Wednesday, May 22, 2013 12:00 AM UTC

The most popular Tumblr porn

The site's users are afraid that Yahoo will make their smut disappear. We take a look at what there is to lose

By Tracy Clark-Flory

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Topics: Pornography, Sex, Love and Sex, Tumblr, Life News

Yahoo’s purchase of Tumblr has some devotees worried that what they love most about the micro-blogging platform — the GIF porn, obvs — will disappear. TechCrunch calculated that more than 10 percent of the service’s most popular 200,000 sub-domains feature Yahoo-unfriendly adult material. The panic was barely lessened by CEO Marissa Mayer’s promise to protect “the richness and breadth of content available on Tumblr.” So I decided to take a look at what, exactly, Tumblr-ers have to lose — by visiting the community’s most popular adult blogs, of course. You know me, any excuse to watch porn at work!

Before we continue, a few words on the unscientific process I used to determine the most popular porny sites: Quantcast provides a long, long list of the most popular Tumblr blogs, which I scanned for porny-sounding domain names. It’s possible that some missed my attention; there were also some false alarms — who would think that tit.tumblr.com isn’t porn? It’s also possible that my personal definition of porn differs from your personal definition. My I-know-it-when-I-see-it barometer went wild when I checked out a Tumblr titled, ironically enough, “Not Porn.” It features zero close-ups of genital penetration, but I’m going to go ahead and call it porn for our purposes because I guarantee that people masturbate to it. (That is, admittedly, a weak qualifier for “porn” because what won’t people masturbate to?) Look, I at least refrained from including jonhammswang.tumblr.com. I think that is as much personal sacrifice as I can offer in the name of journalistic accuracy here.

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5.) The Bad Boys

Welcome to the junior high of Tumblr porn. There are images galore of smooching, dry-humping and unhooking of bras. There’s even a photo of a man proposing on one knee. The smuttiest this site gets is a GIF of porn star James Deen … kissing someone while clothed.

4.) XXX Booty Videos

Here we’ve fast-forwarded far beyond hand-holding (or, if you’re a follower of Freud, regressed to the second stage of psychosexual development). There is not much to say about this site except that it features a whole lot of GIFs of women shaking their butts mid-coitus.

3.) Phat Booty Cuties

Never have I seen so many bouncing-butt GIFs in one place. This site makes XXX Booty Videos look like an exercise in minimalism. I’m pretty sure that I almost had a seizure starring at the blog’s GIF wall of impressive gluteal gymnastics. I would be remiss not to mention the – how to explain? — GIF of a woman rump-shaking with an empty water bottle wedged in her butt-crack.

The Internet, folks. Let’s give it a round of applause.

This blog features sexy GIFs that are largely indistinguishable from perfume commercials: I’m talking a shirtless, chiseled all-American guy in blue jeans kissing down a woman’s neck, a lingering closeup of a lady licking a guy’s neck, et cetera. Not Porn is all about thigh-kissing tenderness — a looping clip of a man slowly running his fingers up a woman’s bare hip, for example. There was one major highlight: a GIF of a bedroom scene from Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo and Juliet” that I remember watching on loop for the entirety of my 13th year of life.

Also, I’d like to officially state for the record that the second most popular “porn” Tumblr in the world features multiple GIFs from “The Notebook.” If that fact isn’t the makings of a master’s thesis in human sexuality, I don’t know what is.

1.) Movies, Sex and Videotape

We’ve arrived at the most popular porn Tumblr, folks. What kind of freaky fare is found within? Well, a clothed Leonardo DiCaprio kissing a clothed Kate Winslet in “Revolutionary Road.” Several of Sharon Stone’s mainstream sex scenes. A clip from “The Sessions.” GIFs from “Mad Men.”

It’s all rather tame. Sure, there’s an explicit scene from the porn classic “Behind the Green Door,” as well as some super-steamy scenes from edgy foreign films, which are worth an after-work gander, but this isn’t the den of depravity that one might expect from our No. 1. Turns out Tumblr porn fans like long, lingering kisses and cinematic moments.

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So, what have we learned here? For one, the most popular masturbation material on Tumblr isn’t especially explicit or extreme. Tumblr has plenty of hardcore blogs featuring pirated mainstream porn, sure, but its most popular adult-oriented sites simply serve as venues for curating a very specific sexual aesthetic. Water-bottle-butt-shaking notwithstanding, a lot of it is subtle and sensual — two adjectives rarely applied to adult content. I suppose that’s the answer to the question of what Tumblr-ers stand to lose. No wonder they’re upset.

Tracy Clark-Flory

Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter and Facebook. More Tracy Clark-Flory.

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