An Elegy for Porn on Tumblr

Tumblr has never been my favourite social network, but I’ve always found it fascinating. It’s a dense forest of weird subcultures, where shoplifters and witches and otherkin vie for sunlight with living dolls and godspouses, serial killer obsessives and slash fiction artistes. It bristles with angry energy. It’s pious and debauched in equal measure. It’s glorious… but I never felt entirely as though I belonged there.

There was, however, one respect in which Tumblr really buttered my muffin: porn. I say was because, following its acquisition by Yahoo back in 2013, the Gender-Neutral Humans In Charge have now made the controversial decision to strip all adult content from the platform, whether that be art, erotica, protest graphics, or just a brief glimpse of a “female-presenting nipple”.

This represents, by the way, a pretty significant blog cull. Some estimates put adult content at a full 1% of Tumblr’s land mass – a reckoning that strikes me as extremely conservative. Indeed, it’s pretty much a running joke that you can’t check Tumblr without seeing at least some degree of tit.

So neutering Tumblr is a big decision, and there are plenty of reasons why it’s a bad one. I’ll leave it to others to explain how the change might negatively impact sex workers, destroy LGBT communities, and enable trolls to wreak havoc using new reporting mechanisms. Instead, I’m here solely to memorialise the pornography of Tumblr, which was varied and glorious and quite unlike the kind of smut that existed elsewhere.

Strolling through Tumblr in search of masturbatory material was never a dull experience. Inevitably, even in the course of the most quotidian wank, you would stumble across at least one new fetish: pedal pumping, balloon fetishism, extreme feeding, dendrophilia… I owe my discovery of all of these intriguing subcultures and obsessions to Tumblr.

Content aside, there were whole forms that Tumblr had carried to an absolute apex. For a while, at least, there was no better place to find pornographic GIFs – a format of filth that I genuinely adore. These are porn distilled down to its most powerful moments; the finest frames isolated from a dirty film and looped endlessly. They mirror (perhaps they even shaped) the way that I think when I masturbate: a single repeating image or phrase is often what carries me over the edge.

Another form of pornography popular on Tumblr had no name that I’ve been able to identify, but consisted of an image and some accompanying text. Sometimes the text was part of the image, and sometimes it was tacked on during a repost. The text almost always built on the image, giving it an added dimension or a backstory, or narrating the thoughts in the heads of the individuals pictured. These were beautiful collaborations between people who had never met, fuelled by a collective reserve of horny energy that seemed rabid and inexhaustible.

The homogeneity of regular porn is no match for the smorgasbord that was Tumblr. The selection of possibilities offered by PornHub pales by comparison – as does the sense of community. On Tumblr comments were used to build collaborative stories, to focus on details, to contribute rather than just register dumb approval.

In losing adult content on Tumblr we have lost something huge, and worthwhile, and beautiful. Yes, it was only porn. Yes, the internet is composed of more or less nothing else. But porn on Tumblr was something really quite special, and I’m really quite sad that it’s gone.