Today, Tumblr is banning porn.
Why is this important? Could you ask. Some of you don't have or never go to tumblr, and maybe you don't understand what it means. I've written about Tumblr a couple of years before, in an article in spanish you could translate to "why there are naked girls in my tumblr". That post is consistently one of the most visited here, mainly because it contains the words tumblr and naked ladies. And in fact, this article isn't very different to that one. I've been using tumblr for around eight or nine years, and the reason I started doing so was because what it was, and also, because what it wasn't.
Let me explain from the beginning.
My friends and I used to have blogs since we were kids (yeah we probably have been born already freaks). Social media, as known today, it didn't even exist. We used Fotolog (very popular in Spain back then) we used messenger spaces and we obscure web-hosting places full of glitter and music in auto-play. I have no idea what were we saying or talking about in them, I think we were just sharing videos and cool anime drawings with our closest friends, hand delivering web directions written in a piece of paper during school. Later we discovered Blogger and WordPress (to where, as you can see, we returned back) hanged there for a while and then jumped from Messenger to Facebook to whatever social media we use today. We jumped the train of the social media thinking it would unify the messenger services with the personal space ones. But it didn't. It wasn't the same as it was before. Yes, you can communicate, but your Facebook page doesn't feel like your page. Sure, you can post whatever you want in it, but it's a gesture to the gallery, it's there to be seen to relatives and friends, a piece of exposure, subjected to the tyranny of others likes and dislikes. Free in theory, very limited in practice. Another part, an extension, of your social life.
Also, the community doesn't value what you do or post there the same way, but that's a long story for another time.
The first thing I noticed on tumblr, visiting a blog that just happened to be hosted there (I knew nothing about the dashboard, where you obviously expend most of your time on when you discover how it works), was that then and there, was a picture of some beautiful women partially or fully naked. Without not further explanation, because why not. Because who cares. Like if the presence of a female breast didn't profane any sacred realm.
I was speechless. I looked side and side, and behind my back to ensure nobody was watching me, or they would think I was in a porn site. Opening tumblr in public can be sometimes a high risk sport, but also a trademark. I didn't even had a computer on my room back then, so I had to do it, just in case one of those images happened to be the next one and someone was passing by. It felt like something unnatural, something to be sorry for. They weren't even porn pictures, I don't even go to tumblr for that. Why does anything of this matter, then? Because they have to be there. They were beautiful. They are. And I always liked woman, sometimes a bit too much for my own good. Not only I loved them, I was also scared as hell, nervous to the presence of them clothed, wreaked into the presence of a naked one. And the unrealistic expectations of porn didn't help on that. I loved to watch to that pictures, and the fact that they were there. And because I also loved the jokes and the memes and wanting to save the best ones, I joined in and made my own one.
With time, I started to normalise it all. And to appreciate another kinds of beauty. Mostly a man of numbers and music, I never had been an aesthetic taste, much less enjoy a picture of a building at night. Now I own a camera, and it makes me look at the world from different eyes. Now I don't look over my shoulders anymore.
The dashboard, following and building the exact kind of content you want on it, exploring other blogs like if they are the world and soul of their strange owners, never knowing anything of them more than that. In form you could say it's similar to the feed of other media sites, but to me, the attraction of it was the voluntary anonymity. For a long time I never told more than a handful of people the direction of my tumblr, because it was only mine, a reservoir of what I wanted to store and make prevail. Because it was nobody's business. I didn't care about what others though of it, and I wanted it to continue that way. If I ever discovered myself thinking about if I should reblog or post something based on what others (strangers or invited ones) would think, I made myself do it asap. With time I relaxed that, started to care less, talk openly about tumblr and invite others, but to a certain extent.
The reason tumblr is different of those other sites with similar functions is because it's introverted nature, it's because is not Facebook, is not Twitter, is not Instagram. Is my fucking blog. Mine. My own. Gunshot noise that means: get out of my lawn.
Carefully read, image by image, a story of my life and personality development can be read there without a word mentioning anything about the two. Censoring porn is not just about porn not being in the site, I can live with that. But it's integrated to it's identity, both as itself and as what it represents. A user-base is created around that, not only around good usability and design; it has identity, a history. Because every single thing tumblr is used and have communities for, can be done in another site. Having them met together in one site and learn from each other is one of the things that makes it a great site. Art, fandom, creation, music, photography, philosophy, movies, anime, vines: a virtual collection and living exposition of all the things I like. I even went to a small meetup once. Maybe I should just save it on a hard drive and for my own shit make a Pinterest account. I don't even use tumblr that much for not safe for work content, for erotic things represents less than a tenth of what I have, I imagine nothing compared to the traffic the stockholders of the site (thanks yahoo) think being family friendly would attract.
The downfall of tumblr dot com is maybe too much of a catastrophic title, but that's how I feel.
I don't even know if I will stop using it, I don't think so, at least not straight away. Freedom is nowadays a buzzword more than anything else, but at least in my case, I would had never ended up in that site if it wasn't for that. Definitely not for near ten years.
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