Over the last few days, Tumblr has flagged the following as inappropriate content for their platform: a Victorian portrait, a screengrab from the Great British Bake Off and Jesus. Yes. Jesus.
This indiscriminate rampage of post-flagging comes after an statement on Tumblr’s website, announcing that, come December 17th, all pornographic content, including “real-life human genitals”, “sex acts” and, most absurdly, “female presenting nipples” will be banned. Tumblr’s decision comes after a long-awaited update to its community guidelines featuring stricter policing of hate speech, non-consensual sex and glorification of violence- necessary checks on the hatred rampant all over social media. But this latest move is less “create a safe space” and more “drive away users exploring harmless sexual desires”.
In its post, Tumblr cites child pornography as a factor in the decision to ban “adult” content on its website. But there is a stark difference between respectful, consensual sex acts by volunteering adults and child pornography. Issuing a blanket statement that conflates displays of consensual sexual pleasure with child abuse is both insulting and a terrible business move.
All the way back in 2006, Tumblr was created as a platform to consolidate “tumblelogs” or blogs focused on a specific topic that allowed users to share snippets of relevant text, image and video with each other. Within a few years, the freedom of the space combined with the ease of sharing multiple media formats transformed Tumblr into a haven for horny teenagers and professional sex workers alike to explore and share their sexual desires.
By 2013, following wild success and advertising campaigns with the likes of Adidas, Yahoo acquired the now-massive platform. According to a report in The Verge, “By July of that year, Tumblr had set up a complicated filtering system where blogs featuring nudity were now marked either NSFW or adult, with adult blogs disappearing from search and tag pages entirely”. In 2017, Yahoo itself was acquired by Verizon, making Tumblr part of a much larger conglomerate.
Cut to 2018 and something interesting happens: the Tumblr app is cut from the Apple Store following a child pornography case. App store downloads bring companies huge profits through in app ad revenue, meaning a ban from the store would cost Tumblr millions. What does Tumblr do? Instead of working on their already existing child pornography protection standards, it decides to remove all adult content from its platform entirely. This “cover all bases” move is typical of a large corporate that is less concerned about its users’ demands than it is about monetising every avenue possible.
For Tumblr’s decision is part of the normalising agenda championed by other corporates like Facebook and Instagram, in which body policing takes priority over monitoring racist, sexist invective or removing deliberate misinformation on their platforms. The underlying assumption seems to be that physical desire is as threatening a force, if not more, than threats of physical and emotional violence.
And this is even more so the case for non-heteronormative desire. Our cultural subscription to the notion that sexual pleasure is strictly the domain of straight men is reinforced constantly by the kinds of porn available on conventional porn websites like Pornhub and Youporn. The very fact that they feature a “for women” section implies that the bulk of videos on these websites is strictly for the male gaze. Tumblr has always been an exception in this sea of aggressively masculinised, often exploitative and non consensual space, since the bulk of Tumblr users are young and female.
In an interview reported by the Washington Post, ReaperSun, an anonymous Tumblr erotica artist who participates in multiple fandoms says, “I frequently g[e]t messages from folks who saw my work and said it helped them understand part of themselves better. That’s primarily what I saw on Tumblr, in my curated bubble: women and LGBT creators exploring sexual concepts that they didn’t feel comfortable sharing anywhere else.”
And yet, in their new guidelines on adult content, Tumblr singles out “female-presenting nipples” as content to be flagged. Coupled with their vision of a “better, more positive Tumblr”, this move falls in line with the heteropatriarchal agenda that determines male nipples “appropriate” and female nipples “erotic”. Even under the guise of making Tumblr safe for people of all ages, this seems a little ridiculous.
With a blanket ban on all pornography sites by the Indian government, Tumblr (not explicitly a porn or erotica site), is one of the few spaces users in India can go to find “adult” content. The closing down of this avenue signals that the already limited online world of sexual expression is steadily shrinking. For people with alternate sexual desires, this space is often the only refuge from normative expectations of pleasure and arousal. Its erasure is a bigger loss than just that of cheeky gifs and arousing photos. It is the erasure of a safe space to discover one’s sexuality. It is the erasure of community.