I’ve written before about the virtues of porn linklists. At their best, they blend convenience, ease of use, and the guidance of a trusted curatorial authority. C’mon, this logo absolutely screams “trusted curatorial authority”, don’t you think?

I’m not poking fun here. I showed you that logo for a reason. See the subtitle? “Only the best porn!” If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then surely porn-quality is in the eye (or in some lust center located closer to the genitals) of the porn watcher. How can MrPornGeek.com possibly claim to have sixty-five categories of links to the “best” porn?

You might argue that it’s just marketing puffery. But you would be wrong. Some of these categories are so ambiguous that no search engine could possibly help us. What makes a MILF site? You can call any porn actress a MILF, but that does not make her MILFy. You need a human deciding whether her site fits in that category. Like old Justice Potter Stewart himself, we know good porn when we see it! That discretionary function, laboriously exercised across many hundreds of sites, cannot help but to be valuable. Are the resulting sites objectively “the best”? Which flower is the prettiest? It’s a nonsense question. But you still get your flowers at a flower shop, don’t you?

Perhaps dipping into a couple of categories in particular will help me explain. Consider the Retro and Vintage Porn Sites category at MrPornGeek.com. What makes porn “vintage”? To me, it’s porn that’s more than eighty years old, from the pre-WWII era. Most people seem to think anything is vintage that looks older than the porn they looked at when they learned to masturbate. And there’s a growing trend to call “vintage” any porn that has pubic hair in it! No search engine can fix this. It’s a problem of philosophy. Worse yet, it’s a moving target, because the arrow of time never stops flying. Having a short list of high-quality sites where a human curator has confirmed that “these sites are worthy compilations of vintage porn” is useful even when the curator accepts any reasonable definition of “vintage” — including both mine and the hairy-pussy one.

Another porn category where it’s very difficult to define the fetish is the so-called “amateur porn” category. What does this even mean? It’s very much all things to all people. To some, it means uncompensated home performers, uploading recordings of themselves for the voyeuristic thrill; to others, it means small-time and little-known porn performers, in sets that look like bedrooms, getting paid to produce stuff that looks like the first category. There’s broad agreement it does not include well-known porn people performing porny scripts in a studio. But there’s enormous hybridization across the category, including “genuine” amateurs who later decide to start performing for pay, and “pure commercial” porn productions going to great lengths to simulate the “amateur” look.

Mr. Porn Geek acknowledges all of this complexity in the intro to his Amateur Porn Sites category, saying he strives for “a healthy balance” between genuine amateur material and the commercial porn that’s made to look like it. You can look for yourself at the dozen amateur sites on his list and judge how good a balance he’s made. But in a porn category where there’s zero agreement on what the term should even mean, just having his list is the triumphant first step in an otherwise-very-difficult search.

And that is how porn link lists can help you defeat ambiguity.