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The Sex Blog Of Record
October 4th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Fourteen years ago I posted a bit of a rant explaining that my typical refusal to link to adult content that’s hidden behind adult disclaimers, login buttons, age verification schemes, and all other “useless excrescence that interferes with the natural linkage from one web resource to another” is political. It’s one little thing I can do to strike small blows in the eternal culture war against the forces of repression who wanted then and want now to keep “adult material in locked ghettos at the fringes of the web.”
Today’s post is in the nature of a policy notice, reminding everyone that Tumblr (under the thumb of Yahoo as sold down the river to Verizon) switched sides in that culture war when they took the explicit porn blogs dark, making them invisible to the open web when they barred them to search robots and made them invisible to everyone but logged-in Tumblr users with non-default settings.
It’s long been my habit to fix broken links of all kinds on ErosBlog by replacing them with functional links to archived pages in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Adult Tumblr links have always been fragile; Tumblr has a history of deleting adult blogs for non-transparent reasons. So I’ve fixed a lot of old broken Tumblr links over the years with Wayback Machine replacements. These days, though, a lot of explicit Tumblr porn blogs (but not quite all of them) are locked behind the Electron Curtain without being, technically, deleted. Links to those blogs now land the surfer at a message like this:
It might in theory be possible for a savvy surfer to comprehend from that message that they need to create a Tumblr account or log into an existing account, change the default settings, and revisit the link in order to see the originally desired content, but as far as I’m concerned, such links are better treated as broken. The purpose of this post is to explain my intention to treat all such links the same as broken (404 not found) links that I encounter in my archives. Which is to say that, time permitting, when I encounter these links I will repair them by replacing them with an Archive.org Wayback Machine link that does not require login. I encourage other webmasters with control over such links to do likewise.
Example: Until today, this post from 2012 contained the following link to the Happy BDSM tumblr: ( link ) Because clicking that link now brings a non-logged-in or non-Tumblr user to the Tumblr buzzkill page, I have treated it as a dead link and replaced it with a working link to an archived page: ( link ) I hope that helps clarify!
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October 3rd, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Fifteen years ago today, I posted the first post on ErosBlog. I am, frankly, amazed to still be at it. I hope you’ll forgive some of today’s wordy indulgences, as I complain about stuff that has gotten difficult and gush about the things I’ve grown passionate about that weren’t even on my radar fifteen years ago.
But first, it’s a birthday! There’s supposed to be cake. I ordered plenty for everybody by clicking on a social media recommended-for-me advertisement. Big Data knows exactly what we want and need these days, right? The cake should be awesome! But when the cake actually got here…
On second thought, maybe we should move rapidly along from birthday cake. Let’s start with a look into my earlier predictions and expectations, shall we?
10 years ago, I was pretty damn upbeat about sex blogging:
I love doing this blog and I can’t imagine stopping voluntarily. Five years ago it was still possible to claim that blogs were a fad. Five years from now, it’s possible we’ll all be considered impossibly old-fashioned, like paper magazines and network television and phones that plug into the wall. But this is about the sex, baby! And people don’t get bored with that, so I should still have an audience.
Five years ago, and five years after I wrote that, I was just a little bit less sanguine:
Where in all this do sex blogs fit it, in the waning month of 2012? Well, people still like reading about sex and viewing dirty pictures, and they all have these miraculous and awesome (I think so anyway; that’s how you can tell I’m old) little always-connected internet devices in their pockets now. Even if “blogs” finish going away and “surfing the web” has become hopelessly quaint, there’s got to be some way to keep on doing what we do (find sexy stuff, pull it together, make a few wise-ass remarks about it, entertain the folk). Our challenge as sex bloggers (or whatever we become when blogging is as dead as carriage racing) is the same as it always was: to do it well enough to be valued, to earn and maintain the attention of our readers in an overstimulated world where attention is the scarcest currency.
In 2007 I asked “Will there be a Ten Candles post on October 3, 2012?” In my secret heart, I was pretty damned sure the answer was “yes”. I’m delighted to have been right. But what about the future? Will ErosBlog still be here in 2017? I’m less confident than I was in 2007; I grow older and move more slowly, while the world speeds up and accelerates into the future. But I’m persistent, and I’m stubborn. Unless I stop being entertained by porn (which seems unlikely) I can’t imagine not having bits of it that need pointed at and talked about. So, just as I did in 2007, I’ll say “I truly do hope so!”
Well, friends, here we are in 2017, and we fuckin’ made it. But blogs in general and sex blogs in particular are not just quaint by this point, they’re positively obsolete. I don’t mind saying that 2022 is starting to look like it might be a serious reach for ErosBlog. More on that later. Let’s talk statistics and history for a minute.
In fifteen years, ErosBlog has published 5,358 posts (5,026 by me, the rest by my several guest bloggers). That’s just under (.98) one post per day — a pretty decent 15-year average if I say so myself! Those posts have attracted 20,499 approved comments, although it must be said that most of those were in the first seven or eight years; since the rise of social media, comment frequency has plunged through the floor, fallen off a cliff, choose your own plummeting metaphor. Only the most loyal blog readers comment any more. Once social media came along, people took their comments there for the most part — and thanks to the #pornocalypse, sex bloggers aren’t welcome on most social media platforms. Or, to be more precise, we may be welcome there in our own persons under our true names, but except on Twitter (the final holdout, for whom the death knell of the #pornocalypse has yet to toll) we aren’t reliably welcome on any major social media under our porn-industry pseudonyms and the adult content of our blogs isn’t welcome there at all.
As for traffic, I don’t have any sort of meaningful long-term traffic numbers I can share. Web traffic is notoriously difficult to measure in any objective way. It’s going down, though, and has been for at least half a decade. I’ve stripped the numbers from this three-year line graph because they aren’t very illuminating, but the trend is clear:
There are many factors that are taking traffic away from independent sex bloggers. They include:
- The decline of the open web and its replacement by closed and adult-hostile social media and app-based ecosystems such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and others;
- Decline in desktop computing and rise of mobile computing generally, feeding the app-based replacement open-web activities noted above;
- Google’s algorithm changes that display virtually all adult websites (except for select popular tubesites) at locations that are buried many pages deep in the search results;
- Deterioration of the paid-subscription porn model that (through affiliate sales) used to support independent adult websites;
- App-based dating software replacement of subscription-model dating sites that (again through affiliate sales) used to help support independent adult websites;
- Rise of video-based “tube” sites based predominantly on free (stolen or promotional) video clips, undermining the paid-porn model and sucking up adult-internet surfer time and attention.
Changes in the porn business and the steady decline in traffic have meant a lot of alterations in the business of sex blogging over the last decade, too. Five years into this gig, it was going really well; I was making more money as a sex blogger (mostly from porn subscription sales) than I ever made at a square job (and I used to work in an office with a tie and a 401k and an eye-watering mortgage). Ten years in, not so much; porn sales were fading fast, but I was making up some of the difference selling ads against my traffic to people who were still making sales on offers that weren’t available to me (stuff that didn’t have affiliate programs). Now? That’s all gone, or nearly so. At these traffic levels I can’t sell a traditional display ad on ErosBlog to save my life, not at least for a price that’s worth having the ugly on my pages. (And the ads that are available are awfully sleazy.) The blog no longer makes me anything that could be considered a living. Such income as does come in is from my generous and much-appreciated Patreon patrons, from sporadic sponsored posts, and from the faded and tattered remnants of the once-mighty affiliate sales ecosystem. Other web projects, freelance writing and research (adult and otherwise), and custom web work take up the bulk of my time, and ErosBlog visibly suffers for it; but it is, as they say these days, what it is.
If you’ve wondered, sometimes, why day after day the new ErosBlog post is just another obscure bit of pulp cover art, that’s why. I am awash in art that I’d like to share, but I simply don’t have enough free time to spend two or four hours busting out a detailed post for the blog every day. A time-consuming post doesn’t pay any more than an image post, things are financially lean chez Bacchus, and it makes more sense to focus on paying work. So, instead, in my free time I use the blog to indulge my passions, which lately have been:
- Surfacing outstanding vintage pulp art from scans that may be online, but are in formats (.pdf and such) that aren’t easily image-searchable and that folks haven’t seen before;
- Tracking and documenting the #Pornocalypse, which is my word and hashtag for the process that social media platforms go through of imposing censorship on their users at that stage in their development when they come under the scrutiny of the moneyed Wall Street and banking interests, who are inevitably more prudish than the Silicon Valley techies who have typically been willing to allow porn on their platforms while they are trying to achieve user volume and “liftoff”;
- Performing curatorial work of all kinds on interesting porn (typically vintage) that exists online in a condition of scandalous disorganization and degraded metadata;
- As resources allow, procure and digitize actual offline porn resources like this, bringing them to the digital world and finding them a secure home here;
Will I still be doing these things in 2022? Well, if we still have a technological society and a more-or-less free country and a somewhat uncensored internet and a functioning economy and a power grid and if I still have access to all those things: probably. I’m pushing fifty, folks; what I enjoy doing seems to change more and more slowly as the years pass.
But will I still be doing all that at ErosBlog?
Cautiously, hopefully, nervously… I think so. Maybe not on the gold-plated, managed-hosting, all-services-provided commercial-grade server that I’ve been using since 2004; the economics are starting to seem highly questionable, although I treasure the rock-solid uptime and the professional support. But I’d hate to abandon my archives (even if Google mostly won’t show them to any but the most dedicated searchers) and I still believe in Bacchus’s first rule. I might get pushed to discount hosting somewhere, but I can’t imagine not keeping up a self-hosted WordPress blog (although five more years of technological change could easily make this sound like a silly thing to have said.)
It’s possible I’ll have to give up on my near-daily posting schedule. The posts I truly value are the lengthy and meaty curatorial ones; and I’m only managing a few of those every month as it is. There’s not much indication, in the traffic numbers or the comments or in any other feedback, that anybody but me would miss the daily pulp art posts, so if I have to cut back to focus more time on making a living, those will be the first to go. The “post every day” rule is a discipline from another blogging era, when (among other virtues) it was thought to help deliver a high volume of Google traffic. If it ever did (and it seemed to) it surely no longer does now!
Reading this over, it “feels” a bit like I’m whining about how ErosBlog used to be a business and has now become a hobby I don’t have sufficient time for. Perhaps I am whining, but if so, please accept my apologies; such is not my true intent. Fifteen years of sex blogging have given me a great deal to be thankful for, including:
- A long list of online sex-blogger friends who, though I may never meet them, I feel I know as well as if we were siblings, and whose good will and ready wit I treasure daily (even if I usually now have to go to Twitter for it);
- An huge visual vocabulary of vintage erotic art and contemporary porn that, although typically it isn’t a thing that’s easy to get paid for having, is ridiculously convenient when undertaking one of my curatorial or provenance-research projects;
- A unique (as far as I know) set of skills for researching the provenance of visual erotica, along with unusual amounts of image-searching skills generally;
- A growing passion for reversing (by means of reconstructive curation and preservation of imagery together with its metadata) the erosive, destructive, entropic destruction of metadata that social media sharing wreaks on internet erotic visual media; and
- A long term ambition to find and digitize “lost porn” that’s still stuck in the analog world — especially rare and vintage specimens thereof — to provide it with a secure digital home and the best possible accompanying metadata.
These are are all fine things to be passionate about, even if I never imagined any of them back in 2002 when I first started this blog. If the last two are the passions that I would still like to find a way to spend more time on than I can currently afford, I shan’t apologize for that; I plan to keep trying to find a way. With any luck at all, by 2022 I’ll be having more success than presently, and it is to be hoped that ErosBlog will still be a part of whatever scheme is working.
The WordPress word count meter tells me I’ve already spent 2,000 words on “me me me” navel-gazing, so let me close with a post-script directed to you, my treasured audience of loyal readers. There’s still a thousand-plus-a-few of you who stop by to view and read on any given day, which is a trust and a responsibility that sometimes weighs heavily when I am being lazy or self-indulgent. I’d like to know a lot more about what brings you, and what keeps you, and what would keep you coming back for the next five years. Even if you don’t normally comment, please consider leaving a comment today. Tell me what you like, tell me what you ignore, tell me what you’d like to see more of. All feedback gratefully accepted!
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October 2nd, 2017 -- by Bacchus
This post falls very much in the category of my endless quest to pursue and repeat authentic-sounding accounts of diverse sexual experience that I would never encounter and do not need to understand. From the Courting Disaster advice column in Guts:
I am a non-binary faggy sort of bi trans woman who tends to be mostly into other trans women and men (cis or trans). For better or for worse, I effortlessly pass as a cis woman despite that never being the goal for my own transition.
I’ve hit a problem where years on hormones have transformed how my genitals work such that I have become an arcane puzzle-box that bewilders all of my sexual partners until they give up.
Since hormones, I have not been brought to orgasm by a sexual partner even once. Everyone who has slept with me has been a cis str8 man, also far from intentional (they only got past my “I don’t want to be seen by straight people” filter by marking themselves heteroflexible). In my experience, str8 men are generally bad at sex anyway. When I was cruising as a gay man, I was usually able to teach str8 men what to do to me to make me finish. Unfortunately, I now have no clue myself what exactly they should do. It doesn’t respond like a dick anymore, nor like a clitoris. I’ve been able to do it to myself but when others do the same things it doesn’t seem to feel like anything.
I’m not sure if this is just because the str8 men I’ve slept with aren’t very good at sex, or because I’m really that much of a challenge now.
I’m a little bit unimpressed with the conflict inherent in the suggestion that “str8 men are generally bad at sex” coming from someone who has “no clue myself what exactly they should do”, but hey, it’s an honest conflict anyway, from someone who is seeking advice on how to resolve it. Whether the advice they actually get is helpful? That’s way beyond my pay grade.
October 1st, 2017 -- by Bacchus
I hope she’s going to be a welcome surprise:
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September 30th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
In what was doubtless the long hard winter of 1955-1956, Mr. Earl Stout of Central, Alaska (per Wikipedia, then a town with a declining population of perhaps 35 people) received five or more air mail deliveries of 8mm films. Roughly fifty years after he received them, some of his 8mm film deliveries turned up at an estate sale in Fairbanks, where I bought them for small money:
Earl Stout is known to local history; according to the “Central Chatter” column in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner of December 9, 1959, he was then “a long-time grader man” for the Bureau Of Public Roads, retiring from winter road-clearing duty to be replaced by one Tom Kennedy. This would mean Earl was nearing retirement (at least from heavy road-grader operations) at the time he ordered the films.
To be precise about what was in Earl’s collection as it came to me, the boxes are sized to hold four films per box, but one film is either missing or was never included; there are 19 films in total. As you can see, one mailing box is so “plain brown wrapper” that it has neither return address nor even (by accident or design) legible postmark; the others are from the “Movie Club Guild” (about which more later) of Burbank, California. The unevenly hand-stamped “titles” on the internal film reel boxes constititute the totality of the labeling that exists anywhere in the collection.
At the time I first bought these, it was clear they were porn, but much more than that was hard to determine. Then and now, I didn’t (and don’t) have any 8mm-viewing tech. I’m old enough to remember when household 8mm projectors for watching “home movies” were common, but that was a long time ago. I’ve seen projectors and even table-top illuminated viewers (for simple cut-and-splice editing) at garage sales quite recently, but not for prices I wanted to pay. A scanner doesn’t really work either (something about reflected light) although it’s enough to confirm in the roughest sort of way what’s on the film:
Back in the early aughts when I bought these, I was quite flush with porn-selling money. I didn’t care about technical details, or (back then) much about curation; I just wanted to get them digitized and sling them up onto the internet for everybody to watch. Trouble was, back then there were no nifty $300 units on Amazon to do the work; you had to send them out to a bureau (who might easily reject porn work, with or without returning your films) or buy thousands of dollars worth of equipment. So I left the films in the care of a buddy of mine, a porn collector and film hobbyist who (a) already possessed much of the necessary equipment; and (b) was willing to do the work, or at least begin it. Of course, I also had to give him a wad of cash to buy the remainder of the necessary equipment, but I figured it would be worth it.
Let’s just say: that didn’t work out. I’ll not say a harsh word against him; we’re still friends. He had some setbacks in life, which happens, and some heavy burdens to carry. The money got spent, the films didn’t get digitized, and he endured a lot of genuine shit that made my 8mm nudie loops fall off his list of actual problems. And thus, as they say in all the old stories, for many years the films were lost — not the “we’ll never find them” kind of lost, but rather the “I know they’re somewhere in that room and should turn up eventually” kind.
My friend was not wrong, either, about what kind of lost they were. Turn up, the films eventually did. And when they did turn up, my friend dutifully dropped them in the mail to me, for which I’m grateful.
What’s actually on the films? Well, that’s an interesting question. I’ll have to get a viewer and find out. Honestly, I don’t expect hard-core porn. These were sold through the mail “on the tease” without much description, and there isn’t much cultural record of a big fan club for them. Most likely, they are fairly tame striptease “nudie” stuff. If they were very awesome at all, you’d expect there would be an avid bunch of collectors swapping copies and reviews, and the internet doesn’t reflect much sign of that. Nope, the business model of the Movie Club Guild was to send these films “on approval” (that means free, sort of; they would come in the mail automatically on a regular schedule, and you could avoid paying if you sent them back promptly enough, or pay the bill that came with them if you wanted to receive the next shipment on schedule.) There’s not much indication that the Movie Club Guild ever advertised their titles publicly, or had much of a catalog; instead they used magazine ads with various come-ons. Here’s one from Man’s Adventure in 1957, the closest-in-time Movie Club Guild advertisement I can find to when my films were shipped:
I don’t believe the ad’s bullshit claims for one second about the contents of the films:
Secret Producers Selection!
First time offered! The startling and dynamic party films formerly seen only by Hollywood’s inner circle of sophisticated producers! Privately staged — feature beautiful showgirls and starlets demonstrating their their special talents when on the way up. A most unusual find for the collector of the bizarre!
Here are more ads from a few years later, by which time the claims had gotten much more dull and generic, although I’m sure the film loops were no different:
In any case, by 1961 the game was all over. The U.S. Postal Service shut down the Movie Club Guild for “depositing or causing to be deposited in the mails information as to where, how, or from whom obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile material may be obtained.” Remarkably, the postal authorities seem to have reached this conclusion based on the tame magazine advertisements alone, without ever actually viewing any of the actual Movie Club Guild films.
Meanwhile, back in small-town 1950s Alaska, imagine for a moment what the sociology of all this may have been like. The town is so small that the postmaster knows what everybody gets in the mail, just by looking at the outside of the packages. And there probably isn’t central grid electricity. What kind of chutzpah does it take to fire up your noisy private generator to watch porn movies, when everybody in town will hear the noise and have a conversation about whether you’re running your electric shaver or watching your pornos again?
Close examination of the Movie Club Guild ads, though, makes it clear that the company offered a free viewer that was very low-tech — probably a plastic (?) reel-to-reel device powered by ambient light, hand cranked and not much different from a child’s Viewmaster toy. No generator (necessarily) required! It’s true that the one film I’ve taken out of its box so far does show one of those distinctive “hot bulb” damage blisters that you would always get when a film would jam in a projector, but that could have happened much later in the film’s existence.
Bottom line: these films were mailed on approval, without having to be carefully described or advertised in any particular detail; they were cheap, and there was no branding or star power or box art or labeling or marketing of any kind at the per-film level. And, seventy years later, there’s no internet fan club or collecting community, even though these things ought to be the 8mm-porn equivalent of Book Club editions of paper books: the most numerous type of this sort of thing available to collectors, given that they were basically broadcast by mail like fish spawn to anybody who could muster a pencil and a stamp. My expectations, therefore, are not high.
But still: nineteen nudie films that maybe don’t exist on the internet. No matter how tame or lame, to me this is like a red flag in front of a bull. You know what I am going to do; the only question is how long it’s going to take me. I just need to scrape up the cash and time from all my other projects and obligations.
Eventually, I will want to:
- Round up a simple viewer and inventory the 19 films by whatever title and credit frames may exist on them, the existence of at least some of which is visible to the naked eye;
- Research the films to whatever extent possible to make sure I am not wasting effort on digitizing films that may already be digitally available;
- Obtain a decent device for digitizing 8mm movies;
- Digitize them;
- Share highlights here and with my Patreon patrons as appropriate;
- Find a secure long-term home for the digitized movies (probably the Internet Archive)
None of this is going to happen quickly; I’ve learned that digital curation projects like this take enormous amounts of time, and there will be hardware costs as well on this one. I’m staking out an ambition here, not a schedule. But I’ll do what I can in the time that I can find, with the money that I’ve got. As always, if you’re really enthusiastic about me making this or any other ErosBlog work a higher priority, an ErosBlog Patreon pledge is the way to encourage that!
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September 29th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
This sexy and colorful veil dancer dates to 1919 or 1920 from the pages of La Guirlande:
There’s a signature on the full plate which I take to be that of Umberto Brunelleschi:
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September 28th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
The internet is awash today with tributes and obituaries for Hugh Hefner, and it would be foolish of me to write another one. But I did want to say one thing.
If you came to your sexual maturity after 1990 or so, you’re probably wondering right now why the internet is losing its shit over the death of an old creep who objectified women relentlessly. As well you might. 21st-century Hugh Hefner was a cruel parody of the man being remembered so fondly in all those obituaries today. The sexual revolution moved on from him, far beyond him in fact… but never forget HOW MUCH HE DID FOR IT.
You have literally no idea how bad things were, sexually, in the world into which Hugh Hefner published the first Playboy. Neither do I; I’m not that old. But I saw my first porn in the 1970s, and I can tell you this: if Hugh Hefner didn’t invent sex positivity (as I’m sure he did not) he sure as fuck carried a bunch of the load of its early promotion.
In that era porn was sleazy, and grim as hell. It was mostly garbage made by mafia dudes, full of racist slurs and misogyny. Every woman in it was a bitch, a slut, a whore, or a tramp, with some kind of racial slur appended with a hyphen if she wasn’t white. Do I exaggerate? Sure, some. But those were the prevalent attitudes. What Hugh Hefner brought to the party was a whole new aesthetic. He said “We’re men, and we like sex, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and here’s a magazine full of culture and literature and pretty nude women, and you don’t have to be ashamed to read it or a dick about being the kind of man who enjoys it, and the ladies don’t have to be ashamed to be photographed in it, and we can all party together at my house, and it’s the new American future, and there’s not one damned thing wrong with it, and the people who don’t like it? They can go to hell.”
Sure. He got old, and he didn’t keep up, and he became a figure of derision or sympathy depending on how much respect and empathy you’ve got in your soul. But what he did for the toxic culture of sexuality in this country in the second half of the 20th century was an enormous fucking gift. Thank you, Hugh Hefner. Goodbye.
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