If you haven’t heard of Vine — Twitter’s video-sharing app — before today, it might have come across your screen this morning after a brief scandal: an explicit video was featured as an “editor’s pick”. Porn on Vine — crazy, right? No. Shut up. There’s porn on almost everything, and there always will be.
Warning: NSFW content and links to NSFW content below.
The notion that porn on Vine is not only surprising, it’s also problematic — Google “vine porn problem” for a chorus of software panic — is silly. Just so, so silly. Vine’s entire purpose is to create tiny videos quickly and then beam them out into the web ether. Of course it’s going to be used for penises; it doesn’t have a “porn problem” any more than our planet has a “dirt problem”. Let’s never forget this, ever:
If something can be used to transmit an image, moving or static, it will be used for penises.
This isn’t unique to Vine. This isn’t even unique to apps. It’s a truism for any medium or device. It depends on how liberally you define “porn”, but there’s sexually explicit stuff across every crevice and razor-burned corridor of the internet.
So, yes, there was a penis prominently featured on Vine this morning, and then removed. You can find more penises on Vine if you look for them. But you can also find sexually stimulating stuff of all kinds on:
Tumblr
Twitter
Facebook (private messages!)
Facebook Poke (same!)
Snapchat
Instagram
And hundreds of other apps you either don’t use or have never even heard of.
But would anyone say any of these apps have a porn “problem”, aside from the fact that none of them are really suited at all for the enjoyment of porn? Of course not, with the prominent exception of reportedly hosting child pornography. There’s no such thing as a porn problem unless you’re grotesquely breaking the law or are an Apple employee tasked with enforcing the company’s notorious Catholic school moral calculus, in which case it’s your problem. Otherwise, this is just the way the internet and the humans on it work: if you build it, we will cum, and feigning shock in the face of a stray penis or torrent of online breasts is naive at best, but more likely a case of absolute cluelessness.
Vine will continue to be a way to ineffectively share porn. So will countless apps after it, barring the death of apps entirely or some sort of fascist new world order. So will the entire internet, forever and ever, until the end of time or sexuality. There will be penises. You cannot stop them. They will not hurt you. So don’t even pretend to be surprised by them.