Guilty Pleasure

I have a guilty pleasure

I am not keen on that phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ especially when it is applied to sex/body related things because it carries with it a message of judgement, that there is something to feel guilty or possibly even ashamed about.

“My guilty pleasure is a wank in the bath on a Friday night whilst drinking a glass of wine”

Why the fuck should anyone feel guilty about any of those things? Clearly they shouldn’t, they are normal, healthy, relaxing things to indulge in, especially the wanking bit. Sex and all that is related to it is not something to feel guilty about and so there is nothing to feel guilty about (as long as it is consensual). So no, I don’t feel guilty about having a wank, or sucking him off, or fucking in the garden once it has got dark, or getting off on him spanking me with the vampire gloves until I bleed or any of the other joyfully filthy stuff I (we) do. I don’t even feel guilty for the glass of wine I drink afterwards.

However

My guilty pleasure is my Tumblr.

I have had a Tumblr for years and only really used it sporadically. I mainly just used it to find porn gifs to get off too when I felt like it and now and then re-blog the odd thing and post the some photos of mine. Mainly I kept that to a minimum because image theft on Tumblr is rife and once your stuff is on there it is very hard to keep it under control.

One night at the beginning of the year we ended up lying in bed together looking through Tumblr on his phone. The theme that night was FMF threesomes and ended up with us getting seriously turned on and having a fabulous fuck. The next I decided to go back and add some of those images to my Tumblr in the hope that either they might inspire some stories and if not they would hopefully inspire some more fucking. Before I knew it I had got completely distracted and started re-blogging other images that floated my boat often with little thoughts or captions attached.

Before I knew it I had started queuing them up so as not to flood people’s feeds and I had at least a week’s worth of posts ready to go….then 2 weeks and currently I have over 120 posts in my queue. It is still a mixture of re-blogged images and my own images. When it comes to my own stuff I tend to repost the ones that either I am not that attached to or that I have other (better) versions of. They do all have my copyright on them and are linked back but it is amazing how many people there are who still seem to feel entitled to download it, flip it, cut off the watermark and repost it. Those people always seem to act like you are insulting them when you point out what they have done wrong too. However I have found Tumblr to be better at removing images if you point it out to them and lots of people now ask for re-blogging to done with captions intact and it seems there is a growing number of people respecting that.

So why the guilt?

Three fold really, firstly Tumblr is owned by Verizon who like all big companies are not remotely sex friendly let alone sex positive. If they thought they could delete all the adult content off Tumblr and still have a viable platform left at the end of it they would do it in a heartbeat with no thought to the artists who have posted their precious work there. Instead they have gone for an alternative but quite frankly similar route. They have decided that all blog marked adult content cannot be viewed unless you have a Tumblr account. So if you are using Tumblr as your hosting platform for your adult content blog it basically just got put into a very dark corner of the internet where only those who already know about you or those who actively try to find you AND have an account on the same platform can find you.

For me it is not the end of the world as I don’t use Tumblr as my main blogging platform, it is just a little side project which I mainly indulge in to share my pervy thoughts with Michael. The fact that others like it and follow it is a happy additional outcome but not the motivation behind doing it.

Secondly and this is the bit that I really struggle with. Tumblr is full of content that has been ripped off in some form of other. Clips stolen from videos, gif created from copyrighted work and tons and tons of images stolen from the original creators. It is literally endemic and it is almost impossible to be repost on Tumblr and not repost content that falls into this category. I do follow a lot of original content creators on there to try to off-set some of the horror of the rest of it but I also know that I am fairly sure there is probably content on my Tumblr that at some point has been taken from the original artist. As a creative artist myself it is that knowledge which leaves me with a slightly dirty feeling about my Tumblr and not in the good sense of that word either.

Thirdly as well as being full of beautiful images it is also home to a whole host of awful content. There is a lot of stuff that is the worse kind of photo shopped botched job ever, with women with impossible narrow waists, arms that seem to come down to their knees, skin that looks like plastic and a distinct lack of any creases, lines and oddly elbows. There are way many “Tumblr Dom” images; the chiselled suave man in the suit with a svelte young woman in sexy lingerie at his feet, over his knee, on a leash, etc. And women who are not white, over the age of 30 and/or don’t conform to traditionally acceptable body shapes (and this is also true of men too) are hugely underrepresented.

And yet, I love it. I enjoy the time I spend looking for the stuff that makes my pants wet and I like that how it has inspired conversations between Michael and I. Sometimes it is a case of just reminding one another of a thing that we like and sometimes it has led to us discovering completely new things that appeal to us. I am a very visual person. I am far more likely to get off to an image than I am to words. Tumblr clearly appeals in that sense as well as also inspiring me to reach for my camera. I don’t have any plans to give it up any time soon but I am also hugely aware of just how terrible it is, hence why it is one of the few things you will hear me say is a guilty pleasure.