James Deen strolls across a carpet in bare feet, pees in the toilet, washes his hands, and films his yawning reflection. A boring first Vine for the porn superstar.
In his second, he clinks wine glasses, signs a bill without leaving a tip, tears off a lady’s underwear, and presumably starts to have sex with her (albeit out of frame). Nudity and porn are already part of the fabric of Vine, and now even porn stars are finding a home here—a place to show off their real, everyday, mundane lives.
Even their toilets.
First vine post… vine.co/v/bVr56t0KZgE
— James Deen (@JamesDeen) May 25, 2013
It actually takes only a few seconds longer to find porn on Vine than it does to watch it.
Despite efforts by Vine to clamp down on porn discovery by blocking certain hashtags, pulling the All Posts tab, and placing certain sensitive content behind a warning label, it still takes just a few clicks to find pornographers, amateur and otherwise, shucking their inhibitions.
Tags like #xxx and #sex are not displayed in the Explore tab any longer. But type those terms in, and there’s a myriad of related tags ready for your perusal. Tap #xxxvine and you’re down the rabbit hole, with tags like #VineAfterDark and #h0rny.
The vast majority of the clips we saw were solo and amateur: people pleasuring themselves and displaying their, er, assets. Some take requests from followers to carry out certain actions. Many are trying to use Vine to hook up, posting their usernames for messaging app Kik and urging those they want to bang to “Kik me.”
There’s still lots of actual, studio porn, too—though most of it is cellphone footage of porn on a computer. It’d be hard to Vine anything with a high production cost. The true underbelly of Vine is the amateur, self-submitted content, short clips of couples having sex and singles masturbating.
It’s not just Internet nobodies getting in on the action. Porn star Jessie Andrews was among the first in her industry to embrace the platform. Her public Vine feed is a simple extension of her (NSFW) Twitter, which is a simple extension of herself: videos of her bleeding thumb, her SoundCloud page, and then her, naked, on set, jumping up and down with her costar, singing, “Today we’re shooting some porn!”
Vine is a place where users feel free to get weird, and by taking a sex-positive approach to censorship, Twitter is banking on all of us weirdos sticking around.
Gettin romantic @krewellajahan vine.co/v/bQhE039YxPO
— Jessie Andrews (@jessieslife) May 2, 2013
It would be shortsighted to call Vine’s XXX community a “porn problem.” When you have a service where people can post anything they want, you’ll inevitably find wieners and boobs. The trick is finding the silver lining: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, discussing soon-to-be Yahoo property Tumblr, revealed she has plans to monetize some of the blogging platform’s saucier content.
If the cornucopia of X-rated bizarrities on Tumblr can make money for its parent company, surely Vine can too.
There are good reasons as to why Vine might wish to hide porn, if not remove it completely. Some users will find it distasteful. Others won’t want their kids around it. But even if Vine did want to completely censor its sex, that would prove difficult.
A Vine of two people boinking may have a caption along the lines of “a fun day with my bestie!” and no mention of a sex act whatsoever—so text-based filters are pretty much out. Relying on the community to flag videos it deems offensive is the only real strategy for IDing offending content.
But for now, the service seems OK with porn. Its terms of service prohibit threats of violence, illegal activities, harassment, and spam, but not nudity.
Porn is plain to see on Vine once you scratch even a little below the surface. With big-name porn stars like Deen on the scene as well, it’s unlikely the smut is going away anytime soon.
Not my best work but I feel like you can get what I was going for vine.co/v/bYpWJMHZX5O
— James Deen (@JamesDeen) May 30, 2013
Photo via quinnanya/Flickr | remix by Fernando Alfonso III