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.
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!
In what was doubtless the long hard winter of 1955-1956, Mr. Earl Stout of Central, Alaska (per Wikipedia, then a town with a declining population of perhaps 35 people) received five or more air mail deliveries of 8mm films. Roughly fifty years after he received them, some of his 8mm film deliveries turned up at an estate sale in Fairbanks, where I bought them for small money:
Earl Stout is known to local history; according to the “Central Chatter” column in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner of December 9, 1959, he was then “a long-time grader man” for the Bureau Of Public Roads, retiring from winter road-clearing duty to be replaced by one Tom Kennedy. This would mean Earl was nearing retirement (at least from heavy road-grader operations) at the time he ordered the films.
To be precise about what was in Earl’s collection as it came to me, the boxes are sized to hold four films per box, but one film is either missing or was never included; there are 19 films in total. As you can see, one mailing box is so “plain brown wrapper” that it has neither return address nor even (by accident or design) legible postmark; the others are from the “Movie Club Guild” (about which more later) of Burbank, California. The unevenly hand-stamped “titles” on the internal film reel boxes constititute the totality of the labeling that exists anywhere in the collection.
At the time I first bought these, it was clear they were porn, but much more than that was hard to determine. Then and now, I didn’t (and don’t) have any 8mm-viewing tech. I’m old enough to remember when household 8mm projectors for watching “home movies” were common, but that was a long time ago. I’ve seen projectors and even table-top illuminated viewers (for simple cut-and-splice editing) at garage sales quite recently, but not for prices I wanted to pay. A scanner doesn’t really work either (something about reflected light) although it’s enough to confirm in the roughest sort of way what’s on the film:
Back in the early aughts when I bought these, I was quite flush with porn-selling money. I didn’t care about technical details, or (back then) much about curation; I just wanted to get them digitized and sling them up onto the internet for everybody to watch. Trouble was, back then there were no nifty $300 units on Amazon to do the work; you had to send them out to a bureau (who might easily reject porn work, with or without returning your films) or buy thousands of dollars worth of equipment. So I left the films in the care of a buddy of mine, a porn collector and film hobbyist who (a) already possessed much of the necessary equipment; and (b) was willing to do the work, or at least begin it. Of course, I also had to give him a wad of cash to buy the remainder of the necessary equipment, but I figured it would be worth it.
Let’s just say: that didn’t work out. I’ll not say a harsh word against him; we’re still friends. He had some setbacks in life, which happens, and some heavy burdens to carry. The money got spent, the films didn’t get digitized, and he endured a lot of genuine shit that made my 8mm nudie loops fall off his list of actual problems. And thus, as they say in all the old stories, for many years the films were lost — not the “we’ll never find them” kind of lost, but rather the “I know they’re somewhere in that room and should turn up eventually” kind.
My friend was not wrong, either, about what kind of lost they were. Turn up, the films eventually did. And when they did turn up, my friend dutifully dropped them in the mail to me, for which I’m grateful.
What’s actually on the films? Well, that’s an interesting question. I’ll have to get a viewer and find out. Honestly, I don’t expect hard-core porn. These were sold through the mail “on the tease” without much description, and there isn’t much cultural record of a big fan club for them. Most likely, they are fairly tame striptease “nudie” stuff. If they were very awesome at all, you’d expect there would be an avid bunch of collectors swapping copies and reviews, and the internet doesn’t reflect much sign of that. Nope, the business model of the Movie Club Guild was to send these films “on approval” (that means free, sort of; they would come in the mail automatically on a regular schedule, and you could avoid paying if you sent them back promptly enough, or pay the bill that came with them if you wanted to receive the next shipment on schedule.) There’s not much indication that the Movie Club Guild ever advertised their titles publicly, or had much of a catalog; instead they used magazine ads with various come-ons. Here’s one from Man’s Adventure in 1957, the closest-in-time Movie Club Guild advertisement I can find to when my films were shipped:
I don’t believe the ad’s bullshit claims for one second about the contents of the films:
Secret Producers Selection!
First time offered! The startling and dynamic party films formerly seen only by Hollywood’s inner circle of sophisticated producers! Privately staged — feature beautiful showgirls and starlets demonstrating their their special talents when on the way up. A most unusual find for the collector of the bizarre!
Here are more ads from a few years later, by which time the claims had gotten much more dull and generic, although I’m sure the film loops were no different:
In any case, by 1961 the game was all over. The U.S. Postal Service shut down the Movie Club Guild for “depositing or causing to be deposited in the mails information as to where, how, or from whom obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile material may be obtained.” Remarkably, the postal authorities seem to have reached this conclusion based on the tame magazine advertisements alone, without ever actually viewing any of the actual Movie Club Guild films.
Meanwhile, back in small-town 1950s Alaska, imagine for a moment what the sociology of all this may have been like. The town is so small that the postmaster knows what everybody gets in the mail, just by looking at the outside of the packages. And there probably isn’t central grid electricity. What kind of chutzpah does it take to fire up your noisy private generator to watch porn movies, when everybody in town will hear the noise and have a conversation about whether you’re running your electric shaver or watching your pornos again?
Close examination of the Movie Club Guild ads, though, makes it clear that the company offered a free viewer that was very low-tech — probably a plastic (?) reel-to-reel device powered by ambient light, hand cranked and not much different from a child’s Viewmaster toy. No generator (necessarily) required! It’s true that the one film I’ve taken out of its box so far does show one of those distinctive “hot bulb” damage blisters that you would always get when a film would jam in a projector, but that could have happened much later in the film’s existence.
Bottom line: these films were mailed on approval, without having to be carefully described or advertised in any particular detail; they were cheap, and there was no branding or star power or box art or labeling or marketing of any kind at the per-film level. And, seventy years later, there’s no internet fan club or collecting community, even though these things ought to be the 8mm-porn equivalent of Book Club editions of paper books: the most numerous type of this sort of thing available to collectors, given that they were basically broadcast by mail like fish spawn to anybody who could muster a pencil and a stamp. My expectations, therefore, are not high.
But still: nineteen nudie films that maybe don’t exist on the internet. No matter how tame or lame, to me this is like a red flag in front of a bull. You know what I am going to do; the only question is how long it’s going to take me. I just need to scrape up the cash and time from all my other projects and obligations.
Eventually, I will want to:
Round up a simple viewer and inventory the 19 films by whatever title and credit frames may exist on them, the existence of at least some of which is visible to the naked eye;
Research the films to whatever extent possible to make sure I am not wasting effort on digitizing films that may already be digitally available;
Obtain a decent device for digitizing 8mm movies;
Digitize them;
Share highlights here and with my Patreon patrons as appropriate;
Find a secure long-term home for the digitized movies (probably the Internet Archive)
None of this is going to happen quickly; I’ve learned that digital curation projects like this take enormous amounts of time, and there will be hardware costs as well on this one. I’m staking out an ambition here, not a schedule. But I’ll do what I can in the time that I can find, with the money that I’ve got. As always, if you’re really enthusiastic about me making this or any other ErosBlog work a higher priority, an ErosBlog Patreon pledge is the way to encourage that!
One of the most wonderful things about vintage erotica is that it’s often impossible to describe in words without offending someone. For instance, if I describe this as two women “playing doctor” I might be accused of infantalizing them and reinforcing sexist stereotypes of male-only professionalism. Likewise if I go with the “student nurses” tag that’s attached to various fragments of this set in places on the internet. However if I go the other way and describe this as an erotic medical exam, I’ll offend medical people who’ll huff that this sort of play violates all medical ethics, can never happen, and should never be ascribed to purported professionals. See? I cannot escape all the winning!
Nonetheless I was delighted to discover this set of sixteen vintage “doctor and patient” erotic photos. The participants are clearly delighted to be on camera, the play is tame to the point of innocence, and really all it needs is kittens and puppies to be any more perfect. I’m guessing that at some point the “Doctor” found out that the “Patient” has been ignoring doctor’s orders (smoking? unsafe sex?) because the medical exam eventually concludes with a mild spanking scene…
Sadly the collection as I found it was in the form of tiny scans (many no more than about 200 pixels wide) from the 20th-century “slow modems” era. I’ve put many Patreon-enabled hours (hint hint) into reverse image searches to try and expand the “10/P” collection (“10/P” being the identifying mark placed on the negatives or perhaps the prints by the photographer and/or publisher). I’ve also worked hard to find larger, higher-quality scans. In the end these searchers were, inevitably, only partially successful. The photos you see here are the best results I could assemble for you: lightly cleaned up, cropped as necessary and where practical, and regularized to 320 and 512 pixel sizes. If anybody out there has more images from this set, or larger cleaner scans of these images, please get in touch!
For purists, each photo appearing here is linked to the unaltered version from which I “regularized” it. Because I had to choose between multiple different source scans of the same photo in some cases — sometimes using a larger scan with less visual detail or clarity — I’ve assembled a zip set of all the originals and made it available to my Patreon patrons. (I figure that anybody who shares this level of obsessive interest in photographic provenance with me would have to be among my patrons, right? Right?)
“Your shoulder sounds good, now let’s see what kind of noises your boobs are making.”
“Doctor, are you hearing yourself?”
“Clearly this medical exam can go no further until we both shuck these heavy skirts off.”
“Could not hear your boob properly with my dress on, let’s try again!”
“Now bend over! I can’t hear your lungs if the photographer can’t see your pretty bottom, dear.”
“All right, time to check you for liver and kidney noises…”
“Well, doctor, what do you think? Have I convinced you yet that I’m younger and prettier and healthier than you?”
“Hmmm, we’ll see, this medical exam is not over yet. I need to look down your throat and check you for … uh, cold sores, yeah, cold sores.”
“Hey, what’s this I see? Pubic hairs? The same color as my husband has? And you think it’s funny to laugh right into the bell of my stethoscope? Why, I ought to slap your tits so hard they fall off!”
“I’ll make you pay, you little shameless hussy!”
“Doctor, I don’t have to put up with this from you! Because I have heeded the wise words of John Willie and you have not! So you’d better put down that stethoscope. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to hear what I’m about to do to you just fine without it!”
Folks, I hope you enjoyed this image set. The curation effort at this level of detail literally consumed an entire corporate-style full-length work day. This is the sort of work I’d like to do all the time, but it’s simply not possible; most days, I have to do too many other things to pay the bills. If you would like to see more work like this, please consider supporting my Patreon. No pledge is too small to be helpful!
ErosBlog is now in its fifteenth year, and yet I’ve never done one of those statistics-based retrospectives that are popular this time of year. I prefer to look forward rather than backward, but if we view my new Patreon initiative as the bones of an effort to do more of what makes ErosBlog worthwhile (which I do), might it not be worth looking at some statistics about what kinds of posts actually bring people here?
Here are the top five ErosBlog posts of 2016, as measured by Google Analytics data from 2016. By “top” I mean that these are the most popular entrance pages for people who were linked here (or sent by search engines) to a specific post:
FBI’s Email Broadcast Stings Four CollarMe Users: My breathless rant about mass surveillance, law enforcement incitement versus entrapment, and official hysteria over imaginary human trafficking.
Breaking Velma’s Snooping Habit: My soft-core summary in eight photos of some very hard-core Velma-from-Scooby-Doo parody bondage porn.
French Pussy Spanking: A piece of vintage French pussy-spanking artwork. (To my shame, unattributed.)
A Nude Celebration Of Sports Victory: Some celebratory force-you-to-grin sports nudity that went viral after it was falsely attributed to a team then in the news for an amazing string of victories.
Vintage Vibrator Porn: My deep dive (including twelve screenshots and substantial narration) into a vintage French porn film starring two friendly massage nurses with an early electric vibrator/massager and some impressive oral skills (plus a willingness to share).
As top posts go, I’m rather pleased with these. My Patreon pitch focused on vintage erotica curation, better provenancing of web erotica in general, and long-form writing about threats to the adult web. Four out of five top posts are square matches for those categories of effort, and though the fifth (the Velma parody porn) was created as affiliate-link porn marketing to pay the bills, it stands as a photo essay that’s not without entertainment value. Meanwhile I’m particularly proud of my provenance-cleanup on the deservedly-popular soccer-team-in-the-shower photo. And the unpacking of the vintage French vibrator porn movie is precisely the sort of work that makes me happiest as a sex blogger.
None of these were quick or easy posts; the fastest was undoubtedly the Velma post, but all the rest of these were multi-hour efforts (especially if you include the time I spent breaking my teeth on the fruitless pussy-spanking provenance). Making and choosing and cleaning up the screen shots for the French vibrator porn was particularly slow and painstaking; I remember that project consuming the best part of one whole day. So it’s good to look back and see that these were the posts that brought the most people to ErosBlog.
I should emphasize these stats are all about people who arrive at ErosBlog from somewhere else. They don’t document the preferences of all the faithful readers who click an ErosBlog bookmark every day or two and read whatever is here. What say you, loyal ErosBlog fans? What were your favorite ErosBlog posts in 2016? Let me know in the comments…
I’m delighted to announce that after months of hemming, hawing, and uncertain faffing about, I’ve set up a Patreon for ErosBlog:
That means it’s now possible for me to ask for your support. My goal? A community-and-fan-supported ErosBlog, with more in-depth writing and a lot more of my “deep dives” into erotica research and curation.
I’ll let you read the full pitch on Patreon. It’s long, because I’m a wordy bastard. If you still want more explanation after all that, you masochist, try reading this.)
I soft-launched the Patreon a couple days ago. I am all agog at the generous pledges already received — OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! Together we are already half the way to my first modest pledge goal. When we get there, I’ve promised to write up a detailed survey of the tools and methods I use for image provenance research.
Don’t worry, though! My Patreon initiative is all about using Patreon’s tools and your generosity to support ErosBlog, not vice-versa. I don’t plan to post very much Patrons-only content on the Patreon platform. I will post there a few things that make sense: some exclusive goodies to entice pledges, and some “extras” from the vintage erotica curation that the Patreon support will (I hope) enable. But I promise I won’t turn ErosBlog into a “I did some nifty stuff, you don’t get to see it unless you go somewhere else and make a pledge” platform. That’s totally not what this is for. The goal is to make ErosBlog stronger and better, with your support.
For the same reason, my pledge rewards are about service to the ErosBlog community: taking your requests for blog content and direction, writing you dirty limericks, doing porn provenance research for you, and helping you promote your own adult-community stuff.
So that’s the pitch. I want to do more of what makes ErosBlog great. I want to do it harder. If you — the ErosBlog community of fans, friends, and supporters — want that too, this is the way to make it happen. Thank you!
P.S. Even if you can’t pledge right now, letting people know about my Patreon also helps enormously. After 14 years ErosBlog must have many tens of thousands of readers and fans who no longer visit every day. If you’ve got an appropriate social media channel, please consider using it to mention this Patreon to them?
There is news today that Patreon has liberalized (a little bit) its stance on what it used to call “NSFW” and now calls “Adult Content”. An article by Lux Alptraum on Motherboard somewhat oversells the news with the misleading headline “Patreon Ends Payments Discrimination Against Adult Content”. Unfortunately the headline doesn’t mean what you’d think it means, because “Adult Content” in this context is a Patreon term of art that (a) Patreon refuses to or is unable to define; and that (b) explicitly excludes “porn” (again not defined). Nonetheless; there is actual good news in the story, and what appears to be real progress on the payments front for adult creators.
Last week [Patreon] sent out an email announcing a couple of changes for its more risque creators. Most notably, creators operating under the “adult content” banner on Patreon can now accept payments through PayPal (or, more accurately, its subsidiary Braintree).
There are a lot of reasons to feel excited about this. For one thing, it straight up makes things easier for Patreon’s Adult Content creators. Until now, Adult Content creators could only accept payments through credit cards, while other types of creators have had PayPal as an additional option for backers. Now, there’s no difference between Adult Content creators and other creators when it comes to payment processing options (though Patreon does distinguish between the two camps in other ways; Adult Content accounts aren’t discoverable through the site’s search function).
According to the Patreon email, the company went aggressively to the mat with the PayPal people, and succussfully argued that these transactions are not any higher-risk than Patreon’s other business:
For creators that have been with us for a while, you may remember that we used to allow this functionality in the past, and we only removed it after PayPal threatened to stop all payments to Patreon. Unfortunately, this is a common issue in the payments industry, both because payments for adult content are subject to a higher rate of chargebacks, and because of an aversion to the content itself among some payment processors.
After many long discussions we were able to convince PayPal, or more specifically their subsidiary Braintree, that Adult Content creators on Patreon are not a serious risk. Our content policy, and the nature of subscription payments, means that Adult Content creators on Patreon are less risky than most creators making adult content. We also have a very diverse mix of content types, so even if our Adult Content creators are higher risk than other types of creators, Patreon as a whole is less risky.
I am reluctant to use a crowdfunding platform that’s openly hostile to porn. There seems to be a crowdfunding-industry consensus around allowing adult projects (sort of) as long as they are not “pornography” or “sexually explicit”, leaving those terms undefined. The rules on all platforms currently seem to boil down to some version of “We’ll allow your adult project, but if it becomes contentious or attracts any sort of negative attention, we’re reserving the right to redefine whatever you’re doing as ‘porn’ and blow you off our platform while pretending you were never welcome in the first place.”
Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked NSFW. If your work contains nudity or any material that could potentially be offensive to users, make absolutely sure to mark the page as NSFW in the creator description when creating your page. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies… but not porn.
Their email from last week says:
We are also continuing to clarify what content is acceptable when flagged as Adult Content and what content is not allowed on Patreon.
However, Patreon’s new clarity has not reached the policy, which is word-for-word identical to the old policy except for the change from “NSFW” to “Adult Content”:
Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked as Adult Content. If your work contains nudity or any material that could potentially be offensive to users, make absolutely sure to mark the page as Adult Content in the creator description when creating your page. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies… but not porn.
So where does that leave people with adult projects who want to use Patreon? Pretty much in the same place they were before: don’t call it porn, and hope nobody complains. Or as Lux Alptraum puts it:
So where does this all leave indie smut creators? Only time will tell, but for now a bit of cautious optimism seems in order. Adult themed comics like Erika Moen’s Oh Joy Sex Toy would seem to be completely in the clear; as are art nudes and dirty minded podcasts. But people who want to photo and video document actual people fucking? Well, that might come down to the age old question of “art” versus “porn.”
Back in May I wrote that I was reluctant to use a platform that makes me lie about what I do, which I conceptuallize as “porn, or I’m doing it wrong.”
I’m proud of the fact that everything I do is porn, even if it’s alsoerotic 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.
And that’s why I’m torn about the news from Patreon. On the one hand, they still prohibit porn while refusing to say what they mean by that. On the other hand, they have promised greater clarity to come, and it’s clear that they actually went to bat with the payment providers in order to improve their platform for adult content creaters. Is it still fair for cynical me (who sees #pornocalypse under every rock) to call Patreon a “porn-squeamish” platform? Or should we credit them for taking this fight to the payment processors, and give them a free pass (until they abuse it) about maintaining a squishy “no porn” policy, especially if that squishy policy may have helped them in winning some very real progress with PayPal/Braintree?
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.
ErosBlog has been rumbling along now for more than thirteen years. There’s no shame in admitting that sometimes, the blog — which is me — has gotten stuck in a rut. There are plenty of posts I’m proud of, sure. But too often, here we are: still in the rut.
On too many days, an Erosblog post is one line of text, one image, and perhaps an attribution. My loyal readers deserve better. What does a post like that have to offer, that would make ErosBlog more worth visiting than a randomly-selected porn Tumblr?
I believe my very best sex blogging work has more in common with the Bernard Montorgueil post I put up yesterday. I’m proudest of the posts that synthesize my fascination with obscure porn, my decades of “experience” as a porn enthusiast, my formidable search skills, and my willingness to pursue a research project down into the tiniest and most ridiculous electronic dead ends and internet rat-holes. Sometimes I may call this higher-quality work by different names, like “erotic art curation or forensic photoarcheology or deep-dive provenance research into viral photographs or reluctant internet-business journalism with cynical commentary.” But call them what you will, all these higher-quality posts share one thing in common: every last one of them took at least half a day to create. That’s minimum. Some take much longer. A search-heavy research project can consume dozens of hours, because there’s always a deeper rabbit warren to get lost in, or another broken link to pursue into the most gruesome depths of the Internet Archives.
On the other hand, I can find and select and crop and make a one-image post in five minutes or less. Is it any wonder that ErosBlog can sometimes go days or even weeks looking like just another slow-paced image blog?
The brutal truth is that, as a business, ErosBlog doesn’t generate enough revenue to justify spending half of my work day (or even longer) on a single post. Once upon a time, it did, back when a lot more people still bought porn-site subscriptions after following my affiliate links. These days? No. Most of the time I spend here now is time I have to steal from better-paying work that I enjoy rather less. Without boring you with my troubles (we all haz them) even the “better-paying work” I steal the ErosBlog time from doesn’t pay all that awesomely well. To meet my responsibilities properly, I “ought” to be doing more of that work, while further reducing the time I spend here.
I would find that outcome…unwelcome. Maybe you would, too.
This is all to explain why I’m looking at the crowdfunding model, and especially the recurring-patronage version that Patreon has pioneered. Perhaps ten thousand people still look at ErosBlog on an average day; that’s down considerably from our heyday, but it remains a lot of people. If I had an easy way to collect small sums on a regular basis from a slim percentage of my most appreciative readers, it could radically transform the economics of the venture. Set it up correctly (and this I consider to be the genius of the Patreon-style model) and it would actually create daily incentives to do more of the good work, and less of the lazy stuff.
Of course, I might instead make the humbling discovery that nobody values this project enough to contribute actual money to its maintenance and improvement. That, too, would be useful to know. Then maybe I could do a little more paying work and still find time to return to my computer gaming habit!
That wouldn’t completely suck.
This post is here because you’re most likely going to be seeing “fund me” pitches in the near future. I think it’s only fair to let my loyal readers know why that will be happening. If you’re reading all of this, you definitely qualify as a loyal reader! Thanks for that.
