The Eternal Problem Of Porn Curation

Tuesday, August 13th, 2024 -- by Bacchus

I am a nut, and my nuttery takes several very narrow and specific shapes. One of those shapes is my eternal obsession with the problem of porn curation: how do we publish, distribute, discover, access, and preserve access to ephemeral erotic material in a world where #pornocalypse and its social cousins have denied independent porn creators most access to search, social media, and the payments system?

Thus when I saw a Mastodon post blurbing Miss Pearl’s latest blog post On Having Porn For Dommes in terms of the “curation and censorship problem” affecting such porn, I knew it would perforce be relevant to my interests.

Longtime readers know that my BDSM porn interests as displayed here on ErosBlog are dirt-common, with male-gaze M/f porn at the top of the list, followed by the usual substantial fraction of commercial F/f material and then by token amounts of F/m and M/m stuff. That said, the Femdom Resource blog (written by a male client and appreciator of pro dommes, but ranging widely across the femdom content space) is one of my frequently-linked favorites, and I have a long history of featuring nonprofessional or lifestyle femdom bloggers (like Bitchy Jones) on the rare occasion that I’ve been able to find them under the avalanche of cookie-cutter pro-domme “spam” (promotional) content that floods most available channels. O Miss Pearl (subtitle: “non-professional perspective femdom & kink, with awesome erotica”) was therefore an instant addition to the ErosBlog blogroll as soon as I saw it.

But what about the “domme gaze drought” (as she teased it on Mastodon) in Miss Pearls’ recent post?

It has been true for the entire lifetime of this blog that fictional depictions of dominant women are really limited, and most typically tailored to what subs are attracted to. Or being more precise, what a certain paying audience of sub men will purchase. This standard tends to depict dominance in women as a vocation performed for the benefit of subs (or their vulnerability and persecution fantasies) and is often gender regressive as heck.

Yup, that sounds right; this isn’t content that I actively search for, but I do watch for it (if that distinction makes sense) and I don’t see much of it.

Her wide-ranging post covers a lot of subtopics in plenty of detail, but I began crying my amens when I got to this part about the problems facing porn creators:

Let’s drop some of our illusions about porn and how it’s made.

Porn, contrary to the way we talk about it, is a marginalized industry, disproportionately queer, with most people not making much money. Artistic talent and skill are not evenly distributed – nevermind that you need to be a wizard at marketing, with a work ethic that is punishing on the body to make it as any kind of artist, sexy or not. That’s on top of an ever increasingly sanitized internet and the frankly censorship oriented nature of most payment providers and most publishing platforms.

Writing, illustration and modeling are also incredibly poorly paid, whether it’s R, E, or P. One of the first things consumers need to know is that the big names are lottery winner, and most stuff falls into the obscure outsider art and cottage industry level. People who create stuff are not trying to cater to the patriarchy to be willing agents of it, they are navigating razor thin profits, fussy platforms and content saturation of a competition that puts you at odds with not only every creator currently working right now, but every surviving work running back more than a thousand years. And every other possible way humans can amuse or occupy their time.

There follows a highly educational tour of the deep weeds of the curation problems faced by Miss Pearl’s specific porn genre of interest. I’m not dismissing any of that by failing to quote or summarize it here; you’ll want to read it yourself in any case. (Yes, dear readers, I am telling you, yet again, that you’ll need to clicky the damn linky. This is a 22-year-old blog; it can serve as social media, but it doesn’t do so without reader participation.) Miss Pearl calls for smart and aggressive curation of niche porn (the fans cheer), talks about the value of self-hosting (a subject long dear to my own heart), and concludes that domme-gaze porn “isn’t reaching the audience. It’s fragmented across different platforms, only has so much advertising and the market it might have doesn’t know it exists.”

In conclusion, Miss Pearl points out that making niche porn is a fiscally-irresponsible artistic act, and that we need to be better curators and better fans if we want to encourage it:

Someone who is an honest to goodness lifestyle domme for real and a good creator, if they are being fiscally responsible, is much better off making something else.

If you want to turn that around, we have to actually make more of a project of curation and sharing out of it, and you are simply going to have to be more assertive fans. You are also going to need to develop a lot more gentleness around the content you consume.

Indeed.

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