Last night I visited kink.com.
The offices are in the city and I’ve been thinking about taking a tour for a while. Overwhelmed with all things involving internet browsing, looking at pictures of naked woman after naked woman was no different. It made me think, especially on a porn site where you’re confronted with at least 50 images directly in front of you, how important branding yourself and being unique is. I would think you would need a character or strong persona to succeed, yet the top earners (which they show off to the side on the site) are the most vanilla looking people. It reminded me of an episode of “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” a British show someone turned me onto awhile back. After one episode I decided it wasn’t my kind of show, but in that one episode the main character shows up to her client’s wearing what you’d expect: a skin tight mini dress, excessive makeup, and stilettos. The session doesn’t go well. The guy tells her that she didn’t listen to his requests. She says something like, “I decided to switch it up. You couldn’t want that.” She offers to come back at no charge since she ignored his requests. The following session she was wearing a fitted white t-shirt, jeans, casual shoes, and natural makeup. That was what he wanted. The sex was incredible. He was presented as a highly successful, professional male. Maybe once you reach that level of success, “normal” girls become hard to find and they turn into something you’d pay for.
I thought about accessibility being a much desired trait; it becomes a thing of fantasy. Seemingly normal people are now late night luxuries. People will pay for a woman who looks exactly like the woman right next to them in bed. I’m sure the one in real life in not accessible. She probably has headaches all the time and has her period every week. The average person is probably fantasizing about someone they could spend the rest of their life with, someone who could raise their kids, someone who they could take vacations with, and all while jacking off.
Then you have the stuff of fantasy that seems inaccessible. There are communities and cultures dedicated to every fetish you can imagine; it’s all accessible, but not socially. You do not want to come out about your interest(s). These porn stars are also the high earners. They bring to life moments that the average person doesn’t dare talk about.
What was missing on this site, which seemed to have just about everything, was androgyny. It got me researching and androgyny is missing from the internet in general (as far as porn goes). Androgyny is something I’ve always been sensitive to because Robert’s a huge fan and it was of the many things that made me jealous for a while. My body was almost there but I had breasts. I tried the short hair thing. It wasn’t something he wanted; it was just something he wanted to look at. It wasn’t his type, it was his fantasy. I learned to respect that.
A quick internet search later and I found this thread. It’s intelligent and insightful. I was particularly impressed by one of the commenters who is a psychology student. He was able to make a few correct call outs about the original poster’s sexuality.
Take a gander:
A word that’s tossed around this thread is “mild.”
My fantasy is to be an androgynous internet porn star. I fantasize about fetishizing “mild” and serving people who find eroticism in limbo.
Being the middle is a hard place to be. It doesn’t make me feel good – I want to be one place or another.
I’m going to spend today embracing neutrality. When you are neither here nor there, neither this nor that, then you can be everywhere, you can be everything.
drearose 