Welcome to our new home! We’re still unpacking a few things, but we’re more or less moved in and we look forward to entertaining visitors here for years to come. Note the rotating headers. There are sixteen of them, so refresh your browser often.
On Friday night I went drinking with a friend from high school who happens to work at Google. She knows nothing of the ins and outs of Jills and my relationship, or of this blog for that matter. Thus it was necessary – though difficult after several beers – to keep myself from telling her how her company had thrown the blogging community to which I belong into disarray.
Last Monday, February 23, I and many of my fellow bloggers who use Google’s Blogger platform received an email announcing changes to Blogger’s adult content policy. According to the email, as of March 23 Blogger would no longer allow blogs with “sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video”. It would, however, “allow nudity presented in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts, or where there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action on the content”, and if that doesn’t sound like an arbitrary distinction, I don’t know what does.
As of March 23, any blogs that contained the aforementioned graphic content and which were not deemed by Google to offer “substantial benefits” would be forced to go private, viewable only to blog administrators and those they have approved for access. It was claimed that no content would be deleted, however.
This isn’t the first time we felt threatened by our choice of blogging platform. In June 2013, Google announced plans to shut down any monetized adult blogs that used Blogger. We weren’t really blogging for pay; our brief tenure writing sponsored posts for a certain adult retailer that doesn’t deserve a shout-out had wrapped up long before, and at any rate, we removed links and references to the company from those posts. Still, the word around the blogosphere was that if Google was shutting down monetized adult blogs, their next step was certainly shutting down all adult blogs. It was simply the latest in a long line of sex-negative maneuvers by the status quo.
Unwilling to lose the years of writing and photography we’d shared, we exported our Blogger blog to WordPress. We declined at the time to self-host, opting instead for a standard free blog. However, it wasn’t long before WordPress announced that it would be shutting down all non-self-hosted adult blogs. So we abandoned our new abode after one single TMI Tuesday post – a lost TMI Tuesday, if you will – that will be posted here soon, and returned to our Blogger blog, taking care to ensure that nothing about it said “we get paid to do this.”
After more than a year and a half of blogging at Blogger with no complications, the email I received on the 23rd was most unwelcome, but perhaps it was a wakeup call. Perhaps if we had self-hosted back in 2013 it wouldn’t have mattered. But all I could think of was the extraordinary expense of self-hosting when blogging had always been – and perhaps should be – free. After all, we’d blogged without paying a dime since 2008. Why should that change just because someone high up on the Google food chain feels uncomfortable when he – certainly he, not she – hears the word vagina?
It became clear that the only way we could continue blogging and reach an audience doing so was to finally bite the bullet and self-host. While money is tight, I was more concerned with whether or not I could actually pull off such a move. However, many of my fellow bloggers offered encouragement, pointing out the relatively low cost of self-hosting, and the relative ease of making the change.
As I contemplated self-hosting, my Twitter feed began to fill with retweets from hosting companies offering sanctuary to those who would be displaced by the policy change. Tech bloggers and free speech activists wrote about the implications of such a move, with most decrying Google for the draconian measure. And the adult blogosphere itself was indeed thrown into disarray, some bloggers throwing up their hands and admitting defeat, and others like me planning to abandon the platform that had served them for so long.
On Thursday, February 26th, I received an email from Katie Notopoulos, Senior Editor of Buzzfeed. She was working on a story about the policy change and had found our blog listed on Rori‘s Top 100 Sex Bloggers list, as reposted at Innocent Loverboy. As our URL indicated we were using Blogger, she asked for some background on our blog, as well as our thoughts on the situation.
As this was the first mainstream media request we’ve ever received, I was only too happy to oblige. Here’s my reply to Katie’s email:
We launched our blog in September 2008. As we had been married just over a year, we thought it would be fun to have some ongoing record of our escapades. It was, and is, a labor of love; we enjoy writing for the blog, and did so even when we had very few regular readers. The adult content that we post includes but is not necessarily limited to photography and prose or other writing. We’ve written a few political posts, generally concerning sexual politics: Sandra Fluke, Republicans’ attempts to ban pornography, sexual consent, and use of the word “slut”.
I couldn’t possibly guess as to how many regular (or even occasional) readers we have, though according to Blogger our posts over the last two months have an average of 197 page views. Posts that we’ve done for Sinful Sunday, a weekly photo meme, received an average of thirteen comments each week since January, but it’s a relatively popular weekly meme and not necessarily indicative of regular blog readership. It’s also worth noting that we’ve blogged less actively the last couple years than we did previously; Sinful Sunday posts in 2012, for example, received between twenty and thirty comments.
We blog for a number of reasons. In addition to having a record of our sexual life both together and apart, we sought a community of like-minded individuals, i.e. those who view sex as a natural part of existence and something to be enjoyed rather than to be ashamed of or embarrassed about. The majority of those we know offline are far less candid about the subject, and it pained us to consider that those few who viewed sex as we do had grown more conservative with age or parenthood. Additionally, I enjoy writing, and I’m fairly certain that more people have read this blog than literally anything else I’ve written.
We’re upset by Google’s decision. It represents yet another example of society’s sex-negative bent, and it’s all the more disappointing considering that Google claims to champion freedom of speech. We find it especially troubling that the company’s Blogger platform will continue to allow explicit imagery “presented in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts, or where there are substantial benefits to the public”. Sounds arbitrary, doesn’t it?
However, we aren’t surprised by this turn of events. There was rumor that Google would be changing its policy in June of 2013, so we exported our blog to WordPress just in time for them to levy a similar threat at non-self-hosted blogs. We abandoned WordPress and resumed blogging in our original location, wary that they could change their adult content policy at any time. Now, however, it appears we’re out of luck dealing with Google, and are planning to switch to self-hosting through WordPress in the next week or two.
By the time Katie’s article was published, however, Google had posted a statement on its Blogger support page effectively reversing its position.
This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy. We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities. So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.
I woke to a message on Friday calling my attention to this latest development, and briefly considered staying with Blogger. After all, I could think of plenty of things to do with the money I would be spending on hosting, and what’s more I didn’t need the stress or headache that would inevitably come with moving our blog into a new space. But then I thought back to 2013, and I realized that eventually someone at Google would decide again to eliminate or otherwise diminish all adult blogs that use Blogger, and I’d have to go through all of this once more. It might be six months from now, or it might be a year from now. And they might backpedal again, or they might not. Or they might just arbitrarily delete my blog one day without warning. It’s happened to others, though whether accidental or deliberate based on content or other factors I cannot say.
That’s ultimately a big part of why Jill and I decided to self-host. It wasn’t as expensive as I thought it would be, and while it was difficult for someone with my limited acumen I had lots of help from those in the know, especially DomSigns, proud owner of Molly Moore, with whose Sinful Sunday meme you’re undoubtedly familiar. Additional guidance and support came from Cheeky Minx and Beck. If you are enjoying our new digs, be aware that they wouldn’t be quite as snazzy without them. In fact, without Molly and DomSigns, we would likely still be shackled to Blogger.
I am grateful to everyone who expressed support and offered encouragement and assistance, but more than anything I am happy simply not having our blog attached to the yoke of a major megacorporation, not having to trust that Google won’t delete our blog someday when someone who works for them has a bad day or simply presses the wrong button. That was always a fear for Jill and I, and it led me to back up our blog religiously. And while we will likely continue to do so, I feel like I can breathe a sigh of relief, somewhat more confident in the knowledge that our blog is in good hands.
Lest it sounds like I’m painting Google in a harsh light, please know that nothing is further from the truth. I just don’t want to rely on them for my blogging livelihood. However, I will be forever grateful to them not only for giving us a platform in the first place, but also for the excellent Doctor Who browser game they created for the show’s 50th anniversary. Play it here if you’re so inclined.