CW: Brief child sexual abuse mention.
Is anyone else worried about this? Tumblr banned porn in 2018, and recently they’ve begun to restrict content even further. GFYCat banned porn. Imgur is also banning porn. Reddit doesn’t allow you to use it to host images on NSFW subs, and I’ll bet you anything they ban porn entirely within a year or so.
Where does that leave people who even just want to discuss adult content? Even if you think porn should disappear from society–and I would hardcore disagree with that–that’s not the only thing that’s getting caught up in this wave of censorship. On Tumblr, if you were sexually abused by an adult as a minor, you can no longer discuss this. Literally any reference to child sexual abuse by an adult is now banned on Tumblr. Even if you’re recounting something that happened to you. Hell, even if it’s fictional.
Where are you supposed to go now to discuss adult topics? Twitter is a fascist hellhole, but soon it’s going to be one of your only options, at least social media-wise. And even outright porn is getting harder to find. Your options now are basically the mainstream porn sites and the shit you have to do deep googling for, with nothing in between.
I find this very worrying. Even the vilest, most no-redeeming-social-value porn doesn’t deserve to be banished from the internet entirely. As long as someone gets something out of it and no one is harmed in its creation, porn has its place. But while decentralized alternatives are cropping up to replace social media, nobody seems to want to step up and make a place where we can all be horny without corporate influence.
Or maybe I’m just bitching that I don’t know where to find the good porn on Mastodon. Who knows. Regardless, I think there’s a worthwhile discussion to be had about the scouring of the internet of too risque for advertisers.
Edit: You know what, this person articulates it better than I ever could: https://devonprice.medium.com/mourning-porn-on-imgur-mourning-trans-kinky-history-64de2eaaa6ce
I don’t know. Aggregator sites are closing shop in that respect, but, sex workers are workers, and they deserve to be paid for their work. What we have had for a long time is a situation of rampant and normalized pirate streaming of a genre of media, while the people who make that media are disaparaged to high heaven and back again. And it’s a situation, further, that obscures or even distributes child sexual abuse materials, revenge porn, videos of sexual assaults passed off as consensual (including videos of otherwise consenting people, who did NOT consent to filming, that were filmed with hidden cameras), stolen nudes and sex tapes, and the like.
Small porn sites, run by the people who make the legitimate porn, still exist. People could, perhaps, consider paying the sex workers for the thing that they make.
Amateur porn might be harder to come by, but, with that, it seems a lot harder if not impossible to guarantee that all parties are consenting to it, anyway.
Too many sites banning NSFW discussion, including discussion like you say of peoples’ own experiences of abuse, is a bridge too far, but I’m not seeing that as a general trend, like video porn bans. If nothing else, it’s far easier to discuss sex or abuse via text here than it is to ask instances to take on the risks associated with trying to host and moderate video or image porn.
Also, erotica is absolutely thriving, especially ever since the invention and adoption of e-readers. There is no shortage of it, nor difficulty with accessing it, except on a few specific sites (e.g. Tumblr).