by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com Porn For Women and Couples
Sometimes people use words without any apparent concern for what those words actually mean. “Official” is one such word.
Unless it is being used ironically (as in “official” explanations which clearly are not true), this is a word which means something has been done with the imprimatur of some sort of organization or authority, whether we’re talking about the official sponsor of some sporting event, or the official seal of a state or government agency.
In any event, despite the suggestion to the contrary in the headline of a Clapway.com post, there’s nothing ‘official’ about the presence of (supposed) porn on YouTube.
Read on…
Since When Is The Mere Depiction of a Vagina Tantamount to “Porn?”
Exhibit A in Clapway’s post is a video called “How to shave your legs,” and while the real point of the video clearly isn’t to demonstrate how to shave one’s legs, calling it porn seems like just as much of a stretch.
Sure, the model in the clip (which is all of 1:45 long) is naked, and yes her naughty bits are clearly visible for what seems like a gratuitous amount of time for a video which is supposed to be about how to shave your legs. If this video is porn, however, several things I do in my bathroom on a regular basis, like shaving, showering and toweling off, would also be porn if anybody committed them to video.
Here’s the thing: Even if you’re one of those people who thinks the video should be totally unacceptable under YouTube’s content guidelines, I think you have to concede videos like it aren’t likely to draw much of an audience compared to the sort of shaving videos one finds on Pornhub – of which there are several that have generated millions of views, compared to the roughly 76,000 views garnered by the YouTube shaving video in question to date.
Naked People Don’t Automatically Make A Video Porn, Either
Another video the Clapway author objects to is “Elave Nothing to Hide Naked Commercial.” What’s pornographic about this video, you ask? Well, it has naked people in it, of course!
This makes me wish I could try an experiment: Remove all videos with actual sex in them from a major porn tube site, replace them with videos like the Elave commercial, leave the replacement videos in place for a full year and see how much traffic the tube loses over those twelve months.
Sure, there are people out there for whom the Elave commercial might represent seriously hot porn, but this tells us more about those people than it does the commercial. After all, I know several men who consider the Victoria’s Secret calendar the best porn ever invented, but their opinion doesn’t somehow magically render a lingerie catalog akin to the works of Max Hardcore.
If the Elave commercial on YouTube is porn, is every copy of National Geographic which features naked tribespeople also porn? And importantly (from the perspective of porn marketers, anyway), what niche does National Geographic porn fill, exactly? Is there a category for it on Clips4Sale?
I Know: Let’s Ask Justice Stewart!
“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description (“hard-core pornography”), and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
The words above were written by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio. I don’t think I’m going out on any particularly thin limbs by saying Justice Stewart would not have adjudicated either the leg shaving how-to or the Elave commercial to be anything approaching hardcore porn, even back in 1964.
Obviously, to some extent at least, porn is in the eye of the beholder. But reasonable people should be able to agree mere nakedness or fleeting close-ups of woman’s vagina doesn’t qualify as what is generally considered “porn” in the current vernacular of most internet users.
Back to That Other Word, ‘Official’
Regardless of whether you think the videos referenced in the Clapway post should be considered pornographic (and to be fair, I didn’t watch all of them), the idea YouTube has “gone porn” is a whole other kettle of semantic fish.
At best, the fact YouTube hasn’t removed the video suggests tacit approval on the part of the site’s operators, not something as newsworthy as a sea change in YouTube’s content policies. Under those policies, YouTube reserves the right to decide whether any given video qualifies as “pornography” or “obscenity.”
If these videos have been flagged by its users, clearly YouTube has decided they don’t qualify as porn, at least not as YouTube defines the word. That’s not “going porn,” officially or otherwise; it’s merely disagreeing with one (pretty conservative) definition of what constitutes porn.
If YouTube ever does ‘officially go porn,’ do you know how you’ll be able to tell? Within hours of the newly liberal content policy, porn marketers will have uploaded terabytes of material that is – without any shadow of judicial doubt – far more explicit than anything you’ll find on the site right now.
Until and unless such a policy shift happens, YouTube will remain the just about the last video site actual porn surfers will browse in search of free titillation.
They do have just a few other options, after all.
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