The Tumblr Porn Ban

Yes, there are a lot of other horrible things going on in the world these days. But the recent decision by Tumblr to ban 'adult content' from the site is still extremely depressing. For one thing, as Violet Blue put it, it's clear that there's now a full-blown war on sex on the internet. And it's not going to make sex on the internet go away. What it's going to do is solidify the dominance of large corporations like MindGeek (the owners of PornHub, etc, etc).

What Tumblr and its ilk offered was an opportunity for people whose sexuality is usually marginalized, fetishized, or denied to express and explore that sexuality on their own terms. Stories abound of young, disaffected, confused, lost people who discovered who they were in large part because of their discovery of people like them on Tumblr. No one has given better expression to that than the wonderful and inimitable Vex Ashley, in this piece on Medium.

Among the 'marginalized' groups in question we find, frankly, women, who seem to have made up a large percentage of various Tumblr porn communities. Mainstream pornography rarely troubles itself to portray women's sexuality except as it serves men's. (We'll explore that and related issues in my graduate seminar this spring.) And it's not just men directors who are responsible. Most women directors struggle to break out of that mold, too. Among many other things, Tumblr provided a place for people to share the alternative pornographies they'd discovered and to try to construct some kind of counter-narrative to what's being peddled by PornHub (now that they've killed and then swallowed much of what used to be the mainstream pornography industry).

Probably all of that will migrate to some new location. (See here and here for some reporting on this.) But in so far as Tumblr's decision was a reaction to the imminent activation of FOSTA/SESTA, it's hard to know whether any platform that allows freely posted adult content can survive.

It's a lesson that's been taught over and over, but that never seems to be learned: Restrictions on sexually explicit expression always affect most directly and immediately sexually marginalized people. In part, that's because it's always up to some authority or other to enforce those restrictions, and the discretion that's built into the system makes it inevitable that they'll clamp down first and hardest on the already marginalized. But, in part, it's just because the marginalized are always the folks who get screwed (and not in a good way).

When Canada implemented MacKinnon-inspired restrictions on pornography in the early 1990s, for example, they were immediately used to shut down gay and lesbian bookstores, while the sex shops catering to straight men were left untouched. When Britain implemented new restrictions on online content a few years ago, they banned any display of female ejaculation while permitting 'facials'; banned women sitting on men's faces for oral sex while permitting rough fellatio to gagging; etc, etc. And whom did the agencies tasked with enforcing the law decide to go after? Women who ran BDSM sites. Anyone want to guess who age verification laws will actually affect? Not the big corporations that can afford the exorbitant fees the credit card companies stand ready to charge for the service.

Depressing? That barely scratches the surface.

UPDATE: Another excellent piece on this, from HuckMag.