It may be surprising to some, normal to others, or even personal to the next that there are pornographic images, gifs and videos on tumblr.com. I have been a member/user of tumblr since 2009, and at first I had no idea about this genre even existing on this website. The first time I came across anything even remotely involving nudity was when I delved into more abstract and/or fashion forward photography for my own personal blog. I would type words such as: heels, hoods, lace, leather, studs and etc. and would see in the mix of what I was looking for, random nudity from different categories under the porn umbrella. Some of the photos would range from intimate, artistic and tasteful nudes, to dominating, graphic and hardcore images. I guess it is safe to say that the images did not bother me as much as they provoked my slight concern for those younger people (under eighteen) who access tumblr and are very likely to come across the same images that I had. Personally, I do enjoy all art in any form, and don’t have a problem with seeing pornographic paraphernalia all over my tumblr dash! There’s just a line that’s drawn between me seeing it, and me actually searching tumblr for it.
When asked about his thoughts and experience with tumblr, a friend of mine made the following point: “MySpace is a place for friends and music and Facebook is for everyone and their momma to mind your business and comment on your life. Tumblr is a space for everything, and it’s pretty easy to find yourself on the wrong side of tumblr. It’s also very easy to avoid it. I say, just stay away from stuff you don’t like!” Unlike my thought for the underage kids using the site, he seems rather indifferent to being concerned about that. He says that “there’s far worse things out there and if [kids] have no parental block on their internet at home, they’re parents apparently don’t care so why should I?” So I wanted to dig a little deeper to really see how prevalent this imagery just might be on the site.
I interviewed a few of my guy friends and a couple girlfriends to see if I found any connections. Most of them had experienced porno-phernalia between the second and third time that they had visited the site, and were not surprised because everything is completely uncensored. All of them claimed to see at least twenty to thirty nude pictures within about twelve to twenty hours of scrolling through their dashboards. One of the guys said that he follows three sex blogs out of the one hundred and fifteen blogs that he follows, but doesn’t have a desire to start up his own sex blog. One guy even created a sex blog of his own after being exposed to the idea on tumblr. The girls follow anywhere from one to five different sex blogs, and two have created their own. Even with all of this exposure, the general consensus amongst this group was that they all preferred to see and view pornography via different websites, or other forms of media.
Yes, tumblr is an open streamline that has been expanding. Tumblr offers everything all in one spot from music to fashion, style tips to relationship tips, religious and spiritual blogs to fitness and health blogs. Pornographic pictures, gifs and videos all fall to “the dark side” of tumblr, and can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the individual and their preferences. It feels entirely unavoidable however, to not come across half naked pictures of males and females on tumblr if not anywhere in our society’s media. Does this shout out as a pure example of our society’s desensitization at work? What do you guys think?
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