|
|
The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
December 18th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Photographer and cinematographer Hywel Phillips is the visual genius behind Restrained Elegance, which I have long considered to be the best and most visually striking of the bondage photography sites that strive to produce pornography and art simultaneously. He, along with his wife and model and business partner Ariel Anderssen aka Amelia Jane Rutherford, are some of the people Spanking Blog calls “porn producer heroes” as they continue to make fetish porn in Britain subsequent to the “latest round of bat-shit crazy UK censorship laws.” In an excellent long-read post yesterday, Hywel cataloged the whole constellation of challenges facing people trying to be adults and to do adult business on the modern internet. He begins:
The internet is no longer a safe place to be an adult. Puritans and authoritarians are closing in from all directions: state censorship, financial censorship and corporate censorship. This sounds like paranoia, but it isn’t. Here’s why.
There’s really no way to summarize the post for you; all I can do is commend it to your attention. Although his post ranges much more wildly, he covers (and shares) many of the concerns I have hash-tagged #Pornocalypse when discussing corporate discrimination against adult materials, adult businesses, and adult-oriented web traffic. He even touches briefly on what I used to call Bacchus’s First Rule of the Internet, or as Hwel puts it:
First, don’t rely on any service where you are not the direct customer. Don’t blog on blogger, get a little bit of web space (ideally hosted in country with protected speech), install WordPress and do it yourself.
I’ve stopped harping on my “rule” because social media have made it… not less essential, but perhaps less sufficient? Despite numerous software efforts and projects (which Hwel discusses in passing) there’s still no good self-hosted way to enjoy the network effects of social media. And that lack makes my notion of pornocalypse all the more chilling, since every big web property and social media silo eventually seems to reach that point in the corporate life cycle where it appears sensible to start banning all the porn. Before the internet, we lived in a world where you could not be heard unless your message was acceptable to corporate sensibilities. The World Wide Web changed all that, but now, corporate social media and squeamish search engines are taking us back to those bad, bland, and puritanical old days.
But now I’m rambling. Hwel does not ramble. Check his post out.
Similar Sex Blogging:
December 14th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Is this what privilege looks like? If so, yum!
From a vintage postcard found at Wicked Knickers. [Wicked Knickers was an awesome Tumblr once, before all its links went dark behind a #pornocalypse-driven adults-only forced login. Broken links now retained on ErosBlog for historical purposes only, and in case they are healed in future by social, political, or economic change. Clicking not recommended.]
Similar Sex Blogging:
November 12th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a new thing for ErosBlog: offering a Kickstarter project for your possible support.
This morning I got a cold request on Twitter from somebody I did not know. Dude knows me, though, at least well enough to suspect this would tickle my fancy for vintage erotica:
It turns out that Justin O’Hearn is an grad student whose academic specialty is Victorian-era dirty books. (For which the academic term turns out to be “clandestine publication”… who knew?) This gives us a common interest that makes us kindred spirits, quite possibly to Justin’s great chagrin if he only knew it.
His project is rather fascinating and utterly worthy. Apparently there’s a famous dirty book (Teleny) whose famousness in part stems from a somewhat controversial partial attribution to Oscar Wilde. Another portion of what seems to have been the same text was published as Des Grieux some years after Teleny. Just two copies of Des Grieux are known to exist, and almost nobody has seen them because they have been in the hands of private collectors. One of those two copies is up for auction at Christie’s in less than a week.
Justin’s scheme is to raise money via Kickstarter so that he can (a) buy the copy of Des Grieux, (b) transcribe and edit it, (c) publish a scholarly edition of it, (d) use it in his PhD dissertation, and (e) donate the original to the British Library when he is done with it.
Justin has successfully done this sort of thing before, publishing a new edition of Letters from Laura and Eveline, of which only one copy was previously known to exist. And he’s already raised pledges for more than a third of his goal from 17 backers as of this writing.
I have long been fascinated by obscure pornographic works. (My particular mania is bringing them into the electronic domain, but it’s a lot of work if you do it right, so I’ve only gotten one of them all the way to the e-book stage.) I believe surfacing rare pornography for broader public access is important work, culturally and academically. I wish Justin’s project all the best, and encourage you to support it, if you’re so inclined and have the resources.
Normally that would be the end of my post, right there. But we live in the era of the #pornocalypse.
Kickstarter is one of the many corporate entities that’s on my shit-list for its vague-but-hostile approach to adult projects of any kind. As I read their rules of prohibition, this project is perilously at risk of being terminated by Kickstarter because it “involves” “offensive” or “pornographic” material. Justin himself unabashedly states that Teleny was obscene when published, and although few have seen Des Grieux, it seems unlikely to have a greatly different character. Is it “offensive” or “pornographic” by Kickstarter’s standards? Well, good luck answering that question; Kickstarter is careful to leave itself maximum discretion by unhelpfully refusing to define its own terms. This is the modern version of “we reserve the right to refuse service to anybody” under a veneer of obfuscatory dishonesty. But the #pornocalypse corporate trend is to shy away from anything even faintly pornographic, especially if somebody complains or if the project attracts media attention (as this project may be doing).
Fortunately Justin’s Kickstarter pitch projects oodles of academic probity and carefully avoids using the words “pornography” or “erotica”. So there’s a chance he’ll pull this off without getting his Kickstarter yanked at the last minute. I won’t deny, though, that my heart climbed into my throat when saw that he plans to be bidding on the Christie’s auction the day before his Kickstarter actually closes. If Kickstarter decides to screw him in the last 24 hours after he wins the auction, he could get financially screwed real hard. Let’s all hope that doesn’t happen.
Similar Sex Blogging:
September 5th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
An outfit called Aslan Leather posted this picture on Twitter:
Scrawled upon the (I am presuming) returned package: “Return To Sender: Sex toys cannot be ship!!”
It’s the two exclamation points that make this perfect.
Nobody escapes the pornocalypse, I tell you!
August 23rd, 2013 -- by Bacchus
I’m always alert for new ways to get web traffic, but I have to admit, putting up ErosBlog eBooks on Amazon never occurred to me:
Sure, a quick longtail search on Google for “Busty lactating MILFs doing the Balinese Monkey Chant with dildos” will still hit the first listing (if such a site exists!), but the more generic words people use for adult entertainment now lead to squeaky clean sites, with hard working pornographers thrown under the bus. Tumblr, Huffpo, Pinterest, blogger.com and so many other SFW outlets for adult entertainment producers have now piled on, resulting in a pressing need for anyone trying to attract surfers to either a steamy sex site, blog or just about anything else to have to explore new options to come into “the back door”, as it were.
Now, I’m certainly no SEO expert, but a quick Google search tells me that to spread an adult message, the top two places that get listing are Wikipedia and Amazon. As everyone else probably figured this out even faster than I did, the marketing focus obviously needs to be getting listed on those websites. Wikipedia, also knowing this, is now sealed up tighter than a drum of toxic radioactive waste for new pages that have even a hint of ways new pages might lead to porn… Leaving eBooks as a low-hanging fruit for spreading your message and adult company branding by releasing SFW content for mainstream eyballs.
Talk about the “Law Of Unintended Consequences”! In what traditionally was a well-run, ethical industry of primarily female authors making a decent living from writing steamy erotica for pulp and eBooks, is now being inundated by frustrated website operators that suspect if they compile some erotic stories buried in there member area since 2001 and publish as an eBook, the traffic will flow back in from the bi-line branding. Sure. Why not? Most of that is going to be crap anyway, and the savvy romantic and erotic reader shoppers at Amazon and B&N know how to spot a real author and avoid the obvious link bait compilations of recycled blog junk.
Of course by the time a tactic like that gets noticed and talked about, whatever data silo is getting SEO-targeted is already taking countermeasures. So, too late for you and me I’m sure.
The above quote is from Amazon, B&N Dragged Into The Corporate Porn Censorship Wave. That article also contains updated news about Amazon’s handling of erotic eBooks (remember when a story about that first got me up onto my Pornocalypse hobbyhorse?) to the effect that Amazon has joined Barnes & Noble and Apple in removing best-selling erotica titles from its best-seller lists. It looks and sounds like cutting off your nose to spite your face, but it’s the new corporate done thing when it comes to smut.
Similar Sex Blogging:
August 8th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Reports are coming in that Tumblr has begun (or ramped up) a crackdown on people who use Tumblr for adult marketing in ways that seem consistent with Tumblr’s community guidelines. Remember, those guidelines say:
Don’t use deceptive means to generate revenue or traffic, or create blogs with the primary purpose of affiliate marketing. Spam doesn’t belong on Tumblr.
Now comes word (and I’ve confirmed it) that there’s at least one adult link that you simply are not allowed to type on Tumblr. (Actually, you can type it, but then your save/publish button won’t work…) A link to this appeared in my Twitter feed:
Post Yahoo acquisition we’ve had several Extra Lunch Money (ELM) related Tumblr blogs removed (with no explanation given) and we’ve heard from other websites and sellers who’ve had their Tumblr blogs taken down as well. While Tumblr has always removed blogs (which they are completely within the right to do), we’ve noticed something more troubling. Tumblr is censoring links to certain adult websites from being published. Which adult website? Namely, extralunchmoney(.)com.
Wait. What’s ExtraLunchMoney(.)com?
ELM is a marketplace for amateur models to sell their own hand made adult movies, pictures, and more. It’s like Etsy, but a LOT naughtier.
How are they censoring ExtraLunchMoney(.)com?
If you try put in any link with “extralunchmoney(.)com” Tumblr will not allow you to save the post so you can publish it. Instead it will say “There was a problem saving your post” which is Tumblr speak for you’re not allowed to link to this website.
Even worse, you can’t even type out the word “extralunchmoney(.)com” in a post without using parentheses. You’ll get the same “There was a problem saving your post” message.
Go ahead and try for yourself.
So I did. I created a brand new Tumblr blog and, as the very first post, I tried to save this:
Wow. So then I changed the “n” to an “r”. Extralurchmoney.com (the place to buy and sell your zombie-themed goods?) saves just fine on Tumblr.
Back to the report:
It’s also not limited to posts. If you want to update your blog side bar to say for example “I help run this site called extralunchmoney(.)com” you’ll get this “error” (lie): “Your settings may not be valid…”
If you take out the reference to the link then magically everything works ok again. Rather than specifically saying “Sorry, you can’t post links to that site”, they present the problem as a vague technical issue…when in fact it’s CLEARLY an issue with the domain name. But, from the looks of it, Tumblr wants to hide that fact.
Why are they blocking ExtraLunchMoney(.)com?
We’re not 100% sure, but it’s probably due to the adult nature of ELM (Tumblr if you’re reading this and we’re wrong, please let us know). The end result being thousands of ELM sellers and supporters being restricted from freely posting what they want to their Tumblr blogs. Which somehow seems like the opposite of valuing “creative expression.”
ELM does not have an affiliate program, and nothing in Tumblr’s community guidelines prohibits self-promotion or adult promotion as long as it’s neither deceptive, nor spam. Of course Tumblr does not define what it means by those terms, but nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that a sneaky and dishonest blanket ban on publishing a specific adult URL is consistent with Tumblr’s methods. Beginning during the negotiation of the sale to Yahoo, Tumblr’s practice has been to disadvantage its adult content in silent and hard-to-notice ways, even when that content was fully-consistent with its fairly permissive community guidelines. What’s more, when forced to backtrack by public outrage after the big robots.txt debacle, Tumblr went to great lengths to pretend it was all a misunderstood and unfortunate technical error.
So my prediction here is that if the link-censoring initiative attracts enough negative attention, publishing these links will start working again and Tumblr will either say nothing, or explain that it was all just a glitch. But if this story doesn’t reach critical mass, look for the list of disfavored adult links to continue to grow.
I am also hearing reports that Tumblr is more aggressively deleting blogs that are being used for adult promotion, even when that promotion seems consistent with the community guidelines. In addition to the mention in the blockquote above of “we’ve had several Extra Lunch Money (ELM) related Tumblr blogs removed”, there are similar reports from the world of camgirls:
As of this morning, my tumblr – hellenlefay.tumblr.com – no longer exists. One minute it was there, the next it wasn’t. I tried opening the dashboard and it said my blog had been terminated, and I could contact support if I didn’t know why this happened.
Um, of course I had no idea why this happened! If you’ve ever stumbled onto my tumblr, it’s very obvious I’ve put quite a bit of time into the design and content. I wouldn’t intentionally do anything that would get me removed! In the recent past I updated my blog to be listed as NSFW, even though I only post pg13 pictures, just in case I was reported for being considered adult content but not listed as such.
So, why was I terminated? Not warned, not suspended, but my entire account deleted?
Spam and affiliate marketing.
This is the reply I received from Mathieu inTumblr Support:
We’ve terminated your Tumblr account at hellenlefay.tumblr.com for spam or affiliate marketing. Per the policies you agreed to when creating your account, Tumblr prohibits such activity.
Don’t put deceptive links or dubious code in your posts. That includes using Javascript to inject unwanted ads in blogs, or embedding links to interstitial or pop-up ad services. Don’t use deceptive means to generate revenue or traffic, or create blogs with the primary purpose of affiliate marketing.
Let’s break that down to address each point. First off, I typically post 1-5 posts per day, so that’s hardly spam. It can’t even be argued that I’m spamming other people through their Ask or Fanmail boxes, because I rarely use them. Or mine. As for affiliate marketing, that is not something I’ve ever gotten into. I truly admire the girls who put the effort into running a successful affiliate system, but really really really I can’t, so no affiliate marketing on my Tumblr.
Deceptive links or dubious code – anything I’ve ever posted has been extremely obvious about where the link goes. For example, if it says “Clips4Sale”, guess what? It links to c4s.com/53691, which is my Clips4Sale page. Shocker! The only sort-of-sneaky code I had done was when I put in endless scrolling and disabled right-clicking on my photos. ;) The last point, about using deceptive means to generate traffic, really threw me… I guess showing my butt is a deceptive way to increase traffic?
The main purpose of my tumblr was promotion – I posted photos of myself and links to my websites. My posts were PG13. I was tagged as NSFW as a precaution, because hey, I have some hot friends who post some very hot photos, and I like to reblog them once in a while. I linked to my profiles on other sites, both on my tumblr blog and in my posts.
My entire account was terminated without warning or suspension.
This isn’t just happening to me, it’s also happened to a couple of my camgirl friends. They were terminated without warning as well.
If you’re a camgirl (or really any adult industry person), be aware that tumblr can and will remove your entire account if they don’t like what you post or where your links go.
This, too, is not new. Tumblr has a long and unsavory history of deleting adult blogs (and for all I know, non-adult ones) it deems too commercial, even if they don’t violate the community guidelines. The best explanation I’ve got for that is that they’ve got an extremely broad and flexible definition of spam. Which, if they’d be explicit about it instead of sheepish and deceptive and piously “we value your freedom of expression”, would be no problem at all.
But they’re not. They are quietly and dishonestly hostile to adult content in general and to adult marketing and self-promotion in particular, even when that marketing complies with their community guidelines in every particular. Which is a nice intro to this morning’s sermon on The Catechism of Bacchus:
- Tumblr is, at the end of the day, a blogging service.
- As I’ve been saying since at least 2004, blogging services suck.
- This is Bacchus’s First Rule and it remains the rule: Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own server that you control.
- You will be tempted to ignore The Rule because of social media network effects.
- You may even feel forced to ignore it, because you can’t get enough attention on your own platform.
- When you disregard the rule (and everybody does, even me who wrote it) you will get burned.
- Count on it. Plan for it. The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.
Update, some hours later: The “extralunchmoney.com” string can now be published on Tumblr without a problem, or it could when I just tested it. I do not believe it was a glitch but if Tumblr ever acknowledges this trial balloon, I’ll betcha they claim it was.
Updated update: It’s official, Tumblr support said it was a glitch. As I predicted. “Looks like a glitch on our end was causing the problem, but now it’s fixed.” Pretty strange “glitch”, though. My guess is that they’ve got a shit-list of unpublishable URLs, which are supposed to be genuine bad actors. This would make sense, to stop a malware link that’s going viral for instance. The “glitch” here would be that a legitimate URL got put on the list, I’m guessing. If they are ramping up enforcement of affiliate spam and somebody got overzealous or had poor training, it would explain this outcome. That would also explain why the camgirl sites are getting slammed; those links they use to direct people to their camming sites look a lot like affiliate links in structure, even though they aren’t actually affiliate links in function.
Similar Sex Blogging:
August 3rd, 2013 -- by Bacchus
There’s a powerful article by Coleen Singer in Erotic Scribes (which is the house organ for SSSH.com, the erotica-for-women site in Colin Rowntree’s venerable Wasteland.com family of adult websites) that asks the question:
Where Did All The Sex Go On The Internet?
It’s a wide ranging and thoughtful piece about the Pornocalypse that’s well worth your time, but I liked it especially for the snarky analysis of just how destructive and useless Google has become as a search engine for finding porn. Coleen just wanted to find a blowjob movie, and she had to dig through endless major-media fluff and crap all the way to page six of the search results:
Anyone that has ever seen a porn movie knows that there is at least ONE blowjob in it. If the movie has six scenes, there are probably SIX blowjobs in it. So, let’s say I really want to find one of the skinamatic masterpieces just to maybe pick up some new tricks and techniques for my personal use at home.
Step 1: Go to Google.com
Step 2: Make sure any adult content filters are shut off to be able to see “the good stuff”.
Step 3: Type in the search term “Blow Job” and wait 150 milliseconds for all of the wonderful things to choose from.
Here is what comes back, in order of appearance on the front page of search results for “blow job”:
#1: Oral Sex Tips — How to Give a Great Blow Job – Redbook
Redbook? I want to see a blowjob, not how to make curtains or cupcakes!
#2: Fellatio — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oh great. A questionably accurate article about the history, socio-economic ramifications and etymology of the blow job. Not exactly toe curling blow job entertainment.
#3: Blow Job (film) — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hmmm….. this looks promising. Maybe it might have a link to it to a website with a blowjob movie. Oh wait, the wiki article tells me “Blow Job is a silent film, directed by Andy Warhol, that was filmed in January 1964. It depicts the face of an uncredited DeVeren Bookwalter as he apparently receives fellatio from an unseen partner. While shot at 24 frame/s, Warhol specified that it should be projected at 16 frame/s, slowing it down by a third.” Warhol HAD ME at saying 24 frames per second, but maybe I’ll come back to that one when I’m in a mood for modern film making techniques….
#4: Urban Dictionary: Steak and Blowjob Day
I didn’t even bother clicking on that one.
#5: Visa Blowjob – YouTube
About as sexy as a YouTube “Cute Kittens On A Piano” home video.
#6: Cosmo Master Class: How to Give a Blow Job – Cosmopolitan
Oh great. Is that before or after Cosmo makes me feel like my ass is too fat, or I read about Angelina’s latest adoption of a lucky kid?
#7: Blow Jobs Videos — Metacafe
Well, finally soomething that might have a blowjob movie in it! MetaCafe? Sounds kinda like a tube site or something so clicked on it. After patiently waiting a full 30 seconds to be force fed a Playstation advertisement, was rewarded with a iphone video of a couple of people under a blue plastic tarp doing something under there. Not sure what it was. Onward…..
#8: Her BJ Hang-Ups — AskMen
Oh great. A men’s magazine blaming all blow job problems with women’s attitudes. Is Pat Robertson on their editorial staff?
#9: 7 Killer Blow Job Techinques | Sean Jameson | YourTango
Mind you, I actually am a regular reader of YourTango and enjoy it, but I know for a FACT I am not going to actually SEE a blow job movie on their site.
END OF GOOGLE PAGE 1 RESULTS
Sigh… Thwarted at the Google Gate in finding a blow job movie. “Maybe page two” I optimistically said to myself….
Page two DID offer a link to something called OV Guide that promised to at least have a set of reviews of blowjob movies, all on the tubes and probably pirated content, but hey, I was getting desperate so gave it a click. As soon as every possible anti-virus and security warning went off telling me this site was going to steal my identity and soul, I quickly returned to my Google page 2 results.
Page two consisted of a blog posting by some guy remembering that his first blowjob in high school was painful, several dictionary site definitions of the word, an Esquire article about “Eight of ten men surveyed preferred giving than receiving oral sex..” (yeah. right), and some posting on a site called “Family Sex” which sounded too creepy for me to even consider clicking on.
Page 3 of Google results for “Blow Job” offered Gwyneth Paltrow giving advice for women about blowjobs, some more dictionary definitions, a couple of cocktail recipes (I had no idea there was a cocktail called a “blow job” so bookmarked that for later mixology experiments) and FINALLY! ONE LINK to some blow job movies! Some site called xnxx.com that seemed to have LOTS of blow job movies.
Click with eager anticipation….
A Free Porn Tube. With horrible quality movie clips (many possibly pirated) as 3 live sex chat windows spawned in the background, all while a friendly woman in a little chat window offered to please me, and another message told me there were dozens of women in my hometown that want to fuck me (which seems odd, as I live in a rural town with only 1200 residents).
Pages 4 and 5 offered much of the same. Celebrity blow job opinions, drink recipes and a couple more cheesy and probably “illegal in some way” tube links.
It was not until PAGE 6 that I finally found exactly what I was looking for:
The Art of Blowjob: Redhead Camille Crimson’s Blowjobs and … www.theartofblowjob.com/ – Gorgeous redhead Camille Crimson’s passionate and sensual blowjob videos.
I clicked. It was good. Peace was restored to the realm.
As Coleen points out, this is a deliberate choice by Google:
Google knows darned well that a keyword search for “blow job” in NSFW mode is not from someone looking for a cocktail recipe or academic discourse on the matter.
Similar Sex Blogging:
|
|
