smut

Tumblr announced on Monday that it would ban all explicit content on December 17, spurring a flood of memes, cartoons, and bitter farewells that overtook queer social media. The announcement was a blow to porn performers, curators, and fans everywhere who had used the platform to easily catalogue and share explicit material, and it’s the latest in a string of moves that further marginalize sex workers, erotic artists, and queer people in general.

ALEXANDER CHEVES
Many of the people I follow here have posted about tumblr's ban on porn. As Cheves puts it in the article appearing in OUT magazine, this last blow to smut online is just one more try to silence smut and more specifically queer-oriented smut on the internet. I have to say I left blogger for tumblr a few years back because I found microblogging interesting and because the platform WAS indeed very open and allowed a gamut of expression that I did not see here. At the hight of my tumblr blog, I had more than seventy thousand 'followers' (that counting all the Russian bots and the lurkers) but among those, I made very good online friends and I was able to post everything I wanted: from hardcore porn to political opinions to LGBTQ artists to essays touching on most everything I like and wanted to post about.

It all came to a screeching halt a few months back, when I was contacted by some people about my blog having 'ads'. They had always been arbitrary about banning some posts but this was a warning that I had not seen before: they were going to close the blog. So I told them they could go to hell. And they vanished my blog. I wrote about it when I came back to blogger. There was no more sugaronastick.

I hope tumblr goes the way of LiveJournal and MySpace: they get overconfident on their ability to survive without the communities that gave them a push to become the behemoths they were. They forgot the fandoms, the queer kids, the sex workers, the queer artists. That was what attracted me to tumblr: the freedom of expression. It was an easy outlet that promoted fast and comfortable relationships with other kindred souls. Be it political opinions, same sense of humor or just plain lust it was easy to relate and bond over movie reviews, music, life experiences and common threads.

I have the feeling tumblr will dim out and Yahoo and Comcast (who bought it) realize that sanitizing a platform of everything that made it a success is really not a good business move. You cannot sterilize something that has thrived on a little bit of dirt and expect it to function exactly the same. To replicate a study, you need to replicate the conditions. Hopefully Facebook, that's also starting a campaign again porn, will follow suit.

So here's for smut. And the freedom to post all the dicks I can find in one day.

xoxo