Using Porn Tubes As A Curatorial Resource

Although ErosBlog does not celebrate all that has resulted from the rise of the porn tubes, I want to highlight one useful thing that I’ve noticed about the large collection of porn video clips that proliferates on big specialized tubesites. I am utterly mad about porn provenance research, where often the hardest challenges are in video, because movies are much more ephemeral than images. Video hosting tends to go down faster and harder than image hosting, video is less likely to be archived anywhere, and video is much harder to search. The one place that video survives online after its producer goes out of business, and survives with some keywords and searchable tags, offering some prayer of tracking it down, is — you guessed it — tube sites.

Here are a couple of examples of ephemeral video that I recently found via tubes. By “ephemeral” I mean video from defunct producers or sources, no longer available anywhere, no longer an item of commerce. Are tubes arguably part of the reason this is so? Sure. But here, in this moment, they are also the only thing saving these bits from oblivion, which I find both interesting and useful.

This screenshot is from a Chinese rope bondage video, sourced (via its watermark) to a Chinese “rope art” (that’s the best that Google Translate can do) forum that no longer exists:

When it did exist, the forum prohibited “pornography, politics, advertising, and irrigation” — but that wasn’t enough to save it in today’s prurient China. We retain access to this video because of, love them or not, the tubes. I assume — I hope — that the bit about irrigation is a machine translation failure to communicate:

Here’s another example of tube curation for you. There was a hardcore BDSM site called Fucking Dungeon that went offline about five years ago. (The domain is currently advertising itself for sale). I’m not sure their videos aren’t in somebody else’s catalog now, but if so, Google isn’t admitting it. Here’s a screenshot of a BDSM sex scene from Fucking Dungeon with a pair of well-matched Russian girls who were marketed as the Russo twins:

As a curator and researcher, if I was starting with that screenshot, I’d have no prayer of finding the video source or identifying the clip without the “public clip library” function served by tubesites. Credit where credit is due!