Pornocalypse Comes For Kink Education

Speaking honestly, I’ve sort of let my #pornocalypse coverage lapse recently. Not much has changed in years; corporate social media keeps tightening the noose, formerly adult-friendly places become less so. On the one hand we still have the old-fashioned open web, with the freedom to publish on adult topics but without much access to traffic or to the financial system. The freedom to sleep under a bridge, right?

On the other hand, we have the infamous five websites, which is where all the people are, and from which they mostly will not migrate nor follow any links.

Adult material and links are mostly not welcome there, on the five websites, except to the extent that that this material is disguised from the machine censors by cutesy emojis and twee circumlocutions. If you’re a “spicy accountant” or a “mattress actress”, a lover of “quink” or a “corn” aficionado, a fan of big eggplants or women whose peach icons sometimes spray cartoon raindrops, corporate social media is very much for you.

So yeah, I’ve grown tired of the #pornocalypse beat, and I’ve let lots and lots of pornocalyptic stories glide by without any of my commentary. But yesterday, Pandora / Blake (perhaps best known to ErosBlog readers as the director and publisher of Dreams Of Spanking), published an open Patreon post discussing their frustration at the recent deletion of their kink education channel on YouTube.

Blake’s treatment exemplifies the recent trend in #pornocalypse behavior by the major social media platforms that I first wrote about back in May:

Increasingly the hot new trend in #pornocalypse is social media platforms banning accounts and people not for what they posted/linked, but merely because of who they are. Biggest example was PornHub getting banned from Instagram despite having a whole team of lawyers and creatives making sure their Insta account broke no rules. It’s frustrating, and it’s why I never have the courage to try anything effortful on adult-hostile social media channels.

It used to be common for porn-hostile platforms to tolerate porn-adjacent people, sex educations, and even sex workers, as long as the platform’s specific TOS against adult material were complied with. For many people, this was workable; they’d ride the ragged edge of the TOS for months or a few years, getting specific posts banned and enduring shadow bans, until eventually (and with great pain) they’d lose an account after too many strikes and have to start all over again. You could make a living that way, if you didn’t tire. But, over time, I started noticing that specific TOS compliance stopped mattering. All over porn-hostile social media, people started losing accounts not for any specific violations, but simply because of who they were. If their public identity was too identified with adult topics, they would be banned without warning or appeal, never knowing which posts gave institutional offense. Thus, Blake’s experience:

I’ve been publishing videos on YouTube since 2014, throughout my campaigns against UK porn censorship and age verification. For the last two or three years I’ve been regularly posting original kink education videos, many of which I’ve accompanied with transcripts here on Patreon. The channel mostly consisted of these fully clothed talky adult education videos on topics ranging across consent, BDSM, porn, feminism, queerness, and organisational and self-care strategies. It also included video podcast style interviews with other educators, interviews with adult performers, political campaign videos, and a few carefully cut trailers for spanking films that showed no sex or nudity, but either clothed character interactions and plot snippets (in the case of multi-performer videos) or excerpts from clothed POV fetish talk videos. I suspect it was these latter videos that fell afoul of the content policy, but I have no way of knowing.

…

None of the videos on my channel included sex or nudity. I avoided posting links to any adult sites in the video descriptions, linking to Patreon and mxblake.com instead. … I’m furious that a channel 90% of which consisted of educational material about consensual pleasure and LGBTQIA issues has been summarily deleted without any option to review or edit the content. Was it just those few talky trailers which YouTube objected to so much, or is the entire project of BDSM education in itself too risqué for YouTube?

My speculation is that the answer is “neither”. Rather, I suspect that one or more videos generated enough algorithmic red flags to fall under human eyes, and the human in question applied the new-ish unofficial #pornocalypse policy that’s been spreading so rapidly throughout corporate social media: “If the entity who posted this is any kind of pornographer or sex worker, nuke their whole stinkyporny channel and get them off the platform. Fuck the terms of service! Those words only mean what we pay them to mean, no more and no less.”

For me, the event that dropped the final scale from my eyes was when PornHub got banned from Instagram. If it ever made sense to go dancing with the social media devil while accepting your periodic lumps from the censorship algorithms, it no longer does, in my opinion. PornHub has a whole professional social media team, complete with content creators, editors, and as much legal support as they need. You can guarantee that they posted nothing that contravened Instagram’s TOS, not by the least jot or tittle. Did it matter? No. Throw them into the pit! You and I? We’re not going to fare any better.

I don’t have any solutions to offer, and anyway Blake explicitly isn’t asking for any. So I’ll leave you with Blake’s powerful summary of the state of the #Pornocalypse in 2023:

I mourn the loss of the open internet that was promised us in the early 2000s. My cyberpunk dreams of open peer-to-peer communication and free expression have been repeatedly thwarted, and I’m so angry about it. Fuck Google, their YouTube takeover, and their long-standing policy of devaluing adult sites in search results. Fuck Elon Musk for turning Twitter into his own personal ego trip, and a hotbed of Nazism and transphobia. Fuck Meta for taking over Instagram and enforcing their “family friendly” policies in a way that forces grown adult sex educators to talk about “s3x”, “quink” and “spicy corn”. Fuck Tiktok too, while I’m at it. I hate that in order to reach an audience we’re forced into these privately-owned silos which loathe everything to do with consensual adult sexuality, and which have the power to remove our access to social connectivity at the whim of a badly-trained algorithm.

All of this, every word.

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A Quiet Evening In: Pandora And Adele

Let’s be honest: you would enjoy having the kind of friends who might spend a quiet winter evening doing stuff like this. Somehow you just know that hot tea and purring cats are not far away:

What’s going on? Well, it’s a scene from Dreams Of Spanking, where all is explained:

Two topless women are engaged in a sensual game: one plays the canvas and the other the artist. Adele Haze lies on cushions, exposing her breasts and bare back – and it’s the latter that her lover will write on. Pandora Blake uses black ink and a brush to adorn Adele with intricate Greek lettering.

As Pandora’s calligraphy winds around Adele’s gorgeous curves, Adele must stay completely still, hardly breathing to avoid nudging Pandora as she writes her lines. In a Victorian school, ink smudges would mean a punishment for the writer. Here, the responsibility to avoid error falls on the writing surface. Pandora weaves her spell in words, and the magic of the moment mustn’t be broken. For each smudge, Adele will get a stroke of the cane.

When the text is complete — the first few lines of Homer’s ‘Iliad’ — Pandora carefully examines her work, stripping Adele naked so she can admire the slick black script that covers her body. Afterwards Adele bends naked over the punishment bench in the Scriptorium, exposing every inch of her bare skin. Pandora’s found some smudges…

Pandora’s blogging about the photoshoot tells us a bit more about the shoot. For one thing, we learn that Girl On the Net does Pandora’s copywriting (see above) which says a lot about why it’s so consistently excellent. (Great copywriting is an anomaly so rare in the porn business as to approach in this case the true meaning of “unique” in its most absolute hard-mathematical full-Highlander “there can be only one” sense.)

We also learned that Pandora doesn’t necessarily impose a storyline on her shoots at the time that she is shooting them:

I don’t know what story these images might tell. Perhaps we are lovers, or witches; perhaps I’m an artist decorating her for some sort of show, or perhaps she’s my submissive and I’ve set her the challenge of stillness and obedience. Perhaps we are students in some strange alternate universe where punishment lines are written not on paper, but on skin.

I’m still pretty sure there will be cats. And probably a fireplace.

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Naughty Schoolgirl Selfies

I’m sure this must be a very posh private school, because the back stairs where Pandora sits taking naughty selfies for her boyfriend are clean and in good repair:

One small flaw in Pandora’s program: she does not realize the headmaster is watching!

You know where all this is leading:

From Dreams of Spanking.

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Pandora Blake: Not Being Exploited

Pandora Blake, who has been turning a lot of heads recently in the spanking porn community with her “fairtrade, sex positive, performer-driven and gender egalitarian” (and 2013 Feminist Porn Awards nominated) Dreams Of Spanking site, has written a magnificent manifesto against the pernicious feminist ideology that deems all porn to be exploitative and denies the agency of the people who make and perform in it. This is just a bit of it:

Making porn empowers me, creatively expresses my true self, and connects me positively with my sexuality. To say “porn never empowers” is to dismiss and deny my lived experience. Porn empowers me. I’m not just talking about the sexy patriarchal power of being desirable to men. I’m talking about my own personal power: the power to choose what I do with each day. The power to run my own business. The power to make creative choices, to make political choices. Making porn has empowered me to develop my dominant side, to connect with new facets of my sexual self. It has given me confidence; satisfaction; skills; courage in my convictions; creative, sexual and political fulfilment. Making porn gives me freedom in multiple areas of my life, and choosing to continue making it is one of the ways I exercise that freedom.

…

In the age of the internet, anyone with a smartphone can shoot footage and sell it on clips4sale or AdultWork — and lots of performers do. So when a performer has a cute idea for a solo scene, shoots it at home on their phone, uploads it and starts receiving cheques in the mail, who exactly is exploiting them? The people sending them money? Do you feel exploited when you get paid for work you do?

In my work I am producer, director, writer, videographer, business owner. I am my own agent, webmistress and promoter. When I have the sexual experiences I want to have with my own lovers, and film it in my own home with my own camera, upload it with my own internet connection and receive money into my own bank account, who exactly is exploiting me?

But even if if I wasn’t running my own business, it would still be possible for me to work for porn productions that didn’t exploit me. Some do, others don’t. As in any other industry, part of a performer’s job is making choices about which clients and companies they want to work with.

What she said!

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