Although ErosBlog does not celebrate all that has resulted from the rise of the porn tubes, I want to highlight one useful thing that I’ve noticed about the large collection of porn video clips that proliferates on big specialized tubesites. I am utterly mad about porn provenance research, where often the hardest challenges are in video, because movies are much more ephemeral than images. Video hosting tends to go down faster and harder than image hosting, video is less likely to be archived anywhere, and video is much harder to search. The one place that video survives online after its producer goes out of business, and survives with some keywords and searchable tags, offering some prayer of tracking it down, is — you guessed it — tube sites.

Here are a couple of examples of ephemeral video that I recently found via tubes. By “ephemeral” I mean video from defunct producers or sources, no longer available anywhere, no longer an item of commerce. Are tubes arguably part of the reason this is so? Sure. But here, in this moment, they are also the only thing saving these bits from oblivion, which I find both interesting and useful.

This screenshot is from a Chinese rope bondage video, sourced (via its watermark) to a Chinese “rope art” (that’s the best that Google Translate can do) forum that no longer exists:

When it did exist, the forum prohibited “pornography, politics, advertising, and irrigation” — but that wasn’t enough to save it in today’s prurient China. We retain access to this video because of, love them or not, the tubes. I assume — I hope — that the bit about irrigation is a machine translation failure to communicate:

Here’s another example of tube curation for you. There was a hardcore BDSM site called Fucking Dungeon that went offline about five years ago. (The domain is currently advertising itself for sale). I’m not sure their videos aren’t in somebody else’s catalog now, but if so, Google isn’t admitting it. Here’s a screenshot of a BDSM sex scene from Fucking Dungeon with a pair of well-matched Russian girls who were marketed as the Russo twins:

As a curator and researcher, if I was starting with that screenshot, I’d have no prayer of finding the video source or identifying the clip without the “public clip library” function served by tubesites. Credit where credit is due!

If a woman wants the pleasure she wants and has no patience at all for putting up with the nonsense of fuckboys, one increasingly-popular strategy is what I shall call “direct supervision”:

This femdom photo was hashtagged as vintage by Mr. Underheel on Twitter, whose image curation marks him in my estimation as something of an expert. When, as here, none of my usual image provenancing methods turn up any deeper information, I generally consider that to indicate an older origin also, harking back at least to the print-publication era. However, in this case there’s just something about the overall composition that strikes me as modern. I want to say “the style of the nipple piercings” but I’m not an expert in those and I’m sure if I said that somebody would land on my head with Victorian-era examples. So let’s just leave this with the notation that my instincts are twitching with a reservation that it might not be as “vintage” as it seems.

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I tell you three times: Titties alert! Titties Alert! Titties Alert!

It looks to me as if JuggyCams may be the ultimate big boobs webcam site — when you click through, their page is utterly wallpapered with cams models who are bustin’ out all over (pun intended) with extremely generous tits, breasts, boobs, honkers, and bazoongas. Please pardon me my infantile moment; even for an internet that’s saturated in humongous hooters, this is a serious breastage situation!

Ahem. Let me step back a moment, if only to give the ladies some room to breathe. If there’s anything I love on the internet, it’s a porn site that takes one narrow specialty, seizes it firmly in a lightly-lubricated fist, shakes it up and down, and then — where was I?

Oh, yes, JuggyCams, and their specialization in cams performers with spectacular frontal endowments. They really do not screw around or fuck up the whole big-tits business, as this screenshot of one of their cams models in action shows us:

Back to my point. For as long as people have been in the cams business, brilliant marketers have had the notion of saying “my cams site is going to specialize in hairy gays with fat butts!” and then they’ll run up some hairy gay butt banners and get right after that demographic. The trouble is, cams performers aren’t easy to pigeonhole. So pretty much every cams site that’s successful has grown until the owner says “Let’s add some hairy lesbians with fat butts too, and maybe some hairy skinny gays and lesbians too, we’ll use categories and tags to keep them all separate.” But the performers are thinking “I’m not so busy, and I’m really hairy, but my butt is sort of middle so I’ll list in both categories…” Before you know it, any cam site of any size has every performer showing up in every category and the specialization is all blown to bits. Then the surfer learns that no matter what the link or the banner promises, when they land they aren’t going to see any specialization, they are just going to see the same mixed bag of random people.

So what makes JuggyCams different and better? For one thing, you can see at a glance that these performers all have huge boobs. How did JuggyCams manage it? Well, according to their “About Juggycams” page, what makes them special is that they cheat in the best possible way. What they are doing is hand-picking the biggest-boobed cams performers from the top reputable cams sites and listing them all together in one place. It’s a feat somewhere between curation and aggregation, and it seems to be managing a result that I have not seen accomplished before in the cams space, which is notoriously resistance to specialization of the performers by themes and categories and niches. I find it impressive.

I have been saving the following Milo Manara artwork for a special occasion. The art originally graced the cover of a CD-ROM published around the turn of the century, and has been “cleaned up” to remove some of the commercial markings from the CD-ROM cover. “Turn of the century” is a rough guess, judging by the fact that the software supported by the CD-ROM included Windows 98 (released in 1998) but not Windows XP, which was released in 2001. In the artwork, we see a couple of lovely naked ladies in Manara’s trademark style, playing with each other via a HUGE (by modern standards) webcam:

You may be wondering: what’s the special occasion I’ve been saving the artwork for? In truth, I didn’t know myself. It turned out to be a request I received from Mistress World. They asked me to turn my skills at researching and porn art curation to the topic of camgirls, cams, camming, and especially fetish cams, which are their special thing and particular forte.

Obviously this is a bit of a challenge, since networked computers and webcams themselves date to precisely 1993, and the earliest webcam had a subject no more exciting than a coffeepot at the University of Cambridge:

History does not record the occasion of the first sexy camshow or the first kinky camgirl, but clearly seven years was plenty of time for the phenomenon to engage the popular imagination, if someone was willing to pay an artist of Manara’s stature to prepare what they would have called a “multimedia presentation” about sexy camgirls by 2000 (or so).

The 90s are remembered, in fact, for so-called “life-casters” — voyeuristic performers who kept webcams running on their lives, in the course of which they were sometimes nude and indeed sometimes had sex on camera. The first and most famous of these lifecasters was Jenni, who ran JenniCam from her college dorm. Later there were also AnaCam, DaniCam, and AtomCam, all before the turn of the century. But, especially at first, their always-on or most-always-on shows were only sporadically sexy, they were one-way shows with limited or no audience feedback, and they weren’t anything like the paid-erotic entertainment webcam shows we know today:

There’s some historical dispute about which of the lifecasters first discovered that they could set up paid memberships and extra-sexy private “pay-per-minute” shows to spin webcam gold, but it seems to have happened around 1998. By 2000 or so, certainly, it was definitely becoming big business!

Inject that kind of supercharged sexy spice into the popular culture and give Rule 34 almost twenty years to work its magic, and there should be a ton of secondary porn about camgirls out there, including the subgenre I went looking for, which was art (especially fan art) about camgirls and fetish camshows. I was expecting to find a metric buttload of it! In that I was disappointed; there’s less of it out there than I thought I would find. But I am who I am; my porn search skills are not easily thwarted. I did indeed find several nice pieces of fetish camgirl art.

The first of these is titled simply Camgirl, by artist Reptileye:

The next is a spanking extravaganza called “Put on a show!” by artist Mcrocks:

And finally, a bit of orgasmic pillowbiting for a camming audience called Inumimi CamGirl, by artist VeryMediocre:

If you know of any more camming and camgirl-themed art, please feel free to link it in the comments. In particular I expected to find fan-art tributes to particular camgirls, and in fact that didn’t turn up hardly at all in my searches. I won’t be at all surprised to find out that I missed some whole art community that one of you learned commenters can link me to.

I have been noticing a set of four grainy images speeding about on Twitter in recent days, a poor degraded sample from what I faintly remembered to be a much larger set of enthusiastic and hilarious Kermit-and-Miss-Piggy art-porn dating back five or six years, that was mentioned briefly at ErosBlog before. My faintly-triggered recollection is that much better photographs exist elsewhere on the web. I can’t really be the guy to curate comprehensive sets of materials like this, because if I assemble and host a definitive image set, eventually the wrath of Henson (the wraith of Henson?) will descend on me. But the doctrine of fair use allows me to at least put together some representative samples and information for the curious seeker, or so I believe and am prepared to defend.

You may therefore imagine my alarm when, upon determining the provenance of this artwork in greater detail than I had previously known it, I realized that the provenance itself was at some risk of being lost. Although there are doubtless many other rapidly-evaporating web references, the one I found is an obsolete search result in the Tineye reverse image search engine, which is at risk of being purged from that engine the next time their crawler finds that the underlying link is gone 404 Not Found:

That, plus some work with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, gets us all of the information about the underlying source art project. But crucially, you will notice that there are no archived images present; without something like my screen capture and this blog post, there might be no way for a future researcher to definitively link the text I am about to quote with these images. It turns out the photos are of epoxy clay sculptures for a 2012 art project by Emilio Rangel:

The project La Puta de Babilonia (The Whore of Babylon) takes its name from a biblical character from the Book of Revelations that represents the evil and lust inherently present in people. This character appears as one of the signs of the Apocalypse, being the one who corrupts the kings of men through desire. A total of 148 pieces, which constitute the entire collection, were sculpted to create a visual deployment of this biblical character. Some pieces depict a swine and a frog having sexual intercourse in different positions, various pigs in erotic positions, and a central piece, representing the Whore of Babylon (the swine) over the seven-headed beast. The total installation of the forms illustrates an almost pornographic landscape of animals with very funny anthropomorphic features.

One hundred and forty-eight pieces! No, they’re not all as amusing as the ones that have been circulating recently. But “emilio rangel miss piggy 2012” and variations will still turn up quite a few decent images. Don’t limit yourself to Google; Bing, Yandex, and sometimes even Duck-Duck-Go all filter “porn” less than Google does, and can sometimes work better for searches like this. Play with it; have fun. What, you don’t have the time? Well, you could pay me; I’ve done detailed curation work like this more than once, for discerning private collectors. As the old saying goes, there’s more than one way to get a frog out of a pig’s ass!

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I woke up this morning to unwelcome news on Twitter. A few days ago, Patreon quietly (which means, without actually notifying the people who use its platform) updated the Adult Content portion of its Community Guidelines in an unequivocally porn-hostile way:

This is a substantial change after a long period of stasis. As recently as September, Patreon had not changed these guidelines since I analyzed them in detail back in 2016, when I was still agonizing over whether to solicit pledges on a platform that was then explicitly “not for porn” but which advertised its openness to “adult content” and promised to clarify the distinction in future policy updates. As I explained then:

I’ll admit I’m of two minds. I’m so offended by undefined “no porn” policies that I want to piss on the toes of every company that trots one out. But I also find myself tempted to give Patreon the benefit of the doubt just now. It’s possible they’re doing the best they can for adult content creators, in the context of a business/financial environment that is implacably hostile to us.

Notice two things. First, there are no reports going around that anybody has been kicked off of Patreon, had their money held, or suffered any adverse consequence of the new guidelines. Yet. So if this truly be #pornocalypse come to Patreon, it’s the sound of the hoofbeats in advance of the dread horseman, not the horseman himself.

The second thing I would have you notice requires your keen focus on the true meaning of #pornocalypse, which is a word that everyone, including me, throws around very loosely. But in its most precise usage, #pornocalypse is a financial term. It refers to that precise moment in an internet company’s business life-cycle where the business value of having “adult” content on the platform (popularity, users, traffic, coolness, network effects, buzz, et cetera) is suddenly outweighed by the detriment to the company of having to justify the presence of that adult content to bankers, stockbrokers, and venture capitalists. These financial-industry people are universally conservative to the point of squeamishness about sexual content in the businesses touched by their money, no matter how libertine they are in their personal lives. And so the pornocalypse always comes, as predictable as clockwork, to an internet company that’s going through a significant financial transition.

Hmmm, didn’t I recently get a bland email from Patreon about exciting developments, something about sixty million in new venture capital? Sure enough I did…

So yes. The way this works is that Patreon cannot afford to have anything in its system that might offend any of its new financial overlords. The new guidelines may or may not be followed up with new hires whose job is to go through and start throwing indy porn projects out of the system; let’s hope not. Best case is that the guidelines are to make things clear-cut so that when some indy porn site gets a bit of press buzz and the headline “Patreon-supported Porn Site Blah Blah Blah” starts trending in the business press, Patreon’s managers will have clear cause to nuke that unfortunate site from the system before Patreon’s venture capitalist backers can get on the phone to complain about reputation damage.

How much does this affect the ErosBlog Patreon? Not, I think, much; my status was ambiguous before and it remains ambiguous. The ErosBlog Patreon was fragile before and it remains fragile. This has been my position since I started exploring crowd-funding options:

I’m proud of the fact that everything I do is porn, even if it’s also erotic art curation or forensic photoarcheology or deep-dive provenance research into viral photographs or reluctant investigative journalism and cynical commentary about platforms used by pornography enthusiasts. So I’m looking for a crowdfunding platform that won’t make me lie about what I love to do. I don’t doubt that with a bit of careful fancy-dancing I could use one of the porn-squeamish platforms, at least for awhile. But I would hate to get invested (or to get my patrons invested) in a platform where the official policy is to prohibit porn officially while tolerating it on a case-by-case basis as long as it doesn’t get too uppity.

I have contacts in the Bay Area. Through one of them, I heard a sort of personal rumor that the Patreon team was committed to trying to make the platform work for adult content creators. I knew it wouldn’t survive the first big financial phase change, but what the hell; I decided to get down off my high horse and give them a shot. And so, I set up my Patreon to emphasize my digital curation and provenance work with vintage erotic art, which should be equally fine under the new wording or the old. But I’ll probably want to revise the pitch a bit to put less focus on supporting this blog, which is still a porn website in my own eyes if (perhaps) not the kind of pornographic material production that Patreon is newly prohibiting. Who knows? It’s not like any of us will get a chance to lawyerlips our way out of a ban anyway; when the #pornocalypse comes for you, there’s usually no appeal. So be careful out there, people!

Fifteen years ago today, I posted the first post on ErosBlog. I am, frankly, amazed to still be at it. I hope you’ll forgive some of today’s wordy indulgences, as I complain about stuff that has gotten difficult and gush about the things I’ve grown passionate about that weren’t even on my radar fifteen years ago.

But first, it’s a birthday! There’s supposed to be cake. I ordered plenty for everybody by clicking on a social media recommended-for-me advertisement. Big Data knows exactly what we want and need these days, right? The cake should be awesome! But when the cake actually got here…

On second thought, maybe we should move rapidly along from birthday cake. Let’s start with a look into my earlier predictions and expectations, shall we?

10 years ago, I was pretty damn upbeat about sex blogging:

I love doing this blog and I can’t imagine stopping voluntarily. Five years ago it was still possible to claim that blogs were a fad. Five years from now, it’s possible we’ll all be considered impossibly old-fashioned, like paper magazines and network television and phones that plug into the wall. But this is about the sex, baby! And people don’t get bored with that, so I should still have an audience.

Five years ago, and five years after I wrote that, I was just a little bit less sanguine:

Where in all this do sex blogs fit it, in the waning month of 2012? Well, people still like reading about sex and viewing dirty pictures, and they all have these miraculous and awesome (I think so anyway; that’s how you can tell I’m old) little always-connected internet devices in their pockets now. Even if “blogs” finish going away and “surfing the web” has become hopelessly quaint, there’s got to be some way to keep on doing what we do (find sexy stuff, pull it together, make a few wise-ass remarks about it, entertain the folk). Our challenge as sex bloggers (or whatever we become when blogging is as dead as carriage racing) is the same as it always was: to do it well enough to be valued, to earn and maintain the attention of our readers in an overstimulated world where attention is the scarcest currency.

In 2007 I asked “Will there be a Ten Candles post on October 3, 2012?” In my secret heart, I was pretty damned sure the answer was “yes”. I’m delighted to have been right. But what about the future? Will ErosBlog still be here in 2017? I’m less confident than I was in 2007; I grow older and move more slowly, while the world speeds up and accelerates into the future. But I’m persistent, and I’m stubborn. Unless I stop being entertained by porn (which seems unlikely) I can’t imagine not having bits of it that need pointed at and talked about. So, just as I did in 2007, I’ll say “I truly do hope so!”

Well, friends, here we are in 2017, and we fuckin’ made it. But blogs in general and sex blogs in particular are not just quaint by this point, they’re positively obsolete. I don’t mind saying that 2022 is starting to look like it might be a serious reach for ErosBlog. More on that later. Let’s talk statistics and history for a minute.

In fifteen years, ErosBlog has published 5,358 posts (5,026 by me, the rest by my several guest bloggers). That’s just under (.98) one post per day — a pretty decent 15-year average if I say so myself! Those posts have attracted 20,499 approved comments, although it must be said that most of those were in the first seven or eight years; since the rise of social media, comment frequency has plunged through the floor, fallen off a cliff, choose your own plummeting metaphor. Only the most loyal blog readers comment any more. Once social media came along, people took their comments there for the most part — and thanks to the #pornocalypse, sex bloggers aren’t welcome on most social media platforms. Or, to be more precise, we may be welcome there in our own persons under our true names, but except on Twitter (the final holdout, for whom the death knell of the #pornocalypse has yet to toll) we aren’t reliably welcome on any major social media under our porn-industry pseudonyms and the adult content of our blogs isn’t welcome there at all.

As for traffic, I don’t have any sort of meaningful long-term traffic numbers I can share. Web traffic is notoriously difficult to measure in any objective way. It’s going down, though, and has been for at least half a decade. I’ve stripped the numbers from this three-year line graph because they aren’t very illuminating, but the trend is clear:

There are many factors that are taking traffic away from independent sex bloggers. They include:

• The decline of the open web and its replacement by closed and adult-hostile social media and app-based ecosystems such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and others;
• Decline in desktop computing and rise of mobile computing generally, feeding the app-based replacement open-web activities noted above;
• Google’s algorithm changes that display virtually all adult websites (except for select popular tubesites) at locations that are buried many pages deep in the search results;
• Deterioration of the paid-subscription porn model that (through affiliate sales) used to support independent adult websites;
• App-based dating software replacement of subscription-model dating sites that (again through affiliate sales) used to help support independent adult websites;
• Rise of video-based “tube” sites based predominantly on free (stolen or promotional) video clips, undermining the paid-porn model and sucking up adult-internet surfer time and attention.

Changes in the porn business and the steady decline in traffic have meant a lot of alterations in the business of sex blogging over the last decade, too. Five years into this gig, it was going really well; I was making more money as a sex blogger (mostly from porn subscription sales) than I ever made at a square job (and I used to work in an office with a tie and a 401k and an eye-watering mortgage). Ten years in, not so much; porn sales were fading fast, but I was making up some of the difference selling ads against my traffic to people who were still making sales on offers that weren’t available to me (stuff that didn’t have affiliate programs). Now? That’s all gone, or nearly so. At these traffic levels I can’t sell a traditional display ad on ErosBlog to save my life, not at least for a price that’s worth having the ugly on my pages. (And the ads that are available are awfully sleazy.) The blog no longer makes me anything that could be considered a living. Such income as does come in is from my generous and much-appreciated Patreon patrons, from sporadic sponsored posts, and from the faded and tattered remnants of the once-mighty affiliate sales ecosystem. Other web projects, freelance writing and research (adult and otherwise), and custom web work take up the bulk of my time, and ErosBlog visibly suffers for it; but it is, as they say these days, what it is.

If you’ve wondered, sometimes, why day after day the new ErosBlog post is just another obscure bit of pulp cover art, that’s why. I am awash in art that I’d like to share, but I simply don’t have enough free time to spend two or four hours busting out a detailed post for the blog every day. A time-consuming post doesn’t pay any more than an image post, things are financially lean chez Bacchus, and it makes more sense to focus on paying work. So, instead, in my free time I use the blog to indulge my passions, which lately have been:

• Surfacing outstanding vintage pulp art from scans that may be online, but are in formats (.pdf and such) that aren’t easily image-searchable and that folks haven’t seen before;
• Tracking and documenting the #Pornocalypse, which is my word and hashtag for the process that social media platforms go through of imposing censorship on their users at that stage in their development when they come under the scrutiny of the moneyed Wall Street and banking interests, who are inevitably more prudish than the Silicon Valley techies who have typically been willing to allow porn on their platforms while they are trying to achieve user volume and “liftoff”;
• Performing curatorial work of all kinds on interesting porn (typically vintage) that exists online in a condition of scandalous disorganization and degraded metadata;
• As resources allow, procure and digitize actual offline porn resources like this, bringing them to the digital world and finding them a secure home here;

Will I still be doing these things in 2022? Well, if we still have a technological society and a more-or-less free country and a somewhat uncensored internet and a functioning economy and a power grid and if I still have access to all those things: probably. I’m pushing fifty, folks; what I enjoy doing seems to change more and more slowly as the years pass.

But will I still be doing all that at ErosBlog?

Cautiously, hopefully, nervously… I think so. Maybe not on the gold-plated, managed-hosting, all-services-provided commercial-grade server that I’ve been using since 2004; the economics are starting to seem highly questionable, although I treasure the rock-solid uptime and the professional support. But I’d hate to abandon my archives (even if Google mostly won’t show them to any but the most dedicated searchers) and I still believe in Bacchus’s first rule. I might get pushed to discount hosting somewhere, but I can’t imagine not keeping up a self-hosted WordPress blog (although five more years of technological change could easily make this sound like a silly thing to have said.)

It’s possible I’ll have to give up on my near-daily posting schedule. The posts I truly value are the lengthy and meaty curatorial ones; and I’m only managing a few of those every month as it is. There’s not much indication, in the traffic numbers or the comments or in any other feedback, that anybody but me would miss the daily pulp art posts, so if I have to cut back to focus more time on making a living, those will be the first to go. The “post every day” rule is a discipline from another blogging era, when (among other virtues) it was thought to help deliver a high volume of Google traffic. If it ever did (and it seemed to) it surely no longer does now!

Reading this over, it “feels” a bit like I’m whining about how ErosBlog used to be a business and has now become a hobby I don’t have sufficient time for. Perhaps I am whining, but if so, please accept my apologies; such is not my true intent. Fifteen years of sex blogging have given me a great deal to be thankful for, including:

• A long list of online sex-blogger friends who, though I may never meet them, I feel I know as well as if we were siblings, and whose good will and ready wit I treasure daily (even if I usually now have to go to Twitter for it);
• An huge visual vocabulary of vintage erotic art and contemporary porn that, although typically it isn’t a thing that’s easy to get paid for having, is ridiculously convenient when undertaking one of my curatorial or provenance-research projects;
• A unique (as far as I know) set of skills for researching the provenance of visual erotica, along with unusual amounts of image-searching skills generally;
• A growing passion for reversing (by means of reconstructive curation and preservation of imagery together with its metadata) the erosive, destructive, entropic destruction of metadata that social media sharing wreaks on internet erotic visual media; and
• A long term ambition to find and digitize “lost porn” that’s still stuck in the analog world — especially rare and vintage specimens thereof — to provide it with a secure digital home and the best possible accompanying metadata.

These are are all fine things to be passionate about, even if I never imagined any of them back in 2002 when I first started this blog. If the last two are the passions that I would still like to find a way to spend more time on than I can currently afford, I shan’t apologize for that; I plan to keep trying to find a way. With any luck at all, by 2022 I’ll be having more success than presently, and it is to be hoped that ErosBlog will still be a part of whatever scheme is working.

The WordPress word count meter tells me I’ve already spent 2,000 words on “me me me” navel-gazing, so let me close with a post-script directed to you, my treasured audience of loyal readers. There’s still a thousand-plus-a-few of you who stop by to view and read on any given day, which is a trust and a responsibility that sometimes weighs heavily when I am being lazy or self-indulgent. I’d like to know a lot more about what brings you, and what keeps you, and what would keep you coming back for the next five years. Even if you don’t normally comment, please consider leaving a comment today. Tell me what you like, tell me what you ignore, tell me what you’d like to see more of. All feedback gratefully accepted!

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