The social networking site Tumblr has gone through many incarnations. It was originally a hip blogging site beloved by New York media types; later, it got a reputation for being a hotbed of feminism and social justice activism, particularly beloved by young queer women and other marginalized communities. By the late s, however, Tumblr became increasingly known for two things: Fandom and porn. But now the porn is gone. Yet assigning an algorithm to scrub all porn, from what is now essentially a porn hosting site with a few personal blogs attached, has been predictably disastrous.
In case you were wondering if the tumblr ban was explicitly anti-gay, this is the only post on my blog full of kissing that was flagged. Several blogs were reportedly shut down even before the formal adult content ban was announced.
In fact, the sheer oddness of all that content, as contrasted against mainstream porn, should stand out to you. Losing Tumblr porn is a big deal in part because its specific audience — young, queer, female — produced a more diverse and femme-centric vision of what was sexy. Elle Chase is the founder of Lady Cheeky, which curates porn. GIFs and stills. Chase says that she was able to draw her strong female following just by being true to her own sense of what was hot.
Sex could be ruled by sensibility, allowing vulnerable and underprivileged communities to connect and start exchanging real information along with nudes.
To this day, the top-reviewed and most-followed porn Tumblrs include not just explicit-content curators, but blogs like Orgasmic Tips for Girls, which teaches women how to masturbate, or xxuntilweod, which mixes relatively vanilla clips of women kissing and holding hands with more graphic images of lesbian sex, letting women explore a whole range of queer intimacy without either sensationalizing or censoring it.
