Although she never uses the word “pornocalypse”, veteran and beloved fetish model Ariel Anderssen posted a lengthy rant earlier this month about the precise pornocalypse pattern that I have tracking all these years:

I’m told by people who’ve been in the industry (even) longer than I have, that this godawful pattern is normal. Every few years a new platform for pornography will appear, offering something better than whatever’s gone before, or something new (as OnlyFans did by allowing creators to essentially monetize their social media).

Producers and models will begin to use this new platform to sell their content, and the site will grow, using the income it receives from commission on our sales to expand its reach, and building a customer base in the process. Creators like me will begin to rely upon it, first for additional income, and then, if the platform becomes successful enough, as our main income, or even (and this is dangerous) our sole income.

…

I’d love to tell you that the cycle just continues this way, with new platforms emerging every few years, giving more choice to creators and customers alike, and forcing the websites we use to remain competitive while providing an excellent user experience. But sadly, that’s not how it works. What happens next, generally, after a few good years, is that the platform will self-destruct. Often, this seems to be at least initially precipitated by external pressures. For OnlyFans, for example, it was scrutiny from Visa and Mastercard, and then from various national governments, that made it become first increasingly censorious, then to announce it was banning adult content altogether, and finally to reverse that disastrous choice after a massive backlash, but to fail so comprehensively in taking on enough staff to sensibly moderate the vast cascade of content being uploaded to OF on a daily basis, that it became essentially unusable for anyone producing anything other than entirely vanilla content. In the process, it also began to hide its pornographic reality behind a safe for work (SFW) facade, which sees OnlyFans’ social media feed looking very much like a pallid, underpopulated version of YouTube.

When things like this happen, porn creators, who tend to be resilient through necessity, will begin to search for new platforms.

And the cycle begins anew!

Thanks to Femdom Resources and loyal ErosBlog reader Vagans for letting me know about Ariel’s essay.

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The reason, I think, that the entire tube girl fetish is usually confined to mad scientists and aliens in pulp artwork and comic books, is that transparent tubes large enough to restrain and display an Earth girl are rare and expensive. But when the brilliant fetish minds behind Restrained Elegance saw a space-efficient plexiglass hemispherical shower stall, they were quick to realize the tubegirl possibilities. Faster than you can say “Hey presto!” the lovely Ariel Anderssen found herself in shackles and on display:

I just hope those steel shackles are protected from rust by a good powdercoat!

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I’m not a big fan (for reasons that will become clear) of the notion of “cultural appropriation” as a bad thing. But it doesn’t come up a lot in the kind of porn I write about and share here. Thus did my feelers twitch when I saw this tweet:

In short. Cultural appropriation is one of the engines of human creativity and innovation. We are all human beings, it belongs to all of us.

— Restrained Elegance (@RElegance) August 1, 2015

I agree! Cultural appropriation, which was called “cultural borrowing” back when I studied this sort of thing, is what (IMO) makes every large “world city” great to visit or live in. It’s at the heart of the cultural “melting pot” notion, too, which I am old enough to remember used to be touted as the thing that made the USA such a successful and dynamic society. Cultural borrowing is as old as human trade; without it, the original Silk Road would never been a route of consequence. What’s awesome about cultural borrowing is that just as with intellectual property, when you copy, you multiply; there’s no diminution suffered by the original author, no deprivation suffered by the original culture. The beauty of cultural “borrowing” is that you can imitate what you like from another culture (the food, the music, the clothes, the art) without depriving anybody of anything. (Calling it “cultural appropriation” reveals the same sort of mentality that thinks of copying intellectual property as “stealing” it.)

So why was Hywel Phillips, who (with his beautiful wife Ariel Anderssen) creates several classy erotic websites including Restrained Elegance and Silk Soles, having to pop up on Twitter in defense of cultural appropriation? I had to know more.

It turns out he got some flak on Twitter for posting “a white girl in a kimono” (see above). His blog explains it all: Why I Will Not Be Taking This Photo Down.

Gracious, I should hope not! It’s utterly lovely!

Phillips explains:

All people of all cultures have drawn inspiration and innovation from other cultures, throughout human history and indeed before. We are all human beings, and we should all be allowed to draw inspiration from cultures we were not born into.

White girls should be allowed to wear kimonos. Nigerian girls should be allowed to wear Ancient Greek Peplos. I have photographed Swedish, Romanian and Scottish girls wearing Cheongsams. I’ve photographed Italian people wearing historical Viking dress and English women wearing Togas. I’ve photographed Dutch men wearing dress traditionally considered appropriate for women; were they culturally appropriating the clothes of a traditionally oppressed minority? No, they were just doing something they enjoyed.

Should I have been offended at the cultural appropriation of English people wearing traditional Welsh dress at school Eisteddfods? Why should I? It’s not in any meaningful sense mine, even though I was born and raised in the country from whence the tradition originates.

I’m no moral authority, but I do have a silver rule to back up the golden rule. Replace all labels by the word “person” or “people” and see what I think of it then.

“Should a white girl be allowed to be photographed wearing a kimono?” becomes “Should a person be allowed to be photographed wearing a kimono?”. Yes they should. Anybody who wants to should be able to.

What is the alternative? Not shooting those photos with that model, I guess. Does that mean we should racially segregate the models who come to work with us?

He then goes into the cultural symbolism and putative “ownership” of that particular kimono, to a depth which some might consider pedantic but which I found fascinating:

And let’s examine the Kimono in that photograph. It is a kimono in the following two senses (again, after Wikipedia). 1) It is a thing to wear, which is the literal meaning, and 2) It is similar in design to the traditional Japanese garment of that name.

It was designed and sewn by a British person based on a pattern designed by a European (inspired by that traditional Japenese style), from fabric made in India. That fabric is a synthetic one invented in Britain (or at least most likely descended from a material invented in Britain) but designed to look like a traditional Chinese fabric in texture and also with a design inspired by Chinese tradition.

There’s a long history of colonialism and bloody war between many of those civilisations.

The kimono itself, according to Wikipedia, was heavily influenced by traditional Han Chinese clothing. So should Japanese people even be allowed to wear them, since they are apparently culturally appropriated from China? What is the statute of limitations on how long ago a borrowing has to be before it becomes legitimate?

This is nonsense. Throughout history we’ve all begged, borrowed and stolen inspiration from each other, all the time and in all directions. We are all human beings. We should be allowed to. It is one of the most fertile sources of innovation we have.

Indeed.

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Photographer and cinematographer Hywel Phillips is the visual genius behind Restrained Elegance, which I have long considered to be the best and most visually striking of the bondage photography sites that strive to produce pornography and art simultaneously. He, along with his wife and model and business partner Ariel Anderssen aka Amelia Jane Rutherford, are some of the people Spanking Blog calls “porn producer heroes” as they continue to make fetish porn in Britain subsequent to the “latest round of bat-shit crazy UK censorship laws.” In an excellent long-read post yesterday, Hywel cataloged the whole constellation of challenges facing people trying to be adults and to do adult business on the modern internet. He begins:

The internet is no longer a safe place to be an adult. Puritans and authoritarians are closing in from all directions: state censorship, financial censorship and corporate censorship. This sounds like paranoia, but it isn’t. Here’s why.

There’s really no way to summarize the post for you; all I can do is commend it to your attention. Although his post ranges much more wildly, he covers (and shares) many of the concerns I have hash-tagged #Pornocalypse when discussing corporate discrimination against adult materials, adult businesses, and adult-oriented web traffic. He even touches briefly on what I used to call Bacchus’s First Rule of the Internet, or as Hwel puts it:

First, don’t rely on any service where you are not the direct customer. Don’t blog on blogger, get a little bit of web space (ideally hosted in country with protected speech), install WordPress and do it yourself.

I’ve stopped harping on my “rule” because social media have made it… not less essential, but perhaps less sufficient? Despite numerous software efforts and projects (which Hwel discusses in passing) there’s still no good self-hosted way to enjoy the network effects of social media. And that lack makes my notion of pornocalypse all the more chilling, since every big web property and social media silo eventually seems to reach that point in the corporate life cycle where it appears sensible to start banning all the porn. Before the internet, we lived in a world where you could not be heard unless your message was acceptable to corporate sensibilities. The World Wide Web changed all that, but now, corporate social media and squeamish search engines are taking us back to those bad, bland, and puritanical old days.

But now I’m rambling. Hwel does not ramble. Check his post out.

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