Thoughts on the Destruction of a Community
Note: I wanted this to be better. I didn’t really have time to make it as cohesive as I wanted to. So please consider this a rather loose collection of my thoughts on the end of porn Tumblr.
When I was in college in the 80s, there was a very strong anti-porn movement led by alleged feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine McKinnon. They, along with allies belonging to - get this - the Christian right (something about politics and bedfellows?) did a lot to keep pressure on cities and towns to crack down on sex businesses. They were somewhat less successful on the state and federal levels, but it was probably just a matter of time.
Dworkin and McKinnon saw the way the industry was expanding when VCRs started to become popular. They wanted to do something about it, and they pushed hard. Unfortunately for them, this was happening at the dawn of the home video revolution. They had been having a hard enough time keeping stores from stocking adult magazines, and now they had to worry about video stores renting out adult tapes. Soon there were so many options, that the anti-porn “feminists” couldn’t keep up. And once the commercial aspect of it no longer happened in public, the fight was effectively over. Porn had won.
I think a lot of people on Tumblr are too young to remember this. Hell, the people running Tumblr might not remember it. Dworkin famously penned the phrase, “All sex is rape.” So that gives you an idea where she was coming from. Even the most hardcore leftists I knew - apart from the lesbians - couldn’t get on board with that.
Sex is good, even if Andrea Dworkin doesn’t think so.
No, it’s not consequence-free as some people would like to think, but to listen to the news media, and social conservatives, you’d think sex is nothing but unwanted pregnancies, STDs, human trafficking, and consent violations. And then, to listen to the entertainment industry, sex is something incredibly desirable, which only really pretty people are allowed to enjoy.
It’s not either of those things. Sex is for everyone who wants it. True, finding a partner isn’t always easy, but the vast majority of people can and do, and the lucky ones discover that with the right partner, sex can make you feel unbelievably liberated. If you’re a kinkster, and your partner loves your kinks, that’s huge. In the context of a loving relationship, sex can be a tremendously powerful mental and spiritual experience. But even outside that context, sex is just a lot of fun.
I don’t think THAT many people would disagree with the above. They might want to put qualifications on it, and stipulate that one must act responsibly, but on the whole, I think most people think sex is good, at least in the proper context. More people will disagree with my next statement:
No, I don’t think it should be available to kids or plastered all over the street, and no, I’m not under the delusion that everyone in the industry is being professional. I know that women are exploited. But I know also that there are plenty of women who are there by choice, and enjoy the job. There are women who produce and direct porn. There are women talent agents.
But regardless, porn itself - divorced from the circumstances of its production - is good. Porn is pictures of sex, and if one believes, as I do, that sex is good, then why would depictions of it be bad? Porn provides an outlet for people who don’t have a partner. It provides inspiration for couples and groups.
It also - and this is something Tumblr might want to look into - drives the adoption of new technology. It’s no coincidence that the porn industry really started getting popular about the time the VCR was introduced. Home video meant that people no longer needed to venture out to seedy peep shows or X-rated movie theaters where they ran the risk of being seen, or worse, arrested (Pee Wee Herman, please pick up the white courtesy phone). DVDs and DVD players were expensive and relatively rare until you could start renting porn on DVD at your local video store. Then they got cheap fast.
Porn has been on the Internet since the Internet has existed. I know, because I was there. I did my time downloading multiple UUEncoded text files off of Usenet, concatenating them, and running UUDecode on them in order to download one lousy picture. That was before the web. When web-based porn came along, a picture still took several minutes to download over a dialup connection. When cable and DSL came along, pictures loaded almost instantly, and video was a possibility. It is not a stretch to say that much of this innovation happened BECAUSE of porn. Sure, I still would have been an early adopter of cable internet, but I don’t think I’d have been as eager if I hadn’t known my porn browsing experience would improve tremendously.
But there’s more to it than just adoption. Porn companies have been pioneers in compression and, critically, e-commerce. Porn sites were among the first to be able to process credit cards. The money they spent on this has been felt throughout the economy. Buy stuff on Amazon? Some of their ability to sell online came from the porn industry. Watch Netflix? The porn industry was there first.
Porn does the dirty work of technology (pun definitely intended). It provides a healthy chunk of the motivation for the development and adoption of it. Porn puts up the beams and joists. Then “respectable” commerce comes along, puts on the siding, and claims they built the house. Porn is condemned, sidelined, and - and I’m very sad that this terrible neologism applies - deplatformed. In some cases, locked out of the very technology that they helped to pioneer.
PornHub, like most websites, collects data about its users. Every once in a while, they give a glimpse at some of the things they’ve learned. One of the biggest things that they’ve learned is that we watch an awful lot of porn. More than we’d thought. According to research, more than half of American men watch porn. The percentage for women is smaller, but growing. This is not some fringe thing. Porn is mainstream.
If this percentage is bigger than it was in the past, I doubt that it’s a sign of the decay of society. More likely, the better ease of use, and privacy have simply enabled people who wouldn’t have had the guts to venture out to the local X-rated theater in years past to check out what they like.
The point is that we’re interested in sex, and we’re interested in porn. That we as a society feel the need to maintain some kind of façade that we’re above that sort of thing is absurd.
At one point, Tumblr was perfectly fine with adult content. They’ve changed their policy because of Apple’s policy of not including adult-oriented apps in the app store. Tumblr is not specifically adult oriented, but because you can access adult content, Apple has flexed their muscles and Tumblr has bent the knee. Like everything, it’s about money, and despite the fact that there’s money in porn, the porn money tends to chase away the “respectable” money.
One of the good effects of the digital revolution is that a number of technologies have gotten cheap and good enough that they can be bought at consumer prices. To record music, you used to have to go into a recording studio. You pay by the hour for this, and if your project is complicated, that can get real expensive real fast. Today it’s possible to make professional sounding recordings in your living room with nothing more than a computer, a cheap keyboard, and maybe a microphone.
Ditto with video. Entire movies have been shot on smartphones and GoPros.
Twenty years ago, if you were a woman who wanted to get into sex work, your options were basically to become a stripper, or go to LA, and throw yourself into the mouth of the porn industry. You were at the mercy of agents, producers, and distribution companies. Today, if you have a computer and a camera, you can produce your own pictures and videos, and your can do cam shows. You can do all of this without having to give some sleazebag a blowjob so he’ll hire you. Some girls get popular enough doing this that if/when they do decide to try out the mainstream industry, they’ve got some negotiating power. They can also network with other girls so they can share information about the business. (Without the Internet, would anyone have known about James Deen?)
Sites like Tumblr have enabled some of these women to advertise their products, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that that advertising has created a living for some women.
So in making their decision, Tumblr has chosen to turn its back on not only the pioneers of the technology that they rely on, but on a community of users who rely on them to sell their products - products that they are able to produce because of that self-same technology.
In addition, Tumblr is turning its back on a community of users that has driven a ton of traffic to the site.
As a private company, Tumblr has the right to decide what they want on their site. If they want to exclude porn, they can do that. But for myself, I think it’s a dumb decision driven by questionable motives.
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