More Women Are Getting Off to Porn GIFs, Thanks to Tumblr

Caroline* started watching porn by accident. The 26-year-old didn’t grow up seeking it out and until five years ago hadn’t seen any without the nudge of a male partner. Even if she found a mainstream video she liked at first, something would usually end up going wrong, like fake-sounding breathing, cheesy music, or a “Miami Vice narrative” that felt awkward and moment-killing. Frustrating, since women take more time to orgasm and a visual or audible interruption—no matter how seemingly minor—can cause us to have to start from scratch.

Then one day as Caroline was scrolling through her Tumblr timeline, she saw a porn GIF, one she describes as “soft-core” and “artsy.” She liked how the repetitive format managed to harness the moment that turns you on, and was then simplified and suspended in time: A woman’s O-face perpetually crinkled in pleasure, the semen in a cum-shot forever arching out into space. Caroline poked around to find more clips like it—all soundless, looped, and sensually erotic—clicking on different tags based on her mood, each one revealing more and more sexual GIFs, like hot digital nesting dolls.

Now she has certain blogs stealthily bookmarked on her phone under the random word “key.” Some of her favorites Tumblr pages include Undercover Cock, which works as a kind of organized archive of porn GIFs based on your kink—“against the glass,” “spanking,” “bouncing tits,” and so on—and the succinctly titled These Are People Fucking.

Like Caroline, a lot of women I’ve spoken to say they discovered porn while fumbling around on Tumblr, not too surprising given a recent study that found that, despite a corporate takeover in 2013, adult content still thrives on the platform. In fact, almost half of Tumblr’s 130 million users report encountering porn on the site, 28.5 percent unintentionally via reblogs.

And because more women use Tumblr than men—54 to 46 percent—it’s a given that much of the content is created by women for women, endowing it with an implicit sense of power and safety that often feels missing from more traditional porn sites. It also, likely, removes the elements of guilt and judgment that so many women associate with consuming porn, by allowing women to explore their preferences in a space that’s not explicitly sexual.

Even better, porn blogs on Tumblr are often curated by bloggers whose aesthetic users trust. Maybe they only feature black and white images or use a cool design theme, making the whole experience feel kind of artistic, even chic. Plus, it’s discreet. “The way I’m getting [Tumblr] porn still kind of feels like a secret,” says Caroline.

Another thing that Tumblr has going for it, where porn is concerned, is a lack of forced storylines. It’s just GIFs, which allow you to feel things free of the confines of a specific narrative. It’s a format that allows imagination to fill in the blank spaces—the sounds, the context, the background. That makes GIFs especially useful when applied to porn, since they can inspire us to create our own stories, giving us the tools to leave out anything we don’t like or don’t feel comfortable with, all of which is pretty powerful when you consider that most standard pornography is made by men, for men.

“Women don’t like…to watch scenes where women’s sexuality exists for the benefit of men,” award-winning adult filmmaker Erika Lust says. “To watch regurgitated misogynistic and sexist values in those scenes, gratuitous violence, and portraying women only as pleasure objects without any sexual agency.”

Monica Torres, journalist and cofounder of women’s website High Strung, agrees. “You’re exerting control in what moments you choose to magnify, [and] you become the director or the postproduction editor of your desires,” she says of how GIFs differ from live-action porn.

In that way, the porn GIF community on Tumblr isn’t unlike the world of erotic fiction, which also works against the myth that women are less horny, dirty, and sexually imaginative than men. If anything, it proves just the opposite, smashing the theory that women don’t enjoy porn. In reality, many do—we just might not be as into the content being offered by the mainstream industry.

“I like that [GIFs] cut a lot of the fakeness out of porn, which usually takes me out of the experience,” says Lucy, 28, an office coordinator in the Southwest. “I can focus on one gesture or look from the performers that feels authentic.” As a bisexual trans woman, Lucy says heterosexual porn works when she can project herself onto the experience of the woman, something that’s easier with GIFs: “[They] distill that into one repeated action or moment that’s much easier to get into than a whole video.”

“You can know, quickly and easily, what you’re getting with GIFs,” says Leigh, a 34-year-old singer from New York. “You don’t have to spend what’s supposed to be a good time dreading something ‘bad’ happening later on. For example, I’m not personally into consensual choking, so GIFs give me a way of enjoying the parts of a rougher sex scene that turn me on without having to wonder if parts that may make me uncomfortable are on the way.”

For a piece on porn GIFs, Torres spoke to Holly, the “twentysomething, not-entirely-straight girl who loves to gossip about sex stuff” behind Orgasmic Tips for Girls, a popular Tumblr for “horny girls everywhere.” She tells me that, in reporting the piece, she was most struck by Holly’s idea that porn GIFs on Tumblr can function as a kind of #sexpo—a sex version of #fitspo, the online community of fitness content creators who share workout plans and dieting tips through aspirational stories (and, for better or worse, a ton of rules). “It’s like when you read about someone who went from not fit at all to running a marathon and you’re like, ‘I could totally do that! I could totally do that!‘” said Torres. Though porn GIFs on Tumblr are less prescriptive, there’s something inspiring about how Holly uses them to accompany practical female masturbation tips.

The most striking similarity between the #sexpo and #fitspo tags has to do with their dedicated communities. “With the confessional nature of Tumblr, you get to know the person [running the blog], you get an intimate sense of what turns them on—you might even know more about that than your own friends,” says Torres. The appeal of porn GIFs stretches beyond how hot they can be in their own right. By consuming them on Tumblr, women are finding not just a place that helps them get off but one where they’re not alone. And in a world that demonizes female sexuality, it’s hard to say which is better.

This article is part of Summer of Sex, our 12-week long exploration of how women are having sex in 2017.

*Names have been changed.