So You Thought Porn Was Bad…

Or “Why I am addicted to Reddit”

This page is part of a series of pages on my love of pictures and photography.  The introductory page is here.

Let me introduce you to a passion of mine…porn.  No, not all that dirty picture “ooh, I see someone’s boobies and pee-pees” crap.  Now, I realize, if you check into the actual definition of the word porn my logic here may seem a little questionable, but really, it makes perfect sense when you think about it.

So let’s first start with a definition, two in fact:

First from Google’s search we have:

porn

• Pornography
• Television programs, books, etc., regarded as catering to a voyeuristic or obsessive interest in a specified subject
  • - a thrilling throwback to the golden age of disaster movies—weather porn of the highest order

Pornographic

• - a porn video

Hmm, nothing that actually explicitly refers to nudity there.  Let’s look a bit deeper at the word pornography then, since it’s a definition in itself:

Definition of PORNOGRAPHY

1: the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement

2: material (as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement

3: the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction pornography of violence>

Really porn has nothing to do with bodies except that we’re all far more puritanical than we probably should be about the stuff nature gave us.  I won’t venture any conjecture on why.  There are millions of humans.  There are millions of  reasons why we love or hate any given thing.  And the reasons change as we do.  But for myself, I happen to be glad there are things that strike me as erotic and arousing in the world.  Such things make the world all the more magical and lovely.  And here are a few of my favorite places to find them online.

More than a few of you may be familiar with sites like Flickr and PhotoBucket.  And you probably suspect there are many more out there in the ether just waiting to be explored.  (There are.  Here’s a non-inclusive list that someone kindly posted on Wikipedia.)  So many pictures, so little time.  How will you be able to find the types of photos that inspire the right mood when you need them?

photo cred. Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

Well, I did post that link to the Five Minute Get-away page.  It’s good for certain types of  pictorial inspiration.  And when my funny bone needs a nudge, I can always hit the main I Can Haz Cheeseburger? page for more, though I almost never do.  I use Imgur, and I use Reddit.  I love Reddit.  Reddit is easily the best place I have found to get that emotional reaction I look for in photography.  (For those of you who don’t know what Reddit is, it’s like the Front Page of the Internet [indeed, that is their "by-line"] as well as the Internet Flea Market [my description, but probably not an original one] because you can find pretty much anything there if you look hard enough.)

So first, let me introduce the Mother lode, as it were, of  Safe For Work Porn on Reddit.  I tend to hang out in Abandoned Porn, Book Porn, Botanical Porn, and Space Porn, but I happily explore them all on occasion.  Other useful Reddits can be found in the generic /r/pics and /r/pics2; the various Wallpaper pages  here, here and here; and of course the Not Safe For Work stuff exists as well notably here, here, and elsewhere.

For people interested in getting help with their photography, there are several subreddits.  I can’t claim to have explored them well, but I’ve found wonderful people in /r/itookapicture and /r/photography’s descendants like Photo It and Pic Request.

So, yes, this page is a general overview for the picture lover to Reddit.  I hope you have some fun there.  I also hope that you will explore not just the pictures themselves but the discussions/comments that are usually posted after each Reddit post.  There is where you can find all the good stuff the artist/photographer who made the image (hopefully) and  where you can find more similar works.  You can meet people who share your interests.  You can have fun.  You may learn a trick or two.

And if all else fails…  You can always do a Google Search for something that fascinates you and look through the images tab.  Sometimes surprise is more inspirational than planning.  Enjoy as much as I have, please.

The next page in this series Four People and Their Pictures will come soon.