This started as a slightly snarky idea inspired by a post earlier this week by PZ Myers, who reported on the research of Professor Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers University. PZ points us to coverage in an Australian newspaper. It was like this:

In their research they asked 16 women to “self-stimulate” until they achieved orgasm, while lying under a blanket in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. Despite the clinical surroundings, all the women were able to achieve their goal, mostly in less than five minutes — although some took up to 20.

I had three quick reactions.

(1) Squee! (I mean, tube girls, right?)

(2) This seems like a research theme we’ve seen before at ErosBlog.

(3) Perhaps I went into the wrong academic field.

Professor Komisaruk went on to find that women have it better than men, maybe.

“In one experiment we asked women to self-stimulate and then raise their hands each time they orgasmed. Some women raised their hands several times each session, often just a few seconds apart,” Professor Komisaruk said. “So the evidence is that woman tend to have longer orgasms and can experience several of them.”

And that’s where the snark set in: “I’m glad we have science to tell us that, Professor.”

Of course, what we have here is a very old theme. We have mythology to tell us this as well. You all do remember Tiresias, yes?

Tiresias, in the course of an adventurous life, managed to be both a man and a woman at various times, and as a consequence of his experiences got drawn into a dispute between the Head God Jupiter and Mrs. Head God Juno about whether males or females get more pleasure out of sex. Ovid recounts the story in Metampohoses III 316-338.

Original Latin text via Perseus. Dumque ea per terras fatali lege geruntur tutaque bis geniti sunt incunabula Bacchi, forte Iovem memorant, diffusum nectare, curas seposuisse graves vacuumque agitasse remissos cum Iunone iocos et “maior vestra profecto est, quam quae contingit maribus” dixisse “voluptas.” Illa negat. Placuit quae sit sententia docti quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota. Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu; deque viro factus (mirabile) femina septem egerat autumnos. Octavo rursus eosdem vidit, et “est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae” dixit “ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet, nunc quoque vos feriam.” Percussis anguibus isdem forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago. Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa dicta Iovis firmat. Gravius Saturnia iusto nec pro materia fertur doluisse, suique iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte. At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto scire futura dedit, poenamque levavit honore.

English translation by poet A.S. Kline. While these things were brought about on earth because of that fatal oath, and while twice-born Bacchus’s cradle remained safe, they say that Jupiter, expansive with wine, set aside his onerous duties, and relaxing, exchanging pleasantries, with Juno, said “You gain more than we do from the pleasures of love.” She denied it. They agreed to ask learned Tiresias for his opinion. He had known Venus in both ways. Once, with a blow of his stick, he had disturbed two large snakes mating in the green forest, and, marvellous to tell, he was changed from a man to a woman, and lived as such for seven years. In the eighth year he saw the same snakes again and said “Since there is such power in plaguing you that it changes the giver of a blow to the opposite sex, I will strike you again, now.” He struck the snakes and regained his former shape, and returned to the sex he was born with. As the arbiter of the light-hearted dispute he confirmed Jupiter’s words. Saturnia, it is said, was more deeply upset than was justified and than the dispute warranted, and damned the one who had made the judgement to eternal night. But, since no god has the right to void what another god has done, the all-powerful father of the gods gave Tiresias knowledge of the future, in exchange for his lost sight, and lightened the punishment with honour.

So take that, Science Guy! A mere poet got there first! (I’ll have to leave it to Bacchus to explain how he manages to be born twice.)

But of course, since I’m characterized by Faustian curiosity I had to dig a little deeper into the case of Professor Komisaruk, and found that he actually has a potential technology coming out of his research which is using these fMRI images to learn to think yourself to orgasm. Using images of your own brain to provide feedback, you learn to do what you otherwise would have required actual frictive contact with your own body to do. He discusses the possibility in a short video clip I found online (look here if the video does not embed properly):

Your own brainscan as porn! Aside from being as triumphant a vindication of Rule 34 as I have ever seen, that’s cool beyond belief.

I really did go into the wrong academic field.

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Y’all know that Kink.com is one of my favorite porn companies. But I gotta ask, what’s up with the dick on a long stick?

This latest example comes from The Upper Floor, but you can see it at any of their sites … and I don’t remember seeing it anywhere else in porn. Still, it’s obviously a porn thing:

I have some theories to explain the dick on a stick, but I don’t know if they are the right ones. For instance:

1. the dick on a stick allows them to show a lot of penetration in scenes that are mostly girl/girl, no male model needed;
2. the dick on a stick allows them to show penetration from angles where an attached man would obscure the camera shot;
3. the dick on a stick allows them to show penetrations that are rougher and more vigorous than could be easily managed with a dick attached to a man; or
4. the dick on a stick allows photographers and directors to participate directly in shoots without being visible on camera.

But weighing against all that is a more fundamental question: Who actually wants to see a dick on a stick?

If porn is about satisfying the fantasies of the viewer, who are the viewers who fantasize about a dick on a stick, either giving or receiving? If this were a fetish, wouldn’t there be written dick-on-a-stick fantasies? (I know, I know, Rule 34. Somebody will probably find some written dick-on-a-stick porn and link it in the comments, in an attempt to prove they have better porn-fu than me. Cool, knock yourself out, we all benefit.) Let’s hear it, readers: Do dicks on sticks do anything for you?

If I should be so fortunate as to have this blog post read by any of the Kink.com creative people who are responsible for stick-dicking porn, I’d be delighted to hear why you make it and what your impressions are of the target purchasing audience for it.

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Did I just write “surplus zucchini?” I repeat myself.

Have twice refused well-intentioned gifts of zucchini and squash in just the past week, I can testify that it’s the time of year when surplus zucchini bags itself up and roams the neighborhood, looking for unguarded porches to colonize. There’s a modern American folk tale in common currency about the man so desperate to rid himself of surplus zucchini that he bagged it up and left it in his unlocked car in a busy parking lot, hoping someone would steal it. When he came back, what did he find? Why, three bags of zucchini!

Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it.

Proof: This post at Spanking Blog. Click the first link in the post for the most graphic demonstration one could hope for.

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Prince Charming is a slow boy, apparently, because he’s fumbling with her foot when so much joy awaits just inches away behind a mere wisp of her underthings that she couldn’t be displaying more blatantly:

I don’t have a source for this Cinderella meme. Update: Thanks to J in the comments, now we know the artist (not the meme creator) is Steven Stahlberg, who has a Patreon. There is also a bare-pussy version of the artwork out there, but I can’t tell if it’s the artist’s work or a fan/machine edit.

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If you spend too much time on the ‘booru image boards, you’ll inevitably find yourself squinting at some sex scene with multiple people in it and asking yourself “why is he sticking his eleven-inch horse cock in her ear?” or “Is that goblin fucking her armpit?”

It used to be that the answer was always “Wow, I’m impressed by the artist’s creative perversity, I never would have imagined putting such a penis in such a place under those particular conditions.”

But nowadays? Well over half the time, the answer is “image was AI generated, model doesn’t know that dicks don’t normally go there or bend like that.” Which for me is always a disappointment. Knowing that a sexual idea was important enough to someone for them to intentionally make art about it is, for me, an important precondition for engaging my own erotic imagination. How would that be? What would that be like? Would it be fun to do, or to watch? Under what fantastic or science-fictional conditions would such at thing even be possible? I’m not going to waste any of that mental effort on AI-generated mistakes.

Yes, I do believe this is a special case of the general principle “If you couldn’t be bothered to write it, I can’t be bothered to read it.”

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I’m sorry to report that recent news of “mature subject matter” returning to Tumblr is pretty much totally a scam. I mean, you can post it, but nobody can see it. Search invisibility is near total, even for logged-in Tumblr users. So you’re posting into a black hole of non-discoverability. What’s the point?

Let’s get into it. There’s a lot of ground to cover.

September: Rumors Of The Tumblr Un-Pornocalypse

In late September Tumblr issued a sort-of-sideways announcement about their intention to relax the anti-porn rules by introducing new community labels for mature content. However, the announcement was at pains to explain that the actual content policies were not changing at that time. Specifically: “We haven’t updated the official content policies yet.”

I didn’t blog about it, although I did Tweet. As far as I was concerned, it was a nothing-burger. Wake me up when you can show me the fine print about what’s allowed. I also wanted to wait and see if any new adult-content flexibility extends to search discovery both internally and externally. I’ve seen parts of this movie before…

Tumblr Speaks A Truth: Social Media Porn Is A Hard Problem

At roughly the same time as the nothingburger announcement, Tumblr’s Matt Mullenweg posted, to his eternal credit, the single most-honest explanation from a social media platform perspective about why porn-friendly social media is essentially impossible in 2022. In Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022 Mullenweg said all the quiet parts out loud and with his full chest:

In 2018, when Tumblr was owned by Verizon, they swung in the other direction and instituted an adult content ban that took out not only porn but also a ton of art and artists – including a ban on what must have been fun for a lawyer to write, female presenting nipples. This policy is currently still in place, though the Tumblr and Automattic teams are working to make it more open and common-sense, and the community labels launch is a first step toward that.

That said, no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007. I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with “go nuts, show nuts” in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible. Here’s why.

He went on to list, in detail, the barriers imposed by credit card companies, app stores, age and consent verification, and the pornocalyptic reluctance of other companies to provide the necessary service stacks modern websites rely upon. Matt’s essay is a good essay. You go read. I’ll just share part of his conclusion:

If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money [to cover costs].

November: “Bruh! Tumblr Allows Noods Again!”

Nah. Not really. Allow me to explain.

Yesterday was the big day. Tumblr’s new nudity-friendlier community guidelines dropped. They… aren’t completely terrible, if your expectations were as low as mine:

Hardcore porn (“sexually explicit acts”) is still off limits, but the dreaded and mysterious “female-presenting nipple” is back on the menu, everybody!

But… what’s a “sexually explicit act”, you may well wonder? Ha! That’s not defined. Who wants to bet that “gay sexually explicit” and “straight sexually explicit” turn out to be two different things? Or, what about sex education? Demonstrating how to roll condoms onto a banana with your mouth, say? Or… wait! Breaking news from our field reporter on Twitter: sucking a dildo has already been flagged under the new rules, and the appeal apparently rejected. I guess “sextoyly explicit” is the same as “sexually explicit” now?

But wait! There’s more… and it’s worse. The above is Mullenweg’s summary of the new community guidelines. The actual text of the guidelines is rather more crabbed. Specifically, the forbidden “sexually explicit acts” are joined in the naughty booth by “content with an overt focus on genitalia.” What does “overt” mean, do you suppose? Guess! See if you get lucky! Would you have guessed that it included sucking on a sex toy?

So, have I got this right? Nudity is allowed, but if it shows too much pussy and cock, it’s not allowed. Or maybe — we’re guessing here — it’s not too much pussy and cock that gets you in trouble. Perhaps it’s a question of how closely the camera zooms in, or how brashly the genitals in question are displayed. “Overt focus” leaves a lot of room for interpretation, doesn’t it?

Search Invisibility And Your Tumblr Nudes

So, nope. I wasn’t too excited by the nothingburger news in September. But you want to know the real reason for my skepticism? It’s search invisibility. I wanted to see whether the newly-allowable adult content would be searchable, taggable, findable. Because if you can’t search for a thing, or link to it, it might as well not exist.

You all know this routine by now. We’ve written about search invisibility before. The way this scam works is that you can post stuff, but nobody can find it. Your tags don’t work; tag search results don’t have your stuff in it. Your keyword searches don’t work; the results don’t have your stuff. I’ve called this totalitarian in the past, because it’s creepy: people who don’t understand the game just assume your stuff doesn’t exist. “I just don’t understand why nothing comes back when I search for Jenna Jameson nude!” (See next link for answer.)

I first wrote about this happening to Google search suggestions back in 2008. In 2015 or before, Instagram started banning hashtags, sometimes silently and sometimes not. Likewise Pinterest and, yes, Tumblr, although Tumblr in those days had an easter egg pixel-hunt you could do to turn banned searches back on. In 2019, I caught Twitter putting adult stars in search invisibility; their names wouldn’t pop up in the @-name autocomplete function, and the one I tested back then still won’t. These are far from the only examples. I would hazard the proposition that search invisibility is the preferred treatment for grudgingly-allowed adult content on most social media platforms these days.

So what about Tumblr? Yeah, you know it.

To test, I set up an ErosBlog-themed outpost on the new more-lenient Tumblr. (Look for an update when my outpost Tumblr-blog gets inevitably banned, perhaps because of the general porn-hostile social media principle that “if you have an off-platform porn destination/brand they will ban you no matter what content you post.”)

So, yeah, it’s here: tumblr.com/erosblogbacchus. I started with one post, which is a link back to this recent comic/vintage/upskirt post on ErosBlog. Here’s what the Tumblr post looks like to me, logged into Tumblr:

Note the Community Label: Mature flag at the top, which I dutifully set per the new rules because I am such a good social media citizen, and even though this image is not even nude, it is mildly racy and shows a fringe of petticoats.

So, who will find and see that post? Presumably, logged-in Tumblr Users who have their mature content filters set properly in the non-default position, if they also know about my Tumblr blog and have chosen to follow it. That’s gonna be “zero” if nobody can see my posts to ever find out my new blog exists, though. No problem, I’ll just grab the URL and share it elsewhere, because that’s totally how well-functioning social media is supposed to work. Here, look at my post!

Again, if you’re logged into Tumblr and your settings are right, perhaps you see that. But if you’re just a random person coming in from the web (right here!) without an adult-verified settings-optimized Tumbler account, this is what you’ll see:

Woo, exciting! “Mature subject matter” is totally back, boyz! Still, I shouldn’t be too negative. Just click that big easy “Show Post” button, right?

If you listen carefully, you can hear the sepulchral laughter echoing from the crypt underneath Tumblr headquarters. Because guess what? Cock-blocked! Yes, my “Community Label: Mature” post is not visible from the open web. Members only:

Tut-tut! “Ah, now, you need clearance for that.”

But wait a minute! Back up. What about all those hashtags? What about keyword searches? Surely…

If you’re on Tumblr, try the exercise. Type “Balloon Crash” into the “Search Tumblr” box. You will find a lot of posts, but not mine. Or search the #petticoats hashtag. You’ll get lots of petticoats, some of them pretty sexy, but you won’t find my “Mature”-flagged post. It is thoroughly invisible on this social media platform, for any reasonable definition of “social”. The “mature subject matter returns to Tumblr” storyline is at least 85% pure scam, because of search invisibility.

I had to poke at all of this, so I posted one more post. This one has an actual nude — a vintage nude — in it. Female-presenting nipple! Hashtag: “Vintage Nude”. When I typed in that tag, a little “popular tag” badge popped into view. Awesome! Then I clicked the tag. Not much there. Not my post, for sure! Half a dozen old posts, carefully chosen to avoid the dreaded female nipples. Popular tag? Sure! But only among friends. Only in the dark.

In Conclusion: Tumblr Can Suck My “Overt Focus” Dick

So yeah. That’s where we are. Maybe you can post some stuff on Tumblr today that you couldn’t post last week. But nobody can find it by accident. Nobody can find it by looking for it. Nobody can find it socially. You can’t show it to your off-platform friends. Time will tell if Google can see it, but I’m betting against, and what good would a Google Search result even do you?

Within Tumblr, if people already know you, are following you, have given Tumblr their date-of-birth info, and managed to set the right settings correctly, then sure, those people can now see your mature-subject-matter posts. That’s… not really very much. It’s not social media. At best, it’s in-your-bubble media. Fuck that. Just fuck it. I’m not impressed. Bacchus verdict: Tumblr is NOT back.

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There’s an old ironic joke that goes “I haven’t had sex in so long, I forget who gets tied up.” This most recent scene from Sex And Submission reminded me of that joke, because even though Raven Hart is the one with the tied wrists and Tommy Pistol is theoretically the dominant who ties her up and fucks her, you can’t hardly tell from these photos, in which she basically rides him down and devours him:

It’s a pretty amazing scene, and I’m pleased to see that even though Kink is no longer shooting at the Armory in San Francisco, they are still shooting fresh stuff that isn’t afraid to bend their own rules and formulas a little when the performer chemistry wobbles away from the standard script. In case you haven’t been tracking how the Kink porn products work these days, all of their channels (their former sites like Sex And Submission) are now part of their one-monthly-price Kink Unlimited product, which also includes an enormous number of promotional shoots and channels from other kinky porn companies with whom they have cross-marketing deals. The result is that you get a ridiculous amount when you join; they are calling it “over fifty channels”, and though it’s tough to get a precise count, that seems about right.

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