34 surprising exceptions to Rule 34

Among the long-held Rules of the Internet, the most infamous is Rule 34: “If it exists, there is porn of it—no exceptions.”

Rule 34 has been ruining favorite childhood cartoons and sexualizing video game characters for about as long as the .jpg file format has existed, to say nothing of all the Photoshopped celebrity nudes it’s produced. And although the rule is nearly universal, there remain some surprising omissions. This may come as news to you if you’re familiar with humanity’s shocking ability to draw breasts on anything and masturbate to it.

To others, it will no doubt come as a challenge.

In other words, this list is accurate for now, but I don’t expect anything on it to remain un-pornified for long.

1) Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

Trudeau, Canada’s young, liberal heartthrob prime minister, is the subject of much online swooning—and has even loosely inspired some erotic fanfiction—but I could find no porn of him. Shocking and disappointing.

2) Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCB4SgXRgKg

This historic tragedy killed nearly 150 people and drew attention to unsafe working conditions in the garment industry, but no one drew any porn of it. If you want to see triangles or shirts having sex, though, you’re in luck.

(Well, “luck.”)

3) John Kasich

Unlike many of his rivals in the GOP presidential race, John Kasich is apparently not popular or sexy enough to inspire pornographic artwork. Nary a fake nude of the man to be found, despite his voracious appetite. For food. I’m talking about food here.

4) Ted Cruz

I cannot tell you how much I was dreading this one, and how glad I am that my search came back with nothing more salacious than a “nude” Cruz Photoshopped into Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” video. Ted Cruz is apparently so unappealing that no one wants to create porn of him. Astounding.

5) Dat Boi

The frog on a unicycle currently starring in a meme that many believe to be dead has not been repurposed for pornographic purposes. It’s only a matter of time, though, and all I can say about that is “o shit, waddup.”

6) Thunderbolt 

There is no porn of Apple’s Thunderbolt cables, adapters, or ports, despite the obvious sexual punnery inherent in “i/o” technology. Your MacBook is safe from violation. You may be sad (but not surprised) to hear that there is porn of Thunderbolt, the heroic dog from Disney’s 101 Dalmatians sequels and spinoffs. Sorry, buddy.

7) T.G.I. Friday’s

There is no porn of beloved family-friendly appetizeria T.G.I. Friday’s, nor of its mysterious founder, who I presume is named T.G.I. Friday. There is, however, hardcore porn that was allegedly filmed at an Applebee’s location.

8) Linguo the Robot

Although there are drawings of nearly every Simpsons character in various sexual positions, Linguo the grammar-correcting robot is a notable exception. Linguo, created by Lisa for a science fair, appeared in just one episode. You cannot currently find a pornographic image of him to masturbate to. Excuse me: to which one might masturbate.

9) Clif Bars

I could find no pornographic content involving the popular energy bar brand. No fan art of Clif Bars with genitals, no adventurous women using the food as sex toys, nothing. Nada. Clif Bars are completely boring and non-sexual. They’re the John Kasich of caloric supplements.

10) Baruch Spinoza

Seventeenth-century rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza has not, as yet, starred in any Internet pornography. As he was known for his Ethics and living “a saintly life,” it makes some sense that he wouldn’t be down. Other, hornier philosophers, including René “Give Her the Dick” Descartes, do feature in Rule 34 images. 

11) WinAmp

Before iTunes, there was WinAmp, the highly customizable music player that ruled the late ’90s. Known mainly for its playlist functionality and the ability to change its look with downloadable “skins,” WinAmp lasted until 2013 before finally shutting down, then popped back up in 2014. There are WinAmp skins that count as porn, but I could find no porn of WinAmp itself. (And if you think software is immune to Rule 34, you should see what perverts have done to all the major browsers. Actually, maybe you shouldn’t see it.)

12) Jai Alai

Jai alai, a sport played at high speeds with a ball and a large wicker basket called a cesta, was pitched on Mad Men as “the perfect mixture of athletics, spectacle, and speed.” Amazingly, it appears to be porn-free. No shots of players in the nude, no women doing naughty things to themselves with the cesta. Practically every other sport—curling, even!—has some Rule 34 content, but not jai alai. Squeaky clean, except for that whole corruption scandal in the ’70s and its not-so-subtle association with gambling.

13) Quorn

Quorn, a meat-alternative food product made from fermented fungus protein, may rhyme with “porn,” but there is no porn of it. None that I could find, anyway. What I did discover in my search, though, is Erik Hinton’s very good personal list of Rule 34 counterexamples—and it includes Quorn. What a world, where more than one living person has scoured a global computer network for images of sex with proprietary, protein-rich fungus. What a time to be alive.

14) Turner & Hooch

There does not appear to be any Rule 34 of Tom Hanks and his costar in this classic ’80s buddy comedy. And thank god for that, because his costar was a large, slobbery Bordeaux dog named Beasley. It’s not as if bestiality is off-limits when it comes to Rule 34 artwork, either, so I guess ol’ Hooch (R.I.P.) is just lucky.

15) Nathan Barley

A cult-classic British sitcom written by Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris, Nathan Barley follows a stereotypical Shoreditch scenester who believes himself to be a “self-perpetuating media node.” This was cutting-edge stuff in the aughts, and it still largely holds up. Plus, you get to see Richard Ayoade, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Ben Whishaw before they were big international stars. You just don’t get to see them having sex, because there’s no Rule 34 of Nathan Barley. If it did exist, though, it would be utterly within the spirit of the show.

16) @dril (Wint)

Perhaps the best-known—and the funniest—account in the loose conglomerate of jokey Twitter jackanapes called Weird Twitter, Dril is recognizable by his icon of a blurry, smoking Jack Nicholson. Is Dril one man? Is he a comedy writing team? Only wint (or wints?) knows for sure.

Is there Rule 34 of Jack Nicholson? It’s unfortunate for your eyes and brain-eyes, but yes. However, there’s none using Dril face, and none purporting to be of the Dril character. He may take a lot of online abuse, but not the kind where people make fake porn of you.

17) Mr. Pickle

The garishly grinning mascot of the California-based Mr. Pickle’s sandwich chain is as phallic as the day is long, but is therea single work of fan art depicting Pickle “getting it in?” Not that I could find. I’m surprised by this one, to be frank—it would take virtually no creativity to porn-ify what’s essentially a giant cucumber. Perhaps Pickle’s unsettling grin has put a damper on whatever pornographic possibilities he presents. Fun(?) trivia: There is plenty of very upsetting Rule 34 of the cartoon dog Mr. Pickles. It’s becoming apparent at this point in the process that no cartoon dog is safe from the internet’s foul dictates.

18) Bad Judge

One of the things you’ll notice about this list is that there are not very many women or female characters on it. The Internet’s porn-generating apparatus exists to sexualize women, and if a character is female, some horny bloke somewhere has imagined her naked. Maybe even naked and with a comically huge penis. 

It’s with this reality in mind that I tried to find a media property that was either so woman-driven or so unwatchable that no man ever masturbated to it and did a drawing afterward. So congratulations to Bad Judge, a short-lived 2014 sitcom starring Grey’s Anatomy‘s Kate Walsh. 

Bad Judge scored an 18% on Rotten Tomatoes and was protested by real-life lawyers incensed by its depiction of a judge as an irresponsible, “hypersexualized” partier. NBC humanely euthanized the show after one season.

It’s not that perverts didn’t find Kate Walsh worthy of fantasizing about—there are dozens of lurid fake nudes on the Internet that attest to that—but they didn’t seem to connect with her Bad Judge character any more than general TV audiences did. No one made porn of Judge Rebecca Wright. 

Nor, interestingly enough, is there porn of her Grey’s character, Dr. Addison Montgomery. That’s a little surprising, considering that same character anchored nine seasons worth of the spinoff Private Practice. And it’s not that hornballs don’t love Grey’s. Case in point: a gay slashfic in which “McSteamy and McDreamy McFuck.”

19) Doodle Jump

By my unscientific guesstimate, 95 to 98 percent of all popular games and cartoon franchises have been converted into porn by enthusiasts. Doodle Jump, the hit mobile game that sold hundreds of thousands of copies circa 2010, is somehow not one of them. It’s especially strange because, frankly, The Doodler looks like it could S a mean D.

20) Venmo Lucas

Star of a 2014 poster campaign for payment platform Venmo, Lucas Chi is a 20-something software engineer who Has Dreams, loves to Buy a Round, and sometimes Takes the Stairs. Of the many present-tense verbs Lucas performs, though, “does porn” doesn’t make the list. While advertising icons like Progressive Flo are some of the most popular characters in the Rule 34-iverse, Lucas languishes on the sidelines. Are the Internet’s perverts simply not ready to sexualize a real-life Asian man as much as they fetishize anime dudes?

21) Elmer the Bull (Elmer’s Glue)

I could find no pornography of the Elmer’s Glue mascot, Elmer the Bull, created circa 1940 to sell the Borden Company’s famous adhesive. Elmer’s wife, according to marketing canon, is Borden Dairy mascot Elsie the Cow. There is Rule 34 of her, which exemplifies the gender imbalance in Internet cartoon mascot porn. (The bovine couple “broke up” in the ’90s when Elmer’s was spun off into an independent company.)

22) Citizen Kane

Many pornographic works have been hailed as “The Citizen Kane of porn,” but what about porn of Citizen Kane? It seems that Charles Foster Kane, Orson Welles’ tragic titan of the media business, has yet to be spoofed in any Rule 34 images. A shame, given the rugged good looks of young Orson Welles. Also a good thing, given that “rosebud” has a whole different, arguably more disturbing meaning in the fetish world. 

Oh, and Orson Welles did work on one explicit scene in his career, but it wasn’t in his own films. He cut a shower masturbation scene of actress Georgina Spelvin for the film 3 A.M. as a favor to his friend and cinematographer, Gary Graver.

23) Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog

Triumph, voiced by Robert Smigel and famous from Conan O’Brien’s Late Night, is a dog puppet best known for verbally pooping on celebrities. He’s never seen without a cigar, and he claims to have a lot of bitches. How is it possible that there’s no porn of him? Well, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and bitches are just bitches.

24) The United States Highway System

There’s no porn of the interstates wrapping around each other, falling breathlessly into a tangled fuckpile. There’s no porn of I-5, I-70, or I-80, nor is there porn of Route 66… er, getting its kicks. I couldn’t find so much as a crude drawing of a highway leading into an orifice.

As for porn that takes place on highways, though, that’s its own thriving genre. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding it if that’s what you’re into.

25) The Parents from Peanuts

There’s so much horrifying Rule 34 of the kids from Peanuts—some of it ages them up to teen or even adult bodies, and the grosser portion doesn’t even bother. It’s a bad ol’ world, Charlie Brown, and Charles Schulz is no doubt spinning in his grave. 

The parents from Peanuts, however—best known for the wah-wah horn noises that replace their voices in the kids’ minds—have yet to be sexualized. Not entirely surprising, because we never see them on screen. Also kind of a bummer, because the result would practically be an art film. And it’s not like the dialogue would be hard to write. 

26) Claude Monet’s “Women in the Garden” 

The amount of porn of the character Monet from the anime One Piece is frankly terrifying, but Internet erotic artistes remain ignorant of Claude Monet. His famous “Women in the Garden” wouldn’t require much imagination to exploit for salacious purposes, and yet those women remain mercifully covered despite the predominately male gaze of the Rule 34 creators. What a strange gap in the laws of the internet!

27) Enuff Z’nuff

The seminal ’80s hair metal band formed by Chip Z’nuff and Donnie Vie is certainly racy in its way, but no one has made a porn parody or drawn an these guys having an orgy. In a 2010 interview, Chip Z’Nuff claimed that he “bats both ways” and “plays with balls,” inspiring the interviewer to declare, “With all this ball play, you’d think he might have made it in porno.”

He did not, however, and no one else has made porno of him, either. None that I could find, anyway.

28) 1894 Kentucky Derby winner Chant the Horse

There’s enough porn of horses on the Internet to tear a human mind apart, but none of those horses is Chant, the winner of the 1894 Kentucky Derby. After his victory, Chant went on to have a long life and a mildly successful racing career, eventually siring “a few stakes winners,” according to Wikipedia. No one was jerking it to daguerrotypes of him back then, though, and they’re not making rude .jpgs of him now. Rest in dignity, Chant. (Gross tidbit: Seabiscuit was, unfortunately, not so lucky in the Rule 34 department.)

29) Apple executive Eddy Cue

You know him from Apple‘s big media events, and from rocking gross sandals while courtside for the Golden State Warriors‘ playoff games. You don’t know him from pornography! He has money and power, which are reputedly sexy, but no one has bothered to Photoshop Eddy Cue nude. Maybe it’s the footwear?

30) SpongeGar and Primitive Sponge

Christ on a cracker, there’s a lot of Spongebob Squarepants porn. More like Spongebob No-Pants, am I right? If this pineapple under the sea’s a’rockin’, and so on. But for this brief moment in history, there’s no porn of SpongeGar, the Spongebob ancestor sometimes confused with “Primitive Sponge.”  Given the recent proliferation of SpongeGar and Primitive Sponge memes, though, there will be hentai cave-paintings of them all over the Internet soon. Get ready. 

31) Yeezy Boosts

Kanye West‘s sought-after footwear has been described as “shoe porn” by those who covet it, and “ugly af” by those who can’t afford it. But is there actually porn of a pair of Yeezy Boosts? Not that I could find. And that’s surprising, because sneaker fetishism is a real thing. But men who get off on destroying sneakers apparently haven’t trashed the rare Yeezy Boost 350s. (Stunt YouTubers have wrecked pairs of Yeezys, but only in the same silly and nonsexual way a YouTuber might destroy anything rare and expensive for fun.)

32) Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth Holmes, embattled founder of blood testing startup Theranos, recently had her net worth downgraded by Forbes from $4.5 billion to zero amid allegations of problems with the company’s test results. Multiple government agencies are now investigating.

Prior to that, though, Holmes was one the brightest rising stars in the tech world, drawing comparisons to Apple founder Steve Jobs. She was the youngest self-made female billionaire in U.S. history.

There’s no porn of her, at least none that I could find. That’s absolutely a good thing, but it’s also unexpected.

Powerful women are some of the most popular subjects of Rule 34. Notable women on both sides of the political spectrum, from Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren to Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter, have had their heads Photoshopped onto nude bodies. And the business elite aren’t immune: Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg has also been a target.

In the shadow of the Fappening, the 2014 leak of nude celebrity photos, it’s worth looking at the Internet’s gendered double standard around porn, and how Rule 34 reflects and reinforces it. When it comes to real people, not cartoon characters or inanimate objects, the rule is more like: If she exists, there’s porn of her. 

It’s heartening that Holmes is an exception to the trend of fake porn being used to play out some misguided attempt at dominance over powerful, successful women. It’s despicable that an exception is so rare to find.

33) HeroQuest

You’d think every remotely nerdy unit of intellectual property would have been repurposed to serve some 4chan geek’s sexual fantasies by now. But not HeroQuest, the greatest game of all time! A cracking game! Now that’s a gargoyle!

34) Dr. Ryuta Kawashima

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnzUW8xbpzc

If there’s one domain where Rule 34 truly holds sway, it’s anime. But if there’s another one, it’s video games. That’s why it was so hard to find a video game character that there’s no porn of. We must therefore applaud Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, whose digital likeness appears in Nintendo’s Brain Age, for avoiding becoming the subject of a sexual fetish. There is a porn parody of Brain Age, but Dr. Kawashima doesn’t appear in it. “Dick Drilling’s Lewd Word Self Training” is instead hosted by adult actress Hikaru Wakana.