“[T]he thing is, all the articles lamenting the demise of Tumblr porn try to elevate their argument into defense of the oppressed, including gays. They assert that Tumblr porn is a critical lifeline to the existence of marginalized groups. I posit that if porn is the basis for your identity, then you have a huge problem.”— Bob Loblaw (via arcticdementor)
This seems rather like cracking down on, idk, Irish pubs and saying “if alcohol is the basis for your identity, you have a huge problem.” The statement is accurate when applied to extremes, but it’s clearly just being used to support some combination of prohibitionism and anti-Irish sentiment. For most people, both alcohol and porn are fun diversions and social lubricants. Rooting out social lubricants used disproportionately by a particular group in the name of trying to save everyone from a vice that only becomes a serious problem for a few is something I’m against.
Which is the social group disproportionately engaged with porn? NEETs? This is a serious question, actually, as I’m actually a little perplexed why Tumblr is so outraged over this given that the groups that I most associate with porn use are not the groups that Tumblr usually sympathizes with.
“Nerd/hipster hybrids, many of whom are queer.” Y’know, stereotypical Tumblr denizens.
Except that the word “porn” here isn’t doing the work that you instinctively think it is.
This is getting into heavy speculation, take it with as many grains of salt as you think appropriate, but…
Saying “porn is primarily a social lubricant” does sound insane on first blush. Porn is, famously, a solitary vice in its classical instantiation. But in fact the “porn” that fills Tumblr is mostly stuff that is in fact serving an expressive/artistic/social purpose rather than a directly masturbatory purpose; you can tell because people are sharing it, showing it off, which is precisely how you deal with expressive/artistic/social content and how you don’t deal with masturbation fodder. If you post something “adult” on Tumblr, probably someone somewhere is actually getting off to it, but a lot more people are nodding appreciatively and liking/reblogging just like they would with anything else. People who really just want an orgasm…probably are not turning to Tumblr to help them deal with that.
Of course, you can’t actually draw any kind of hard line between “social erotica” and “real porn,” so no one tries to keep the categories distinct. But if you could, I’m sure that many of the smutty fanfic fans would be reasonably happy to throw the mainline porn business under the bus. In fact, many of them are happy to do that, although they use the usual social-justice-y sorts of arguments rather than content category distinctions in order to achieve it.
If the question is “why would a community choose to build itself up with sexy stuff as one of its central expressive/artistic/social pillars?” – well, uh, in addition to all the obvious universal things, a lot of these groups are sexual-minority groups and “this is the weird stuff we find hot” is in fact a major bonding material.