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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
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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April 17th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
Twenty years ago I blogged about a site that had faked-up celebrity women with photoshopped jizz all over their faces. I ended the post with this prognostication disguised as a query:
How long until you can beam a mugshot of your cutest co-worker from your phone cam to your DVD player, which will cheerfully paste her facial features onto the lithe body of Vivid’s latest superstar porn model?
Futurism is always a curious mix of oh-my-god-nailed-it and hilarious failure. In 2024 we still have phone cams, but DVD players are getting rare. Vivid Entertainment hasn’t released a new movie since about 2018, and superstar porn models are also a vanishing breed. But technology to give us porn that features our latest crush object, with or without their consent? That, twenty years later, we most definitely have. Whether we (socially, culturally, individually) want it, or not.
Here’s my existence proof. On the left, we have a 1957 photograph of cabaret dancer (high class stripper) Jenny Lee, aka “The Bazoom Girl”. Three clicks later, on the right, we have a very convincing image of Jenny without her dance costume, courtesy of an AI filter offered by the for-pay (if you have cryptocurrency) service DeepNoods:
I’ll have more — much more — to say about DeepNoods in a moment. But first let’s look more closely at what the service has done. (Click on the above image for the full resolution side-by-side.) What was my user experience, and what do we think of the modified image?
User experience first: After setting up an email-verified login, it’s literally just three clicks to process a photo. Hit the upload button, select a photo, hit the “reveal” button, wait two minutes, done. No parameters, no controls, no settings, no muss, no fuss. Just upload and go.
As for the image: I’ve studied it closely, and I only have three minor complaints. Look at the areas I’ve indicated with yellow arrows:
- The biggest flaw, by far, is that the AI got confused by her right foot where it was partially obscured by her left thigh. The bit of half-shod toes visible in shadows in the original image was removed entirely, and something subtly important has gone wrong with her ankle in the altered image, leaving the impression that she’s trying but failing to hide a club foot from the photographer.
- In the original image, Jenny artfully turned out her left foot in that subtle way that dancers and pinup models have. The AI did its “revert to the mean” magic and turned her digitally-unshod foot back to the right, into a more natural pose that’s presumably better-represented in its training database of nudes.
- That same reversion to the mean was cruelly unkind to Jenny’s generous bosom. Not to put too fine a point on it: the “bazoom girl” got robbed by the AI, which provisioned her with digital tits that fall sadly short of the 42Ds she advertised in her performing heyday. Indeed, her digital curves in general are smaller and more muscular than her actual ones were. This may be in line with 21st-century tastes, but for a nostalgic curmudgeon like me, it’s not ideal.
All of my nitpicks aside, the effectiveness and ease of use of this software/service is astonishing. These are the fraudulent x-ray spectacles of comic book fame, made real (or at least less fraudulent) through the magic of software. I’ve known for twenty years that this day was coming, and I’ve known for a year that this particular photomanipulation was possible with the image generation and manipulation tools we’ve come to call by terms such as “AI” and “generative art”. But I’ve been thinking of it as a technology with substantial barriers to entry, such as technical skill and access to software and the creative cleverness to avoid the pornocalypse filters that are baked into all commercially-respectable AI tools. DeepNoods has rubbed my nose in an unsettling fact: the barriers are gone. Any fool can do all this now.
So let’s talk about the ethics of it all. Make no mistake: this is software that can hurt people. As the name advertises, it is a deepfake generator. Deepfakes, in the succinct language of Wikipedia, “have garnered widespread attention for their potential use in creating child sexual abuse material, celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, bullying, and financial fraud.” The pornocalypse filters I’ve bitched about already exist for a reason, and the reason is that publicly traded companies and financiers with public reputations have to grapple with the pernicious deepfake projects listed on Wikipedia and somehow prevent the worst abuses of these capable image manipulation tools. It’s arguably among the biggest business problems that these so-called AI companies have.
The proprietors of DeepNoods have gone another way. They have chosen to remain carefully anonymous vis-a-vis their customers, and their web page makes no claims or representations about who they are or where you could find them. After processing your first image (which is free) at DeepNoods, the next one costs a dollar (presented as a 50% discount off a $2.00 list price). The “buy credits” button dumps you without explanation onto a sparse third-party page that demands a telephone number “for verification” in order to “complete your crypto purchase”. (That’s as far as I explored, since I don’t have a telephone number I’m willing to provide to an untrusted site presenting itself as a crypto exchange.) We are left to assume that DeepNoods proprietors have chosen to avoid the potentially-messy reputational, legal, moral, and financial consequences of any misuse of their tool by being, if not beyond reproach, at least beyond being found or forced to endure remonstrance.
Yesterday, when I processed the Jenny Lee image for this post, using the single free promotional credit found in my account at first login, the DeepNoods site had neither a privacy policy nor any terms of service. Today it has links to both; and the TOS do contains words of prohibition with regard to “offensive, harmful, or illegal content.” But terms of service have no binding force outside the law of contract, and you can’t contract with an anonymous party. Which is to say: the terms of service are empty words, and thus I shan’t bother analyzing them further.
It’s probably also worth noting that the altered demonstration image DeepNoods chose to display on their homepage began as a widely circulated image of celebrity musician Billie Eilish.
So much for the service-provider side of the ethics problem. What of the users?
First of all, let’s talk about me, here at ErosBlog. I was not paid to write this post; it is not promotional in any way. I am not endorsing DeepNoods nor any other deepfake tool or service; I am not making any general claims about the ethics of using such tools. The ethics of using this kind of software are not different in kind than we have been grappling with since the invention of Photoshop, or the airbrush, or the sharp knife in the darkroom wielded by Stalin’s propagandists. The only thing that’s different about AI-enabled generative deep-fakery is the lower barriers to entry. It’s fuckin’ easy now.
It’s true that I have said a lot in the past about the ethics of altering images. I’ve posted about photoshopped cum on celebrity faces, the asshole who puts fake digital “whore” tattoos on beach nudes, the infamous Jesus buttsexed by Roman soldiers ‘shop, the construction of a naked quadriplegic, and even my own fumbling use of generative art tools to create topless depictions of Sophia Loren, albeit ones that inhabit the uncanny valley. That last generated some mild backlash, as well as some thoughtful questions; and prompted me to dig in to the ethics (as I see them) in some — but far from sufficient — detail.
The shortest summary of my views is that the technology used to create an image — any image — has no particular ethical relevance. The ethical inquiry is always a balance: what potential for harm does this image have, and what are the benefits of creating and publishing it? Who suffers the harms, and who reaps the benefits? Are the harms big enough to worry about? Do they outweigh the benefits?
To one degree or another, I’ve had to grapple with these questions every time I’ve published an image on this blog. I’m 100% certain that some of my choices — some of my attempts to balance the harms and benefits — have been wrongly made. To test today’s deepfake service, I deliberately chose the image of an adult entertainer who has been dead for thirty years, knowing that she’s far beyond the reach of my ability to harm her. I’m comfortable with that choice. Some of you may not be. If you want to tell me how you feel, the comment section is open for any civil remarks. The ethics of erotic imagery in general, and of AI image manipulation in specific, are endlessly interesting to me. Let me know what you think!
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March 16th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
In 2022 y’all may remember that I gave a poor review to Tumblr’s so-called unbanning of porn. While they did jettison the ludicrous prohibition on female-presenting nipples they inherited from Verizon/Yahoo, my conclusion was that the overall changes in 2022 were “pretty much totally a scam” because of near-total search invisibility for adult material.
At the time, however, I gave Tumbler’s Matt Mullenweg credit for writing the single most-honest explanation from a social media platform perspective about why porn-friendly social media was, in his opinion, essentially impossible in 2022. I linked and quoted extensively from Matt’s Tumblr post Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022. Well, now, guess what? I just tried to follow that link to revisit his essay, and look what I got!
As it happens, I think that Matt’s unusually-open essay from the perspective of a social media owner/operator is an important document in the history of censorship battles, the pornocalypse, and the contest between closed social media silos and the open web. So here’s an open link (no login required) to his essay in the Internet Archive:
Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022
And here, because diversity in archiving is good, is another copy:
Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022
For those who don’t know or remember, Tumblr used to have a policy around porn that was literally “Go nuts, show nuts. Whatever.” That was memorable and hilarious, and for many people, Tumblr both hosted and helped with the discovery of a unique type of adult content.
In 2018, when Tumblr was owned by Verizon, they swung in the other direction and instituted an adult content ban that took out not only porn but also a ton of art and artists – including a ban on what must have been fun for a lawyer to write, female presenting nipples. This policy is currently still in place, though the Tumblr and Automattic teams are working to make it more open and common-sense, and the community labels launch is a first step toward that.
That said, no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007. I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with “go nuts, show nuts” in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible. Here’s why:
- Credit card companies are anti-porn. You’ve probably heard how Pornhub can’t accept credit cards anymore. Or seen the new rules from Mastercard. Whatever crypto-utopia might come in the coming decades, today if you are blocked from banks, credit card processing, and financial services, you’re blocked from the modern economy. The vast majority of Automattic’s revenue comes from people buying our services and auto-renewing on credit cards, including the ads-free browsing upgrade that Tumblr recently launched. If we lost the ability to process credit cards, it wouldn’t just threaten Tumblr, but also the 2,000+ people in 97 countries that work at Automattic across all our products.
- App stores, particularly Apple’s, are anti-porn. Tumblr started in 2007, the same year the iPhone was released. Originally, the iPhone didn’t have an App Store, and the speed of connectivity and quality of the screen meant that people didn’t use their smartphone very much and mostly interacted with Tumblr on the web, using desktop and laptop computers (really). Today 40% of our signups and 85% of our page views come from people on mobile apps, not on the web. Apple has its own rules for what’s allowed in their App Store, and the interpretation of those rules can vary depending on who is reviewing your app on any given day. Previous decisions on what’s allowed can be reversed any time you submit an app update, which we do several times a month. If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we’d probably have to shut the service down. If you want apps to allow more adult content, please lobby Apple. No one in the App Store has any effective power, even multi-hundred-billion companies like Facebook/Meta can be devastated when Apple changes its policies. Aside: Why do Twitter and Reddit get away with tons of super hardcore content? Ask Apple, because I don’t know. My guess is that Twitter and Reddit are too big for Apple to block so they decided to make an example out of Tumblr, which has “only” 102 million monthly visitors. Maybe Twitter gets blocked by Apple sometimes too but can’t talk about it because they’re a public company and it would scare investors.
- There are lots of new rules around verifying consent and age in adult content. The rise of smartphones also means that everyone has a camera that can capture pictures and video at any time. Non-consensual sharing has grown exponentially and has been a huge problem on dedicated porn sites like Pornhub – and governments have rightly been expanding laws and regulations to make sure everyone being shown in online adult content is of legal age and has consented to the material being shared. Tumblr has no way to go back and identify the featured persons or the legality of every piece of adult content that was shared on the platform and taken down in 2018, nor does it have the resources or expertise to do that for new uploads.
- Porn requires different service providers up and down the stack. In addition to a company primarily serving adult content not having access to normal financial services and being blocked by app stores, they also need specialized service providers – for example, for their bandwidth and network connections. Most traditional investors won’t fund primarily adult businesses, and may not even be allowed to by their LP agreements. (When Starbucks started selling alcohol at select stores, some investors were forced to sell their stock.)
If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money. I estimate you’d need at least $7 million a year for every 1 million daily active users to support server storage and bandwidth (the GIFs and videos shared on Tumblr use a ton of both) in addition to hosting, moderation, compliance, and developer costs.
I do hope that a dedicated service or company is started that will replace what people used to get from porn on Tumblr. It may already exist and I don’t know about it. They’ll have an uphill battle under current regimes, and if you think that’s a bad thing please try to change the regimes. Don’t attack companies following legal and business realities as they exist.
It’s an important snapshot of a moment in adult social media history, and it needs to be publicly viewable for future scholars, researchers, and commentators.
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January 4th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
This is, of course, not our first conversation like this. She came up to me at my computer wearing nothing but her towel robe, and tried to get a quick kiss. So of course I reached under the robe and found something to grasp between thumb and forefinger.
Her: “Ow! What’s the matter with you? Let go!”
Me: “I need a better kiss than that.”
After a pleasant interlude, her escape attempt resuming:
Her: “I gotta go get in the shower and then put on my facial lotion.”
Me: …
Her: What?
Me, grinning: …
Her: WHAT?
Me: You gonna make me say it?
Her: …
Me, grinning even harder: …
Her, still clueless: Just say it!
Me, leering: I got your facial lotion RIGHT HERE, baby!
Her: {blushes, flees}
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January 2nd, 2024 -- by Bacchus
A few days ago on New Year’s Eve, Girl on the Net posted a question on Mastodon, asking sex bloggers to reply to her with a link to the post/story we’re most proud of from 2023. It reminded me that I hadn’t done any sort of retrospective, and I didn’t have time to do one before 2023 gasped its last. Instead I gave her a quick answer, along with this disclaimer:
Not a great year for my blog writing. I’ve been demoralized by the degraded state of the open adult web and the usual #pornocalypse difficulties around linkage and search and traffic and attention and money. For me it was a year of modest image posts with light commentary.
Every word is true, but upon reflection, it’s not hard to come up with a double handful of posts I’m proud of. So here’s my 2023 “ErosBlog in Review” notable posts list, a couple of days late.
- Let’s start with the post I chose to respond to GotN’s Mastodon question. I told her “my true blogging joy these days is surfacing vintage pop culture that illuminates the ties between historical and modern sexual culture.” Daddy Doms And Sugar Daddies features a 1950 magazine article I found about sugar daddies and their sugar babies. There were so many more age play tropes in two short pages than I ever would have expected to see 75 years ago. Plus, the post includes a bonus meme!
- My post The Free Love Bus Hasn’t Stopped Here In Years is a short post, but personally notable for me because I finally managed to capture in two sentences something I’ve been thinking about since the 1980s. Specifically, the complex and highly specific grief that people my age felt when the promised benefits of the sexual revolution were snatched away by the AIDS crisis during the few years while we were old enough to anticipate them but not yet old enough to have enjoyed them.
- If 2023 was, for me, mostly a year of “modest image posts with light commentary”, I still managed to find some delicious images. He Chose Ass is the post with the modern commercial porn photo I most enjoyed sharing in 2023.
- By far the most personal post I wrote in 2023 was She Balked At The Zipping. It’s about an unusual moment of clarity during the beginning of the end of my first serious relationship, back in the 20th century.
- My first post in 2023 turned out to be thematically important to a big story for erotic art this year, which of course is the rise of generative art made with AIs trained (controversially) on large databases. On January 2 I posted Sticky Jessica Alba, in which post I revisited a link from twenty years previous when ErosBlog was young, and celebrity fakes were made the old-fashioned way, in Photoshop. In January I speculated a little bit about the new AI tools, but by mid-summer, I finally got my hands on some that were simple enough for me to play with them, leading to a short series of posts like Generative Art: Alien Sex Toy Shop 2 with a few of my own primitive efforts using these tools.
- In July, I realized that an awful lot of artists have played with the erotic implications of Snow White and her seven horny dwarven roommates, so I did a Snow White And Lusty Dwarves Roundup post of examples that had previously appeared on ErosBlog.
- One of the simple but time consuming post types that I once hoped to do very much more of here on ErosBlog is curation of vintage gems from 20th-century pulps and men’s magazines. These are fun to do but when I give them the full treatment, cropping and cleaning the imagery for blog presentation and converting machine OCR results into clean text for searchability and ease of reading, one of these posts is often most of a day’s work. If I had more Patreon support I could and would do a lot more of these and less random gig work. Instead I’ve only been doing these when the subject matter particularly delights me, such as this failed 1970s effort to boot up a floating sex club aboard a Dutch cruise ship: All Aboard The Sex Boat: Atlantis.
- Another curation post that I couldn’t resist doing involved a presumed-fictional “feature” in True Men Stories magazine about a notional WII-era sea-going bordello in the Pacific. The 1970s headline was The WW II Cruise Of The Ship Of Sex and the post is Tramp Steamer And Floating Bordello.
And now, onward further into 2024!
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