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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
November 11th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
The time has come for another Share Our Shit Saturday:
- Very practical and useful advice from Miss Jezzebella: How I Learnt To Orgasm Every Time During Sex With A Man
- This post about kinky keychains spoke to me — I’ve had a leather paddle-shaped key fob on my key chains for about twenty years. Near as I can tell, no one has ever noticed. I ordered it from — can I remember? — The Stockroom, maybe, or perhaps it was Good Vibrations, or maybe Blowfish. One of the pioneers, back in the Nineties, when paper catalogs where still a thing. The edge stitching has held up, but if the miniature leather paddle was ever embossed with a logo — which my memory suggests it may have been — that’s long gone.
- We can all use a little sexting help, so here are Three Major Tips For Sexting from A Couple Of Kinks.
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November 4th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
It’s Share Our Shit Saturday again!
- Web comics count! And although the Oglaf comic that’s up right now is awfully weird and meta, they are usually weird and sexy. Recommended.
- Paltego at Femdom Resource has been thinking a lot about the potential and future of VR porn.
- The Sensual Liberation Army — an ErosBlog ally since forever — stands foursquare with the brave bikini baristas of Everett, Washington. “Eros clearly resides in Ecotopia rising…”
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October 29th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
A little while ago when @whoresofyore tweeted the above photo out under the hashtag #VintageHalloween I knew I was finally going to have to get off my ass and get this shit in order. I thought I might get something special for my patrons out of it (which didn’t happen, in the event) but mostly I just couldn’t take it any more.
Here is (was) my problem.
I’ve been seeing that photo (and several more from the same series) every Halloween for many years. And why not? The flapper-esque blonde is cute as a button, her tits are perky, and the burlesque Halloween thing is too fun and cute and Betty Boop not to love.
So, my first-stage reaction was “I need to track down that whole series of photos. It would make an awesome Halloween gallery. And if it’s really as old as the some of the clues would indicate, it’s bloody amazing; I want to know more about where these photos come from!”
Sadly, my second-thoughts reaction was “There’s something wrong here. The Halloween iconography is too modern; this is 1950s cheesecake pinup staged as late 1930s burlesque produced with 1920 flappers published by 1900s postcard publishers. Just a whole mishmash of subtle anachronisms.”
My particular problem was with the ghosts and bats and jack-o-lanterns and black cat and happy-skeleton stuff all brought together in one display. You see all of these elements in Halloween imagery going back at least to the Victorians, but a comic erotic burlesque of them? My first mental/visual reference for a thing like that would be the painted cheesecake pinups of the late 1940s and early 1950s. I would be really excited to find them all in a real-photo pinup postcard series from then, but from decades earlier as these photos superficially appear to be? That would be…astonishing.
But hey, a cynical skepticism, no matter how well-informed, is no substitute for doing the work, which for a project like this is quite considerable. Basically, my method is recursive image searching; I start with the first image, and while searching for the largest, best, most-original scan of it, I also look for any pages that offer any provenance, and I also look at all of the “similar images” that the image search engines throw up, saving anything else from the series that turns up. And then I proceed through each of those in stepwise fashion, doing the same for them. It’s a slow, often-tedious, and painstaking process.
There were early indications that something was hinky about this image set.
One thing that bothered me was that diamond “MG” logo. It’s very much like the logos used by photo postcard publishers going back to the turn of the twentieth century and before. Only, a logo like that is typically the initials of the publisher, it’s a handy reference, and it’s usually easy to Google. Those two letters in quotes, “postcard”, and Bob’s your uncle. Collectors and auctioneers are all over that shit. Here? Nothing.
Another thing that bothered me was that as an iron rule, the best-quality scans I was turning up were always 805 pixels wide. That indicated a common digital place of entry onto the internet. Theoretically possible if these photos were from, say, a set of postcards in the hands of a collector, with no other exemplars known; but in practice, usually genuine vintage photos exist in a wide variety of (usually small and terrible) scans of different sizes.
More subtly but also damning, no provenance for any of the photos from the set was turning up. They were widely distributed in copy-and-paste collections of vintage photos, usually mixed with genuine vintage photographs from the “French postcard” and burlesque eras. But nobody had ever taken the time to curate these together into a common gallery. This could just an artifact of digital decay (there’s an awful lot of the adult internet gone missing from the 1997-2007 era) but sometimes it means that the source was known and that the folks doing the copy-and-paste felt constrained from acknowledging that source. But why, if the photos were truly vintage?
As is usually the case, there was just one clue, a single fragile provenance, one person who took the time to drop a credit, that broke the entire mysterious case wide open. One of these images, on a Tumblr that has not yet gotten autoflagged and force-vanished behind the Verizon #pornocalypse Tumblr-porn event horizon, had a link credit to a Deviant Art source, where the photo had been posted more than a dozen years ago by a photographer from the Ukraine who has not been back to DeviantArt since 2005. The photographer went by “MGstudio” (note those “MG” initials) and gave their URL as marthasgirls.com in their DeviantArt profile. Martha’s Girls is a website I vaguely remember; it’s defunct now, but for many years and until sometime in 2016, it ran an old-fashioned subscription paysite selling “The finest emulations of vintage erotica and pin-up, spanning the period from the Victorian times to the 50s pin-up era.” Ding ding ding ding DING! The mystery is solved.
So these are modern, not vintage; they are a formerly-available commercial porn product by an unknown photographer from Dnipropetrovsk whose artistry I quite admire. My hope is that by assembling them here, it will be less likely for future enthusiasts to make the all-too-easy mistake of believing them to be vintage. If you know of more photos from this series, please let me know!
Happy Halloween, and enjoy!
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October 28th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
As I explained yesterday, today marks the start of a new meme for sex bloggers and anybody else producing adult content on the free/independent/open/ web. There are no rules per se; but the general idea is that you use your open web platform to highlight some porn stuff you admire that’s on somebody else’s open web platform. The price of using these old-fashioned #pornocalypse-resistant “real websites” is the difficulty of getting links, traffic, and attention; the purpose of this meme is to ameliorate that difficulty a little bit. Without further ado:
- Here’s a guest post at Girl On The Net’s blog by porn performer Charlie Ten talking about her view of ethical porn — something that we don’t talk about enough, mostly because it gives the mindless porn-haters too many opportunities to spout their anti-porn nonsense. But it’s still an important conversation, when you can find people of good will, willing to to have it.
- The 99th episode of Elust at Molly’s Daily Kiss deserves a shout-out in this first #SSoS because the Elust enterprise is a detailed, high-quality, curated sort of project that’s very much in the same spirit. #SSoS is by no means a new concept; we used to call this sort of things “link roundups” and they were a major blog-sociability concept back when social-media was barely dreamed-of. By my lights, Elust is an honored veteran and survivor from the olden days. Elust takes submissions, too!
- I’m linking to Bex’s Five Easy Ways To Give A Blowjob With A Condom for a nostalgic reason that might make sense to nobody else. Way back in 2003 I linked to a ridiculously pornified set of “how-to” photographs of a woman putting a condom on a man’s dick with her mouth; some years later, after that link was long broken, I rescued those photos using the Internet Archive, and they are now on ErosBlog But they are, no question, more porn than how-to. Bex’s post offers a two-minute video on condom application by mouth that’s far more useful from an educational perspective. Highly recommended.
- The world needs more blogs like The Rialto Report, which bills itself without false modesty as “oral history, audio, photo, and documentary archives from the golden age of adult film in New York, and beyond”. The post I’m sharing today is an interview with Steven Ziplow, who is the author of 1977’s The Filmmaker’s Guide To Pornography — perhaps the first-ever textbook of adult film-making. In the best Rialto Report tradition, a complete downloadable copy of the book is included in the post.
- Ms. Naughty has been making porn websites since 2000 (!) and this summer she wrote an article called Six Things Today’s Internet Could Learn From Old School Porn Websites. As she says, “there was a time when porn did its best to be respectful to the surfer and tried hard not to piss them off because we knew that a happy, non-harassed surfer was more likely to trust you and to buy something.” She’s not wrong.
October 4th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Fourteen years ago I posted a bit of a rant explaining that my typical refusal to link to adult content that’s hidden behind adult disclaimers, login buttons, age verification schemes, and all other “useless excrescence that interferes with the natural linkage from one web resource to another” is political. It’s one little thing I can do to strike small blows in the eternal culture war against the forces of repression who wanted then and want now to keep “adult material in locked ghettos at the fringes of the web.”
Today’s post is in the nature of a policy notice, reminding everyone that Tumblr (under the thumb of Yahoo as sold down the river to Verizon) switched sides in that culture war when they took the explicit porn blogs dark, making them invisible to the open web when they barred them to search robots and made them invisible to everyone but logged-in Tumblr users with non-default settings.
It’s long been my habit to fix broken links of all kinds on ErosBlog by replacing them with functional links to archived pages in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Adult Tumblr links have always been fragile; Tumblr has a history of deleting adult blogs for non-transparent reasons. So I’ve fixed a lot of old broken Tumblr links over the years with Wayback Machine replacements. These days, though, a lot of explicit Tumblr porn blogs (but not quite all of them) are locked behind the Electron Curtain without being, technically, deleted. Links to those blogs now land the surfer at a message like this:
It might in theory be possible for a savvy surfer to comprehend from that message that they need to create a Tumblr account or log into an existing account, change the default settings, and revisit the link in order to see the originally desired content, but as far as I’m concerned, such links are better treated as broken. The purpose of this post is to explain my intention to treat all such links the same as broken (404 not found) links that I encounter in my archives. Which is to say that, time permitting, when I encounter these links I will repair them by replacing them with an Archive.org Wayback Machine link that does not require login. I encourage other webmasters with control over such links to do likewise.
Example: Until today, this post from 2012 contained the following link to the Happy BDSM tumblr: ( link ) Because clicking that link now brings a non-logged-in or non-Tumblr user to the Tumblr buzzkill page, I have treated it as a dead link and replaced it with a working link to an archived page: ( link ) I hope that helps clarify!
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October 3rd, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Fifteen years ago today, I posted the first post on ErosBlog. I am, frankly, amazed to still be at it. I hope you’ll forgive some of today’s wordy indulgences, as I complain about stuff that has gotten difficult and gush about the things I’ve grown passionate about that weren’t even on my radar fifteen years ago.
But first, it’s a birthday! There’s supposed to be cake. I ordered plenty for everybody by clicking on a social media recommended-for-me advertisement. Big Data knows exactly what we want and need these days, right? The cake should be awesome! But when the cake actually got here…
On second thought, maybe we should move rapidly along from birthday cake. Let’s start with a look into my earlier predictions and expectations, shall we?
10 years ago, I was pretty damn upbeat about sex blogging:
I love doing this blog and I can’t imagine stopping voluntarily. Five years ago it was still possible to claim that blogs were a fad. Five years from now, it’s possible we’ll all be considered impossibly old-fashioned, like paper magazines and network television and phones that plug into the wall. But this is about the sex, baby! And people don’t get bored with that, so I should still have an audience.
Five years ago, and five years after I wrote that, I was just a little bit less sanguine:
Where in all this do sex blogs fit it, in the waning month of 2012? Well, people still like reading about sex and viewing dirty pictures, and they all have these miraculous and awesome (I think so anyway; that’s how you can tell I’m old) little always-connected internet devices in their pockets now. Even if “blogs” finish going away and “surfing the web” has become hopelessly quaint, there’s got to be some way to keep on doing what we do (find sexy stuff, pull it together, make a few wise-ass remarks about it, entertain the folk). Our challenge as sex bloggers (or whatever we become when blogging is as dead as carriage racing) is the same as it always was: to do it well enough to be valued, to earn and maintain the attention of our readers in an overstimulated world where attention is the scarcest currency.
In 2007 I asked “Will there be a Ten Candles post on October 3, 2012?” In my secret heart, I was pretty damned sure the answer was “yes”. I’m delighted to have been right. But what about the future? Will ErosBlog still be here in 2017? I’m less confident than I was in 2007; I grow older and move more slowly, while the world speeds up and accelerates into the future. But I’m persistent, and I’m stubborn. Unless I stop being entertained by porn (which seems unlikely) I can’t imagine not having bits of it that need pointed at and talked about. So, just as I did in 2007, I’ll say “I truly do hope so!”
Well, friends, here we are in 2017, and we fuckin’ made it. But blogs in general and sex blogs in particular are not just quaint by this point, they’re positively obsolete. I don’t mind saying that 2022 is starting to look like it might be a serious reach for ErosBlog. More on that later. Let’s talk statistics and history for a minute.
In fifteen years, ErosBlog has published 5,358 posts (5,026 by me, the rest by my several guest bloggers). That’s just under (.98) one post per day — a pretty decent 15-year average if I say so myself! Those posts have attracted 20,499 approved comments, although it must be said that most of those were in the first seven or eight years; since the rise of social media, comment frequency has plunged through the floor, fallen off a cliff, choose your own plummeting metaphor. Only the most loyal blog readers comment any more. Once social media came along, people took their comments there for the most part — and thanks to the #pornocalypse, sex bloggers aren’t welcome on most social media platforms. Or, to be more precise, we may be welcome there in our own persons under our true names, but except on Twitter (the final holdout, for whom the death knell of the #pornocalypse has yet to toll) we aren’t reliably welcome on any major social media under our porn-industry pseudonyms and the adult content of our blogs isn’t welcome there at all.
As for traffic, I don’t have any sort of meaningful long-term traffic numbers I can share. Web traffic is notoriously difficult to measure in any objective way. It’s going down, though, and has been for at least half a decade. I’ve stripped the numbers from this three-year line graph because they aren’t very illuminating, but the trend is clear:
There are many factors that are taking traffic away from independent sex bloggers. They include:
- The decline of the open web and its replacement by closed and adult-hostile social media and app-based ecosystems such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and others;
- Decline in desktop computing and rise of mobile computing generally, feeding the app-based replacement open-web activities noted above;
- Google’s algorithm changes that display virtually all adult websites (except for select popular tubesites) at locations that are buried many pages deep in the search results;
- Deterioration of the paid-subscription porn model that (through affiliate sales) used to support independent adult websites;
- App-based dating software replacement of subscription-model dating sites that (again through affiliate sales) used to help support independent adult websites;
- Rise of video-based “tube” sites based predominantly on free (stolen or promotional) video clips, undermining the paid-porn model and sucking up adult-internet surfer time and attention.
Changes in the porn business and the steady decline in traffic have meant a lot of alterations in the business of sex blogging over the last decade, too. Five years into this gig, it was going really well; I was making more money as a sex blogger (mostly from porn subscription sales) than I ever made at a square job (and I used to work in an office with a tie and a 401k and an eye-watering mortgage). Ten years in, not so much; porn sales were fading fast, but I was making up some of the difference selling ads against my traffic to people who were still making sales on offers that weren’t available to me (stuff that didn’t have affiliate programs). Now? That’s all gone, or nearly so. At these traffic levels I can’t sell a traditional display ad on ErosBlog to save my life, not at least for a price that’s worth having the ugly on my pages. (And the ads that are available are awfully sleazy.) The blog no longer makes me anything that could be considered a living. Such income as does come in is from my generous and much-appreciated Patreon patrons, from sporadic sponsored posts, and from the faded and tattered remnants of the once-mighty affiliate sales ecosystem. Other web projects, freelance writing and research (adult and otherwise), and custom web work take up the bulk of my time, and ErosBlog visibly suffers for it; but it is, as they say these days, what it is.
If you’ve wondered, sometimes, why day after day the new ErosBlog post is just another obscure bit of pulp cover art, that’s why. I am awash in art that I’d like to share, but I simply don’t have enough free time to spend two or four hours busting out a detailed post for the blog every day. A time-consuming post doesn’t pay any more than an image post, things are financially lean chez Bacchus, and it makes more sense to focus on paying work. So, instead, in my free time I use the blog to indulge my passions, which lately have been:
- Surfacing outstanding vintage pulp art from scans that may be online, but are in formats (.pdf and such) that aren’t easily image-searchable and that folks haven’t seen before;
- Tracking and documenting the #Pornocalypse, which is my word and hashtag for the process that social media platforms go through of imposing censorship on their users at that stage in their development when they come under the scrutiny of the moneyed Wall Street and banking interests, who are inevitably more prudish than the Silicon Valley techies who have typically been willing to allow porn on their platforms while they are trying to achieve user volume and “liftoff”;
- Performing curatorial work of all kinds on interesting porn (typically vintage) that exists online in a condition of scandalous disorganization and degraded metadata;
- As resources allow, procure and digitize actual offline porn resources like this, bringing them to the digital world and finding them a secure home here;
Will I still be doing these things in 2022? Well, if we still have a technological society and a more-or-less free country and a somewhat uncensored internet and a functioning economy and a power grid and if I still have access to all those things: probably. I’m pushing fifty, folks; what I enjoy doing seems to change more and more slowly as the years pass.
But will I still be doing all that at ErosBlog?
Cautiously, hopefully, nervously… I think so. Maybe not on the gold-plated, managed-hosting, all-services-provided commercial-grade server that I’ve been using since 2004; the economics are starting to seem highly questionable, although I treasure the rock-solid uptime and the professional support. But I’d hate to abandon my archives (even if Google mostly won’t show them to any but the most dedicated searchers) and I still believe in Bacchus’s first rule. I might get pushed to discount hosting somewhere, but I can’t imagine not keeping up a self-hosted WordPress blog (although five more years of technological change could easily make this sound like a silly thing to have said.)
It’s possible I’ll have to give up on my near-daily posting schedule. The posts I truly value are the lengthy and meaty curatorial ones; and I’m only managing a few of those every month as it is. There’s not much indication, in the traffic numbers or the comments or in any other feedback, that anybody but me would miss the daily pulp art posts, so if I have to cut back to focus more time on making a living, those will be the first to go. The “post every day” rule is a discipline from another blogging era, when (among other virtues) it was thought to help deliver a high volume of Google traffic. If it ever did (and it seemed to) it surely no longer does now!
Reading this over, it “feels” a bit like I’m whining about how ErosBlog used to be a business and has now become a hobby I don’t have sufficient time for. Perhaps I am whining, but if so, please accept my apologies; such is not my true intent. Fifteen years of sex blogging have given me a great deal to be thankful for, including:
- A long list of online sex-blogger friends who, though I may never meet them, I feel I know as well as if we were siblings, and whose good will and ready wit I treasure daily (even if I usually now have to go to Twitter for it);
- An huge visual vocabulary of vintage erotic art and contemporary porn that, although typically it isn’t a thing that’s easy to get paid for having, is ridiculously convenient when undertaking one of my curatorial or provenance-research projects;
- A unique (as far as I know) set of skills for researching the provenance of visual erotica, along with unusual amounts of image-searching skills generally;
- A growing passion for reversing (by means of reconstructive curation and preservation of imagery together with its metadata) the erosive, destructive, entropic destruction of metadata that social media sharing wreaks on internet erotic visual media; and
- A long term ambition to find and digitize “lost porn” that’s still stuck in the analog world — especially rare and vintage specimens thereof — to provide it with a secure digital home and the best possible accompanying metadata.
These are are all fine things to be passionate about, even if I never imagined any of them back in 2002 when I first started this blog. If the last two are the passions that I would still like to find a way to spend more time on than I can currently afford, I shan’t apologize for that; I plan to keep trying to find a way. With any luck at all, by 2022 I’ll be having more success than presently, and it is to be hoped that ErosBlog will still be a part of whatever scheme is working.
The WordPress word count meter tells me I’ve already spent 2,000 words on “me me me” navel-gazing, so let me close with a post-script directed to you, my treasured audience of loyal readers. There’s still a thousand-plus-a-few of you who stop by to view and read on any given day, which is a trust and a responsibility that sometimes weighs heavily when I am being lazy or self-indulgent. I’d like to know a lot more about what brings you, and what keeps you, and what would keep you coming back for the next five years. Even if you don’t normally comment, please consider leaving a comment today. Tell me what you like, tell me what you ignore, tell me what you’d like to see more of. All feedback gratefully accepted!
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July 31st, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Back in June when Tumblr announced that blogs containing “primarily explicit content” would no longer be visible on the open web (but only to logged-in Tumblr users), I wrote:
Although the email does not say so, I predict that explicit-content blogs will go back to flying that involuntary robots.txt that makes them invisible to the search engines, too. No more outside search-discovery for Tumblr porn!
That day is here, and it gives me no pleasure to announce that I was right. A reader forwarded the email they got from Tumblr:
We’re contacting you to let you know that your Tumblr has been marked as containing explicit content. This means it won’t be visible to minors, people who are using Tumblr in Safe Mode, and people who aren’t logged into Tumblr.
No mention of search, but when I went to check the robots.txt on their Tumblr, sure enough:
As I explained in Thou Shalt Not Search Adult Tumblr Blogs back in 2013 when Tumblr first tried to sneakily hide all the porn blogs:
In robot, that means, roughly “All robots: stay out!” No search spiders allowed. No Internet Archive crawler. The tumblr is there, but you have to know about it, or you have to be linked to it. You won’t find it in Google, you won’t find it in any other search engine that honors robots.txt, and when Tumblr decides to stop hosting it, you won’t find the pages in the Wayback Machine – it will be gone for good, lost to humanity unless somebody with the technical chops and outlaw sensibilities of Archive Team finds a way to archive it anyway, robots.txt be damned.
So it is now official. The ghetto walls are up and the gates are closed. The adult-Tumblr community is no longer part of the open web. The #pornocalypse has claimed another social media victim.
Image credit: the graphic at the top of the post has been adapted from part of a panel that appeared in Action Comics #292 (1962).
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