What good news!:
The internet is home to a plethora of destinations offering adults-only content. But soon, Tumblr won’t be one of them.
The microblogging platform announced Monday that it is banning adult content. In, naturally, a Tumblr post, Chief Executive Jeff D’Onofrio said the move was meant to promote “a better, more positive Tumblr.”
The move appears to stem from a recent dispute Tumblr had with Apple’s iOS App Store. The Tumblr app was not available as of Nov. 16, news site the Verge reported, and a post from Tumblr indicated it was related to an issue with the filter the site used to automatically remove child pornography.
“Every image uploaded to Tumblr is scanned against an industry database of known child sexual abuse material, and images that are detected never reach the platform. A routine audit discovered content on our platform that had not yet been included in the industry database,” Tumblr said in the post.
Monday’s announcement said the ban on adult content will be enforced beginning Dec. 17.
More:
Over the years, Tumblr has also struggled with swarms of porn bots. A Tumblr blog called Purge the Bots was created this year to raise awareness of the problem and update users on what actions the site was taking to address it. A total ban on adult content could solve the problem, though possibly at the cost of users who are on Tumblr specifically for adult content.
Well, too bad for them. I’m glad Apple did what it did, and that Tumblr has made this switch.
Alas, America’s most famous Fake Vagina Haver™ is upset:
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The BBC’s reporter laments the effect on the “marginalized”:
Unlike typical pornography sites, which overwhelmingly cater to men, and serve an often narrow definition of what is attractive, Tumblr has been a home for something else – content tailored at vibrant LGBT communities, or for those with tastes you might not necessarily share with all your friends.
If society deems it acceptable for any porn to be on the internet, then that acceptance must surely be inclusive. Unlike most of those other sites Mr D’Onofrio speaks of, Tumblr has been a space where different body types are sexually celebrated, not degraded.
… Many on Tumblr have been fearing a porn ban since the network was acquired by fading web giant Yahoo in 2013. That time, the adult content was allowed to remain. But in 2017, when Yahoo was acquired by Oath, the digital arm of telecoms giant Verizon, the writing was on the wall.
“I had feared this day would come,” wrote one user, who runs a fetish account, in response to the chief executive’s message on Monday.
“I’m so sad to see this happen, and can’t believe I’ll be losing this blog. I honestly don’t know what I’ll do without it, but I truly hope that the kinky community comes up with a new place for us all to get together and share.”
Not The Onion! Alas, poor degenerates. I’m sure they’ll get by somehow.
In The Washington Post, John Paul Brammer laments Tumblr’s cleaning itself up, saying that it made him who he is. Again, not a joke! Excerpt:
“Do you have a Tumblr?”
I asked this question a lot in college after coming out as gay my junior year. I joined the campus Gay-Straight Alliance, sure. I downloaded dating and hookup apps. I met people. But in my “baby gay years” in Oklahoma, nothing ensured a connection like meeting a fellow user of the micro-blogging site.
First, it meant you were probably queer; the platform is a hub for LGBTQ discourse. But being on Tumblr also meant you had an offbeat sense of humor, an interest in social justice and, of course, a fondness for utter filth. Tumblr, more than any other social media site, has been a veritable clearinghouse for porn.
More:
It’s a setback not only to the many sex workers, kink fans and artists who populate the site but also to the Tumblr ethos itself, which drew in so many queer people and made us feel at home, especially those of us in remote parts of the country without an immediate community to connect to. Explicit content played a crucial part in creating that space, so it’s unsurprising the ban has been widely received as Tumblr’s death knell.
I don’t condone all of Tumblr’s explicit content. What’s wrong on Tumblr, such as depictions of abusive or nonconsensual sex acts, would be wrong elsewhere. But with the ethical stuff, Tumblr exposed me to forms of sexuality I had not previously considered and, even if they weren’t for me, expanded my thinking about sex and about myself.
This is supposed to be a reason why Tumblr’s banning porn is a bad thing? It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around the idea that here is a man who is praising a kinky pornography site for being a major formative influence on his character. If it’s really the case that indulging “a fondness for utter filth” is key to learning how to be a gay man, then who in their right mind would want their kid to be socialized into that culture? Brammer, raised in Oklahoma by parents who accepted his homosexuality, is certainly confounding the bourgeois media narrative.
Like the BBC writer, he ends by mourning the pain that the “vulnerable” will now suffer because they won’t be able to access pornography on the platform. This has to be the ultimate SJW Millennial take: howling in protest that cutting porn from a microblogging site hurts the marginalized.
The Muslim blogger Ismail Royer predicts what’s coming next from professional Muslim activists:
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Seriously, how did we become the kind of culture where celebrating kinky porn is a respectable point of view? No culture I want to be a part of, for sure.
As an aside, if you are the kind of conservative Christian who thinks that Muslims like Ismail Royer are your enemy, and not a vital ally against the pornification of the American character, you really need to re-think your position. What we need is a practical intersectionality of the morally sane.
UPDATE: The Washington Post publishes a second column from a Millennial — this one a female member of its editorial board — who sees Tumblr’s porn ban as a blow to the “vulnerable,” and as an occasion of mourning. I’m not kidding. Excerpt:
Mourning Tumblr’s pornographic content is more than mourning sexy GIFs. It’s mourning openness. The Internet democratized sex; suddenly, what was once too taboo to access without stigma was available to anyone with a screen and a search engine. Tumblr made that democratized system more democratic still. Its independent model emphasized performers’ agency, which meant posters’ output was more likely to be ethical and not exploitative. And a focus on creativity over merely clicks for cash led to bodies that were not stereotypically porn-ready, sexualities that sold less well on the mainstream market, kinks that were not presented as some strange sort of “other. ”
This is the sort of porn it is worth shedding a tear or two over, and its loss is a sign that an Internet that once seemed limitless may be getting a little smaller. It is hard to say now what the world will look like with a slightly less wide Web. One thing, though, is certain: We’ll know it when we see it.
I understand that people like pornography. People are subject to vices of all kinds. Geezer that I am, though, I am gobsmacked by these claims that porn is character-building and civic-minded. What astonishing corruption has overtaken our elites.
UPDATE.2: A Catholic reader from France e-mails:
“As an aside, if you are the kind of conservative Christian who thinks that Muslims like Ismail Royer are your enemy, and not a vital ally against the pornification of the American character, you really need to re-think your position. What we need is a practical intersectionality of the morally sane.”
I am glad to see you’ve finally come to the position I’ve reached a long time ago – and for which I’ve been mocked and abused by my coreligionists for almost as long.
The normalization/mainstreamization of porn is one of the most irksome features of this “culture”, for it’s not just about filth being available to everybody, it also affects people’s behaviour. I don’t have a problem with people watching others having sex on a screen; my beef is when they start boasting about it, discussing it as though it was one of the noblest pursuits of mankind or “no big deal”. Twenty years ago, people who watched porn did it behind closed doors and didn’t tell anyone because while “everybody did it” it was usually considered a pastime for losers with no sex lives of their own or couples in need of fresh ideas. Fox Mulder with his videotapes “that didn’t belong to him” was pretty much typical of the porn viewer of the era.
Move twenty years on and porn is everywhere and almost regarded as a fundamental right; even worse people pornify their own lives, flaunting their sexual exploits as they would talk about what they had for dinner last night, and the more people in the know the better. Celebrities and the media as often show the way ahead. I mean, you know pretty much everything you need to know about the situation when one of the most popular podcasts in the world is called “My Dad Wrote a Porno” and frequently has famous people coming to talk about sex, including their own sex lives, in graphic and foul detail. Whatever happened to the very notion of privacy? Of course uttering a single word in opposition brands you immediately a “prude” or “judgmental” but one of the reasons why I don’t have kids is that I don’t want them to grow up in a culture in which famous entertainers boast about being Grindr users.
So yes, as I said to you previously, I hold no grudge against Muslims, provided of course that they don’t try to impose their beliefs and rituals upon me. Since none has tried so far, I regard them as allies, not threats.
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