Work safe porn (2002)NSFW

Introduction

If something is fundamentally true about Internet, it’s that it gives an easy access to sexual oriented materials, thus porn:

Porn, as part of many others things, are NSFW (Not Safe For Work), meaning that it could cost you your job if you get busted looking at that kind of stuff at your work.
Work safe porn is the opposite. It symbolizes a picture, or any material where all the visible explicit content have been taken away, retouched, masked or modified in order to have something completely different, safe to look at nearly everywhere in theory and usually funny.

Origin

In september 2002, a topic named Make Porn Work-Safe appeared on one of the Something Awful forum sub-sections called “Comedy Goldmine”:

The Something Awful Forums goons have been cooking up another batch of humorous humor, and this week’s Goldmine is all about making porn into images that are socially acceptable and work-safe, should your boss peer over your shoulder at the exact moment you pull up your pin-up girl favorites. Enjoy as you would 4 cans of Spaghettio’s in rapid succession.

As written on the first page of that topic, the new Something Awful humor trend of that moment fell on porn pictures. That was the first instance of sexually explicit pictures transformed into “work safe” pictures displayed over 7 pages.

Spread

From that point, the meme went slowly but increasingly viral among several forums, some organizing their own altered pictures contests.

The meme also reached YTMND a first time the 2nd of April 2006 with http://skinflute.ytmnd.com/ by DeitysWarrior, gaining more than 2,000 views only.

But, the main amount of original pictures remained in Something Awful forums topics like this one until september the 14th 2007 when it reached Newground’s forum leading to 16 pages.

The following day, the meme returned to YTMND:

• http://worksafepornupdated.ytmnd.com/ by partypenguin and gaining more than 23,000 views this time.

PornBlocker’s inspiration

In June 2008, PornBlocker, a company based on content filtering software and network internet security systems, made a viral campaign for their anti-porn software called “Ishield” by using their own image versions of the meme:

Their tagline was “Give the internet back its innocence”.

Diesel’s intervention

In september 2008, Diesel, an Italian fashion clothing trademark, released a commercial greatly inspired by the meme to celebrate their 30th birthday of existence:

Diesel’s SFW XXX Party Clip – Watch more Funny Videos

The team that got credits for creating that ad is called The viral factory

Even if Diesel wasn’t the first one to use the meme as an advertising tool, the video format made it instantly viral.
While the video was immediately featured on many other streaming websites, the ad in itself got worldwide press coverage, revealing the meme to the rest of the world at the same time:

• Guardian’s article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/25/advertising.digitalmedia1

• French “20 minutes” article: http://www.20minutes.fr/article/256586/High-Tech-La-mode-du-porno-safe-for-work.php

Even Something Awful itself made an article about it.

It’s during that period that the meme hit the highest peak of its popularity.

Safe For Work Porn as a ms-paint trend

Websites entirely dedicated to hosting deNSFWed pictures were created as a result:

• http://notnsfw.blogspot.com/
• http://www.sfw-porn.com/
• http://pornsfw.com/