|
|
The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "curation"
August 13th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
I am a nut, and my nuttery takes several very narrow and specific shapes. One of those shapes is my eternal obsession with the problem of porn curation: how do we publish, distribute, discover, access, and preserve access to ephemeral erotic material in a world where #pornocalypse and its social cousins have denied independent porn creators most access to search, social media, and the payments system?
Thus when I saw a Mastodon post blurbing Miss Pearl’s latest blog post On Having Porn For Dommes in terms of the “curation and censorship problem” affecting such porn, I knew it would perforce be relevant to my interests.
Longtime readers know that my BDSM porn interests as displayed here on ErosBlog are dirt-common, with male-gaze M/f porn at the top of the list, followed by the usual substantial fraction of commercial F/f material and then by token amounts of F/m and M/m stuff. That said, the Femdom Resource blog (written by a male client and appreciator of pro dommes, but ranging widely across the femdom content space) is one of my frequently-linked favorites, and I have a long history of featuring nonprofessional or lifestyle femdom bloggers (like Bitchy Jones) on the rare occasion that I’ve been able to find them under the avalanche of cookie-cutter pro-domme “spam” (promotional) content that floods most available channels. O Miss Pearl (subtitle: “non-professional perspective femdom & kink, with awesome erotica”) was therefore an instant addition to the ErosBlog blogroll as soon as I saw it.
But what about the “domme gaze drought” (as she teased it on Mastodon) in Miss Pearls’ recent post?
It has been true for the entire lifetime of this blog that fictional depictions of dominant women are really limited, and most typically tailored to what subs are attracted to. Or being more precise, what a certain paying audience of sub men will purchase. This standard tends to depict dominance in women as a vocation performed for the benefit of subs (or their vulnerability and persecution fantasies) and is often gender regressive as heck.
Yup, that sounds right; this isn’t content that I actively search for, but I do watch for it (if that distinction makes sense) and I don’t see much of it.
Her wide-ranging post covers a lot of subtopics in plenty of detail, but I began crying my amens when I got to this part about the problems facing porn creators:
Let’s drop some of our illusions about porn and how it’s made.
Porn, contrary to the way we talk about it, is a marginalized industry, disproportionately queer, with most people not making much money. Artistic talent and skill are not evenly distributed – nevermind that you need to be a wizard at marketing, with a work ethic that is punishing on the body to make it as any kind of artist, sexy or not. That’s on top of an ever increasingly sanitized internet and the frankly censorship oriented nature of most payment providers and most publishing platforms.
Writing, illustration and modeling are also incredibly poorly paid, whether it’s R, E, or P. One of the first things consumers need to know is that the big names are lottery winner, and most stuff falls into the obscure outsider art and cottage industry level. People who create stuff are not trying to cater to the patriarchy to be willing agents of it, they are navigating razor thin profits, fussy platforms and content saturation of a competition that puts you at odds with not only every creator currently working right now, but every surviving work running back more than a thousand years. And every other possible way humans can amuse or occupy their time.
There follows a highly educational tour of the deep weeds of the curation problems faced by Miss Pearl’s specific porn genre of interest. I’m not dismissing any of that by failing to quote or summarize it here; you’ll want to read it yourself in any case. (Yes, dear readers, I am telling you, yet again, that you’ll need to clicky the damn linky. This is a 22-year-old blog; it can serve as social media, but it doesn’t do so without reader participation.) Miss Pearl calls for smart and aggressive curation of niche porn (the fans cheer), talks about the value of self-hosting (a subject long dear to my own heart), and concludes that domme-gaze porn “isn’t reaching the audience. It’s fragmented across different platforms, only has so much advertising and the market it might have doesn’t know it exists.”
In conclusion, Miss Pearl points out that making niche porn is a fiscally-irresponsible artistic act, and that we need to be better curators and better fans if we want to encourage it:
Someone who is an honest to goodness lifestyle domme for real and a good creator, if they are being fiscally responsible, is much better off making something else.
If you want to turn that around, we have to actually make more of a project of curation and sharing out of it, and you are simply going to have to be more assertive fans. You are also going to need to develop a lot more gentleness around the content you consume.
Indeed.
Similar Sex Blogging:
August 22nd, 2024 -- by Bacchus
After Monday’s Gemini pornocalypse test, ErosBlog reader Roger decided to run a similar prompt through ChatGPT. My expectation, since ChatGPT is known to be a pornocalypse-baked-in tool, would have been a similar negative result for the requested ErosBlog summary. As, indeed, it proved:
“I’m unable to browse the content of specific websites that require login or are behind paywalls. If you can provide more details or context about the content you’re interested in from Erosblog, I can certainly help you with a summary or further information based on that!”
Then, apparently, Roger decided to do a little prompt hacking, specifying Erosblog as a URL rather than merely by name. That produced a handsome summary:
ErosBlog.com is a blog that primarily focuses on erotica and adult content. The blog, often referred to as “The Sex Blog of Record,” features a wide range of topics related to sexuality, adult entertainment, and sex culture. Here’s a detailed overview of what you can typically expect from ErosBlog:
Erotic Imagery: The blog often posts erotic images, including art, photography, and occasionally vintage erotica. These images are typically tasteful and artistic, though they do include nudity and sexual themes.
Sexual Commentary and Insights: The blog includes commentary on various aspects of sex and sexuality. This can range from discussions on sexual norms and taboos to personal reflections and broader societal observations about sexual behavior and attitudes.
Adult Industry News: ErosBlog sometimes covers news and updates from the adult entertainment industry. This can include discussions about new trends, legal issues, technological advancements, and other relevant industry happenings.
Literary Erotica: The blog occasionally features erotic short stories or excerpts from longer works of erotic fiction. These are usually well-written and cater to readers interested in literary erotica.
Curation of Web Content: ErosBlog curates and links to other erotic content available on the web. This could be other blogs, articles, videos, or websites that align with the blog’s focus on sexuality and erotica.
Humor and Satire: There’s often a light-hearted tone to the content, with humorous takes on sex-related topics or satirical commentary on sexual politics and culture.
Links to Adult Resources: The blog provides links to various resources related to sexuality, such as sex-positive websites, educational materials, and other adult content sites.
Vintage and Historical Erotica: ErosBlog has a particular interest in the history of erotica, often showcasing or discussing vintage erotic materials, including old advertisements, photographs, and literature.
The blog is well-regarded for its thoughtful and respectful approach to adult content, making it popular among readers who appreciate a more nuanced and artistic exploration of sexuality.
I love to read all that. It’s like it was custom-tuned to make me think “Ooh, sweet, this AI really gets what I’m trying to do! So insightful, so accurate!”
I can almost feel the smoke being blown up my ass.
Remember that these models are bullshitting engines. And this is some diligent bullshitting! The confabulatory hallucinations start in the second sentence of the summary, with the claim that ErosBlog is “often referred to as “The Sex Blog of Record””. Is that flattering? Sure! But… nobody has ever referred to ErosBlog that way. I would have seen. I would have remembered.
Sure enough, when you search for “the sex blog of record” on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex, there are no results for that phrase. None! It’s a total hallucination!
And then there are all the laudatory phrases: “tasteful and artistic”, “nuanced and artistic”, “thoughtful and respectful” and so forth. That sounds like praise, all right, but not like any praise I can remember ErosBlog ever actually getting. And we all know that LLMs can’t actually form judgments like that. Pure hallucinations!
How paranoid am I, if I begin to suspect that these models are deliberately tuned toward positive-sounding output, in hopes that investors and journalists will evaluate it by feeding it their own stuff and then thinking “ooh, how accurate!” when praise comes out the other end?
Update: Amy Bones on Mastodon reacted to the confabulation of ErosBlog being often referred to as “The sex blog of record” by saying “highly recommend you just start calling it that tbh” and it was one of those smack-your-forehead no-brainer moments. Imagine Captain Picard saying “Make it so.” It is so. (The old tagline/subhead on ErosBlog hadn’t been updated since 2006 and at its inception, it was shaped by some long-obsolete notions of SEO. It was time for a refresh.)
Similar Sex Blogging:
January 2nd, 2024 -- by Bacchus
A few days ago on New Year’s Eve, Girl on the Net posted a question on Mastodon, asking sex bloggers to reply to her with a link to the post/story we’re most proud of from 2023. It reminded me that I hadn’t done any sort of retrospective, and I didn’t have time to do one before 2023 gasped its last. Instead I gave her a quick answer, along with this disclaimer:
Not a great year for my blog writing. I’ve been demoralized by the degraded state of the open adult web and the usual #pornocalypse difficulties around linkage and search and traffic and attention and money. For me it was a year of modest image posts with light commentary.
Every word is true, but upon reflection, it’s not hard to come up with a double handful of posts I’m proud of. So here’s my 2023 “ErosBlog in Review” notable posts list, a couple of days late.
- Let’s start with the post I chose to respond to GotN’s Mastodon question. I told her “my true blogging joy these days is surfacing vintage pop culture that illuminates the ties between historical and modern sexual culture.” Daddy Doms And Sugar Daddies features a 1950 magazine article I found about sugar daddies and their sugar babies. There were so many more age play tropes in two short pages than I ever would have expected to see 75 years ago. Plus, the post includes a bonus meme!
- My post The Free Love Bus Hasn’t Stopped Here In Years is a short post, but personally notable for me because I finally managed to capture in two sentences something I’ve been thinking about since the 1980s. Specifically, the complex and highly specific grief that people my age felt when the promised benefits of the sexual revolution were snatched away by the AIDS crisis during the few years while we were old enough to anticipate them but not yet old enough to have enjoyed them.
- If 2023 was, for me, mostly a year of “modest image posts with light commentary”, I still managed to find some delicious images. He Chose Ass is the post with the modern commercial porn photo I most enjoyed sharing in 2023.
- By far the most personal post I wrote in 2023 was She Balked At The Zipping. It’s about an unusual moment of clarity during the beginning of the end of my first serious relationship, back in the 20th century.
- My first post in 2023 turned out to be thematically important to a big story for erotic art this year, which of course is the rise of generative art made with AIs trained (controversially) on large databases. On January 2 I posted Sticky Jessica Alba, in which post I revisited a link from twenty years previous when ErosBlog was young, and celebrity fakes were made the old-fashioned way, in Photoshop. In January I speculated a little bit about the new AI tools, but by mid-summer, I finally got my hands on some that were simple enough for me to play with them, leading to a short series of posts like Generative Art: Alien Sex Toy Shop 2 with a few of my own primitive efforts using these tools.
- In July, I realized that an awful lot of artists have played with the erotic implications of Snow White and her seven horny dwarven roommates, so I did a Snow White And Lusty Dwarves Roundup post of examples that had previously appeared on ErosBlog.
- One of the simple but time consuming post types that I once hoped to do very much more of here on ErosBlog is curation of vintage gems from 20th-century pulps and men’s magazines. These are fun to do but when I give them the full treatment, cropping and cleaning the imagery for blog presentation and converting machine OCR results into clean text for searchability and ease of reading, one of these posts is often most of a day’s work. If I had more Patreon support I could and would do a lot more of these and less random gig work. Instead I’ve only been doing these when the subject matter particularly delights me, such as this failed 1970s effort to boot up a floating sex club aboard a Dutch cruise ship: All Aboard The Sex Boat: Atlantis.
- Another curation post that I couldn’t resist doing involved a presumed-fictional “feature” in True Men Stories magazine about a notional WII-era sea-going bordello in the Pacific. The 1970s headline was The WW II Cruise Of The Ship Of Sex and the post is Tramp Steamer And Floating Bordello.
And now, onward further into 2024!
Similar Sex Blogging:
May 1st, 2023 -- by Bacchus
I’ve always been given to understand that women don’t want to see dick pics. However. Something, some instinct that I’ve honed over decades of curation for a mixed audience, tells me that this particular photo might not be the kind of dick pic women don’t want to see, if you’re parsing my negatives with sufficient care:
This particular attention-grabbing cock shot has been internet-circulating, mostly in gay male spaces, for many years. I expect it has its origins in commercial gay porn, but I can’t say for certain.
Similar Sex Blogging:
September 8th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
This stylish girl-washing photo exploded all over Tumblr more than a decade ago. The BDSM set especially loved it. It’s ambiguous, but in a delicious way:
Is our besuited man a stuffy old-fashioned butler? A loving but very busy husband, stopped by his young wife’s boudoir between important meetings? Husband or not, perhaps he’s her wealthy and attentive submissive? Or maybe she is his submissive, well-kept to the point of being a wee bit spoiled? Whimsical captions and imagined contexts proliferated. But nobody had, or cared to share, the photo’s actual provenance. When it recently percolated to the top of my queue of interesting blog-fodder, I immediately suspected it of being from a fashion magazine. That guess turns out to be about half right, but proving it took a lot of research. I do these things for you, dear readers and treasured patrons, and also for me.
Luminary sex-blogger Violet Blue shared the photo, while expressing misgivings about the sorry state of Tumblr attributions, in November of 2009. Although the actual image is gone from her blog now, her discussion of it remains:
I recently discovered danae’s exquisite tumbleblog, “kinda like a blog but with short-form, mixed-media posts with stuff I like.” What I like about it, besides the fantastic curation of sexually explicit images (with a strong accent on female submission, of course), is that whenever possible danae credits the photo source. That’s really important to me. But that’s always a ridiculous hope with Tumblr blogs — which is why I seldom post about them. This one’s exceptional.
In 2009 both Danae and Violet sourced the photo to its “patient zero” appearance on Tumblr, which doesn’t help me, in 2021, in my quest for real provenance. Fortunately, I was able to find some information scattered across a handful of nearly-defunct websites. When I chased it all the way back to the source, the photo turns out to have appeared as part of a spread in Deliciae Vitae #3, a magazine from 2003. If you have never heard of Deliciae Vitae, you might be forgiven; it was an annual, and there were only ever three issues. Copies, if you can find them, sell on eBay for upwards of $200. I scraped the following explanation of the project from an old broken fashion site, where DV’s editor-in-chief Kinder Aggugine had this to say:
In 1983, aged 18, I approached one of Europe’s leading publishers of adult material with my idea for a stylishly superior men’s publication. I knew there was a market for an international magazine that was classy, luxurious and sexy but which was fundamentally not about porn. I mean if that’s all you want you can get it anywhere, right? They laughed me out of the building…
Another 18 years on, the culture of photography and publishing has come a very long way. Having worked as a fashion designer for much of the intervening period I’ve been struck how much fashion, and particularly fashion photographers have embraced sex and sexuality in advertising and editorial fashion shoots for men and women.
Ultimately, as the fashion industry knows very well, it’s the image — the way someone (or something) is photographed — that makes them desirable. The medium — as they say — is the message. Which explains why certain fashion photographers have become as famous as film directors.
Deliciae Vitae is an independent bi-annual publication, of deliberate, unashamedly luxurious excess. Autonomous and unconstrained in a world of ever more increasing conglomerate fashion. Beautiful women from across the globe are photographed by the very best fashion and art photographers to give pleasure to the most sophisticated of palates. But such sophistication is indulged just as much by fine writing. So look out for features on the eternal sexual chemistry of champagne, the elitist joys of supersonic travel or the return of the ultimate pop playboy Bryan Ferry. Deliciae Vitae is not meant to appeal to everyone. But then, you’re not everyone, are you?
Issue 3 of Delicia Vitae featured a digitally sliced-up Naomi Campbell on the cover:
Inside, readers found a lengthy spread by photographer Giampaolo Sgura starring Eva Riccobono and titled Pictorial #8: Attendant (Upstairs And Downstairs And In My Lady’s Chamber). The spread included an 8-photograph bathing sequence which is worth reproducing in full, especially as it took a lot of scraping through busted malware-loading celeb and porn sites to reassemble:
Well, that turned out to be a journey that was worth the search for a map. Wasn’t it?
Similar Sex Blogging:
February 14th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
There’s an amazing winter storm warning in place for an enormous swathe of these United States, and though the Nymph and I are lucky to be snug as two bugs in a rug, in the midst of the Valentine’s Day near-blizzard, my thoughts are with those who are not. Be safe out there!
The cute condoms/heart/pussy image was circulating on Tumblr ten years ago and made it into one of my themed image directories. But if I had any attribution then, which I doubt, it hasn’t survived my rough curation.
Similar Sex Blogging:
July 25th, 2020 -- by Bacchus
For reasons I don’t fully understand, the Internet Archive’s crawler had a lot of trouble capturing porn pages on Tumblr over the years. Even when it got the text and comments on a particular post, the image was often not captured. The cultural loss of the curated porn collections on Tumblr when Yahoo took the porn blogs dark was painful enough, but the fact that such a small portion is archived tends to intensify the pang.
The loss seems even more severe in the realm of animated porn .gif clips, which were an art form almost unique to Tumblr. Perhaps because of the file sizes, these seem generally to have been archived less successfully than single-image .jpg files. But a few of these Tumblr ghosts were saved.
Here’s a classic example: an enthusiastic blowjob animation prepared by DarkMinstrel007 back in 2013. Don’t let anybody tell you that making porn .gifs isn’t an art form. You could call it curation if you prefer, but if so, all you’ve done is established that curation, too, is art-making.
Similar Sex Blogging:
|
|
