I spotted a few pro-dommes suggesting that tumblr blocking porn might be a good thing, as it’d remove a source of free porn and push more people to buy from content creators. That’s an interesting thought, and it’s hard to know how these kind of changes will play out, but it does seem to miss some aspects of the bigger picture. Firstly, tumblr was also used by sex workers to advertise and attract clients. With it gone, the only social media site still friendly to sex workers is twitter. That’s a precarious situation to be in. Secondly, I think the broader internet ecosystem for kinky content has helped dramatically increase the potential audience for kink.
It’s tempting to divide the world into kinky and vanilla people. In reality I think there are three groups. There’s obviously those who have zero interest in it and those who’ll always be active in it. In the middle, and possibly the largest group, are the potential kinksters. For these people the broad availability of kinky imagery and writing is a gateway. It draws them in with fantasies and ideas that they didn’t realize was their ‘thing’ until they saw it. Seeing someone act out their kinks normalizes the idea of trying your own.
I’d actually put myself in that middle category. I think I’ve always been kinky, even before I knew what sex or BDSM was, but I’m not sure I’d have ever truly discovered or explored my kinks without the internet. I couldn’t have imagined broaching the topic with a partner or calling an unknown pro-domme from a card in a phonebox. It was porn that expanded my imagination and kinky bloggers that made me realize that this was something I could try out for real.
Obviously tumblr removing adult content is not the same as it being removed from the internet. However, it was the largest and most user friendly of the porn hosting platforms. The more porn is pushed into the unfriendly corners of the internet, and the more it’s suppressed by search tools, the fewer conversions I think we’ll see from potential kinksters to actual kinksters. Which means fewer potentially kinky partners and fewer clients for pro-dommes.
These photographs are a great example of the kind of thing we risk losing. This is from Misingui’s tumblr, which features a lot of equally wonderful images. These two are from this post. Rigging is by Misungui, the model is Stan Briche and the photographer is Ludovica Anzaldi.