It was five years ago that ErosBlog first covered the then-developing story of the sexualization of eggplants, to the point where the eggplant emoji was banned on Instagram. What with Rule 34 and all, it should be no surprise that by now, there is anal insertion porn of it. Bondage Blog has it:
It feels like a very long time ago that I wrote the post Google’s Mechanical Prude, documenting how Google’s then-new autocomplete search-suggestion feature ignored your settings (if you had asked Google not to impose its censorious “Safe Search” on your search results) and used a bunch of stop words to avoid suggestion porn, nudity, or popular adult performers. It feels like a very long time ago because it was eleven years ago, in 2008. Of course, Google never backed down from that then-cutting-edge bit of search-invisibility engineering. One ludicrous example I documented back in 2008 was that Google autocomplete refused to comprehend or to admit that searching for “Jenna Jameson nude” was a thing that people might want to do. And today, in 2019, Google is still sticking to those ancient prudish guns:
That investigation was perhaps the genesis for my hatred and horror of search invisibility as a #pornocalypse tactic. It feels totalitarian and epistemologically violent to me. People search for a thing. The robot assistants who operate so smoothly we barely notice them: those helpful bastards blandly pretend that the thing we want doesn’t exist and never existed. It’s insidious, it’s dangerous, and it’s intolerable. It’s also unaccountable, and we have no real way to protest or demand better searches.
Today’s post, however, is not about Google. It’s about Twitter. Search invisibility on Twitter is hardly a new thing, to be sure. It’s been a sometimes “feature” of the poorly-understood shadow bans that have plagued adult performers and sex bloggers on Twitter for years, though denied by Twitter until the recent release of their new 2020 terms of service incorporating shadowbanning as normal practice. Yesterday, however, I discovered a new-to-me type of search invisibility on Twitter. (I say “new to me” because some accounts of shadow banning had previously reported this dysfunctionality, but I never saw it when I myself was shadowbanned.) Specifically, the autocomplete search function that we all rely upon when we are trying to “at” somebody appears to have some disfavored Twitter users whose user IDs are not autocompleted. My discovery exemplar, surprise surprise, is an adult (porn) megastar with 172,000 followers. Gee, I wonder why she’s been invisibilized? I don’t know … but there’s a pornocalypse stench to it, don’t you think?
Here are my receipts.
Yesterday, I went to tweet about a lighthearted Christmas femdom shoot featuring Syren De Mer taking extreme liberties with a hapless Santa. I knew she was on Twitter but I didn’t know her username, so I just dove in with my “at” symbol and the first three letters of her name:
At this point there are ten results in the drop-down autosuggest box, although we only see five (without scrolling) in the screenshot. None of them are for Syren. Not really a surprise; we are only three letters in. Moving on.
And on and on and on… By the time I get all the way out to “@SyrenDeM” we are down to just two suggestions:
That second result looks like a possible hit; it’s @SyrenDeMerX. But no; if you look at the account profile, it’s a low-activity fake or tribute account, dating to 2014-2015 exclusively, consisting mostly of porn retweets. Let’s keep typing:
Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Her true Twitter handle is @SyrenDemerXXX, which is a 10-years-old but still-currently-active account with her OnlyFans and her agency booking info in her profile. But when we type it all the way out to one letter short of the full user ID, Twitter is still stalwartly maintaining that it has never heard of her. @SyrenDeMerXXX? Who dat?
If this is a “regular” shadowbanning “feature” that Syren is currently suffering under, the behavior might be gone by the time you attempt to confirm or replicate it. Shadowbans are notoriously fickle; they come and they go. Or maybe she’s on some hitherto undiscovered permanent pornocalypse Twitter username blacklist aimed at adult performers. Does it really matter? This is a woman with 172,000 followers on Twitter, suggesting that she’s somebody that a lot of people want to hear from. But if you try to type her Twitter username, Twitter does its best to pretend that she doesn’t exist. The reason doesn’t really matter; the result is fucking shameful.
By the way, in case you were wondering, Syren De Mer is not just blacklisted in Twitter’s user search engine. She’s also on Google’s autocomplete search-suggest blacklist, just like Violet Blue was when I wrote Pornocalypse Comes For Your Keyword Searches back in 2015. Violet now appears to have escaped from Google jail, but Syren is very much in it, even when I’m logged into my Google Account with so-called “Safe Search” turned off:
This is a woman, mind you, with 12.7 million search results currently in the Google web database:
If that doesn’t make you wonder what else Google and Twitter refuse to show you when you search for it, you’re not a very curious person. And if having to wonder about it doesn’t horrify or concern you, I truly worry about your capacity for imagination, empathy, and self-preservation in the information age.
Seventeen years ago, on this day in 2002, I posted the first ErosBlog post ever. I linked to a political blog and a risque newspaper photo. Although both links still work, it’s only due to active maintenance on my part and some help from the Internet Archive. (Apparently neither Glenn Reynolds nor The Sun ever got the memo about cool URIs not changing.)
On other anniversaries, I’ve maundered about the decline of blogs and wondered how long ErosBlog would hang on. Not this time. This is a very different blog than it was in 2002, or 2007, or 20012, or 2017. Most things have changed, usually several times. No matter. I’m in a confident place. ErosBlog gives me space to do some things I want to do, and that won’t change while I’m hale. Science fiction author John Scalzi recently marked his blog’s twenty-first anniversary with these comments:
I do still tell people that they should keep their own sites for when whatever social media site they use the most eventually sinks into the Internet’s graveyard, they’ll still have some place to be. The longer I do this, the more I realize this makes me sound vaguely like an Internet Prepper, waiting and perhaps hoping for an online apocalypse that likely won’t come. I don’t mean it that way, honest. Writers and creators should definitely have their own sites, with information about them and what they do, if only for search engine purposes. Everyone else, well. Do what you want, I guess. I do, which is to keep this place running. When Facebook falls, you’ll all still want something to read! I’ll be the last site standing! Bwa ha ha hah ha!
His “joke” about Facebook falling? He’s kidding to be sure, but he’s kidding on the square. Even if megacorporate social media won’t be going away any time soon, lots of people are starting to notice the tarnish on it. In a pornocalyptic era when Facebook bans and silently vanishes people for using “sexually explicit language” or offering sex to their own spouse, my first rule of the internet doesn’t look quite so crazy. And when the huge porn tubes control the vast majority of adult internet traffic, while offering nothing but video clips to weary porn surfers, I can convince myself that even my laziest streak of dirty picture posts makes somebody happy. Plus, look on the bright side: after the suicide of Tumblr, I no long need to worry that I’m “just doing Tumblr cosplay in a costume made out of stale WordPress.” Tumblr porn? Add it to the lengthy list of things that ErosBlog has outlasted!
Seventeen years. It’s a long time to run a website. I am, however, far from done.
As if we didn’t have enough problems, there’s a mounting body of evidence that Google now has an attention span somewhat shorter than ten years. After ten years or so, Google forgets things. Or, perhaps, Google just can’t be bothered to index these older web pages, because there’s no money in it.
Bray had discovered that his old blog posts weren’t turning up in Google searches even when he chased them with extremely precise search terms. I had noticed the same thing, but I assumed it was the “Google hates porn” filter that was killing me. (More on this later.)
Bray also noticed that Bing and Duck-Duck-Go were finding his old posts just fine. The implication is that it’s not some inherent “the web has gotten too big to index” problem, but rather it’s a deliberate choice by Google to focus on newer, fresher material. Bray:
My mental model of the Web is as a permanent, long-lived store of humanity’s intellectual heritage. For this to be useful, it needs to be indexed, just like a library. Google apparently doesn’t share that view.
Unless we’re all missing something here, it seems more correct to say that Google forgets stuff that is more than 10 years old. If this is the case, Google will remember and index a smaller part of the web every year. Google may do so simply because it would be impossible to do more, for economical and/or technological constraints, which sooner or later would also hit its competitors. But this only makes bigger the problem of what to remember, what to forget and above all who and how should remember and forget.
Neither Bray nor Fioretti applied the term “dementia” to Google. I got that term from an earlier (2017) blog post by open-data maven Tony Hirst, that was referenced in the comments on Bray’s post. Hirst posits that Google is getting both paranoid (because of SEO and other factors) and forgetful. To Hirst, Google seems rooted in the past, crediting signals of link authority that people are mostly not using these days (publication of links on websites) and not able to properly weight or remember the social media signals that accompany most links modernly. It’s a different problem to be sure from the one that Bray and Fioretti highlighted, but the terminology seems applicable here too.
My observations, from my perspective inside the adult/porn parts of the web, are parallel with Hirst’s. Google’s digital dementia is even more severe with respect to adult URLs, because our #pornocalypse-driven exclusion from so much social media means that our links are automatically absent from so many of Google’s modern page quality signals and ranking algorithms.
Here’s my own example, showing the type of digital dementia Bray highlighted. There’s an ErosBlog post from 2005 called Dildoes In the Subway (that’s the post title.) As of this writing, if you search for those four words in quotes, Google will admit to knowing of four places on the web — including three on ErosBlog — where that phrase exists, but Google doesn’t seem to know that the post itself exists:
Bing? Bing still has possession of all its faculties, and returns the proper post as the first search result:
I’ve been seeing this phenomenon for years, but honestly? I just assumed it was a porn thing. Google hates stinky porn sites like mine, and is always pretending not to know about pages that are actually in its index. Usually what this means is that you haven’t used enough “porn words” in your search query to convince Big Brother Google that you realio-trulio want a porn result, so the porn result is being hidden from you for your own good. But that’s probably not the case here, because “dildoes” ought to be porny enough. And anyway, we can test this; adding the “site:erosblog.com” search filter should override the “it’s for your own good” anti-porn filters:
Nope! Google is being adamant here; it knows of three places on ErosBlog that mention this post, but the post itself? Not in the Google index any more.
Just in case you’re skeptical or curious, though, here’s what it looks like when you’re searching for an ErosBlog page that actually is (unlike the Dildos In The Subway page) in Google’s dementia-ridden memory, only Google doesn’t want to show it to you, because stinky porn. I wrote a post in 2005 called The Pony Girls Of Ancient Egypt that contains the unique-on-the-web (until I hit the publish button on this post) phrase “a charioteer boffing a woman”.
Google knows about it. Google hasn’t forgotten it. Google has the charioteer-boffing in its index, all right:
But apparently “boffing” is an insufficiently pornographic word to signify that I am an adult who wants to see porn, genuinely and truly. Because, even though I have all the so-called “safe search” settings turned as far off as Google will allow these days, here’s what Google pretends to know about my Egyptian pony girls once I remove the site:erosblog.com search constraint. That’s right, it’s Sergeant Schultz time: they know nothing! Pony girls? Boffing charioteers? New phone, new search engine, who dis?
Increasingly I find myself going to Bing when I need completeness in a search result. Google’s digital dementia, it turns out, is part of why that has become necessary.
Serious question: Say you are an artist whose medium is video. Specifically, erotic video. Porn, not to put too fine a point on it. But you’re also part of today’s remix and fan cultures: you work with existing tropes, characters, stories, universes, and memes. (In other words, you are “extending and embracing” intellectual property that is not, strictly speaking, your own.) Now you’ve got a fun little porn loop sitting on your desktop, the product of a few weeks’ work that you want to share with the world.
Where do you upload it?
Forget my rule: almost nobody can afford to host their own video without a business model. Not if it has the potential to go viral.
YouTube is not an option. It’s a #pornocalypse platform. Google/Alphabet does not welcome your porn. Your porn will not survive on their platform for any significant length of time.
Что делать? What is to be done?
There truly is only one sensible solution. You would, you must, upload your work to a tube site.
Yes, yes, I know. Responsible commercial-porn consumers who pay for porn are primed to think poorly of tubes, because tubes have had a such pernicious effect on the commercial porn industry. But where you stand depends on where you sit. And if you’re an indy nonprofit artist looking for free distribution of bandwidth-heavy porn video files, tubes are an amenity. What follows from that is, that as a curator and researcher of obscure porn goodies, I have to give credit where credit is due: sometimes there’s no substitute for a good tube when I’m looking for video that won’t be found, that simply can not be found, anywhere else.
All of which is by way of explaining how I found myself searching pornkai.com for robot sex videos yesterday. Pornkai.com is an extremely interesting and useful site for the porn video researcher. Using various APIs made available by several large tubes and a search engine that does not suck, it exposes more than twenty-two million heavily tagged and key-worded video clips to the queries of intrepid researchers like your loyal reporter. Twenty two is a lot of millions. Or, to put it another way: that’s a metric buttload of video clips.
Did I find me some robot sex? Yes I did. Specifically, I found a somewhat puzzling fan video featuring a robot getting a blowjob followed by robot frottage (robot penis between humanoid thighs):
A bit of traditional in-out-in-out robot sex follows that but when our robot decides to sprout a whole bunch of tentacle dicks, Our Heroine (not actually a human, but apparently a humanoid android named Yorha 2B) has had enough; she draws her sword and there’s a sudden spate of robot de-dickifications. Cheering! And scene.
What does it all mean? Fuck me if I can tell you. I did track it all down as fan art associated with a videogame franchise called Nier: Automata. The artist and video maker is XiestoXenox-Xavi, aka Xiësto. I’d call them good at what they do.
Amid today’s cable news babble, one bit of good news. The ongoing government shutdown disrupted plans for a State Of The Union speech that nobody wanted to hear anyway. But as I poured myself a celebratory shot of booze, it occurred to me that I never gave you all a report on Kink.com’s extremely rocky — but eventually successful — process of uniting its once-ragtag empire of kinky porn sites under the Kink Unlimited brand.
I have a long and positive history with the company that became Kink.com in 2006. Peter Acworth’s original sites (beginning in the ’90s with Hogtied) were fresh and easily-marketed from an affiliate perspective. The company was professional, easy to work with, and paid like clockwork. As a sex blogger — even one not primarily focused on kink — I had a lot of time for all their projects. And at least in the early years, their models routinely reported safe and happy shooting experiences. They broke new ground with Sex and Submission, combining sex and bondage in a way that no mainstream porn company had previously had the courage to do. So great was their success, they were spinning out new sites like cotton candy. It honestly got hard to keep track of them all. They spent double-digit millions to buy their famous “castle of kink” — a former national guard armory — and ramped up production so much that by 2013 or so we started to need special web pages just to list all the Kink sites. Frankly, it was all getting to be more than just a bit of a wonderful mess.
But by that time, the arc of the profitable porn business had already peaked. Piracy, consolidation, and tubesites were taking their toll. In 2012 I noted with fascination an interview with Peter Acworth about his future plans for Kink.com in which none of those plans involved actual innovations in porn production. Obviously he wasn’t going to just walk away from his company’s core revenue stream, but his entrepreneurial eye was roaming off in other directions. About that time is when I started noticing that the affiliate department stopped being reliably and courteously staffed, too. Suddenly, getting affiliate support became catch-as-catch-can; whomever was doing seemed to be doing it “other duties as assigned” instead of as a core priority. Corners were being cut. Times were getting hard in the porn business.
One response from the company was to shut down or put on hiatus a few of its raunchiest sites (Bound In Public, Public Disgrace, and HardCoreGangBangs), eventually relaunching some of them with softer content, new shooting guidelines, and a bit of metaphorical soft-core Vaseline on the camera lenses. This was explicitly part of an effort to reposition the Kink.com brand as more of a mainstream lifestyle trademark a la Playboy. The unspoken notion, I think, was to license the fancy K on merchandise, and extend the “Kink” brand beyond porn, which was seen as a business in the final throes of ignominious death.
This cost-cutting and brand repositioning culminated in two huge moves in 2017 and 2018. 2017 brought news that all porn production in the huge San Francisco armory building had ceased, due to a search for tenants that were being dissuaded by sharing space with porn production. (That same story included rumors of a 40% decline in porn subscription revenue, driving the need to find tenants to support the massive space.) Porn production reported moved to “Southern California, Nevada and other parts of the Bay Area.” This caused one waggish email correspondent to describe the company to me as “a loose collection of contractors flying in formation” which I think may have been accurate at the time — except, I’m not sure if they were managing much of a formation. Of which, more later. (The move out of the Armory had to be traumatic for the organization. Empathy.)
Anyway, when I heard production was leaving the armory, my instant assumption was that this was preparation for sale of the building. I was not wrong: it sold in early 2018, for $65,000,000. (2006 purchase price: $14,500,000.) I’m not saying Kink.com didn’t make lots of money in porn, but this makes it look like a wildly-successful real estate business to me!
But I got ahead of myself. Backtrack to 2015 or so, when nobody much was making any money in porn. Everybody was grasping at crazy straws like remaking themselves as “lifestyle brands” — this was the brutal year when even Playboy briefly flirted with the notion of abandoning nudity because they were bleeding losses and couldn’t get any social media traction due to #pornocalypse anti-nudity policies everywhere.
One strategy, widely adopted by the few remaining big porn companies, was to take all their little porn sites (and everything left was little compared to previous years) and shovel them together into package deals. “10, 20, 30 sites for one low subscription price!” Those were the shouty offers, and to this day they remain the industry’s default value proposition. Some of these offers — if they are backed by a company that’s still actively producing a wide variety of porn — are very good offers indeed.
But that’s not even close to the whole megillah. Every test shoot, abortive site concept, and side project that never saw release — why not throw that in? Stuff that only ever got sold via their Kink On Demand porn-by-the-shoot product, that goes in. If it’s got a shoot ID in their shoot database, there’s really no reason not to throw it into the final product. And then, icing on the cake — why not let other porn companies into the action? I don’t know the details of their cross-licensing deals, but apparently it’s not hard to cross-license kinky porn from other companies and make that available too. (Presumably the back-end-software tracks views/consumption and compensates the original owners on some sort of negotiated pay-per-view basis.)
The end result? A product called Kink Unlimited. It rolled out in beta in 2016. The price point has fluctuated a bit, but it’s currently about forty bucks a month. That’s the base price. Sales — usually around various national holidays — can dip quite a bit cheaper. It’s also the case that if you’re willing to prepay for six or twelve months at a time, the monthly cost drops radically. Whichever price point you go for: for your money, you get access to a fucking ludicrous amount of porn.
Kink.com no longer makes any serious effort to estimate how much porn you get; the various banners and bullet lists don’t get updated regularly. “Over 70 channels” is their current claim — where a “channel” is code for a former site, or for a collection of content licensed from some third party. They say “Over 10,000 hours of HD video” — and they’ve been saying that for quite some time; I’m sure it’s rather more by now. “Over 12,000 shoots” — likewise. “Over 2,000,000 photos” — that number has not been updated since perhaps 2016. You get the idea. You get a shit ton of porn for your monthly Kink Unlimited subscription!
But friends, we did not get to “here” without some growing pains. The consolidation was painful.
Consider what the Kink.com porn site landscape looked like in 2015. They had thirty or more kinky porn sites, each on its own domain. Many of them were closed, or at least moribund, not being updated, with discount-priced access to stale archives. They had millions of affiliate links scattered all over the web (using at least three generations of different link structures) belonging to a bunch of affiliates most of whom where no longer active, due to the overall decline in the online porn business. They had millions of expensive “hosted galleries” — free porn, on their servers — to support those mostly-out-of-business affiliates and a bunch of freeloading porn surfers. And it was a world where the conventional wisdom was that the future was video, video, nothing but video. Google was giving all the search listing to porn tube video pages. Still porn photos weren’t appearing in search engine results anywhere in the top results (they still aren’t) because “the time the surfer spends on the page” is considered a powerful page quality factor by Google.
How in the nine frozen hells was Kink.com supposed to transition this mess into a single subscription offering under the Kink Unlimited banner?
In the event, they went with the Leroy Jenkins strategy:
That’s right. In June of 2016, they just burned it all down.
Hosted galleries? Gone. All the old legacy affiliate links? They mapped a few of them, but most of them broke. Gone. Those two million photos? It’s the age of video, we don’t need ’em. “Only…a small portion of our members use or appreciate them.” Gone. (Fortunately, the legacy photo collection did come back after about six months, although new shoots are variable; some sites don’t produce many more than the handful they need to show for free on the shoot promotional page.)
Needless to say, I found all this pretty demoralizing. My increasingly urgent (ok, desperate) emails to affiliate support were getting either no answers at all, or snotty “we don’t have the technical resources to address your issues” non-resolutions to my tickets. At one point one tech gave me a tiny cash credit for all the broken links he was refusing to fix, which I calculate was enough to cover about four hours of link repair work at my normal freelance rate. At this point I had something like 270 posts covering the years between 2004 and June 2016, call it an average of 3 links per post, something like 800 links. In excess of 500 of those were broken — either not going to the right place, or not crediting my affiliate account. Virtually none of these were simple, repetitive links amenable to a bulk find-and-replace. It was a fucking nightmare.
It was also too burdensome and demoralizing to fix. I didn’t even try.
What I did do, eventually, is start making new posts about holiday sales. I explained my reasoning here. And I noticed that people were buying, some, the Kink Unlimited product.
It’s a good product. It has kept growing since it was introduced in June of 2016. It’s fucking enormous now.
Finally, during the long holiday sales event that started in December, I bit the bullet and laboriously went through my 270 old posts, rooting out all the old broken links and replacing them with “new” working links. Everything is a Kink Unlimited link now — either to the main site itself, or to one of the channels (really just a themed subpage within the main site, showcasing the content from one of the old branded sites).
The laborious part was the old hosted gallery links. Those hosted galleries are gone. But, for the most part, each of the galleries had 20 pictures, and those same 20 pictures are now the free photos used to advertise the shoot. Most (but not all) the old hosted gallery links had the shoot ID numbers encoded in their URLs. So it was possible — not easy, but possible — to look at those old hosted gallery links, extract a shoot ID number, deduce a modern shoot URL, and edit the old post so that instead of saying “see more pictures in this free hosted gallery” it says “more pictures available with the shoot” or something.
But it took days and days and days. I drank. A lot.
Why did I do it? Honestly, it wasn’t about the money. Porn affiliate sales aren’t much of a thing these days, and what sales there are, come almost always from new posts. I have stats, and they tell me that old posts don’t see much traffic. A few long-tail searches, but the numbers are tiny. Honestly, rationally, leaving the links broken for 2.5 years didn’t cost me much, and leaving them broken forever wouldn’t have cost me a whole lot more.
Part of it was obsessive-compulsive disorder. It bothers me to have a large body of broken links in my archives. (Don’t tell me, I know, there’s still a bunch.)
But part of it was … the successor product is good. Kink.com has built a good thing with Kink Unlimited. All those hundreds of old posts, pointing at sites that no longer exist? I’m proud of those posts, and it’s worth some effort to point them at the closest thing to the proper modern URL.
In June of 2016 when Kink.com went Leroy Jenkins on us all, I didn’t imagine they’d build anything worth linking to. They were a company in crisis, a company in transition. A flock of contractors looking for a formation, with a boss looking for the real estate payout of a lifetime. I did not trust that it would be worth my time to invest in changing out half a thousand links.
It’s still very much my impression that Kink.com is a real estate company with a serious porn hobby. I don’t expect Peter Acworth to walk away from his porn revenue stream — which obviously remains substantial — but I very much doubt that porn is his primary obsession here in 2019. I don’t think it has been his first focus for many years. If he sold the business to MindGeek or another one of the big players, it wouldn’t surprise me at all. But that shouldn’t (fingers crossed) affect subscribers or affiliates too dramatically, at least in the short run. Kink Unlimited produces, licenses, and distributes a colossal volume of iconic kinky porn at a value-package price. It was worth a week out of my life to fix all my broken links. You might find it worth a twenty (or two) to subscribe.
October 2022 update: The Kink Unlimited product has been rebranded as “Kink Prime” and no longer includes any of the gay male content, which has been rebranded and repackaged as a separate subscription product as Kink Men.
So what kind of good shit have my fellow bloggers been publishing since the last time I did a Share Our Shit Saturdays post? It’s my last chance in 2018 to round it all up:
The Rialto Report has issued another set of otherwise inaccessible porn-history magazine scans. This batch is all the issues from 1980 and 1981 of the magazine called… well, it’s complicated: “The east-coast magazine Porn Stars first appeared in mid 1980. It only lasted for four issues before undergoing a name change and becoming Skin Flicks. Skin Flicks was even more short-lived and lasted only two months before it was renamed Starlet. Starlet lasted for four issues, before reverting to the magazine’s original name, Porn Stars, once again.” They sort this sort of curatorial mess out, once, so that nobody like me ever has to worry or wonder about it ever again!
Paltego at Femdom Resource was “flipping rapidly through his Twitter” the other day when he “noticed a domme pitching her ‘selectively crafted artisinal pee'”. It seems he was prepared to mock this as a marketing overreach — and well he might! — but discovered it was a false alarm caused by reading too fast. As you were, torches down people.
Susie Bright’s blog sadly sees little activity these days but she has a gig producing audiobooks for Audible as their Editor at Large. I’m linking to her Top 10 Audiobooks I Produced This Year because of one title described thereon: A Day In The Life Of Marlon Bundo, featuring Vice President Pence’s gay pet bunny. Royalties go to good causes that will piss off annoying people.
STD testing is one of those sensible and virtuous best-practices that everyone always advises without pausing to consider the practicalities. It’s easy to breeze “Get tested, be safe!” but for a lot of people there are barriers. Money is an obvious one for which there aren’t easy answers, but even if you have money or insurance that will cover, there are often surprising obstacles, like doctors who will argue with you, not give you all the tests you need, or engage in sex-negative shaming and gatekeeping behavior that makes it all exquisitely humiliating if not outright impossible. In this post, Rain DeGrey positively reviews an STD testing service that sidesteps most of those problems by letting you go to a blood lab near you and then sending your test results by mail. It won’t solve everybody’s problems, but it’s an approach I hadn’t considered and it sure sounds less daunting than having “that conversation” with your regular provider when they aren’t up to speed on the necessary issues!
