Do It Yourself Porn: On Tumblr?
The notion of making the porn you want to see in the world has been an interest of mine for some time, although I personally don’t have the right sort of creative skills to do very much of it. My friend and erstwhile co-blogger Dr. Faustus wrote an epic sequence of posts on making your own porn back in 2011, and he’s been practicing what he preaches (most notably but by no means exclusively with his Gnosis College series of comics) for longer than that. So it’s natural enough that when I see a headline like “DIY Tumblr Porn: The Porn Movement We’ve All Been Waiting For?” I would parse it as potentially relevant to my interests.
You can imagine, then, my disappointment upon reading this sentence in the fourth paragraph:
Log in to Tumblr, however, and it’s unlikely you’ll find anything resembling hardcore pornography. Instead, you’ll find erotic and even romantically-charged content that couldn’t be further from the fake orgasms and artificiality of mainstream porn.
Am I the only one who feels this sentence disqualifies the author from any claim of knowing anything about mainstream porn or Tumblr?
If you’re interested in the phenomenon of people who make porn to share on Tumblr, you’ll find some things of interest in the article. But the notion that Tumblr isn’t first and foremost full of the same commercial porn the author disdains with words like “artificiality” suggests a dangerous lack of familiarity with Tumblr for someone writing about it for an audience. Worse, the notion that “mainstream porn” (whatever that means) can be somehow typified by the most boring and least authentic material in the genre suggests (and this is me being charitable) a lack of familiarity with the truism that is Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap.”
I’m not going to list any more of the ill-informed negative generalizations about commercial porn from the article. The obligatory quote from a sex-negative “therapist” with a book to sell on the “problems caused by pornography” didn’t help much either. Yes, there are people making porn for primary publication on Tumblr. But if you want to learn very much about that phenomenon and how it fits in the broader picture of commercial porn generally or the most recent pornographic innovations of whatever kind, this article will prove shallow and disappointing. Once again, I look at these things so you don’t have to.
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