AUSTIN, Texas – When I launched my first free porn site during those carefree days of the late 1990s, despite what Justice Potter Stewart said about the definition of porn some 30 years earlier, I think most people agreed what did and did not constitute a “porn site.”
Even in the early days of the commercial internet, long before most people had surfed a single page of the web, I think there already was an intuitive understanding that publishing porn on any given domain, or on an individual webpage of a given site, did not by itself render the entire cyber-property a porn site.
After reading “5 best free porn sites on the internet” on the Daily Dot, I’m beginning to think the common definition of “porn site” has expanded beyond all reason.
Why do I think this? Well, offhand, I’d argue neither Tumblr nor Reddit qualifies as a porn site, and yet there they are at #3 and #5, respectively, on the Daily Dot’s list.
To be fair, the author of the piece does seem to realize there’s more to Tumblr and Reddit than porn, judging by the way she refers to Reddit as a “social news site.” This recognition only deepens my confusion, though. If you know Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking site, and you know Reddit is a social news site (whatever the fuck that means), why would you put them on a list of free porn sites right alongside PornHub, RedTube and Porn.com?
While Tumblr’s terms of service do not prohibit the posting of sexually explicit materials (other than “non-consensual pornography,” which Tumblr defines as “private photos or videos taken or posted without the subject’s consent”), I still strongly suspect the company would prefer its platform not be referred to as a porn site.
Glancing at their respective index pages, I think it’s safe to say nobody would confuse RedTube for Reddit. Yes, people post porn to Reddit, but all people post to RedTube is porn, and that strikes me as a significant distinction.
Plenty of people tweet porn. Does that make Twitter a porn site? If the answer to the question is so obvious as to render the question absurd, then the same logic should apply to Reddit and Tumblr, it seems to me. While both might be good sources of free porn (at least in the mind of the article’s author), neither can be reasonably described as a porn site.
What difference does it make whether some Daily Dot contributor refers to the platforms as “porn sites” rather than the far more accurate term “good sources of free porn”? Well, among other things, if I’m a major Tumblr investor, I’m not terribly excited about it being perceived as a porn site in the current political climate, in which more and more states seem to be lining up to declare porn a “public health crisis” or as platforms for human trafficking.
It would also be foolish for the owners and operators of social media platforms to believe a focus on their erotic offerings can’t prove problematic in ways which go well beyond public perception.
After all, it’s not as though Backpage.com exists as only a listing service for prostitutes and other sex workers, but once politicians and state attorneys general began to view it as such, it ultimately didn’t help Backpage much to repeatedly point out the site contains countless listings that have nothing at all to do with sex work. By the time the company shut down its adult services ads, the legal damage had been done.
To be clear, I’m not in any way suggesting some state attorney general is going to read the Daily Dot piece about free porn sites and then suddenly get a wild hair up his ass that inspires him to indict the operators of Tumblr for obscenity, or for ignoring the fact their members routinely ignore the exemption statement required under 28 CFR 75.7.
All I’m saying is, if you’re going to recommend five good free porn sites to your readers, it might be nice to a) give them an option other than tube sites that regularly host pirated materials (even if their terms expressly prohibit uploading such) and b) give them five actual porn sites instead of three tube sites and two social networking platforms.
Yes, in the context of a mostly harmless little Daily Dot post about good places for surfers to get their rocks off for free I’m undeniably nitpicking. When it comes to the interaction between porn and the law, or even just porn and public perception, however, details do matter.
