Yahoo! bought Tumblr a few weeks ago, which makes this as good a time as any to tell this story. For a brief while, I was sort of a pornographer, by which I only mean that I owned and operated a second Tumblr account, unconnected to my main, on which I posted various bits of pornography — usually photos, usually softcore, but hey, why box ourselves in here? I also followed the pornographic Tumblrs of some 200 other like-minded individuals. The details aren’t important. The Tumblr in question is long gone now. But goodness, for a while there, what a fascinating exercise it had been.
It all started as the answer to a simple problem, which was: back in my early days on Tumblr, I was following a single erotic Tumblr in my regular account (I believe it was Pussy Les Queer?) and, at that time, I was working for a bank. Being someone who likes to check his various social media streams a couple of times a day, it became quickly apparent that I couldn’t very well follow erotic Tumblrs in my regular account if I planned to look at those accounts in the workplace; even if the odds were relatively small that I’d open Tumblr at the exact moment that a particularly fantastic vulva was crowning my newsfeed, the possibility certainly existed, and inappropriate is inappropriate.
But hey: free porn! Hard to let go of. So I scrubbed out my Tederick Tumblr account of any followees likely to post pictures of naked people, and opened a second Tumblr account, which I was in no danger of opening at a bank.
And THEN, I started getting really interested in what people were posting on their porn Tumblrs — or more accurately, in the sheer scope of the pornographic ecosystem that was existing side-by-side with the umpteen Doctor Who gifs and “Keep Calm and _____” images that make up the vast majority of the mainstream Tumblr experience. Porn is all around us all the time here in Tumblrland, and I’d expect that the majority of Tumblr’s users aren’t even aware of it. We’re all probably a maximum of two followees away from the porn, at any time: an insane holy fuck amount of pornography, totally free, largely uncensored, and — like the rest of Tumblr — entirely, touchingly, even painfully, representative of the thoughts and moods of the people running the Tumblrs in question.
By which I mean: yeah, there are a lot of Tumblrs out there that are the Tumblr equivalent of professional porn sites, whose purpose is to drive hits to monetized items elsewhere on the web, and feature the usual, boring, plasticized imagery. But there are just as many Tumblrs (and they are far more interesting) that are just like my regular account right here, or yours, except that they feature erotic imagery rather than, say, Supernatural fan art or funny YouTube clips. Those Tumblrs are just as weirdly innocuous, low-fi, punk and funky as your Tumblr or mine, only with boobs, and penetration, and people peeing on each other. You think you’ve seen what Tumblr can do with Joffrey-slap gifs? Baby, you ain’t seen nothin’.
The first thing one notices when trolling the sexy side of Tumblr (and this is the obvious point, because we’ve all been on the internet) is that there is porn for everything, and that there are people who are deeply into that porn, regardless of what it’s about. It’s the latter part that never ceases to amaze me. I’m a relative libertarian on sexual issues — consenting adults, and otherwise go for it — but the personalized architectures of niche erotic ideas which are possible in the Tumblr frame are legitimately something I’ve never seen on the internet before. These social porn blogs are like longform storytelling: they can go on forever, and develop themes and ideas and image systems, and all of them are curated by (for the most part) single minds (or playful couples), thereby creating a unity of… shall we call it “erotic design”?… that doesn’t happen on even the most indie of privately-hosted erotic web sites. What’s happened in Tumblr’s pornographic sphere is true personalized, public, ground-up eroticism at a level of detail and access that’s probably never been otherwise possible in the history of humanity. And the weirder the content, in some ways, the more insightful and – indeed – touching I found the erotic blogs. There’s a whole lot of mainstream out there, but some of these folks are doing bald subversion of mainstream sexuality in the name of their own particular sexual identities. It’s a legitimate act of cultural resistance, upheld by the obvious corollary fact, which I’ll call Thing I Noticed #2:
It’s all anonymous, of course. When it was still running, you’d have never found my porn Tumblr; and if the guy sitting next to you right now has one, you’ll never find his either. (Well, you might, if you were in the market for images of naked girls with sushi on their stomachs, and that happened to be the Tumblr that the guy next to you had created. But you’d never know it was his.) I’d love to know, from Tumblr or elsewhere, how much of the total Tumblrsphere is made up of porn, though I doubt it’s in Tumblr’s best interest to release that information, especially now that fusty old fuddy-duddy Yahoo! is their daddy. But regardless, the absolutely blind anonymity that Tumblr gives us — for both porn and non-porn blogs, mind — has naturally lead to a creative expurgation of various deep, dark souls that just can’t happen on Facebook. And if that leads, to point #3, well… point #3 might be obvious too:
Inappropriate content grows like weeds in this shit, because at the end of the day, the entirety of the human race is (I’m guesstimating here) 35% more pervy than we like to think we are, and not in “safe” ways. And when it comes out, it comes out of nowhere. You can be following the most vanilla porn blog on the whole network, and then for no discernible reason one day, there’s a horse’s erection on it. And by dint of how Tumblr was designed in the first place, it’s all insanely, insanely viral. Someone posts something that turns them on; other people who are turned on by it jump onto the pile and re-blog it to their sites; and a strangely passionate, communal declaration starts to take place, along the lines of “This Turns All Of [The Undersigned] On.” Tumblr reblogs keep records of themselves — those “notes” you see at the bottom of every single post, telling you where it’s been, who has liked it, and who has reblogged it — and so there’s a whole story that collects under every single piece of erotic content about who was interested enough in it to declare themselves – declare themselves through pseudo-anonymous non-identities, of course, but adding themselves to the architecture of the story nonetheless. A fairly deep lesson on virality in the social media age could, I’d argue, be taught entirely based on how quickly a particular kink is disseminated across a broad platform of otherwise unrelated erotic blogs.
I wonder what’s going to happen to all that, now that Tumblr is growing into, theoretically, a more legitimate place; this question applies to both porn- and non-porn blogs alike. I suspect, at some point, the herd will simply move elsewhere. This is because, in all Tumblr content regardless of NSFW-level, I don’t think mainstream content is the point of the thing: again, people who want to wax rhapsodic about their flower beds probably do so on Facebook, while the majority of Tumblr is made up of random, kaleidoscopic mood boards of thoughts, feelings, and images. Once you begin constraining that creative endeavour into the societally appropriate sphere, whether it’s for porn or not, it loses its appeal to the very people who are building the structure in the first place.