Back in June when Tumblr announced that blogs containing “primarily explicit content” would no longer be visible on the open web (but only to logged-in Tumblr users), I wrote:

Although the email does not say so, I predict that explicit-content blogs will go back to flying that involuntary robots.txt that makes them invisible to the search engines, too. No more outside search-discovery for Tumblr porn!

That day is here, and it gives me no pleasure to announce that I was right. A reader forwarded the email they got from Tumblr:

We’re contacting you to let you know that your Tumblr has been marked as containing explicit content. This means it won’t be visible to minors, people who are using Tumblr in Safe Mode, and people who aren’t logged into Tumblr.

No mention of search, but when I went to check the robots.txt on their Tumblr, sure enough:

As I explained in Thou Shalt Not Search Adult Tumblr Blogs back in 2013 when Tumblr first tried to sneakily hide all the porn blogs:

In robot, that means, roughly “All robots: stay out!” No search spiders allowed. No Internet Archive crawler. The tumblr is there, but you have to know about it, or you have to be linked to it. You won’t find it in Google, you won’t find it in any other search engine that honors robots.txt, and when Tumblr decides to stop hosting it, you won’t find the pages in the Wayback Machine – it will be gone for good, lost to humanity unless somebody with the technical chops and outlaw sensibilities of Archive Team finds a way to archive it anyway, robots.txt be damned.

So it is now official. The ghetto walls are up and the gates are closed. The adult-Tumblr community is no longer part of the open web. The #pornocalypse has claimed another social media victim.

Image credit: the graphic at the top of the post has been adapted from part of a panel that appeared in Action Comics #292 (1962).

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Kinky Delight calls this What Phone Sex Looked Like, 1931:

It’s cropped from a promotional photo of actress Dorothy Mackaill in 1931’s Safe In Hell.

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Seduction was a different and apparently more hazardous business back in the 1920s, but a bold man could make some progress, as in this cartoon by Field Smith in The Merry Magazine (March 1929):

The caption reads:

She: “I never thought you would dare to kiss me!”

He: “Well, there was a good deal of danger about it, so — er — I thought we’d better face it together.”

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In McSweeney’s, Helena De Bres offers fourteen items of Writing Advice To My Students That would Also Have Been Good Sex Advice For My High School Boyfriends. Here’s one of those items:

Avoid making bold assertions you’re unprepared to back up.

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This charming little poem about a Great War romance and the international language of kisses comes from the May 1919 issue of Saucy Stories, which I found in the Internet Archive.

A War Memory
By Frederick Moxon

When I was over there in France
Driving an army ambulance,
I sang a song and took my chance.

I took my chance and sang a song,
For war is foul, but youth is strong,
And life is sweet, and death is long.

Yes, life and love alike are sweet,
And by the well we used to meet —
Myself, and pretty Marguerite.

In southern vale the village lay —
(“Hell’s Road” a thousand worlds away),
And there was rest and holiday.

A church there was with chiming bell,
And moonlight silence by the well
Where whispering poplar-shadows fell.

I tried my French each little while,
And Marguerite, with puzzled smile,
Our meanings tried to reconcile.

But Love be praised! and thank the Fates!
One thing for no translation waits:
Her kisses “talked United States.”

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The artist writes:

Originally called “Talented” but I didn’t want anyone to miss the her bulging throat! So I added a couple tears, and changed the name.

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I come from a long line of men who, in my family, all run to varying degrees of in-person social discomfort, possibly due to some sort of mild spectrum disorder. If that’s what it is, it’s necessarily undiagnosed, because we are emphatically not the sort of men who voluntarily seek medical attention unless there is chest pain or spurting arterial blood. Moreover, we come from the social class where our imagination of mental health care (imagination of it being all that we have) is a Loony Tunes vision of something imposed by predatory men in white coats who come in a van with their straitjackets and a net on a long pole, preparatory to hauling us off to a room with padding on the walls.

However much or little of this social discomfort issue any one of us may endure, one common nuance of it is an extreme aversion to doing anything where we “don’t know the program”; I once saw my father refuse to eat at a fancy wedding brunch buffet because he’d never seen a buffet before that had servers at stations (like an omelette station) and he didn’t “know the program.” He was, basically, paralyzed and willing to forgo thirty-five bucks worth of all-you-can-eat chow because he didn’t know how he was supposed to interact with a catering employee. I had to get him a plate. (No, I’m not free of the disorder; I just avoided all the stations that had terrifying paper hats behind them, which the men in our family would consider “above-average coping skills”.)

Needless to say, we are not the sort of men who would voluntarily participate in an orgy or visit a sex club. Too many strangers and, it can be inferred from first principles, too obviously a set of necessary behavior protocols that we don’t know. It’s just not going to happen. We don’t know the program.

Still: although a visit to a sex club would likely be an impossibly large ask for one of us, we can and do learn new programs, albeit slowly and at no small cost in psychological stress. And one of the ways we do that is by doing lots of advance research and preparation. Hence I’m always fascinated by “how to” articles about activities where I don’t “know the program” and would thus be unlikely to do the thing. Slotting firmly into that category is Navigating a Sex Club for the First Time by Red Hot Suz, who offers about a dozen different tips and suggestions that will ease your first visit to a sex club. Reading the article doesn’t make it more likely that I’ll take my odd little bundle of inherited social phobias to a sex club any time soon, but it should smooth the way for more adventurous types. Consider this sensible suggestion from the Interacting With People section:

Flirting. Most clubs have an Ask Once policy, meaning that you can only approach a person/group of people once to ask to join them. If they say no, you cannot ask again. However, a good amount of people in attendance are open to talking and flirting, and maybe playing if the connection is right. Just because you’re at a sex club does not mean that you don’t have to try. Be as respectful as possible, and be as charming as you would be on a date.

Much more good sense of this sort awaits ye who go to read the whole thing.

Credit: The image at the top of the post is by good-girl artist Bob Powell and is from the story “I Joined A Teen-Age Sex Club” in First Love Illustrated #13 (1951).

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