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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
January 3rd, 2025 -- by Bacchus
Those of you who, like me, have rather lost interest in corporate social media and its inevitable enshittifications, might not have been paying attention to BlueSky, which has been growing up in recent months as a possible Twitter replacement. I haven’t tried it because by all accounts it’s quite adult-hostile, which is consistent — given my theory of pornocalypse — with its venture-capital funding sources.
That means I’m not fully briefed on what it means (in terms of search invisibility, loss of algorithmic juice, and so forth) to have your content flagged as adult content on BlueSky. But there’s never been an algorithmically-driven pornocalypse platform where the involuntary adult-content flag was a good thing. And what’s adult content on BlueSky? Well, mentioning vaginas, apparently. Here’s the Vagina Museum in London complaining on Mastodon about BlueSky’s moderation:
Maybe the filter kicks in based on the titilating content at the link destination? Let’s go see:
Oh, wow! Salacious! Lewd!
I’d welcome a discussion in the comments about your experiences on BlueSky with adult content and moderation.
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December 29th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
Overheard on Mastodon:
“Tumblr had some good stuff, until the Payment Processor Nation attacked.”
I feel like “attack of the Payment Processor Nation” is describing part of the same blind men’s elephant as the pornocalypse coinage is describing.
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October 10th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
I can’t say whether my changing social media habits are responsible for today’s observation, or whether it’s more about changes in the online scene. Either way, in the last year I’ve become aware of (or “met”, in a parasocial way) more online sexy-ladies than I probably did in the previous half-decade. I’m not only talking about the subscription-based erotic personalities on OnlyFans and similar sites, but also the camgirls who work through sex cam sites like Rabbits Cams and the e-girls who promote themselves and their paid-influencer personas on porn-hostile platforms as diverse as Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch.
My personal discovery of the joys of TikTok coincides with my surprise at learning that all these adult performers have, essentially, found a way to beat the pornocalypse. It’s not so much that they found one weird trick to fight the algorithmic censors. No, my impression is that they’ve become fluent in non-explicit seduction and ways of communicating the destination of their proverbial “link in bio” without actually having a (probably-prohibited) actual link in their actual bio.
From what I can tell by fascinated observation, these seductive social-media entrepreneurs first make themselves attractive and then, when they’ve got a firm grip on the erotic imagination of their male viewers, they deploy a fluid mix of euphemisms and suggestive hints to help viewers understand which camsite or subscription platform to check for their more explicit content.
There are a thousand strategies for being commercially seductive without being explicit. My favorite, which appears in dozens of variations, is something I’ve dubbed the “patriarchy-bait” strategy. A pretty woman will appear, fully and casually dressed, and she’ll say something like:
Ladies, you want to keep your man happy? When he leaves for work in the morning, he should have a full lunchbox, a hot breakfast in his belly, an empty sack, and a smile on his face. Every day! It’s not that hard…
There’s really nothing for a pornocalypse algorithm to seize on. The “empty sack” is of course a reference to drained balls, and implies wakeup-sex every morning, or a blowjob; but it’s generic enough (with many possible circumlocutions) to fly under the pornocalypse radar. And it’s sweet bait for sexually-unsatisfied men, who think “Yeah, I like this girl, even if she is too good to be true” and follow her.
So that’s one way a TikTok “accountant” (euphemism for sex worker) or “mattress actress” (which implies being a porn performer or camgirl) can set her horniness hook, as it were. But then how does she reel in the customer to her subscription or cams platform of choice? More euphemisms! In a different video, she might say with a wink “I only have fans, no air conditioning.” She might just say “look for me in the usual places.” She might mention being a “corn star” and say words that rhyme with the name of the site she’s on. Again there are a thousand ways, all of which rely heavily on euphemism, something very similar to the old Cockney rhyming slang, winks, verbal nudges, and salacious hand gestures. It’s very much a finely-honed art form, and I am not an artist in that medium.
In my original 2013 post on surviving the pornocalypse, I wrote that thriving on porn-hostile social media platforms was a matter of being pushy on a diverse array of platforms and then staying agile in the face of the inevitable backlashes and bans. I wasn’t wrong, but I sure didn’t envision the amazing deftness and skill that clever adult performers would evolve!
Image credits, top to bottom: The curvy innocent with rabbit ears who is getting dubious help making a sex tape for her “OnlyStans” account is by PonehAnon. The blue-haired babe with big tits and bunny ears preparing to make some blowjob content for her channel is by Kisou. The bunny taking mirror selfies of her ample breasts is by Eltonel. The woman posing for pics under her ring light in the full Playboy Club bunny-waitress outfit is by cela/akeeeeee675. The jizzed-upon woman shooting porn in her bunny ears, stripper cuffs, and fishnet gloves is by Player1.
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August 24th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
After ChatGPT falsely claimed that Erosblog is “often referred to as the sex blog of record” (which has never yet happened even once in 22 years) a mutual on Mastodon told me I should take it and run with it: “highly recommend you just start calling it that to be honest.”
And that was… a superb idea! The old tagline/subtitle for ErosBlog was “Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality”, and that hasn’t changed since 2006. Now: updated!
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August 23rd, 2024 -- by Bacchus
[Publishing note: I wrote this article in 2017 for the onsite blog of an erotic stories site called NovelTrove, which stopped updating in 2022 and went offline a few months ago. This version is as submitted to NovelTrove, with subsequent editorial changes not reflected. An archive of the as-published article is here. The instant republication was prompted by yesterday’s thread on Mastodon that evolved out of this ErosBlog comment.]
Let’s talk about the early days of sex blogs. It’s not easy, though, because what exactly is a sex blog?
As the proprietor of ErosBlog in the early days, I was there — I lived that history. I think I was the first person to call my blog a sex blog. Having that experience, though, doesn’t make the history of sex blogging seem any less complicated.
Everybody knows a “sex blog” is a blog about sex. But what do you mean by “blog”? There are many definitions, but here’s the one I was using in 2002, when I started ErosBlog. A blog to me was a personal website where people would post regularly, their posts would be dated, their newest posts would be at the top of the page, and they would also have a link list or “blogroll” pointing to other blogs. Were you doing all that while talking about sex? Congratulations, you had a sex blog!
It’s different now that social networking sites are so big, but back then, if the site wasn’t personal in some way, it wasn’t a blog to me. Blogs (“web logs”) evolved from the online journaling/diarist tradition that had grown up at sites like LiveJournal, and they were distinct from news sites or “web magazines” because those sites didn’t speak with a human voice. If you didn’t have a human-sounding authorial voice, you didn’t have a blog.
Similarly, if you didn’t have a list of outbound links, you weren’t a blog because you weren’t part of an ongoing conversation. In the early days, bloggers talked to each other in the comments. Blogging was a true social network back then, in a way that it no longer usually is.
Finally, your posts had to be dated. Lots of people had “web pages” where they would edit the HTML by hand from time to time to make updates, but if you couldn’t see at a glance when a thing was posted and how that thing related to other posts, you didn’t have a blog.
What did early sex bloggers post about on their blogs? Well, they posted about sex, of course! But it was different back then, because most sex blogs were almost porn-free, at least in a visual sense. Dirty pictures were quite rare on sex blogs, because in the mainstream blogging world, there were still a lot of taboos. “Internet porn” was a big thing, but many people reading blogs would not dream of viewing a “porn site”, and many more were reading blogs at work, which is why “NSFW” (not safe for work) became the obligatory adult warning tag among bloggers generally. It’s difficult to describe just how delicately a sex blog had to treat erotic images back then. It was incredibly easy to be “too” graphic, with the resulting loss of links and traffic from the blogging community at large.
Still, there was plenty for the early sex blogs to talk about. Many bloggers talked frankly about their own sex life and kinks. Posting erotic stories was also common. People would post their own stories, or they would post short excerpts from another blogger’s dirty stories and then link readers to the author’s web page to see the full story. There were occasional reviews of porn videos, and there was a lot of commentary on the sex writing that existed in the mainstream print press and on the mainstream websites of the day. In those days, print magazines were publishing such terrible sex articles that making fun of them quickly became an overused trope for sex bloggers. (Mocking the sex tips in Cosmo is probably the most famous example of this; some bloggers did it as a regular monthly feature.)
In the early days, though, it’s probably fair to say that we had sex blogs in fact before the idea of sex blogs ever existed. People were sex blogging but not thinking of it as sex blogging; and then for awhile they were thinking of it as “sex blogging” but not calling their blogs “sex blogs.”
I believe I’m the first person to ever start a site and call it a “sex blog” from day one. This was ErosBlog’s header in early October of 2002:
The day I started sex blogging, I only knew of one other blog I considered a sex blog, and that was Susannah Breslin’s The Reverse Cowgirl’s Blog. She didn’t exactly call it a sex blog, but it totally was one:
Breslin concurs; she wrote in 2014 that she “would consider” Reverse Cowgirl to have been a sex blog.
Breslin volunteers Daze Reader as her nominee for the first sex blog, and I have to agree that it was a very early one. Daze got his start almost two years before Breslin and me; in September of 2002 Daze said his site was “nearing its second anniversary”. The oldest archive I can find (October 2000) confirms that. Even in 2000, Daze Reader was a sex blog by any reasonable measure, linking mostly to sex stories in the mainstream press, but with editorial comment and the blog subheading “All about sex, technology, culture, news, art, gossip, politics, ideas, drugs, rock & roll…but mostly sex.”
Another early “sex blog” that didn’t use the name was Debrah Hyde’s Pursed Lips, which had its origins in an even earlier web diary and by August of 2000 was using “Sexuality News” as a header over content that’s indisputably sexblog-like:
One of my biggest influences in my earliest sex-blogging days was the website Tiny Nibbles run by Violet Blue, dating back to 2001 at least. Violet wrote about sex toys and sex education and sex in general, all with an open and unabashed sex-positive authorial tone that was extremely rare at the time. Her site, and especially her editorial voice, impressed me hugely. But it never crossed my mind that she was doing a blog, because her articles were undated until the early months of 2003, when she began including a “Tiny Log” on her pages, and putting dates on her articles:
Beginning in 2003, sex blogs started to take off as a category and as a community. They completely exploded in number, sophistication, and popularity. Over the next five years, sex blogs got better connected into mutually-supporting networks, while becoming more honest, more raw, more explicit, more pornographic, and more commercial. Sex toy reviews moved from an occasional oddity to a supporting industry, and explicit imagery (whether amateur, artistic, or commercial) became much more common. It would be a daunting task to even briefly summarize the sex blog world during those years. For an article that serves as a good place to start, I recommend Dangerous Lilly’s A Brief History Of Sex Blogging.
2008 marked a sort of “beginning of the end” for the sex blogging community, although the actual “end” never came, and probably won’t. The US economic crisis in 2008 had a big negative impact on the affiliate sales that supported so many sex bloggers, and the rise of social media sites (most of them hostile to adult content) sucked a lot of the traffic, readership, and community out of the blogging world in general. What’s more, the explosive rise in people using mobile devices (and spending all their time within specific apps instead of browsing the web) began to sharply diminish the amount of general web traffic to blogs of all kinds.
It was roughly then, too, that Google started filtering adult sites and deprecating them so they stopped appearing in the most prominent search results. That meant people doing general searches for adult topics mostly stopped landing on sex blogs at all. That was a big negative change for sex bloggers, who were used to appearing quite high in search results for sexual keyword searches of all kinds.
Despite such challenges, we sex bloggers are resilient. We won’t be going away any time soon. If the last fifteen years of sex blogging were a wild roller-coaster ride (and they were) I can’t wait to see the next fifteen!
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August 13th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
I am a nut, and my nuttery takes several very narrow and specific shapes. One of those shapes is my eternal obsession with the problem of porn curation: how do we publish, distribute, discover, access, and preserve access to ephemeral erotic material in a world where #pornocalypse and its social cousins have denied independent porn creators most access to search, social media, and the payments system?
Thus when I saw a Mastodon post blurbing Miss Pearl’s latest blog post On Having Porn For Dommes in terms of the “curation and censorship problem” affecting such porn, I knew it would perforce be relevant to my interests.
Longtime readers know that my BDSM porn interests as displayed here on ErosBlog are dirt-common, with male-gaze M/f porn at the top of the list, followed by the usual substantial fraction of commercial F/f material and then by token amounts of F/m and M/m stuff. That said, the Femdom Resource blog (written by a male client and appreciator of pro dommes, but ranging widely across the femdom content space) is one of my frequently-linked favorites, and I have a long history of featuring nonprofessional or lifestyle femdom bloggers (like Bitchy Jones) on the rare occasion that I’ve been able to find them under the avalanche of cookie-cutter pro-domme “spam” (promotional) content that floods most available channels. O Miss Pearl (subtitle: “non-professional perspective femdom & kink, with awesome erotica”) was therefore an instant addition to the ErosBlog blogroll as soon as I saw it.
But what about the “domme gaze drought” (as she teased it on Mastodon) in Miss Pearls’ recent post?
It has been true for the entire lifetime of this blog that fictional depictions of dominant women are really limited, and most typically tailored to what subs are attracted to. Or being more precise, what a certain paying audience of sub men will purchase. This standard tends to depict dominance in women as a vocation performed for the benefit of subs (or their vulnerability and persecution fantasies) and is often gender regressive as heck.
Yup, that sounds right; this isn’t content that I actively search for, but I do watch for it (if that distinction makes sense) and I don’t see much of it.
Her wide-ranging post covers a lot of subtopics in plenty of detail, but I began crying my amens when I got to this part about the problems facing porn creators:
Let’s drop some of our illusions about porn and how it’s made.
Porn, contrary to the way we talk about it, is a marginalized industry, disproportionately queer, with most people not making much money. Artistic talent and skill are not evenly distributed – nevermind that you need to be a wizard at marketing, with a work ethic that is punishing on the body to make it as any kind of artist, sexy or not. That’s on top of an ever increasingly sanitized internet and the frankly censorship oriented nature of most payment providers and most publishing platforms.
Writing, illustration and modeling are also incredibly poorly paid, whether it’s R, E, or P. One of the first things consumers need to know is that the big names are lottery winner, and most stuff falls into the obscure outsider art and cottage industry level. People who create stuff are not trying to cater to the patriarchy to be willing agents of it, they are navigating razor thin profits, fussy platforms and content saturation of a competition that puts you at odds with not only every creator currently working right now, but every surviving work running back more than a thousand years. And every other possible way humans can amuse or occupy their time.
There follows a highly educational tour of the deep weeds of the curation problems faced by Miss Pearl’s specific porn genre of interest. I’m not dismissing any of that by failing to quote or summarize it here; you’ll want to read it yourself in any case. (Yes, dear readers, I am telling you, yet again, that you’ll need to clicky the damn linky. This is a 22-year-old blog; it can serve as social media, but it doesn’t do so without reader participation.) Miss Pearl calls for smart and aggressive curation of niche porn (the fans cheer), talks about the value of self-hosting (a subject long dear to my own heart), and concludes that domme-gaze porn “isn’t reaching the audience. It’s fragmented across different platforms, only has so much advertising and the market it might have doesn’t know it exists.”
In conclusion, Miss Pearl points out that making niche porn is a fiscally-irresponsible artistic act, and that we need to be better curators and better fans if we want to encourage it:
Someone who is an honest to goodness lifestyle domme for real and a good creator, if they are being fiscally responsible, is much better off making something else.
If you want to turn that around, we have to actually make more of a project of curation and sharing out of it, and you are simply going to have to be more assertive fans. You are also going to need to develop a lot more gentleness around the content you consume.
Indeed.
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May 10th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
It matters a whole lot less than it used to, because who searches for “sex blog” in 2024? But a long time ago, being at the top of Google for that phrase brought in enough traffic to fund my rather-less-modest-than-it-has-subsequently-become lifestyle. Affiliate money was easy money, search traffic was king, and top search results for popular phrases were a guarantee of traffic and income.
It’s been more than fifteen years since any of those things were true. Moreover, for most of the last two decades, Google search has prioritized lifestyle columnists and sexual wellness/health sites (which is to say, people selling sex toys in a soft-pitch deniable way) in sex blog searches over any of the sex blogs like mine (or Girl On The Net’s, for example) that publish actual content intended to arouse. You know, porn.
That’s why I don’t much care any more if ErosBlog ranks well in a pornocalypse search engine. It doesn’t matter financially the way it did in, say, 2003. Nor is it any longer much of a competitive feel-good prize, now that sex blogging has outlasted its cultural moment. The only sex bloggers left are stubborn diehards like me. Why we still do it is a complex question with diverse complex answers, but “for bragging rights with each other about our Google search placement” isn’t even close to being on the list.
All of which is to say that that I haven’t seen a sight like this in a very long time:
I know what changed, too. A 22-year-old site is guaranteed to have a lot of technical debt, especially when operated by a tech-numbskull like myself. I freely confess dragging my feet for way too long about upgrading to secure browsing. For a long time, certificates were expensive and fixing big volumes of legacy content was a complex problem. Then, eventually, certificates became free (although still dangerously centralized) and WordPress plugins solved most of the legacy-content problems (old posts prone to breakage). But the biggest problem with technical debt is never the technology, it’s always the stubborn old butthead in charge of the site who balks at the necessary investment to fix it. Especially when the investment is mostly his own time and energy. It’s me. I’m the butthead.
Google has, of course, been downgrading insecure sites in the search results for years. See above for why I didn’t care very much. Over time, browser software, including Google’s, has also gotten more aggressive about warning surfers to stay away from insecure sites, with frighteners like scary colors, harsh symbols, and stern warnings.
A few days ago, I finally got my https:// shit together here on ErosBlog. Sure enough, traffic is up about 40% (albeit from a low base). Moreover, as the above screenshot reflects, I’ve got my #1 search position back for “sex blog”. Should have done it years ago, of course. But at least it’s done now. Onward!
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