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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
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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June 21st, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Marc Hochstein, writing somewhat abstractly for American Banker about Bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies, turns some nice phrases that go a long way toward explaining why the adult industry struggles to do safe transactions in a world where #pornocalypse-squeamish banks control all our payment systems:
As the world goes digital and physical cash transactions continue to decline – egged on by payments companies aiming to expand market share and by governments seeking to maximize tax revenues – there will likely be a lot more attempts to turn trusted third parties into choke points. The writer Brett Scott warned about this last year:
“Cashless society” is a euphemism for the “ask-your-banks-for-permission-to-pay society.”
…
[I]n a world where all payments are subject to veto by virtue-signaling middlemen, today’s politically correct social norms could become tomorrow’s dangerous control state.
“All payments are subject to veto by virtue-signalling middlemen.” That’s our situation all right!
Thanks to Maggie McNeill for the link.
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December 2nd, 2016 -- by Bacchus
I am in the research phase of setting up a Patreon page for ErosBlog, with an eye toward keeping the lights on and building the chance to do more of what I do best. “Research phase” in this context means studying how people I respect are doing it; and thus have I have been reading a lot of compelling Patreon pitches, and coming to the conclusion that we all need to be doing more to highlight patronage-supported projects of our friends, peers, mentors, heroes, and creative people we could not live without. Hence this post, which I hope will be the first of a lengthy if occasional series.
Today I want to highlight the Patreon pages of three women who have been doing excellent work in the adult/erotic space for at least as long as I’ve been blogging. But first, perhaps just a few words about the growing importance of the peer-patronage economic model?
As I see it, we live in a world where the old economic orders are breaking down. Automation, globalization, and information technology have utterly disrupted the reliable wage-and-salary economies upon which most of us depended, while the internet has killed the traditional publishing models that used to keep artists and creatives (a few of them, anyway) in day-old bread and thinning shoe leather. Late-stage capitalism seems increasingly predatory and self-referential; it pays only for what it values, its values are increasingly estranged from the culture that supports it, and precious little sustenance trickles down from the well-caulked boats being buoyed up on its rising tide. The creativity that brings us joy is no longer likely to be well-supported in the market, and relying on the patronage of the wealthy (although a time-honored survival strategy of artists everywhere) has its limits in the tastes of the wealthy. If this were not true, why would #pornocalypse — which at heart is about the squeamish unwillingness of the investing class to have its money associated with sexual culture — even be a thing?
One approach to a solution is crowdfunding. A duke or a titan of industry can support an entire opera company, but the company (predictably enough) will perform mostly the operas the duke enjoys. The internet lets us democratize this patronage model; I’m no duke, but I can (at least in a good month) afford a dollar here or a fiver over there to support something that delights me. The same internet that destroyed the traditional publishing model now lets an artist who draws anally-obsessed anthropomorphic ponies find support in a hundred or a thousand places. No more insufficiently-perverted dukes gate-keeping our pornography!
But finding each other is still a challenge in this newly-democratized peer-patronage model. The internet makes such finding possible, but does not make it easy. So that’s my inspiration for this post: to try and help with that. Here are three tireless women who deserve all the support they can get, and whose creative energy will more than repay us for whatever support we can provide. I’ve “known” all of them for more than a decade without ever meeting any of them, but what I “know” may not always be the face that they choose to present to the world today, so for purposes of this series, I’m just going to amplify their own words as found on their own crowdfunding pages:
Violet Blue at Patreon
I’ve created and run the oldest sex culture blog on the internet (tinynibbles.com). I’ve authored dozens of indie books in a turbulent and censorious market. And I regularly make news by reporting on hacking and privacy, companies behaving badly, and injustices to at-risk populations. I’ve bootstrapped my site and everything that goes with it, I work at industry rates (which aren’t great), I constantly have to chase down people who take months to pay invoices for my writing, and I was homeless as a kid, so I only have me. I want to do so much more.
I want to grow all of this.
If you’ve ever followed me or my work, you’ve seen how hard I fight for people who need a voice in their own conversations — and you’ve seen how badly I get attacked, censored (Libya, Apple, Focus on the Family, Amazon search, Facebook, the list goes on). You’ve also seen my work cause positive change, like drawing attention to PayPal’s financial discrimination against sex workers, getting Tumblr’s NSFW search reinstated properly. And maybe some of my work has touched your life, too.
…
I’m freelance and indie. This means I’m not beholden to interests or advertisers, and no one will ever control what I say. But there are many business tools I cannot use, because the topic of half of what I cover is sex — plus, like many, I’m affected by things like Amazon deciding to deep-six searches for indie books about sex.
Alison Tyler at Patreon
My name is Alison Tyler, and I’m an insomniac. Since I don’t value sleep, I write. All the time. If you see me at a 24-hour diner, I’ll be writing. If I’m stopped in traffic, I’m scribbling with a ballpoint on the back of my hand. That light on in the window at 3 a.m.? That’s me. Hope I didn’t disturb you.
To date, my career has been a whirlwind–a drive in a fast car, on a mountain road with winding hills. Was it being in the right place at the right time, sheer luck, or a refusal to give up? No clue. But I’ve managed to work for Masquerade, Black Lace, Plume, Harlequin, Penthouse, and others.
There’s no safety net here. I’m in my glitter and rhinestones. Let’s run off together and make our own circus.
Pandora Blake at Patreon
I’m Pandora Blake, the award-winning feminist porn producer and performer. I’ve been making kinky films since 2011, when I launched Dreams of Spanking, my website dedicated to ethically-produced BDSM erotica. The site is radical in prioritising gender diversity, explicit behind the scenes enthusiastic consent, and equal pay for equal work.
My erotic films express my own kinky fantasies and are sex-positive, body-positive, and strongly rooted in queer politics. I’m proud to say that my work has won multiple international awards, as well as attracting a wonderful fan base – until the UK porn censor ATVOD stepped in and shut my site down in August 2015 under new anti-porn legislation. After a drawn-out campaign, I’m delighted to have successfully won an appeal against the ruling, and the site is now back online, officially exempt from the new legislation.
Since fighting that battle I’ve had to learn a lot about porn law – and I’ve been increasingly called upon to speak publicly on issues of sex work law reform, censorship and obscenity law, sexual freedom, kink acceptance and ethical porn. I was honoured to be awarded Publicist of the Year at the Sexual Freedom Awards 2015 for my efforts advocating for sex workers’ rights and against porn censorship. Now, I’m taking that work to the next level.
Image Credit (directly above): Movie patrons in an advertisement for the National Cash Register Company’s new ticket-printing register, from the Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual 1916.
Image Credit (top of post): An opera company seeks royal patronage for French opera by throwing vulgar English theatre under a train, from an 1841 issue of Punch.
July 28th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
There is news today that Patreon has liberalized (a little bit) its stance on what it used to call “NSFW” and now calls “Adult Content”. An article by Lux Alptraum on Motherboard somewhat oversells the news with the misleading headline “Patreon Ends Payments Discrimination Against Adult Content”. Unfortunately the headline doesn’t mean what you’d think it means, because “Adult Content” in this context is a Patreon term of art that (a) Patreon refuses to or is unable to define; and that (b) explicitly excludes “porn” (again not defined). Nonetheless; there is actual good news in the story, and what appears to be real progress on the payments front for adult creators.
Last week [Patreon] sent out an email announcing a couple of changes for its more risque creators. Most notably, creators operating under the “adult content” banner on Patreon can now accept payments through PayPal (or, more accurately, its subsidiary Braintree).
There are a lot of reasons to feel excited about this. For one thing, it straight up makes things easier for Patreon’s Adult Content creators. Until now, Adult Content creators could only accept payments through credit cards, while other types of creators have had PayPal as an additional option for backers. Now, there’s no difference between Adult Content creators and other creators when it comes to payment processing options (though Patreon does distinguish between the two camps in other ways; Adult Content accounts aren’t discoverable through the site’s search function).
According to the Patreon email, the company went aggressively to the mat with the PayPal people, and succussfully argued that these transactions are not any higher-risk than Patreon’s other business:
For creators that have been with us for a while, you may remember that we used to allow this functionality in the past, and we only removed it after PayPal threatened to stop all payments to Patreon. Unfortunately, this is a common issue in the payments industry, both because payments for adult content are subject to a higher rate of chargebacks, and because of an aversion to the content itself among some payment processors.
After many long discussions we were able to convince PayPal, or more specifically their subsidiary Braintree, that Adult Content creators on Patreon are not a serious risk. Our content policy, and the nature of subscription payments, means that Adult Content creators on Patreon are less risky than most creators making adult content. We also have a very diverse mix of content types, so even if our Adult Content creators are higher risk than other types of creators, Patreon as a whole is less risky.
That’s good news. But as I wrote back in May:
I am reluctant to use a crowdfunding platform that’s openly hostile to porn. There seems to be a crowdfunding-industry consensus around allowing adult projects (sort of) as long as they are not “pornography” or “sexually explicit”, leaving those terms undefined. The rules on all platforms currently seem to boil down to some version of “We’ll allow your adult project, but if it becomes contentious or attracts any sort of negative attention, we’re reserving the right to redefine whatever you’re doing as ‘porn’ and blow you off our platform while pretending you were never welcome in the first place.”
At that time, Patreon’s policy was worded like this:
Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked NSFW. If your work contains nudity or any material that could potentially be offensive to users, make absolutely sure to mark the page as NSFW in the creator description when creating your page. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies… but not porn.
Their email from last week says:
We are also continuing to clarify what content is acceptable when flagged as Adult Content and what content is not allowed on Patreon.
However, Patreon’s new clarity has not reached the policy, which is word-for-word identical to the old policy except for the change from “NSFW” to “Adult Content”:
Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked as Adult Content. If your work contains nudity or any material that could potentially be offensive to users, make absolutely sure to mark the page as Adult Content in the creator description when creating your page. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies… but not porn.
So where does that leave people with adult projects who want to use Patreon? Pretty much in the same place they were before: don’t call it porn, and hope nobody complains. Or as Lux Alptraum puts it:
So where does this all leave indie smut creators? Only time will tell, but for now a bit of cautious optimism seems in order. Adult themed comics like Erika Moen’s Oh Joy Sex Toy would seem to be completely in the clear; as are art nudes and dirty minded podcasts. But people who want to photo and video document actual people fucking? Well, that might come down to the age old question of “art” versus “porn.”
Back in May I wrote that I was reluctant to use a platform that makes me lie about what I do, which I conceptuallize as “porn, or I’m doing it wrong.”
I’m proud of the fact that everything I do is porn, even if it’s also erotic art curation or forensic photoarcheology or deep-dive provenance research into viral photographs or reluctant investigative journalism and cynical commentary about platforms used by pornography enthusiasts. So I’m looking for a crowdfunding platform that won’t make me lie about what I love to do. I don’t doubt that with a bit of careful fancy-dancing I could use one of the porn-squeamish platforms, at least for awhile. But I would hate to get invested (or to get my patrons invested) in a platform where the official policy is to prohibit porn officially while tolerating it on a case-by-case basis as long as it doesn’t get too uppity.
And that’s why I’m torn about the news from Patreon. On the one hand, they still prohibit porn while refusing to say what they mean by that. On the other hand, they have promised greater clarity to come, and it’s clear that they actually went to bat with the payment providers in order to improve their platform for adult content creaters. Is it still fair for cynical me (who sees #pornocalypse under every rock) to call Patreon a “porn-squeamish” platform? Or should we credit them for taking this fight to the payment processors, and give them a free pass (until they abuse it) about maintaining a squishy “no porn” policy, especially if that squishy policy may have helped them in winning some very real progress with PayPal/Braintree?
I’ll admit I’m of two minds. I’m so offended by undefined “no porn” policies that I want to piss on the toes of every company that trots one out. But I also find myself tempted to give Patreon the benefit of the doubt just now. It’s possible they’re doing the best they can for adult content creators, in the context of a business/financial environment that is implacably hostile to us.
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May 23rd, 2016 -- by Bacchus
For reasons that will be explained in a post appearing soon, I am looking into crowdfunding (preferably Patreon-style) in order to try and improve the depth and quality of posting here at ErosBlog. However, I am reluctant to use a crowdfunding platform that’s openly hostile to porn. There seems to be a crowdfunding-industry consensus around allowing adult projects (sort of) as long as they are not “pornography” or “sexually explicit”, leaving those terms undefined. The rules on all platforms currently seem to boil down to some version of “We’ll allow your adult project, but if it becomes contentious or attracts any sort of negative attention, we’re reserving the right to redefine whatever you’re doing as ‘porn’ and blow you off our platform while pretending you were never welcome in the first place.”
Trouble is, I’m proud of the fact that everything I do is porn, even if it’s also erotic art curation or forensic photoarcheology or deep-dive provenance research into viral photographs or reluctant investigative journalism and cynical commentary about platforms used by pornography enthusiasts. So I’m looking for a crowdfunding platform that won’t make me lie about what I love to do. I don’t doubt that with a bit of careful fancy-dancing I could use one of the porn-squeamish platforms, at least for awhile. But I would hate to get invested (or to get my patrons invested) in a platform where the official policy is to prohibit porn officially while tolerating it on a case-by-case basis as long as it doesn’t get too uppity.
Here are the results of my first round of quick research into the porn policies at a few of the most popular platforms that sometimes allow adult projects:
- Patreon: “Patreon is not for pornography.”
Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked NSFW. If your work contains nudity or any material that could potentially be offensive to users, make absolutely sure to mark the page as NSFW in the creator description when creating your page. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies… but not porn.
- Indiegogo: currently prohibits “sexually explicit” projects.
Do not post images or videos that are sexually explicit or post links to sites that contain sexually explicit material.
- Kickstarter: “We prohibit…pornographic material.”
- Offbeatr: Closed 2/8/16. Sounds like #pornocalypse in action:
We’d like to thank all our customers and users for supporting Offbeatr throughout our years but the website will be closing indefinitely due to changes in corporate structure.
So, what have I missed? Is there a single crowdfunding platform out there that is officially open to projects featuring pornography and sexually explicit material?
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