My Fetish Is So Weird I Had To Invent A New Type Of Porn
Our source for this article, "Tim," has a pretty specific fetish, which we'll let him describe in his own words: "I've always been, since puberty, turned on by the concept of girls betting their clothes and losing them." He is, largely, attracted to somewhat shy women doing this and being embarrassed by it.
On its own, there's nothing exceptional about this. Many (most?) of you reading this have your own weird, super-specific kinks. But we're going to guess y'all enjoy them in the privacy of your own home/sex dungeon/the literal belly of a whale (we don't judge). Tim decided to turn his particular kink into a full-time business. What follows is the story of how one man built an erotic empire -- and what he lost in the process.
It Started With An Inexplicable, Lifelong Turn-On
Most great creations begin with an unfulfilled urge. A consumer has an appetite for a product that doesn't exist in the marketplace and is forced to create it on their own -- the inventor of the sandwich was just a guy who wanted a full meal he could eat with one hand in an era before blenders. Well, it's a good bet that your favorite pornmonger got started the same way.
The more things they could do with one hand, the better.
For many years, Tim's fetish was something kept between him, his significant others, and numerous tissues. The internet changed that. "As time went by," he explains, "and the internet grew, I found other people with similar interests, and they were all kinda lamenting that there was not much content for our specific kink." Yes, kids, there was a time when not every ultra-specific fetish had an entire sprawling community dedicated to it, complete with its own jargon ("Oh, you're looking for Steve Buscemi dragon transformation autofellatio? Did you know there's a big SBDTA convention in town next month?"). This was the early 2000s, and the porn boom hadn't fully kicked in. The number of porn-related URLs increased by roughly 1,700 percent from 2000 to 2004. Even at that point, there were only 1.6 million porn sites -- by 2013, there were nearly 25 million.
There's a one-in-eight chance your grandfather is touching himself right now because you foolishly taught him how the Google works.
Tim wasn't the first person to make porn out of his very specific kink, but he was probably the second. "Somebody had started a site a few years earlier with this particular content. But it was still images only; that's pretty much all there was at the time," he says. "Eventually they started publishing videos." But, that site went out of business (after getting sued by a patent troll) and Tim heroically stepped up to fill the void. The fetish is girls playing games where they bet their clothes one item at a time, while the viewer excitedly waits to see who "loses." Pretty straightforward as far as fetishes go.
"I bought a cheapie video camera, got a hotel suite," Tim remembers. He found a number of models on Craigslist and, since this was 2004, he was rightfully concerned that they might be violent serial killers, rather than sexy ladies. He took appropriate precautions: "My friend Jeb came along with me and brought a baseball bat."
Usually, when baseball bats mix with porn, the actors demand a lot more money.
You Meet Some Wonderful People Recruiting Porn Stars On Craigslist
Most creative tasks look easy until you try them. Like internet porn -- there are probably all sorts of difficult challenges for a newcomer, right? No, not really. Tim makes it sound like any of us could start tomorrow.
The title of his first Craigslist ad was, "Get Paid To Play Games!" and he explained in the body of the message that they were doing a shoot "where we need some models to do some stripping games." Not only were the two models who showed up a good, uh, physical fit for the roles, they also knew a shitload more about making videos than Tim or Jeb, who we're going to picture as Jeb Bush for the remainder of this article because it makes us smile.
"Don't just look at her titties, jiggle them. Faster. Niiiiiiice."
So Tim's Craigslist models showed him the ropes of filming, because, he says, "I didn't know a thing. I had no tripod, I had no lights." He'd planned on using the hotel's lights at first, not knowing "that'd turn everything orange." At this stage, Tim was so nervous he had trouble asking the girls to rub themselves in oil, do jumping jacks -- pretty tame stuff, from the perspective of a pornographer. But thankfully, "They were friendly, smart, and they thought it was adorable the way I blushed when they walked out naked. That was a theme for my early shoots."
Low camera shots are an overexcited rookie porn director's best friend.
So there was some luck involved -- Tim says if he'd gotten less-helpful models that first time, he might have abandoned the whole enterprise instead of turning it into a lucrative living for the next nine years. "Sometimes I wonder if there's some sort of providence out there that likes my site and wants to see it succeed."
Sometimes, Laziness Is The Best Policy
Knowing the premise of the videos, you'd imagine Tim would have scripted these "games" fairly heavily, to make sure he got the most sellable outcome from a porn-maker's point of view. But early on, he decided to commit to making all the "games" his models played fair. Not out of any moral concerns, but because writing scripts is hard: "I am unbelievably, almost superhumanly lazy." He did try including a little scripted plot for his second and third video shoots: "For one shoot, I had to pretend that one girl had stolen the other's boyfriend." But he quickly decided even that was too much work.
"The girls we were hiring were models, not actresses," Tim says. So he decided the best strategy would be to actually have his models play real games of chance, and "what happens, happens." This new strategy, if we're using the most charitable definition of the word "strategy" imaginable, wound up working much better than Tim had predicted. See, his fans weren't interested in sexy scripted videos with professional actresses.
No one wants to hear your 75th variation of a "I got two pair" joke.
The exact appeal of Tim's particular kink is that these are "good girls" and boys awkwardly flirting with one another and very much embarrassed about losing games and stripping off their skivvies. If the models are awkward or aren't quite sure what to do, that just helps sell it. He had invented an art form that he could screw up only by doing it too well.
First Comes Success, And Then Come Obstacles
Tim released his first "poor quality" video for free. "Because I didn't know what I was doing," he says. But after four shoots, he decided to try and make a profit. This was in September of 2007. "The response flabbergasted me," he says. On that first day he brought in $850 selling his videos on Clips4Sale, a website you can visit right now and find Tim's porn on, if you look hard enough. In his first month, Tim made exactly $3,521.74. He was still working as a software engineer at that point and continued for the next four years, but his pornographer side gig was making a nice income. Even so, Tim insists he didn't see it as a business at first. It was "just as more of a hobby that was suddenly bringing in thousands of dollars."
Next time you ask, "Who actually pays for porn?" remember the correct answer is, "Everybody, apparently."
But early on in his career as an impresario of erotic delights, the otherwise unreasonably lucky Tim took a shot to the chops from Lady Fate: He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a disease that sucks pretty damn hard. MS can cause blindness, tremors, and a whole host of other problems that make it difficult to work a full-time job. Over time, his porn career morphed from "hobby" to something of a retirement fund. He now relies on his website as a source of income and for a sense of purpose. That said, the last few years have been tough for niche porn purveyors.
First, there's the fact that polite society just doesn't approve of porn -- which extends even to the financial institutions where you're trying to deposit huge paychecks. Tim had his bank account with Washington Mutual, which was acquired by Chase during the 2008 recession. And then, four years into his career, his bank decided they were done with him. "I got a letter from Chase informing me they were closing my accounts without explanation, without warning. It could be that they found out how I got my living," he says.
"Come back when you've found honest work, like drug-dealing or running a cockfighting ring."
Tim's not just being paranoid, nor is he the only porn person that Chase slammed the door on -- apparently receiving a $25 billion bailout makes you into kinda a prude.
"Too big to fail" definitely didn't refer to the size of their balls.
Tim's porn operation also ran afoul of Google. "It really hurt us when Google decided to stop accepting ads for adult content. I never understood why. People go to porn on the internet, but they won't take our money. We were kicked off of YouTube and kicked off of Dailymotion and kicked out of Model Mayhem."
Model Mayhem is, essentially, a dedicated Craigslist for modeling work. It seemed like the answer to Tim's filthy dreams. "Their site is set up to do nudity; they allow people to advertise as looking for nudity," he says. But they don't allow anything that falls under the heading of porn.
You're only allowed to get naked naturally, not thanks to a bad beat at the roulette wheel.
And that's kind of the general story with being a porn producer. Conventional internet wisdom is that "everybody" consumes porn, at least sometimes. That may be true, but it's also true that a majority of Americans view it as immoral and would be OK with putting more legal restrictions on the industry. We watch the stuff, and then we hate ourselves for it, and then we punish the people who make it. Don't ask why; it's just how polite society works.
Yes, You Can Ruin Porn For Yourself
The dot-com economy is a series of bubbles, as untapped markets quickly get tapped to shit. Over the last five years, per-video advertising rates have dropped like a rock (for all types of videos, even without boobs), even as streaming online video has become a larger and larger industry. To stay profitable, Tim has turned to porn trade conventions like Fetish Con to make video production more economical:
"Clips4Sale: We can't pay you outright for your work, but this is close enough, right?"
And we mean he shoots videos right there at the convention. The sheer density of kinky people makes it a perfect time to film months' worth of videos, all at a much lower cost than he'd pay to slowly draw in models over the course of a year. "We've gone there eight years now, and we get about a half a year's material in one week. But it's a hell week; we're shooting constantly." Just a sleepless marathon of filming porn girls playing strip Twister.
For some, a harmless attempt at a world record. For others, a hardcore orgy in the making.
But each of those videos will make less money than before. The rest of the world has jumped on board the "girls making naked bets" train, so there's now plenty of competition even for that specific fetish. "Sales have been way down, either from the lack of Google ads or saturation," Tim says. This has created a sort of arms race in which video makers are forced to be more and more explicit. "Every time we push the envelope, people seem to like it," he says. "In the early days it was very tame. You have to do jumping jacks or rub baby oil into your breasts. Since then things have gradually escalated."
This creates an unexpected problem, in that the fetish's fans are "into the whole embarrassment aspect," as Tim puts it. On the other hand, he says, "If you can find a girl willing to take four cocks at once, she's usually not embarrassed about it." Also, it seems like there's a pretty stark line between "I want to see a modest girl giggling because she lost a game of Truth Or Dare!" and "I WANT TO SEE A GIRL FORCED TO PERFORM SEX ACTS SHE IS VISIBLY UNCOMFORTABLE WITH."
"If it's not double-digit cocks, what's the fucking point?"
Add it all up and you wind up with a man for whom porn has lost its magic. More than 500 videos into his career, Tim is desensitized. "I no longer blush when I see the models come out naked. I used to hesitate when I said things like, 'After this, could you just sort of ... touch yourself there?' These days I'm more comfortable saying, 'You three go over there and take her.'" He added, with some sorrow in his voice, "I rarely get turned on by my own material."
Obscure fetishes actually helped save the human race: Find out how in Robert Evans' new book, A Brief History Of Vice!
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