As I explained yesterday, today marks the start of a new meme for sex bloggers and anybody else producing adult content on the free/independent/open/ web. There are no rules per se; but the general idea is that you use your open web platform to highlight some porn stuff you admire that’s on somebody else’s open web platform. The price of using these old-fashioned #pornocalypse-resistant “real websites” is the difficulty of getting links, traffic, and attention; the purpose of this meme is to ameliorate that difficulty a little bit. Without further ado:

1. Here’s a guest post at Girl On The Net’s blog by porn performer Charlie Ten talking about her view of ethical porn — something that we don’t talk about enough, mostly because it gives the mindless porn-haters too many opportunities to spout their anti-porn nonsense. But it’s still an important conversation, when you can find people of good will, willing to to have it.
2. The 99th episode of Elust at Molly’s Daily Kiss deserves a shout-out in this first #SSoS because the Elust enterprise is a detailed, high-quality, curated sort of project that’s very much in the same spirit. #SSoS is by no means a new concept; we used to call this sort of things “link roundups” and they were a major blog-sociability concept back when social-media was barely dreamed-of. By my lights, Elust is an honored veteran and survivor from the olden days. Elust takes submissions, too!
3. I’m linking to Bex’s Five Easy Ways To Give A Blowjob With A Condom for a nostalgic reason that might make sense to nobody else. Way back in 2003 I linked to a ridiculously pornified set of “how-to” photographs of a woman putting a condom on a man’s dick with her mouth; some years later, after that link was long broken, I rescued those photos using the Internet Archive, and they are now on ErosBlog But they are, no question, more porn than how-to. Bex’s post offers a two-minute video on condom application by mouth that’s far more useful from an educational perspective. Highly recommended.
4. The world needs more blogs like The Rialto Report, which bills itself without false modesty as “oral history, audio, photo, and documentary archives from the golden age of adult film in New York, and beyond”. The post I’m sharing today is an interview with Steven Ziplow, who is the author of 1977’s The Filmmaker’s Guide To Pornography — perhaps the first-ever textbook of adult film-making. In the best Rialto Report tradition, a complete downloadable copy of the book is included in the post.
5. Ms. Naughty has been making porn websites since 2000 (!) and this summer she wrote an article called Six Things Today’s Internet Could Learn From Old School Porn Websites. As she says, “there was a time when porn did its best to be respectful to the surfer and tried hard not to piss them off because we knew that a happy, non-harassed surfer was more likely to trust you and to buy something.” She’s not wrong.

It’s been a #pornocalypse kind of week here at ErosBlog central, between the Patreon news (and there have been further developments I haven’t updated, but nothing that changes the essential core of the story) and the unwelcome but unsurprising news that the ErosBlog twitter account is shadowbanned. For them as don’t know, that latter thing means I’ve been partially stealth-muted; my tweets no longer show up in any twitter searches (even for people who have found the hidden default hide-the-porn settings and turned them off) and when I address people by @name who don’t already follow me, they can’t hear me. So, yeah, I’m now in the same category as nazi bots and people who yell fuck at verified accounts all day, woot go me. Why? Fuck if I know, call it pornocalypse and move on, I have better things to worry about.

Such as: worrying about how the free and independent open web (which means, those of us whose stuff is on our own domains and servers, not on some “free” social media site or blogging/picture service that can change the rules without notice) are going to survive long enough that we’ll still be here when the rubble stops bouncing. Because this shit cannot last. Blockchain tech and peer-to-peer and strong crypto and supercomputers in every pocket and software radios strong enough to bounce streaming video off of hobbyist drone balloons in the jet stream and more awesome cryptoanarchist shit of that sort that I’m too old and slow to understand: it’s not just coming, it’s already here, it’s just not been patched together properly yet. And when that happens, Facebook is dead. PayPal, Visa, Mastercard? Dead. Patreon and all the other crowdfunding middlemen? Dead. Twitter and Google? Dead. Oh, we’ll have things that look like social media and payments and search and crowdfunding, but they won’t be gatekeepers, they won’t be censors, and they won’t suck more than a microfraction out of any transaction. Because if they try, they’ll be ignored and replaced in real time.

The trick, as it’s always been, is to survive in the meanwhile. Head down, shoulder to the harness because the mules are dead, do the work. If you can’t rely on social media, don’t trust it and don’t invest in it; but use it for what it’s still good for, and be ready to skip briskly to shore (or to the next boat) when the party barge you’re on today gives its final gurgle. And above all, keep your home island solid.

Girl On The Net, always brilliant, made a very smart post about this a few days ago in response to the unhappy Patreon news. In Sex Blogger SOS: Share Our Shit, she points out first the problem:

Patreon is not the first — and it definitely won’t be the last — company to try and purge adult content from its platform. Tumblr has done it, Twitter does it in drips and drabs (stripping adult content from search, banning accounts with adult avatars and headers, etcetera), Facebook has always been a giant prick about adult content so no change there. Payment providers are usually clear from the outset that they don’t want our money. Ad platforms like Google Ads and Amazon Affiliates don’t want our traffic or money either. No one likes us. We’re just too goddamn sexy.

Alongside being really fucking difficult to make a living from, adult content is also really difficult to market.

And then she offers a solution:

However, when platforms like this strip ‘adult’ from their services, they are banking on the fact that you won’t care. That it won’t make a difference to you because adult content is embarrassing and shameful: no one’s going to share a link to their favourite porn site, or their favourite bit of erotic writing, so really who’s going to notice if all that shit disappears?

I’ll notice, gang. I will notice. And I hope you will too.

So here’s my SOS: share our shit. Share your favourite posts, images, videos, tweets, facebook updates. Links to porn sites where people can pay for amazing stuff. Recommend great erotica to your friends. Make it clear to large platforms that the consumers who click on Amazon and Google ads, who buy clothes and books and video games: these consumers also enjoy porn! And erotica! And other forms of sex! It is not utter fantasy, just a boring and simple truth, that the venn diagram of ‘consumers’ and ‘adult consumers’ is a circle. This is important because when platforms push sex content into a silo they’re effectively telling people that sex is different to anything else that humans do. It should be separate. We should take a surgical blade to our brains and our lives and neatly slice sex from the rest of it.

So find your favourite sex content, and share that shit. Retweet it, promote it, email it to your friends. While we’re getting stripped from search results and pulled from Patreon and told that we can only do our thing on Facebook if we shroud it in censor bars and euphemism… we’ll see you sharing our shit, and it will help us keep going. It will bring more people to our websites, and perhaps help us either make more money or build more traffic and that in turn will keep us going too.

She’s aiming this plea outward, rhetorically speaking, from the sex blogger community, and I think that’s smart. But I think it makes almost as much sense internally. We who have our own websites could stand to do a better job of strengthening our internal networking, not just with the passive and outdated “blogrolls” that are becoming rare (with good reason, since few read or click them anymore) but by means of more active engagement with each other’s writing and work. To that end, I am proposing a new blog meme.

I’m going to call this one “Saturday Share Our Shit” (#SSoS) and I imagine it as something like the old link roundups that used to be popular. But I want this one to be optional, occasional, fun, and easy, much like Follow Friday in its heyday. So you don’t have to do it every Saturday, it isn’t mandatory, there’s no set amount of links or set amount of discussion for each one. I’m thinking maybe three links with a sentence or two about each, but here’s the core notion: you put this on your own website, not on a tumblr or a blogspot or facebook or any other social media. And the content you share and promote? Should likewise be content that’s on the independent web, not on anybody’s “free” social media server anywhere. Once your #SSoS post is up on any given Saturday, then, sure: promote the shit out of it on any social media that will allow the promotion. That’s a given. But this meme is all about promoting what’s left of the open web, on what’s left of the open web. And then we use social media to promote our content, instead of using our media to promote their content. Capiche?

I’ll see you tomorrow!

Update: In honor of the fact that I haven’t been able to keep the hashtag straight twice in a row yet, which bodes poorly for the notion that anybody else will either, I have uttered a lordly proclamation:

I hereby further declare in my capacity as Bacchus, Lord of Drunken Misrule, that hashtags #SSoS or #SoSS are both and each perfectly fine.

— ErosBlog Bacchus (@ErosBlogBacchus) October 28, 2017

See also:

This revolution has room for two hashtags!

— ErosBlog Bacchus (@ErosBlogBacchus) October 28, 2017

In short, don’t worry about it!

This is not, as it would at first appear, what the engineering wags used to call a “Wernher von Braun divorce” — indeed, the device our svelte maiden is strapped into is not even a rocket, despite all appearances:

According to Weird Universe, that’s Miss Margaret Travis, preparing with something less than full enthusiasm to demonstrate something called the Shapson Aquaplane at Santa Monica, California in 1935. It was, supposedly, a crank-operated device allowing a swimmer to achieve a speed of 12 knots through the water, although it seems not to have caught on as a technology.

Here’s a newspaper clipping and photo featuring a different model and swimmer, one Bobbie Sperry, whose facial expression suggests she’s even less impressed than Ms. Travis with inventor S. Shapiro and his whizbang device:

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I don’t know whether her pedal dexterity here would give her an edge with just any man, or whether using her toes and the sole of her left foot to massage his balls is a play on something she knows about this particular gentleman’s weakness for a woman’s feet. But either way, the lady’s ingenuity and dedication is commendable:

Artwork is by Georges Pichard.

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From a photograph by John Kayser that was part of a show at Farago gallery in 2016, via AnOther.

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I woke up this morning to unwelcome news on Twitter. A few days ago, Patreon quietly (which means, without actually notifying the people who use its platform) updated the Adult Content portion of its Community Guidelines in an unequivocally porn-hostile way:

This is a substantial change after a long period of stasis. As recently as September, Patreon had not changed these guidelines since I analyzed them in detail back in 2016, when I was still agonizing over whether to solicit pledges on a platform that was then explicitly “not for porn” but which advertised its openness to “adult content” and promised to clarify the distinction in future policy updates. As I explained then:

I’ll admit I’m of two minds. I’m so offended by undefined “no porn” policies that I want to piss on the toes of every company that trots one out. But I also find myself tempted to give Patreon the benefit of the doubt just now. It’s possible they’re doing the best they can for adult content creators, in the context of a business/financial environment that is implacably hostile to us.

Notice two things. First, there are no reports going around that anybody has been kicked off of Patreon, had their money held, or suffered any adverse consequence of the new guidelines. Yet. So if this truly be #pornocalypse come to Patreon, it’s the sound of the hoofbeats in advance of the dread horseman, not the horseman himself.

The second thing I would have you notice requires your keen focus on the true meaning of #pornocalypse, which is a word that everyone, including me, throws around very loosely. But in its most precise usage, #pornocalypse is a financial term. It refers to that precise moment in an internet company’s business life-cycle where the business value of having “adult” content on the platform (popularity, users, traffic, coolness, network effects, buzz, et cetera) is suddenly outweighed by the detriment to the company of having to justify the presence of that adult content to bankers, stockbrokers, and venture capitalists. These financial-industry people are universally conservative to the point of squeamishness about sexual content in the businesses touched by their money, no matter how libertine they are in their personal lives. And so the pornocalypse always comes, as predictable as clockwork, to an internet company that’s going through a significant financial transition.

Hmmm, didn’t I recently get a bland email from Patreon about exciting developments, something about sixty million in new venture capital? Sure enough I did…

So yes. The way this works is that Patreon cannot afford to have anything in its system that might offend any of its new financial overlords. The new guidelines may or may not be followed up with new hires whose job is to go through and start throwing indy porn projects out of the system; let’s hope not. Best case is that the guidelines are to make things clear-cut so that when some indy porn site gets a bit of press buzz and the headline “Patreon-supported Porn Site Blah Blah Blah” starts trending in the business press, Patreon’s managers will have clear cause to nuke that unfortunate site from the system before Patreon’s venture capitalist backers can get on the phone to complain about reputation damage.

How much does this affect the ErosBlog Patreon? Not, I think, much; my status was ambiguous before and it remains ambiguous. The ErosBlog Patreon was fragile before and it remains fragile. This has been my position since I started exploring crowd-funding options:

I’m proud of the fact that everything I do is porn, even if it’s also erotic art curation or forensic photoarcheology or deep-dive provenance research into viral photographs or reluctant investigative journalism and cynical commentary about platforms used by pornography enthusiasts. So I’m looking for a crowdfunding platform that won’t make me lie about what I love to do. I don’t doubt that with a bit of careful fancy-dancing I could use one of the porn-squeamish platforms, at least for awhile. But I would hate to get invested (or to get my patrons invested) in a platform where the official policy is to prohibit porn officially while tolerating it on a case-by-case basis as long as it doesn’t get too uppity.

I have contacts in the Bay Area. Through one of them, I heard a sort of personal rumor that the Patreon team was committed to trying to make the platform work for adult content creators. I knew it wouldn’t survive the first big financial phase change, but what the hell; I decided to get down off my high horse and give them a shot. And so, I set up my Patreon to emphasize my digital curation and provenance work with vintage erotic art, which should be equally fine under the new wording or the old. But I’ll probably want to revise the pitch a bit to put less focus on supporting this blog, which is still a porn website in my own eyes if (perhaps) not the kind of pornographic material production that Patreon is newly prohibiting. Who knows? It’s not like any of us will get a chance to lawyerlips our way out of a ban anyway; when the #pornocalypse comes for you, there’s usually no appeal. So be careful out there, people!

It may be nearly Halloween, but you know what? It’s never too late in the season for a glass of lemonade!

Via Kinky Delight. The lemonade stand operator is Charlotte Cross. Per the watermark and link at Kinky Delight she’s getting her lemons squeezed somewhere in the vast Brazzers porn network.

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