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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
October 17th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Ever since Dr. Faustus asked me about it on Twitter, I’ve been paying attention to the stories about a scummy British tabloid fright piece on dirty ebooks that has been rippling through the online bookselling ecosystem recently. It’s terribly difficult to get precise information, but it appears that all the major ebook retailers are going through their catalogs with fire and sword and badly-tuned keyword searches, removing many titles from availability and explaining themselves either badly or not-at-all.
The best summary (even if it’s a few days old now) that I’ve seen so far is here: Self-Published Erotica is Being Singled Out For Sweeping Deletions From Major eBookstores.
I haven’t done any independent reporting of my own, except to go check my own self-published ebook (a lightly-edited repackage and modernization of a neglected Victorian classic) in the Amazon and Kobo stores. I can report that it remains in both stores, though I did get a creepily-vague form email from Kobo putting me on notice of unspecified changes in how they enforce their unspecified policies.
I guess I don’t need to remind everybody that eventually the pornocalypse comes for us all…
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June 26th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
My twitter feed just lit up with outrage about the email Google just sent to some or all of the adult bloggers on Blogger/BlogSpot blogs (of which there are a lot):
Important Update to Adult Content Policy on Blogger
You are receiving this message because you are the admin of a blog hosted on Blogger which is identified to have Adult content.
Please be advised that on June 30th 2013, we will be updating our Content Policy to strictly prohibit the monetization of Adult content on Blogger. After June 30th 2013, we will be enforcing this policy and will remove blogs which are adult in nature and are displaying advertisements to adult websites.
If your adult blog currently has advertisements which are adult in nature, you should remove them as soon as possible as to avoid any potential Terms of Service violation and/or content removals.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Great thanks to Molly for sending me a copy; I myself do not have any Blogger-hosted sites because of Bacchus’s First Rule. However, Blogger/BlogSpot have a long history as the most reliable and long-lived host for free blogging, and (other than a heavy hand with an adult warning page that went up a few years ago) they’ve always been entirely adult-friendly. I didn’t see this coming, not in any specific way.
Obviously currently active bloggers can (if they move quickly — four day’s warning, seriously Google?) delete offending affiliate links and save their blogs. But the real impact here will be in to the long list of moribund adult blogs going back for most of a decade. There are many thousands of these, and being moribund, there’s no hope that they’ll be saved. Not only will they vanish from the web (I wonder if Google will use robots.txt to kill them in the WayBack Machine like Tumblr does?) but when they go, they’ll take with them an “installed base” of ancient blogroll links the departure of which will be strongly felt by all of the adult sites they ever linked to. It’s going to be a Page Rank bloodbath, for the folks who care about SEO and all that.
The pornocalypse comes for us all, I tell ya.
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June 10th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a person who had their personal D/s blog deleted from WordPress.com (the blog hosting service, not the .org self-hosted blogging software) and has been utterly unable to get any explanation except for form letter responses about the terms of service. From WordPress.com hostile to kink?, this excerpt:
I would respect them if they said “we don’t want mature content, period”. But I refuse to support a company that wants to be perceived as mature-friendly, but secretly kicks out kinky bloggers for subjective, undocumented and arbitrary reasons. That’s just dishonest.
The pornocalypse comes for us all. And anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own server that you control.
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June 4th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
It was February 22, really, when the stories about Google Glass finally began to catch my attention. This is the one that first fired my imagination:
Verge: I used Google Glass: Up close and personal with Google’s visionary new computer
That was the story that convinced me that Glass (or some future, similar device) was something I’d actually maybe want to use. I believe it was this paragraph that actually did the trick:
If you get a text message or have an incoming call when you’re walking down a busy street, there are something like two or three things you have to do before you can deal with that situation. Most of them involve you completely taking your attention off of your task at hand: walking down the street. With Glass, that information just appears to you, in your line of sight, ready for you to take action on. And taking that action is little more than touching the side of Glass or tilting your head up – nothing that would take you away from your main task of not running into people.
Of course, it was only six days later on February 28 that I began to see the hideous tentacles behind the curtain:
Creative Good: The Google Glass feature no one is talking about
I was (and remain) confident that all the person-to-person privacy issues (“Are you filming me now? Please take off the glasses”) will sort themselves out through normal cultural adjustment, but I hadn’t really considered the full implications of making every Glass-wearer into an uncompensated Google StreetView camera-monkey:
Take the video feeds from every Google Glass headset, worn by users worldwide. Regardless of whether video is only recorded temporarily, as in the first version of Glass, or always-on, as is certainly possible in future versions, the video all streams into Google’s own cloud of servers. Now add in facial recognition and the identity database that Google is building within Google Plus (with an emphasis on people’s accurate, real-world names): Google’s servers can process video files, at their leisure, to attempt identification on every person appearing in every video. And if Google Plus doesn’t sound like much, note that Mark Zuckerberg has already pledged that Facebook will develop apps for Glass.
Finally, consider the speech-to-text software that Google already employs, both in its servers and on the Glass devices themselves. Any audio in a video could, technically speaking, be converted to text, tagged to the individual who spoke it, and made fully searchable within Google’s search index.
…
The really interesting aspect is that all of the indexing, tagging, and storage could happen without the Google Glass user even requesting it. Any video taken by any Google Glass, anywhere, is likely to be stored on Google servers, where any post-processing (facial recognition, speech-to-text, etc.) could happen at the later request of Google, or any other corporate or governmental body, at any point in the future.
Remember when people were kind of creeped out by that car Google drove around to take pictures of your house? Most people got over it, because they got a nice StreetView feature in Google Maps as a result.
Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device — every single day, everywhere they go — on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.
Well, that’s gonna suck. But if wearable computing is a compelling user experience, people will suck it up and monkey-cam their way to happiness. Let’s move on to the porn stuff, shall we?
Fast forward to April 17, which was the day a bizarre trainwreck of competing Glass stories landed. Let me just dump these two headlines here for you in the order that I saw them:
Wired: Google Is Forbidding Users From Reselling, Loaning Glass Eyewear
BizJournals: How Google Glass will change porn forever
Do you see the dialectical struggle between those two headlines?
Up until the moment I saw the first headline, I had assumed that Glass would be just another Android device, running some sort of special Android software to be sure, but basically part of the open Android ecosystem that allows users to run whatever software they want on their hardware. More fool me:
The company’s terms of service on the limited-edition wearable computer specifically states, “you may not resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person. If you resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person without Google’s authorization, Google reserves the right to deactivate the device, and neither you nor the unauthorized person using the device will be entitled to any refund, product support, or product warranty.”
If they’ve got the power to remotely deactivate your computer, that means you don’t own it; and it also means that in order to preserve that power, they’ve got to control the software you run on it. Which means Google Glass will be like the iPhone — a walled garden ecosystem, not an open one.
And porn is never welcome for long in corporate walled gardens. The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All. The instant I saw those terms of service, I knew that Glass would never be a porn-friendly device. Knew it. Dismissed it from my adult interest. Never gonna happen. Game over, man.
Nor was that any kind of surprise. Google has grown increasingly porn-hostile in recent years. Remember when they removed the “off” setting from the SafeSearch filter button, and turned it into a toggle between “on” and the former “moderate” setting? Have you noticed how harshly porn sites are penalized in the search algorithms lately? Remember when they started filtering Violet Blue out of the autocomplete search dropdowns? Or decided that there’s no such thing as a “safe search” for “clitoris” while allowing three million “safe” results for “penis”? The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.
So if porn on Google Glass was always a non-starter, what was up with that other “Glass will change porn forever” headline that dropped on the same day? Well, it turns out that the Silicon Valley Business Journal interviewed Kink.com’s Peter Acworth and got some great quotes, which (because he makes porn for a living) are (when you look at them closely) all about how Google Glass might change the making of porn, rather than its consumption or distribution:
“Google Glass opens up new opportunities for reality-based films,” says Acworth.
Acworth says Glass offers amateur filmmakers the opportunity to produce homegrown films featuring couples at home or other spontaneous situations.
“You could film picking up someone at a bar and taking them home, for example,” he said. “It takes the whole genre of POV and reality productions one stage further. You’ll hopefully get something very authentic.”
And that’s nifty (once you gulp yourself past those “sorting out the interpersonal privacy stuff” issues I hand-waved us past near the beginning of this post), but it doesn’t require Glass to be porn-friendly. Acworth is talking about Glass as a new sort of camera device, and that’s it.
So, that was April. In early May, I wrote this post:
ErosBlog: Google Glass: No Fuck For You!
It was actually a bit of a cheap shot on my part, reflecting my increasing awareness (and perhaps even a bit of nascent bitterness) that Google Glass wasn’t going to be an open platform that adults could play with. The actual story was that the voice-recogniton-to-email engine built into Glass was censoring cuss words, replacing them with asterisks. And as I noted at the time, this “felt” more like an accidental default setting inherited from some earlier, more business-corporate use of the voice recognition engine. But it prompted me to write this:
What’s it going to be like, living in a world where everything you say passes through filters you can’t see and don’t control? Where, when you search for something you can’t find, you don’t know if it doesn’t exist or if it was silently filtered from your search results? When someone says something to you, did they actually say that? Or were their words edited on the fly?
Obviously this is relevant to the Pornocalypse discussion. If the corporate data silos that own the filters are porn-hostile, the world will look very different than it would if the filters were transparent and under user control.
That was early May. Then in late May came a spate of stories about genuine porn apps (well, really only one) coming soon for Google Glass:
Huffington Post: Google Glass Porn App To Be Released In A ‘Couple Of Days’ By MiKandi Porn App Store
New York Post: XXX-ray vision: Google Glass getting porn apps
Time: Yes, Of Course There Will Be Google Glass Porn
The only story I actually bothered to read at the time was the one by Violet Blue, because I knew deep in my gut that there would never be porn apps on Google Glass:
ZDNet: MiKandi making Google Glass porn, app imminent
Violet expressed a little bit of the necessary skepticism:
However excited as I am to see what Mikandi does with Glass, I think I’m not the only one wondering if Google is going to pull an Apple and send MiKiandi a cease-and-desist — or worse.
Indeed. And that brings our pornocalypse timeline up to yesterday, June 3rd, when the “porn app for Glass” finally released:
TechNewsDaily: MiKandi Launches First Google Glass Porn App
Mashable: Google Glass Gets Its First Porn App
NBC: Porn app comes to Google Glass – are you surprised?
Buried in the TechNewsDaily story was the key kernel of cold-water truth that would inform the next wave of headlines:
MiKandi has been keeping close tabs on Google Glass’ terms of service, and discovered that over the weekend that they now prohibit sexually explicit apps. “We were not notified of any changes and still haven’t been notified,” said McEwen. “We wanted to be sure we played within Google’s boundaries and push the envelope in a responsible way.”
That’s the anticipatory drumroll before the headsman’s axe falls, people. But — late yesterday while the drum tattoo was still beating — I saw a different story that reinforced the extent to which Glass is going to be a walled garden:
Slate: “Don’t Be Creepy”: Google Glass Won’t Allow Face Recognition
People (and not just cops!) are really going to want facial recognition in their wearable field-of-vision computers. Those of us with a touch of face-blindness, in particular, would really welcome an app that put names over heads just like in World Of Warcraft. But, no, here’s Google’s Saturday update to the developer policies:
Don’t use the camera or microphone to cross-reference and immediately present personal information identifying anyone other than the user, including use cases such as facial recognition and voice print. Applications that do this will not be approved at this time.
Walled garden, folks. Your hardware is not actually yours. It will not run the software that you want it to run. It will only run the software Google wants it to run.
Meanwhile, back here in porn world, the drumbeat about the Glass porn app came to its abrupt crescendo later in the day yesterday. The axe fell. Let’s go right to the horse’s mouth for this one, to the Mikandi blog:
Mikandi: Google Bans Glass Porn Apps
This is worth quoting in some detail:
Wow, what a morning, folks. Really. We appreciate all the positive feedback on our adult Glass app, Tits & Glass.
Since we announced the availability of Tits & Glass this morning, nearly 10,000 unique vistors have visited TitsAndGlass.com, and a dozen Glass users have already signed up with our app. Not surprisingly, we’ve reached our API limits. Our previously approved request to up our limit was later denied today, so unfortunately, there’ll be no more updates to Tits & Glass until tomorrow.
However, more importantly, and thus the purpose behind this blog post- MiKandi became aware today that Google changed its policy over the weekend to ban adult content on all Glassware.
When we received our Glass and started developing our app 2 weeks ago, we went through the policy very carefully to make sure we were developing the app within the terms. We double checked again last week when making the site live on the Internet and available for install for testing during last week’s announcement. We were not notified of any changes and still haven’t been notified by Google. We also double checked our emails to see if any notifications of policy changes were announced, but we haven’t found any such emails.
Although the app is still live and people are using it, at this point we must make changes to the app in order to comply with the new policies.
The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All. I could have told ’em, if they’d asked me.
Of course this has triggered a storm of breathless headlines that I found waiting in my morning feeds:
Fox News: Mikandi Porn app for Google Glass released, immediately banned
ABC: Google Strips First Glass Porn App, Bans Adult Content on Its Connected Glasses
Daily Mail: Google Glass porn app launched – and then swiftly banned
Silicon Republic: Google quickly updates policy to shut down porn apps for Glass
There’s about 600 more of these — it appears to be the tech story of yesterday and today — but they all say the same thing. Here’s Google’s corporate-bland response, to the Fox News reporter:
“Our policies make it clear that Glass does not allow Glassware content that contains nudity, graphic sexual acts, or sexually explicit material. Any Glassware that violates this policy will be blocked from appearing on Glass.
Our Explorer Program makes users active participants in evolving Glass ahead of a wider consumer launch. In keeping with this approach, we’ve updated our developer policies. We look forward to learning more from our users as we update the software and evolve our policies in the weeks and months ahead.”
And there you have it, folks, straight from the belly of the data-silo. You might spend 1,500 smackeroos to buy your Google Glasses, but Google says you can’t run any software on there that might specifically facilitate your ability to see bare titties. It’s the iPhone all over again. Nifty for what it does? Sure enough. But the device does not work for you. It doesn’t truly belong to you. You’ll never truly own it. It’s just a hardware portal for that limited subset of activities the manufacturer considers to be consistent with its own corporate image.
I’ve said it before and I’ve got the weary certainty that I’ll be saying it many times again:
The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.
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May 1st, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Ask not for whom the pornocalypse tolls. It tolls for thee.
Recently I’ve been seeing lots of tweets and headlines suggesting that Amazon is going through another round of cracking down on porn ebooks, generally burying them deeper and making them harder to find (or, as their people would no doubt put it, making it harder for porn to pop up accidentally in general searches.) I haven’t paid a lot of attention, because I’m old and I’m weary and I’ve seen this pattern repeated over and over again throughout the internet age. Somebody builds a platform or service or community or whatever, it is even better with porn, lots of people use it for porn, it grows awesomely, eventually the suits get uncomfortable with all the porn that is at the foundation of their business, and so they try to marginalize it or (usually later in the process) drive it out entirely (though this often fails).
Smart people know that the internet (hell, any new technology disruptive enough to be interesting) is for porn. Remember why home VCRs exploded in popularity? How many of you Usenet veterans were motivated to get a Usenet feed (or a better feed than the on you started with) because of the porn groups? Smarter observers than me have noticed that the appearance of porn on your new platform is proof, of a weak sort, that your platform is important enough to matter:
I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media — it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test — if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.
There’s one sentence there that’s very important: “If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work.” The suits always miss an important corollary: “If you’re trying to root out the porn in your system, you’re trying to break your own system.”
But, strive to break it they do. It’s a seemingly-inevitable phase in the growth cycle of any commercial “read/write technology”. (Although, these days, I’ve noticed that a lot of new platforms are attempting to bake “broken for grownups” into their products from the beginning. Pinterest and your “no nudity” TOS, I’m thinking of you! Google+ and your war on nyms, you also.)
The first one of these cycles I lived through was eBay in the early days. If you remember that far back (we’re talking mid 1990s) eBay was especially vital and amazing right after it got a critical mass of users, but before the whole world had figured out that old stuff was suddenly much more valuable now that there was an efficient mechanism for matching it to willing buyers. Basically there was a supply glut on nifty old stuff right at first, the accumulated collectibles of history all hitting the market at once. And this was as true for vintage porn (magazines and books and videotapes) as it was for any other genre of collectibles.
And it was AWESOME. I still have (in very deep storage) apple boxes full of vintage porn magazines I bought for less money than it cost to have them shipped to me via USPS media mail. Someday I’d love to get a high speed scanner and put them all up on the web Internet Archive style, but it would be a labor of years and I’d need a very wealthy and eccentric patron. Meanwhile, I preserve them as best I can.
But then Meg Whitman happened. It’s too many years ago now for me to recall how many successive waves of anti-porn activism swept the eBay auction platform, but it was many.
The adult items got their own section, it got put behind an age self-verification button, the adult items vanished from the general search, the adult section itself got removed from the category listing making it very hard to find, and then there was wave after wave of auction removals based on listing policies that were vague and erratically enforced. There were rules about how much nudity could show on magazine covers, there were wide-ranging keyword bans that meant you could not list (or show an uncensored photo of) the true titles of many porn items, there was a ton of selective enforcement, and there was an enormous chilling effect because seller accounts were often banned or limited based on first-offense violations of these deeply-murky rules.
It eventually became clear to everyone that Ebay under Meg Whitman (the former Disney exec) was now officially hostile to porn, where once it had been the leading sales platform for vintage porn especially. The market dried up, market offerings became bland and boring, and everybody who was on eBay for that reason had left. The suits, having stricken off the member that so offended them, declared victory and moved on. They broke it, but they like broken better. Broken is what they wanted, broken is what they got.
So now: is Amazon doing the same with erotic ebooks? To me it looks like early days, but yeah, I see the handwriting on the wall.
One high-profile erotica author, Selena Kitt, writes: “The Pornocalypse has begun. Amazon continues filtering erotica out of their All Department Search in large numbers.”
That’s true as far as it goes. My nascent Bacchus Media porn ebook project has one erotica title (a Victorian erotica classic that I repackaged for the Kindle back in 2009) for sale on Amazon, and sure enough, it’s flagged “Adult” and does not appear in an “All Departments” search. But it does appear in “Kindle Store” and “Books” searches, which strikes me as proper behavior. This is not (yet) a hidden and unsearchable category ghetto.
Not yet. But erotic authors are starting to feel the noose. Here’s Selena Kitt in another post:
Hey, does anyone remember when Amazon started banning erotic fiction?
Or when Apple removed “certain” titles from their bestseller lists?
Or when Paypal stopped paying for “certain types” of erotica?
When Amazon began excluding books from its “all department” search?
When Smashwords started cracking down on “nipples and floppy bits and dangly parts?”
Or when Apple began rejecting outright those books which contained “certain content” they didn’t agree with?
Or when Barnes and Noble stripped bestselling erotica books (in the top 100) of their ranks by 1,000 points?
And the new anti-porn pornocalypse rules get bizarre very quickly. Why would the largest bookseller in the world deny the existence of the Erotic Romance category? Back to the first Selena Kitt post I linked to:
Back when I hit the top 100 on Amazon, the competition wasn’t anywhere near as fierce as it is today. They didn’t know quite what to do with a naked woman’s bottom on their bestseller list.
That’s when they began the system that we are seeing them implementing now — what we in erotica circles call the “ADULT filter.” Back then, you were only filtered (which means that you were excluded from the all-department search, and your book didn’t appear in the also-boughts of any books that were not filtered, which was very limiting at the time!) if your book contained nudity on the cover.
So I slapped a thong on the woman on my Babysitting the Baumgartners cover and Amazon “unfiltered” my book. Sales resumed at their usual pace and life went on. But I had to figure out myself what the problem was, the reason the filter had been applied in the first place. There was no transparency on Amazon’s part. None. Nada. I even talked on the phone to an “Amazon executive customer service representative” who would only “confirm or deny” my suspicions.
I felt like Woodward and Bernstein talking to Deep Throat in a parking garage somewhere. That’s how bizarre and surreal the conversation was.
The media has recently picked up on Amazon’s latest attack on “porn,” but the Pornocalypse looks as if it’s just begun.
The filtering tool that Amazon previously only used to exclude nudity on covers is now being applied to books arbitrarily, but in very, very large numbers. We haven’t seen a purge this big on Amazon since they banned incest and bestiality in erotic work.
First of all, Amazon has now separated Erotica and Romance. I don’t know if erotic romance writers know this or have realized it yet, but Amazon has recently changed their policy (not that they’ve told anyone about it or anything!) and you can no longer put your book in BOTH Erotica and Romance categories. You have to choose one or the other. “Erotic Romance” as a category will now classify your book as “erotica.”
And be careful, because once you have labeled your book as “erotic,” they will not allow you to reclassify it as NOT erotic. The only exception to this rule I have seen so far is for traditionally published books (ala Fifty Shades). Self-published books don’t get this treatment.
Meg Whitman rides again, and this time her name is Jeff Bezos. My prediction is, the pornocalypse rules will get more restrictive and more opaque and more arbitrary. Erotica will never vanish from Amazon’s platform — just like it never vanished completely from Ebay — but its prominence in the success of the Kindle platform will be swept under the rug of history.
And make no mistake: erotica mattered to the success of the Kindle and to that of ebook readers in general. Here’s my own take on that from a few months ago, from a post I called Discreet Porn For Women:
It’s no secret that the rise of the portable e-book reader (whatever brand you favor) has triggered a quiet boom in the prose-porn-for-women industry. But if you’re a man and you’re like me, you may have been fooled by the unassuming “Erotic Romance” styling of the genre.
…
When a book was a physical artifact only, you had three choices. First, you could limit your reading to book-objects that wouldn’t get you more grief than you could handle, when you were observed with them by your friends and family. Second, you could limit your reading to times and places so private that your book-objects were physically secure from observation. Or, third, you could fudge, by reading book-objects that looked more innocuous than they were, placing them in the first category by courtesy.
Now the electronic reader gives you a fourth choice: read whatever the hell you want, where-ever the hell you want, and just flip closed your completely opaque personalized bejazzled leatherette Hello Kitty e-reader cover whenever anybody else gets too close to your screen. Throw in the Internet so you can buy whatever the hell you want without any witnesses, and the circle is complete. Your credit card statement says “Amazon” and your browser history says (at worst) “erotic romance” and it’s all so very safe from inspection, criticism, or judgment.
Here’s a confirming related visual found at Bondage Blog, talking about why an iPad is an awesome thing to have for looking at porn in public:
Selena Kitt puts the “porn built the Kindle” case even more strongly, from her erotica author’s perspective:
Jeff Bezos may have put out the product, but I made the Kindle into what it is today. Me, and legions of other erotica writers who were already writing it, and those who came later, who saw how much readers were clamoring for it. Readers could suddenly read erotica without anyone seeing the cover. The Kindle device made that possible, Amazon made the Kindle available… but I provided the content readers were surreptitiously reading under their desks at work and on the subway home.
…
THAT is what sold Kindles. Porn. Face it, Jeff Bezos. You owe the success of Kindle to me, and to every erotica writer out there making a living writing “porn.”
It’s true. And Jeff Bezos knows it. But Amazon is moving on nonetheless. The Pornocalypse comes for us all.
Who is next? My guess would be Tumblr. [2018 update: Did I call this or what?] Tumblr is, of all the big platforms, perhaps the most porn friendly; there’s lots of porn on there and the Terms of Service do not prohibit it. But if you surf Tumblr porn blogs for very long, you’ll notice that they get deactivated a lot. There are some kind of rules (not published anywhere) and if you break them (or, maybe, if somebody complains) you get nuked.
What is forbidden? Tumblr does not say. Maybe it’s age-play images that causes trouble (it can be hard to distinguish that stuff from illegal/pedo shit after all), maybe it’s rough sex photos that aren’t obviously consensual/commercial porn, maybe it’s scat or bestiality. It’s hard to say when all you’ve got to go by is the occasional non-working link with [deactivated] in it.
But Tumblr is, famously, a popular platform in search of a revenue-generating business model. And we’ve learned that the suits have no loyalty to the porn users who made their platform popular. So, my bold prediction is that as Tumblr casts about for a business model, one of their steps will be to “clean this place up” (for the VCs, for the advertisers, for the potential buyers, for somebody). A lot more porn tumblrs will go away when that happens.
The pornocalypse comes for us all.
Is there any defense against the pornocalypse? Not really. To be sure, if you follow Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet you can at least protect yourself from losing your data and intellectual property when the anti-porn suits decide to “clean up” whatever social publishing platform you might otherwise have been using. You remember my First Rule: “Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.”
Unfortunately I wrote that before the true social power of platforms became fully apparent to me. You can protect your physical stuff from loss if you keep it buried in a cave, too, but what good is it if people can’t see it and play with it?
Social media platforms, publishing platforms, auction platforms, online stores, all of these benefit from the network effects of their many connected users, and increasingly they are turning into self-contained silos that aren’t sufficiently connected to the open internet. Following the First Rule protects you from loss, but it doesn’t expose you to gain as well as I thought it did, back in 2004 when I first wrote it down. Back then I believed in the power of the open web and in the impartiality of Google. You make a cool porn thing, you put it on the web, people will find it, joy and orgasms and profit for everybody.
But here in 2013 things look very different. What’s more useless than an iPhone app that isn’t allowed into the Apple store? If you publish that bad boy on your own domain, Google won’t surface it well for searchers and Apple won’t let them install it if they did find it. Nope, the First Rule is not enough.
If you want to play, you have to play where the people are. If you do anything with erotica and porn, that means shunning the platforms where you’re wholly unwelcome, pushing yourself as far as possible onto the platforms where you’re somewhat tolerated, and enthusiastically exploiting the platforms where you’re truly welcome.
But even when you do all this, it’s important to understand that companies and platforms have life cycles, and there seems inevitably to come a time in all of them where porn that was formerly welcome (often, porn that played a fundamental role in building the popularity of the platform) will get kicked to the curb or shoved behind a sleazy curtain at the back of the store. Although I believe in making this process as embarrassing and painful as possible for the companies that do it, I don’t really believe it can be prevented, or even mitigated much. All you can do is expect it, prepare for it, diversify as much as possible onto as many platforms as possible, and stay agile.
The pornocalypse comes for us all.
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July 6th, 2025 -- by Bacchus
It’s been almost 25 years since I started ErosBlog, and the world of porn has changed immensely over that quarter of a century. So much so, that if you were not already back then a porn-enjoying adult who was paying a lot of attention to your erotic media, it’s very hard now to describe the scope and intensity of all the changes, not only in the porn “industry” but in the diversity and community of people who buy and enjoy porn.
One thing I said pretty early on, in various places and different ways, was that ErosBlog was intended to be a place for unabashed and unapologetic male-gaze porn, without also being a loutish cesspool of misogyny, which unfortunately was the norm for most internet porn sites in 2002 when ErosBlog was new. At that time I had never heard of porn for women, and indeed it was widely believed among mostly-male pornographers that “women aren’t visual creatures” and also that women didn’t like or enjoy watching porn. That last, of course, was the most self-fulfilling prophecy that ever fulfilled itself. If you make visual entertainments in which women are mostly treated like worthless cum-dumpster garbage, what reasonable person would expect them to line up to enjoy your oh-so-pleasant motion picture spectaculars?
Luckily for me, sex blogging has always been an eye-opening and a horizons-broadening experience. This broadening, no pun intended, was facilitated for me in those early days by a female friend and co-blogger known here as Aphrodite, whose early posting about Sssh.com introduced me for the first time to the porn-for-women idea. Although I did not know it yet, Sssh.com’s Angie Rowntree had by then already for some years been making sex-positive cinematic ethically-produced porn movies to scripts inspired by the fantasies of the site’s women members. In the decades since, the work has expanded to include many other award winning directors, and Sssh has helped pioneer the development of ethical porn practices, which “back in the day” were something that directors and producers of goodwill struggled with individually.
Obviously, any porn site with roots going back to 1999 offers extensive photo galleries to supplement its flagship movie products. If you, like me, were at first somewhat slow to realize why the women of the world were so faithfully devoted to their e-book readers, the answer is “smut” and you will correctly deduce that a porn-for-women offering will include a considerable library of erotic stories and novels, too. What you might not realize is that they also offer audio content such as audiobooks and erotic podcasts.
Ms. Rowntree describes her site these days as “your source for ethically produced, sex-positive indie adult cinema.” I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Angie, but we’ve exchanged friendly emails over the years about mutual porn industry interests and frustrations, such as my obsession with reporting on the pornocalypse and her steps a decade ago to keep porn performers safer on set than the industry norm. In my opinion, she does amazing work!
Image credits: All photos from the current Sssh.com tour.
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February 24th, 2025 -- by Bacchus
According to this post on bsky.social:
This morning at Dept of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) HQ in DC, as mandatory return to office began, this video played on loop for ~5 mins on screens throughout the building, per agency source.
Building staff couldn’t figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs.
The video, in context:
Yes, that’s a (presumably AI-generated) video of Donald Trump sucking Elon Musk’s toes playing underneath a text legend that says “Long live the real king.” Do we stan toe-sucking oligarchs? Well, I don’t, but I would never want to yuck your yum.
The clean .gif of just the toe sucking makes it more obvious that this particular King Elon has two left feet, which is normal life for an AI-generated monster.
Update: Sometimes my pornocalypse-sensitized curatorial instincts are super-solid. BlueSky deleted the post about this already, per an article at 404 Media. Supposedly the lame AI toe-sucking violates BlueSky’s policy on “non-consensual explicit material”. We might fairly wonder if there’s an unstated reason more compelling than that one.
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