i had written this up a few nights ago and deleted it bcuz it felt like, rambly and incoherent, but before cohost goes down for good i really do wanna say that like, the environment it bred for porn and erotic art did feel very unique. i dont really go out of my way to look at porn anymore, drawn or otherwise, because so very much of it is heavily informed by the tropes of an industry that is all but designed to reinforce heterosexual male-centric sexual experiences. things that are coated in sexualized shame and disgust, that promote and reinforce every unhealthy idea about sex that society force feeds us from day one. but here, divorced from the numbers game, in an environment where there's no benefit to playing into all those popular tropes, i feel like there was a lot more room for erotic art that felt like sincere expressions of desire and sexuality.
not to say there wasn't any like, disembodied dicks surrounding an anime woman declaring that her only purpose in life is to service cock, but there was plenty of other stuff, and i saw artists ive followed for years start to experiment and try new things with how they expressed themselves. there was a lot more stuff that felt like it was really celebrating sex, reveling in the beauty of it, and the one thing i hope is that a little of that is carried into other spaces once cohost is gone for good.
I’ve talked about this at length within several friend groups and the general consensus is also that the way porn is consumed on other sites is vastly different than here.
Mainly, the big one being Twitter, there’s a numbers game adding into how it’s consumed. Artists become Brand Names and the Brand Names gotta play nice with the masses that make their Numbers. Within these Big Numbers, come Trends and those trends have turned into a circle jerk of shame about being horny, shame over more fringe kinks, sexualizing the shame, sex is scandalous and taboo no matter how blasé or extreme the kinks are.
It is a constantly churning machine of “god I’m such a horny freak for this”, whatever the this turned out to be.
Here though, there was freedom from that, sex and kink for the sake of enjoyment, absent of algorithm, organic exploration. It was nice. It was so, so nice.
I’ll miss this.