if i see one more fucking haha relatable!!!1!! comic or some shit from a SFW artist making fun of "wow, the comments on this horny pic sure are HORNY amirite????" or "wow! porn sure is the ticket to easy street AMIRITE???" im gonna fucking go nuclear
fuck, i saw one today that was making fun of people who DONT post horny comments on fetish art. and instead engaged with other aspects of the artwork! why! why are you making fun of folks engaging with art shut the fuck up!!!!!
I'm going to be real for a second, and in a way I'm not often publicly.
For years, probably for most of my life, I was aware of the tactic of "sex sells." So much marketing, particularly towards men, was, and is, focused on either showing you hot babes, promising a more robust sex life, or somehow elevating your status based on what sex does for you.
And I hated it. Most people hate advertising, so "sex sells" felt like a trick to me. They were talking down to me. They thought I was dumb enough to fall for it? Eat shit. Sex does the opposite of sell me on things.
This created what was ultimately a very toxic association in my brain where being horny was bad. They want me to be horny. And sure, I "get horny," but only on my own terms. Your beer commercial or cologne or body wash or whatever? I refuse to entertain the thought.
Then we had the early internet, right, where it felt like everybody was shunning the "attention whore." People with big personalities who are establishing an online identity and kind of control the spotlight wherever they go. And these two ideas comingled -- you can't control my sexual interest, you can't be an attention whore -- leading to what I think is this kind of behavior. And that's not even touching on upbringing and how sexual content is often treated very differently and more harshly than even the worst violence, etc. etc. etc.
Shit, it's even anime. The whole "all anime fans must be child predators and thus anyone with an anime avatar can never be trusted" idea, right. I've been around places online full of people on both sides of that coin, and I can tell you for certain that there are normal, human, well-adjusted anime fans.
But it all mixes together. All of it. And it establishes this idea of what "a pervert" looks like online, and it's a perception that just isn't true.
Something I have been making active progress with myself over the last, I dunno, 10 or 15 years, maybe more, is being more accepting of NSFW artists and more accepting of my own feelings about what they produce. And to some degree, I think I have Twitter to thank for this, because either I'll be looking into a cool artist or I'll see a weird username or avatar, and I invariably end up on the account of someone who does cheesecake or even just straight up pornography.
And there was a version of myself, many, many years ago, that would see an account like that and be kind of upset at it. After all, this is an individual selling sex and being an attention whore. The worst kind of person, right?
But, in spite of everybody hating Twitter's inability to keep follows and likes private, I'd see people I admire and respect following some of these accounts. People I know to be intelligent. Creative. Successful. Well-adjusted. Not perverts. Some of them were even my good friends.
And slowly my eyes began to open to the idea that, like, it's... okay to admire that kind of artwork? Maybe you don't always have to hide it? Maybe it's not always bad? Some people like the shapes, the forms, the motion. Some people dress to be sexy on purpose -- not to sell you anything, but just because they like the way they feel. They like themselves and want to show off how good they think they look. Or how good they think their artwork is.
And that's better than okay. That's good! Great, actually! Flaunt what you're good at, even if it's just being hot as hell. Nudity can be beautiful. Sex can be beautiful. And a lot of other positive things, too. There shouldn't be any shame in that.
And I wish more people could have that realization.
