Millennial women are totally over PornHub and poorly directed scripts with the same ending. Let’s just say, we are all about the 21st Century form of getting off.
Recent studies have found that women are turning to Tumblr, or .GIFs, for their exposure to porn. Tumblr is an image based platform where users can reblog or simply post their original content for others to see. However, while using Tumblr, it’s difficult to escape the impact of porn. As it turns out, women like it that way.
The Tumblr community is predominantly used by 72 percent of young females — on average 26 years old. While 84 percent of the content is created by men, Tumblr’s interface lends itself to women quickly being able to reblog and redistribute content filters images, videos, .GIFs, and text to a large group of other women on the web. In addition to the grassroots reblogging, Tumblr makes it easier for sub communities to thrive, therefore bringing fetish blogs into the mainstream feeds for users.
The numbers alone prove how prevalent adult content is on Tumblr — a 2013 study found that adult content found that adult content makes up 11.4 percent of the website, which translates to one in 10 blogs containing adult images.
Tumblr porn is easy. It’s accessible. The loop of a .GIF is enough to create a fantasy of your own without the ruin of a long, drawn out story that can be found on PornHub. Real sex can also be easily shared on Tumblr, giving users a more authentic and amateur image. Since Tumblr users are primarily female, the porn and .gifs are typically female-friendly.
Liz*, 25 says, “I hate watching porn but I love lesbian .GIFs on Tumblr,” which don’t take up too much of her time and aren’t going to be dominated by a male gaze. Allie* agrees, saying “I started getting off to .GIFs before I started getting off to porn.” She goes on to say that, “I still have the tumblr app and just for the porn .GIFs,” which brings up an important point of accessibility to porn in public spaces.
While watching a video on a laptop requires dialogue, noise, and long scenes, .GIFs can be tucked away in clear sight. Sitting on a train, walking down the street, or waiting in a doctor’s office can give someone the pleasure of sneaking in a peak in the midst of the day. Porn doesn’t have to be something that gets you off, either. Tumblr has made porn something that almost desensitizes us, or makes us more addicted, to watching a consistent loop of a similar action being played over, time and time again. What’s more interesting is that the content is continuous. By continuing to scroll through your Dashboard, you can filter through several hundred .GIFs of moments in time that exist in a porn somewhere in the ether.
Erika Lust, a feminist adult filmmaker told Cosmopolitan that women are looking at Tumblr for porn “because women can find bloggers who curate great photos, .GIFs, and videos that they themselves like, which personalizes the experience.”
This new form of getting off can also be shared between two individuals. Chat websites like Chaturbate and CamSoda have an option to send porn .GIFs to models while they are camming. Couples can send these looped images as a means to sexting, without their own personal photos or words. Fantasies can be exchanged between partners via their blogs or through messaging. It’s become a new way of speaking a love language to your partner. .GIFs are also becoming a means of advertising — this sex toy company is utilizing the impact of the short moving image to market their pleasure items.
Watching an oral scene on loop repeatedly is enough for many women to get off. It’s also easy to do while one handed, since no fast forwarding is involved. Because the truth is that on average, it takes women between 30 seconds to three minutes to have an orgasm while masturbating, which means that for some PornHub videos, which are typically 10 to 15 minutes, are just too long.
Porn .GIFs seem to be staking their claim on Tumblr, however and don’t seem to be coming to the world of Facebook or Instagram anytime soon. Even though those platforms can have x-rated material from time to time, their level of progression is far off from Tumblr’s incredible sense of curation and publication of porn .GIFs.
*Names have been changed.
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