Loop of Desire: The erotic potential of GIF porn, GQ India (link now defunct), July 2017

A single pink manicured fingernail rests on the base of an erect penis. A few inches to the right, a wet pink tongue makes a perfect O around its head. Again. And again and again. For as long as you want it to. This isn’t the world’s lengthiest blow job: It’s a three-second video playing on loop – also known as a GIF.

I discovered GIF porn the same way I’ve discovered a lot of porn recently: someone sent it to me.

It’s not as weird as it sounds; I’m actually writing a book on pornography, and one of the wonderful unintended consequences is that people send me their favourite stuff. With this, though, I had my doubts. A short looped video did not sound like prime masturbatory material, mainly because three- seconds-to-orgasm is not a thing – not for women anyway.

In any case, I persevered. And soon discovered that GIF porn, like all porn, caters to a variety of human desires and requires you to search until you find what works for you. Google ‘dominatrix GIF porn’, for example, and you’ll find tons of URLs featuring leather-clad, whip-wielding women riding atop their partners and running the show. A search for ‘softcore black and white GIF’ takes you to looping erotica in monochrome.

Most popular GIF platforms like GIPHY limit themselves to PG-13 content, so GIF porn has found other cyber homes: porn websites, social media platforms and, most significantly, Tumblr. Like GIFs, Tumblr posts are easily shareable, and allow people to curate collections according to what turns them on.

And even on one of the largest GIF porn Tumblrs featuring the usual porny suspects (blow jobs, Asian, anal), I found creative categories tagged ‘he’s on top’, ‘she’s on top’ and ‘faces’ – which I was happy to discover is less cumshots, more sexy facial expressions.

Not all GIF porn is personally curated, though. In 2012, three friends, Raj, Katie and Chris, built The Worst Drug, a website that collated the most popular GIFs on the internet. They expected an archive of cute kittens, but the next day, 99 per cent of their website was porn. Over time, The Worst Drug became synonymous with sexy GIFs – so much so that no one was willing to fund its massive archives, forcing it to shut down two years later. But its founders maintain that porn was never the intention. They simply built an algorithm that collected the most popular GIFs – which happened to be almost entirely porn.

Which, if you think about it, isn’t all that surprising. In his book The Erotic Engine, Patchen Barss explains that from the moment human beings developed tools for expression – from cave paintings to sculptures to GIFs – they used them to represent human sexuality. When a new piece of tech was developed, its first adopters were people looking to make or access porn. It was the possibility of sexual pleasure that drove people to try the slowest early versions of the internet, and then to figure out how to make it work better. As written porn became photographs became videos became webcams, GIF porn fills our modern appetites: bite-sized porn for our bite-sized attention spans. Or so I thought.

But the more I watch it, the less convinced I am that this is fast porn for fast lives. Most sexy GIFs are taken from porn movies but the experience is a lot closer to looking at a photograph than to watching a film. These Harry Potter-style moving images wave their boobs at you, and you stop to look. And if you like it, you stay there. When a particularly alluring GIF catches my eye, I find myself getting lost in its repetitive motion, unaware of how many times a single loop of desire has played.

When I was growing up, access to erotic content was almost exclusively through photographs. I didn’t have access to Playboy’s centrefolds, but Ja Rule’s shirtless abs were another matter. There he was, two black- and-white printouts on my teenage bedroom wall – a constant and reliable presence, inviting me to be a part of his sexy world.

In comparison, most of the porn I went on to consume was far more detailed. Erotic stories, my first stop in the world of X-rated content, provided everything from characters to scenery. Video porn, including the work of my favourite erotica film- maker, Erika Lust, had fully fleshed-out plot lines – ranging from an Airbnb host who provides sexy welcomes to a flying instructor who sleeps with her ruggedly handsome student.

But with photographs, and with GIFs, there’s no scripted narrative; there are only individual moments, contained neatly within their frames. It’s up to you, the viewer, to fill in the story. Is that your dick? Are those your girlfriend’s fingernails? What happens next? GIF porn calls on us to employ that crucial erotic muscle rendered largely defunct by porn videos: the imagination. And in doing so, it expands the frame to make room for us, too.

A torso arches. A butt clenches. A mouth gasps in silent pleasure. And you sink back into your sheets, leisurely building the sexy narrative you want to see.

Like all quality foreplay, GIF porn takes its own sweet time – and offers even sweeter returns.