Patreon pitches, and coming to the conclusion that we all need to be doing more to highlight patronage-supported projects of our friends, peers, mentors, heroes, and creative people we could not live without. Hence this post, which I hope will be the first of a lengthy if occasional series.
Today I want to highlight the Patreon pages of three women who have been doing excellent work in the adult/erotic space for at least as long as I’ve been blogging. But first, perhaps just a few words about the growing importance of the peer-patronage economic model?
As I see it, we live in a world where the old economic orders are breaking down. Automation, globalization, and information technology have utterly disrupted the reliable wage-and-salary economies upon which most of us depended, while the internet has killed the traditional publishing models that used to keep artists and creatives (a few of them, anyway) in day-old bread and thinning shoe leather. Late-stage capitalism seems increasingly predatory and self-referential; it pays only for what it values, its values are increasingly estranged from the culture that supports it, and precious little sustenance trickles down from the well-caulked boats being buoyed up on its rising tide. The creativity that brings us joy is no longer likely to be well-supported in the market, and relying on the patronage of the wealthy (although a time-honored survival strategy of artists everywhere) has its limits in the tastes of the wealthy. If this were not true, why would #pornocalypse — which at heart is about the squeamish unwillingness of the investing class to have its money associated with sexual culture — even be a thing?
One approach to a solution is crowdfunding. A duke or a titan of industry can support an entire opera company, but the company (predictably enough) will perform mostly the operas the duke enjoys. The internet lets us democratize this patronage model; I’m no duke, but I can (at least in a good month) afford a dollar here or a fiver over there to support something that delights me. The same internet that destroyed the traditional publishing model now lets an artist who draws anally-obsessed anthropomorphic ponies find support in a hundred or a thousand places. No more insufficiently-perverted dukes gate-keeping our pornography!
But finding each other is still a challenge in this newly-democratized peer-patronage model. The internet makes such finding possible, but does not make it easy. So that’s my inspiration for this post: to try and help with that. Here are three tireless women who deserve all the support they can get, and whose creative energy will more than repay us for whatever support we can provide. I’ve “known” all of them for more than a decade without ever meeting any of them, but what I “know” may not always be the face that they choose to present to the world today, so for purposes of this series, I’m just going to amplify their own words as found on their own crowdfunding pages:
Violet Blue at Patreon
I’ve created and run the oldest sex culture blog on the internet (tinynibbles.com). I’ve authored dozens of indie books in a turbulent and censorious market. And I regularly make news by reporting on hacking and privacy, companies behaving badly, and injustices to at-risk populations. I’ve bootstrapped my site and everything that goes with it, I work at industry rates (which aren’t great), I constantly have to chase down people who take months to pay invoices for my writing, and I was homeless as a kid, so I only have me. I want to do so much more.
I want to grow all of this.
If you’ve ever followed me or my work, you’ve seen how hard I fight for people who need a voice in their own conversations — and you’ve seen how badly I get attacked, censored (Libya, Apple, Focus on the Family, Amazon search, Facebook, the list goes on). You’ve also seen my work cause positive change, like drawing attention to PayPal’s financial discrimination against sex workers, getting Tumblr’s NSFW search reinstated properly. And maybe some of my work has touched your life, too.
…
I’m freelance and indie. This means I’m not beholden to interests or advertisers, and no one will ever control what I say. But there are many business tools I cannot use, because the topic of half of what I cover is sex — plus, like many, I’m affected by things like Amazon deciding to deep-six searches for indie books about sex.
Alison Tyler at Patreon
My name is Alison Tyler, and I’m an insomniac. Since I don’t value sleep, I write. All the time. If you see me at a 24-hour diner, I’ll be writing. If I’m stopped in traffic, I’m scribbling with a ballpoint on the back of my hand. That light on in the window at 3 a.m.? That’s me. Hope I didn’t disturb you.
To date, my career has been a whirlwind–a drive in a fast car, on a mountain road with winding hills. Was it being in the right place at the right time, sheer luck, or a refusal to give up? No clue. But I’ve managed to work for Masquerade, Black Lace, Plume, Harlequin, Penthouse, and others.
There’s no safety net here. I’m in my glitter and rhinestones. Let’s run off together and make our own circus.
Pandora Blake at Patreon
I’m Pandora Blake, the award-winning feminist porn producer and performer. I’ve been making kinky films since 2011, when I launched Dreams of Spanking, my website dedicated to ethically-produced BDSM erotica. The site is radical in prioritising gender diversity, explicit behind the scenes enthusiastic consent, and equal pay for equal work.
My erotic films express my own kinky fantasies and are sex-positive, body-positive, and strongly rooted in queer politics. I’m proud to say that my work has won multiple international awards, as well as attracting a wonderful fan base – until the UK porn censor ATVOD stepped in and shut my site down in August 2015 under new anti-porn legislation. After a drawn-out campaign, I’m delighted to have successfully won an appeal against the ruling, and the site is now back online, officially exempt from the new legislation.
Since fighting that battle I’ve had to learn a lot about porn law – and I’ve been increasingly called upon to speak publicly on issues of sex work law reform, censorship and obscenity law, sexual freedom, kink acceptance and ethical porn. I was honoured to be awarded Publicist of the Year at the Sexual Freedom Awards 2015 for my efforts advocating for sex workers’ rights and against porn censorship. Now, I’m taking that work to the next level.
Image Credit (directly above): Movie patrons in an advertisement for the National Cash Register Company’s new ticket-printing register, from the Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual 1916.
Image Credit (top of post): An opera company seeks royal patronage for French opera by throwing vulgar English theatre under a train, from an 1841 issue of Punch.
November 19th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
Not that we don’t have our own problems looming here in the United States when it comes to worrying about official hostility to online pornography, but this blog post by Pandora Blake explains in the bleakest imaginable terms how all but the most uncontroversial and bland corporate porn is in the process of being legislated off the internet in the United Kingdom. Pandora recently fought a protracted and successful legal battle for the right to sell her progressive and ethical spanking porn online in the UK, but her site was offline during that battle and so her victory was necessarily something of a Pyrrhic one. And now her site is once again under threat (along with pretty much every other porn site in the UK from the sound of things) from a proposed new law that imposes economically-ridiculous age verification requirements on porn websites while simultaneously just flatly banning from the internet a great deal of kinkier porn:
The Digital Economy Bill is currently going through Parliament, and has just come to the end of its committee stage. The section of the Bill introducing compulsory age verification for all adult sites accessible from the UK will have a serious impact on Dreams of Spanking, and on many other adult websites.
Complying with this legislation will be difficult, if not impossible. First of all, I’ll have to overhaul the whole site structure of Dreams of Spanking. Any content that would be classified as “18” or higher will be illegal to publish publicly, on the open internet. So video, images and audio that contain any nudity, bums or spanking will need to go behind intrusive, privacy-violating age checks.
To prove you’re over 18, you’ll have to type in sensitive personal details such as your legal name, credit card details, date of birth, address or phone number. That data will be visible not to me, but to whatever age verification system I install – private companies that are free to operate unregulated, and without having to safeguard the security and privacy of your personal data.
Not only is this terrible for you, it’s terrible for me. Every age check will cost me money – estimates range from £0.05 to £1.50 per check. Dreams of Spanking currently receives over two thousand visitors a day (under half the traffic we had before ATVOD forced us offline), so the cost of checking the age of every site visitor would add up to significantly more than the site’s total revenue – and that’s before we take into account existing costs such as production, paying my team members, and bandwidth. In other words, complying with the age verification law will immediately put the site out of business.
Even if I can somehow persuade enough of those two thousand visitors to buy memberships that I can afford to verify all their ages, the site will never be the same. This law will mean no more public previews. No free trailers, no preview images, no free hosted galleries, no birthday spanking giveaways, no Creative Commons projects and no charity caning films. No more getting around CCBill’s content restrictions by giving material away.
No more transparency, and no more free porn.
As bad as that sounds, we haven’t even gotten to the worst part. The new UK law proposes to outright prohibit whole swathes of BDSM and fetish porn:
Even if I somehow manage to fully comply with the legislation: hide everything spanking-themed on the site behind age checks; find the money to check the ID of every non-paying visitor who wants to browse my free previews; survive the loss of traffic and Googleability – even if I can stomach the disappearing of this blog, the behind the scenes videos, the performer interviews, and the discourse about ethics and consent – the site still can’t survive, because every scene that was criminalised by the AVMS regulations will be recriminalised by the Digital Economy Bill.
ATVOD found us in breach because they ruled that some of our videos depict corporal punishment that leaves ‘lasting’ marks. We won our appeal on the basis that the principle purpose of the site is not commercial, and it is not in competition with mainstream broadcast media. That victory won us an exemption to the AVMS Regulations 2014. But the AVMS didn’t invent the rules around what content is banned; it drew them from existing classification guidelines used by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) for films and TV.
The guidelines prohibit any depiction of pain play that leaves marks on the body beyond those deemed “transient and trifling” from classification even as R18, the highest classification category in the UK. Basically, under the current rules you can’t show any act which would constitute assault or actual bodily harm, or any act which would risk injury to the viewer if it were imitated. So no caning, no belting, no welts, no bruises – and that’s before we get into the bans on things like facesitting, breath play, fisting, squirting, watersports and “full” bondage, defined as the restraint of all four limbs plus a gag.
The AVMS regulations were the first instrument of UK law to apply those classification guidelines to material published on the internet. We’ve enjoyed a heady few months of official exemption from them: but now the Digital Economy Bill uses those same guidelines to control what can and can’t be published online. If the Bill is passed it will be illegal to publish any ‘prohibited content’ even behind age checks. Let that sink in: even age-verified, consenting adults who have handed over their real names and addresses to prove their age won’t be allowed to look at spanking videos that show marks.
Pandora is an award-winning community-supported activist as well as a pornographer, and she isn’t giving up. No law is a sure thing before it’s final; things might go differently and better in the UK than Pandora and her lawyers currently expect. We may certainly hope so, but my point, in any case, is a larger one: the relative freedom pornographers have enjoyed to publish internet porn in the 21st century is more fragile than you probably imagined. When British porn goes dark and Great Britain vanishes from the kinky internet, we in the rest of the world may barely notice; it’s not like we don’t have our own fetish porn resources. The lesson, though, is clear. Laws and policies change, not always for the better. If we value the work of independent pornographers here in the United States (as I, for one, do), we’ve got to have their backs.
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October 9th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
I’m sure this must be a very posh private school, because the back stairs where Pandora sits taking naughty selfies for her boyfriend are clean and in good repair:
One small flaw in Pandora’s program: she does not realize the headmaster is watching!
You know where all this is leading:
From Dreams of Spanking.
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November 2nd, 2014 -- by Bacchus
There was an excellent article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian yesterday about fair trade porn. So excellent was it that, frankly, I think the editors should be ashamed of the unwarranted click-baiting question mark in their headline: Is there such a thing as ethical porn?
Zoe Williams seems to have relied heavily on detailed interviews with Pandora Blake and her merry band of collaborators at Dreams Of Spanking, which was a wise choice. And there’s much goodness to be had in the interviews and quotes with other “fair trade” pornographers, such as long-time ErosBlog favorite Madison Young. But my absolute favorite part of the article is a single lengthy paragraph in which the complete history of the feminist porn wars is recapitulated and fought in Zoe Williams’s mind at a feminist convention in 2011:
I have confronted my views on porn only once, in 2011, at a UK Feminista meeting, 1,000 women strong. Someone in the audience said, “Exactly what’s wrong with me getting off on Debbie Does Dallas with my boyfriend?” An audible part of the audience was instantly furious: porn was exploitative, it was impossible to make porn without damaging the women who performed in it. Plus, when she said she “got off”, what she really meant was that she’d internalised her boyfriend’s sexual pleasure. I was conflicted: the kind of people who say porn is exploitative, physically and psychologically, are generally the people with whom I agree on everything. Yet, in this one particularity, I cannot agree with deciding women are being exploited unless they say they are. And, much more trenchantly, I cannot agree with adjudicating what someone else gets off on. Even if she is turned on by a fantasy that traduces your political beliefs (and her own), sexual fantasy is a sacred thing; you can’t argue it away, and nor should you want to. And the key argument, that it causes male violence, I don’t buy; what we watch might influence the way we behave, but not in obvious ways that you can map.
If I was the kind of guy who got text tattoos, I think “I cannot agree with deciding women are being exploited unless they say they are” would be a fine candidate. It would do for an ErosBlog motto, too.
Moving on: Pandora Blake is quoted being smart about porn throughout the article, but my favorite quote is this one on anti-porn feminists watching the wrong porn:
Blake says: “When you read them [anti-porn feminists], it’s very obvious that they’ve typed ‘hardcore gonzo’ into Google and watched the free stuff. They’re obsessed with the worst of it.”
Not only do I agree that the anti-porn feminists (although I cannot use that phrase without wondering how feminist it can possibly be to deny the agency of women who make porn) are looking at the worst porn, but I think the problem even goes beyond that. I think they are looking at the worst porn and then, using empathy, they are projecting their own imagined reaction were they modeling the scene onto the models, of whose motivations, professionalism, and physical skills they are utterly ignorant. I first encountered this made explicit in the notorious “threads swimming in blood in your throat” passage by Andrea Dworkin, who, upon seeing the movie Deep Throat, seems to have re-imagined it as a horror movie based on her own gruesome fantasies of what giving a blowjob must be like. The rest of us saw rather a different movie.
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June 29th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Here’s an article that uses the billing problems Pandora Blake ran into (“No talking about consent next to your porn!”) with her Dreams Of Spanking website to illustrate what’s becoming a broader problem for internet freedom generally:
Most media coverage of the Internet focuses on how much privacy we’ve lost. What we sometimes miss is that we’ve also lost public space. The web is almost entirely privatized: the servers, the network cables, the sites themselves are all privately owned. You might have a right to walk and talk on public streets, but your right to do so on the Internet is entirely dependent on those who own the hardware and software running the web. As Pandora Blake found out, even money has been thoroughly privatized on the Internet. The money that we use for transactions on the Web is minted by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Paypal.
Government censorship becomes redundant in such an entirely privatized environment. The concept of free speech is one that developed alongside the assumption of a public commons, open to all. But while the Internet appears to have expanded the public square – sometimes even to have made it universal – it has in fact shrunk. The hidden nature of speech on the Internet is that even after you publish your ideas, the paper and ink they’re on still belongs to someone else. Journalist A.J. Liebling famously said that “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” In the age of the Internet, who actually owns the printing presses?
The fact that getting paid over the internet is subject to the vague and shifting whims of the payment companies (and subject to their private rules) is a bigger issue than is generally recognized. Bacchus’s First Rule pretty much demands that you be paying for your web hosting (so you can be a customer instead of a product) but for most non-wealthy people, that means you’ve got to generate some revenue if you want your stuff to stay up over the long haul. Leasing a server in the private market doesn’t unduly limit freedom of expression because (so far) there are still many competing hosting providers happy to have your business, but it does take some subjects off the table (like, say, where to find good torrents). But there’s apparently not the same level of competition between online payment services; most won’t allow adult transactions at all and all the rest maintain a suite of broad and vague speech-chilling restrictions on them. Sadly, I don’t expect the situation to improve, not unless somebody finally figures out how to boot up a true digital bearer currency.
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