another eye opens

The Paradox of Porn in a nutshell. My fellow Tumblr hounds and I are outraged that the company suddenly adopted a new policy banning from the site “adult content” — i.e., porn, the only reason anyone I know looks at Tumblr. It’s as if Con Edison shut down its service. Tumblr has felt as essential as a utility, something that every citizen has a right to be provided. In contrast to X-Tube and PornHub and other major porn sites, which evolved out of an effort to promote clips circulated by commercial producers, Tumblr with its easy reposting mechanism became the champion of niche porn. Micro-communities sprang up to share pictures and videos and fantasies and memes in a safe, non-judgmental, friendly environment that doesn’t really exist in most online porn environments. The hue and cry has been vociferous and eloquent, especially among sex workers and marginalized populations. (San Francisco sex educator Carol Queen wrote the best overview that I’ve encountered so far.) We’re adults! We’re Americans! We’re entitled to free speech! We are savvy consumers of NSFW content! We can tell the difference between child pornography and sexual imagery depicting consenting adults — why can’t you? We are constitutionally guaranteed a right to privacy!

As performance artist Penny Arcade declared in her legendary show Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, “I need a little homoerotica to get me through my day.” If I want to spend the last minutes of the day clicking around cumdump4daddy or pervedpozpig, who am I hurting? Since Monday December 17, when Tumblr’s new policy went into effect, I scroll through favorite blogs — strictly for professional research purposes — where the images have been removed and all I see are the names of the blogs that originally posted them. This gives me the opportunity to look closely at what I’m defending. Bring back my poppers-and-powerbottoms! You can have your womendegrade, your toiletwhores, your peekaboolingerie. I want my barebackrapefuck! My flipnginger! My gaycuntpornblog! My manholebreeder, my hotseedspreader, my bukkake-bonanza, my fuckabilly, my raunchysubbottom! I have to take a big breath and remember that porn is where the rubber of the First Amendment meets the road of “Don’t yuck my yum.”