The Day The Pornocalypse Came For Sex Stories

On December 21, 2020, the popular adult user-upload site xHamster had 219,000 sex stories in its database:

Five days later, all those stories were gone. The URL had went 404 Page Not Found. (With a cute hamster, naturally.)

Generic 404 text says “Sorry, this feature is technically unavailable due to technical reasons.” But that’s boilerplate. Three and a half months later, the sex stories are still gone. Sorry, people, they ain’t coming back.

Was this truly a #pornocalypse situation? xHamster isn’t talking, but signs point to yes. The biggest (and presumably most profitable) part of xHamster’s offering is its tubesite-style video content, which they monetize, presumably, in all the usual tube ways. In December of 2020, other large tubesites were targeted in a coordinated media campaign that used questionable content on their sites to successfully interrupt their credit card billing access via Visa and Mastercard. My guess is that xHamster saw that attack go down, did a quick internal review of vulnerabilities, and removed the entire erotic stories section out of fear that unpleasant content in there would open them up to similar attacks.

Story sites, as all who frequent them know, accumulate some really bizarre stories when not moderated. I don’t use the word “perversion” lightly, but I feel safe in saying you will get a comprehensive tour of human perversion when exploring any really big story site. The notorious and long-ago arrest of Jake Baker for posting snuff stories to alt.sex.stories notwithstanding, sex story archives have frequently been an “anything goes” medium for over-the-top erotic expression. Blood-on-the-walls splatter-gore, cannibalism, piss and poop and vomit, incest between people of all ages, and other squicky stuff that’s too odd to describe in a few short words: it’s all in there.

Now, I never frequented xHamster’s offering, and thus I can’t say whether or how well they moderated their stories. Maybe they didn’t have any of the wildly perverted stuff. Odds are, though, whatever they did have panicked them. They saw other tubes under attack, and it dawned on them how readily their most unpleasant story content could be weaponized against their billing. Since the stories likely weren’t much of a profit center… Boom! The pornocalypse came, real sudden-like.

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Can’t Hide From l33t h4ck1ng Muth4fukk4

Thomas Roche likes to dive into those bullshit sex stories that always get the old media all moist in their collective sex-negative panties, just so he can mock them comprehensively from the perspective of an web citizen who understands about search engines and how you can, y’know, check that shit before you write about it. I admire this, because it takes work as well as wit, and as a lazy half-wit, usually I can’t be bothered; once my advanced spidey sense tells me “this is bullshit”, I typically want to forget I ever saw that stupid headline as rapidly as possible, and thus I get to spend the next three days cursing as people retweet it at me. But Roche makes sex-story-stupidity-debunking funny, and I suspect serves a salutatory educational function while he does it. What’s more, in the process he typically does a better job reporting the actual stories in question than anybody previously has done. This may indeed be what 21st-century journalism looks like, folks!

His latest takedown is of the “ZOMG, sex while skydiving!” story, the breathless headlines about which have been infesting my RSS and twitter feeds of late and causing, thereby, extreme weariness in the finger I’ve been using to click on something else, ANYTHING else, “NO PLEASE FEDERAL NETWORK, I would NOT like to know more!” I’m not even going to link that shit, because Roche did it already and to link it, I’d have to look at it, and that would make my brain hurt more than it already does.

I’m posting this for an entirely different reason, namely, that I just about lost my cookies laughing at this bit in Roche’s story, where he mocks people who write for the web but who don’t seem to possess even the most rudimentary web search skills:

Incidentally, before we get started: multiple news sources (and Gawker) have said that the “original video” of the flying fuck between porn stars Alex Torres (aka Voodoo) and Hope Howell (possibly aka Maryjanesexy and Paige Thomas) was quickly “taken down from YouTube,” and “only fakes” exist. I have to tell you, if I got my porn from YouTube, I would think babies were made by Florida blondes in bikinis telling me about the Transitive Verb of the Day. Yes, the forces of decency did conspire to keep that video out of Gawker’s hairy palms. But I am one l33t h4ck1ng muth4fukk4. I did have to pull out some serious Neuromancer-era cyberpunk mojo to find the video that the FAA doesn’t want you to see, but after changing into my black PVC catsuit and Converse Hi-Tops, putting on night-vision goggles, drinking a six-pack of Jolt and eating a box of Hot Pockets while listening to Skinny Puppy at top volume, I “hacked the mainframe” and scored that tasty morsel of thoughtcrime contraband! I liberated that dirty video even though it was kept in a secure location guarded by Pentagon infobots…on Alex Torres’ website. Information wants to be free!

Muah ha ha ha ha, I can’t stop laughing.