Plenty of Russians were disappointed when their government's censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, blocked access to Pornhub and YouPorn last week.
To protest the move, people are sharing videos on Facebook of themselves watching porn and narrating what happens onscreen, under the hashtag #rospornobzor.
Daniel Trabun, the digital director of Esquire Russia, kicked off the hashtag with this video, in which he gives an 8-minute play-by-play of a clip called "Stepbrother Catches His Sister With a Big Dildo and Then Fucks Her."
He describes everything down to the camera angles, the "very simple interior" of the bedroom and the pop-up ads that appear after the video ends.
Trabun pointed out that the judge who ruled to block Pornhub and YouPorn couldn't remember what prompted the decision, and invited people to protest what he called the government's "hypocritical, sterile, and conservative position, which is in no way explained."
The videos take a dry, clinical approach, aimed at countering what Trabun decried as "the absence of a neutral vocabulary we can use to talk about sex."
🚨 Heads up: all the narrations are in Russian, but in some of these videos, you can hear the original audio from the porn they're watching. 🚨
PLEASE PROCEED WITH CAUTION AND/OR HEADPHONES.
"I am your VPN," Nastassja Popova wrote in a Facebook post introducing her video. "A very indifferent, nasal VPN."
There are clips filmed in dark rooms...
...under the covers...
"They turned off the porn, but they haven't turned on the heat," Liza Volokhova wrote on Facebook.
...and in broad daylight.
"Pornhub and YouPorn are banned in Russia," Vasily Sonkin wrote on Facebook. "That's not really a problem, of course, as he who seeks will always find. But all the same, it's at least stupid, as Russia loves porn, everyone watches it, and it's normal, healthy, cool...So I want to express my little protest...Grandma, maybe you don't need to watch this."
Some people, however, criticized the idea of using porn to start an honest dialogue about sex.
"I don't really understand how retelling porn films under the hashtag #rospornobzor is being described as a discussion about sex, if it's a discussion about pornography," feminist writer Tatyana Nikonova said on Facebook.
A woman who narrated some Pokémon Go-themed porn — because of course that is a thing that exists — explained that despite her views about the porn industry, she made the video to protest censorship. (Heads up: the NSFW audio in this one is especially clear!)
"While mainstream pornography is abusive as fuck, we're not talking about that right now, but about the fact that censorship is an even greater violence and the way to total hypocrisy and isolation, where no honest conversations are possible, not just about sex, but about anything at all," Natalia Istomina wrote on Facebook.
Another woman suggested that becoming more comfortable talking about sex as a society might help Russia more effectively address sexual violence.
"To be honest, I'm completely indifferent to porn," Pania Kirillina wrote in the introduction to her video on Facebook. "But to ban it, well, in short, that's very bad. And we don't have words in the Russian language for discussing sex, it is really awkward to talk about sex in detail...maybe, a bunch of girls are being raped in their marriage bed, for example, but they don't know it, because they have never once in their life discussed with anyone how intercourse is supposed to happen."
Anyway, if you've ever wanted to watch someone describe pornography in exacting detail, in a language that you may not understand, now you can go do that here.
