(NSFW) What should pro artists do with their weird fetishes?

Public Post

Hello, Patrons and other friends.

This is a public post because, despite the NSFW themes, this is an important message that I wish more people were talking about in art. Even with the cultural revolution of the internet, we are still in the growing pains of what it means to create pornography or touch sexual topics at all while also existing as nuanced individuals with platonic--and sometimes even professional--lifestyles.

I had to write this post because one of my mentees is into vore (you know, like the suffix -vore, a fetish showing or implying the imminent consumption of one person by another). My mentee and I talk often on the merits of creating esoteric fetish work, in this case different kinds of this particular niche and how some concepts are just destined to be awkward. My mentee faces a disconnect between their public-facing work and their fetish work: fetish work seems to abandon all his skills learned in critical study in favor of parroting a select IP. The purpose of this post is not to praise or decry rule 34 (shorthand for fanart that is pornographic) . But as my student, this labour-intensive porn became an auto-pilot for him, a source of frustration against the professional portfolio work he desires. There couldn't possibly be a middle-ground between our sexual ambitions and and our professional goals in a public-facing world, right?

In my opinion, it is a travesty how difficult it is to find these discussion points written down anywhere. Even in the sex-positive cultures of the furry fandom, even in the Porn Industry, one must dig to find an intersecting point of sexual content and purpose… and maybe even providence. In this post, I'm going to do just that. I'm going to talk to you about what I think pornography and/or sexual art is, and how yours truly, despite his 29 years of church attendance, found himself morally obligated to create sexy art of animal people.

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I. What is "pornography", and what is "art with sexual themes"?

During leisure time in university, I had the pleasure of watching this documentary on the history of pornography. While I'm not a historian or sexologist, I'm a fan of taking little bits and running with them, this one being a highlight:

There was explicitly sexual content on the walls of Pompeii, but it wasn't for masturbating. Onanism, at that time, was seen as the waste of a valuable resource. The sexual content on those walls was a mark of culture and expression, not a thing to enjoy in private.

Pornography = an idea to be consumed privately, in secret gratification

Sexual Art = an idea to be consumed in [semi] public, studied, and intuitively reflected on

That's the oversimplification that I love. As you probably guessed, those aren't mutually exclusive terms. It's largely up to the viewer's context. Pornography under critical study is no longer porn, but a revealing of the humanity under fleshy distractions. And for someone dieting, a good picture of a cheeseburger or hot and gooey pizza could literally be food porn.

Soon we will talk about Puritanical Christianity exacerbating all this, but for now keep in mind that simple difference between the porn and the art of things.


II. What would Grandma think?

Q1 2008, my sophomore year of university, I was gathering my sketchbooks before returning to my Christian school. There was one particular sketchbook I couldn't find, one that had a drawing of Falco Lombardi and Fox McCloud from the Nintendo franchise, Starfox. This was not the kind of drawing I wanted to show my parents.

"Mom, do you know where my sketchbooks are?"

"They're in your backpack," she called from upstairs, "I wanted to show my coworkers your art before you went back to school."

The sketchbook, that sketchbook, was leaning up on the backpack, front and center. My stomach sunk. The page I immediately flipped to was missing. Mom had taken it, diligently removing any paper leavings from the binding.

At the very start of the four hour drive to school, I asked if Mom saw the drawing. She had. She was disappointed but wasn't angry. She asked me what Grandma would think. Despite her anal-retentive tendencies, when things really hit the fan my Mom always kept her cool. I laughed off the awkwardness of it all, and we still loved each other. She bought me a chocolate bar, and I said I wasn't going to do stuff like that anymore.

Six years later, the beginnings of BEOKAY were brewing. I trusted myself and my God on a whole new level as I created art about the darkness I felt inside. With mixed media I mourned the sexual encounters I wanted that were destroying me, the sex life I could never have with my wife, and all the lies my community branded on my heart concerning queerness and what sex should be. These were dark and unsettling paintings, but they were what I needed. They were true. Many other people seemed to understand.

The Empty Circle was painted in the autumn of 2015, and shared at IlluXCon. It now belongs to a private collector who is definitely not my mom, along with the rest of the Animus Solo triptych.

"What would Grandma think?" is a great question. The Grandma is an archetype of matriarchal purity and wisdom. This is clearly why it feels objectively amazing to have a grandma that is proud of you. My grandma died a few weeks ago, about a year after she disowned me over my queerness. She could never love me the same way again, she said, when I came out. Grandma may have woken up at 5AM to pray for all her children or grandchildren, but she wouldn't once listen to me like an adult. That disrespect was a tradition my mother inherited when raising her children.

"What would your mother think?" is similar. Our mothers do make us, in one way or another. Whether we like it or not, we inherit some of their dysfunctions and their virtues. In my last big conversation with my mom, the day before Grandma died, she too pushed me. She told me she already knows everything she needs to about sexuality, gender, and God's will. (She has not read The Bible but does go to Church on occasion, enjoys couples' devotionals and marriage retreats, and avoids befriending people who aren't already like her.) She blocked me on Facebook after learning that my partner is trans. She won't allow us into her home, because it would imply that she supports our "lifestyle".

What would Grandma think?

A better question is,
"Why should Grandma's opinion matter?"

If the tone of that made you wince, pretend I wrote it this way,
"Will my Grandma help me make good art?"

A flower and landscape kind of gal, Grandma was turned off by even the innocuous creature designs in my concept art portfolio. She worshiped Pretty Shampoo Commercial Jesus, not some radical brown Levantine bum. She was old-world immigrant and small-town American. And she was not equipped to serve my art or my pursuit of Truth. Thomas Kinkade grannies and Evangelical Christian soccer moms are not going to understand or care about my work. My work, much like the sexual themes in the Bible that they avoid thinking about, constricts their nice little boxes, their human-shaped god built around their desire for a heavenly father they can be faithful to.

I try to let Grandma go, but I'm still angry. I was invested in mine for 30 years and despite loving me on some level, she still threw me out like the trash. We never talked about ideas. She doted and she made wry little jokes that I loved, but I worry she died without seeing me.

What Grandma thinks only matters if your Grandma helps you love yourself. I wasn't at my Grandma's funeral because she was done talking to me one year ago. She'll never know the pain she caused me, and didn't trust me with her pain long enough for us to work things out. Despite my desire for an inner love and peace, I may shoulder that pain until I too have passed.

Life is too precious to let people like that control what you paint. Don't do it. Find the personal art you want to but are afraid of painting, then paint it for yourself anyway.

   
III. God, why do I like this stuff?

That drawing I did of Falco and Fox knockin' boots confronts me to this day. If I had the language to understand the context all those years ago, I certainly wasn't brave-enough speak it. At the time I played it off as a means for earning commissions, and that may have been true, but I didn't have the heart to tell her I drew it primarily for myself.

I wanted to see that image, so I drew it. I was barely old-enough to legally consume pornography, let alone draw it. Taboos made this desirable to pursue and disgusting to associate with. I had used furry porn as a moral high ground, a sexual outlet without victimizing any human being. I moved to gay furry porn after having it drilled into me that women were precious objects to protect while men were all sexual creatures deserving of dismissal. Human bodies could now be adorned with animal faces and tails, claws and fangs, paws and pads, furs and patterns. Those familiar with my personal brand of furry will know that human anatomy is the star of the show. Animal features and coloring is really just a coat of paint on my human experiences.

This posturing is a necessity in a culture that illustrated gay people (and really, anyone open about their sexuality) as cartoony deviants.

The idea of a drawn male body and an animal head was the moral loophole I had utilized since being addicted to human pornography at a young age. My attractions to anthropomorphic images would, perhaps, send me to Limbo instead of Hell, providing the rest of me was good-enough. These lessons were taught to me at a young age, decades before I could sort cultural narrative from God's will. Growing up in Evangelical Christianity forced me to find my own answers when teachers, pastors, and parents all worshipped a god too small to possibly contain my adult questions.

At the time, I didn't know how destructive my situation was, or how complicated my life was going to be because of this dynamic. But as a child who always wanted to be treated like an adult, I felt better knowing that I could compartmentalize my sexual exploits in the virtual world until I got straight-Christian-married and started a family.

That family didn't happen. Not in that shape, at least.

  
IV. Finding personal truths in hindpaws

I looked at my mentee's awkward vore image and was transported to ten years ago, working in my parents' basement, terrified of people finding out that I liked sexualized  art of people with animal heads.

With a graphics tablet and my own laptop, a 17-year-old Jonathan drew a couple furry porn sketches of video game characters. He knew they weren't drawn well, but the thrill of it was enough to excite him. He uploaded these onto a furry art website,  where they were promptly faved by several people. While that feedback was incredible, the excitement quickly died after checking the other pieces favorited by these strangers. They were all poorly drawn. These people didn't care about craft or ability as much as seeing fetish art of one character they obsessively searched for. I was part of this bad art obsession and knew it.

So… what would Grandma think?

Oh no, Grandma must never know about Kevin from Seiken Densetsu II and Lynx from Chrono Cross sporting erections!

And worse, I'm attracting people with crappy tastes in art. What are the consequences of having a fanbase that cares more about Rule 34 than about me as a person?

Of course they wouldn't care about me. It's because I'm not sharing the parts I love about myself. This porn I'm sharing is sharing only one part of me—the part that's ashamed and frustrated towards his sexuality. It doesn't show the Jonathan that loves others, that wants to help, that's trying to figure out his inner conflicts. It's just about wanting to be liked while being too ashamed to own it.

It won't surprise anyone to hear that awkward, poorly drawn porn still attracts people. Those desperate folks with poor tastes (myself included, sometimes), many whom can't draw for themselves, are starving for their unique flavor of porn. Artists catering to those tastes click into urges seated deep in the reptilian brain.  The stereotype of porn artists earning more money with less effort comes from here: sexual content provides a bonus layer of attention and accessibility to an artist looking to make money.

When an artist uploads art that shares only her sexual tastes and not the parts of herself that she loves, she will attract people who do not value her but rather what she can draw for them. Draw your fetishes to find fuck-buddies. Draw your soul to find friends. I've made good friends through designated fetish sites. Thanks to the intention that comes with in-person consent, many have found friends and family through kink scenes. But for creating and distributing fantastical porn online, the majority of your interactions are designed to not promote that kind of depth.

I just wish more people realized fetish and soul can exist in the same images.

Sexual themes are a long-standing tradition in human civilizations. Even your strict grandma's Bible uses straight-up pornographic themes as a literary device. Growing up in a Christian household is not an excuse to abstain from sexual themes, not if you take ownership of the complexities of Scripture and your own sexual nature as a human being.  

Back to last weekend, 2019, I was trying to verbalize all this to my mentee with the vore fetish. I remembered a moment when my own frustrations lead me to do an awkward drawing, and it taught me something surprising.

Angry, 2019 (left), Unpublished Sketch, 2007 (right) that I was planning on never showing anyone, ever.

The werewolf on the right was drawn purely from my sexual frustrations of twelve years ago. It's of Jon Talbain done in [my failed attempt at] the cartoony style from The Darkstalkers series. This uncanny, nude, hindpaw-focused R34 had so much more context than I realized at the time.

Most paw or foot-focused images didn't do it for me, so this image reveals my navigating that journey for understanding. Having paw pads and claws on big, gnarled extremities was a reminder that I was looking at something strong and bestial.  This posture denotes a desire to remotely embody a dominant and masculine expression, using a character I already had the hots for.  Earlier I recognized foot positioning as a means to show intention, subject/viewer relationship, etc… but this was my first time I was brazen enough to do something so crazy. Furry is a way to make drawing or appreciating a trait like feet more accessible, especially for someone not really into feet in real life. I'd say a lot of furry—and drawn porn in general—is a path to sexualizing human traits via visual proxy. Also of note, queer folks often associate and are attracted to monsters and creatures for their sense of otherness.  As a creative, I became a xenophile. As a queer person, I myself became a kind of monster amongst heteronormative standards, and solidified myself as a monsterphile.

The panther on the left, Angry, is part of my ANIMUS SOLO series. ANIMUS SOLO features tight square crops on aggressive figures. Angry is as relevant to this post as the 2012 image of Jon Talbain. Angry was created freshly in the face of my mother disowning me, my being declared dead to my grandma a year before she died, my un-Christ-like Christian upbringing that had no room to listen to me, and it's still about my sexual tastes. Since 2012, I was no longer a virgin. I had plenty of sexual experience, I viewed my beliefs from the outside, I studied enough South-Asian art to clue into the reasons contrasting palms and soles were compelling to me. I was resolved to "draw the angriest bottom-of-the-foot the world has ever seen".

Maybe you weren't expecting me to say this, but the biggest difference between the panther and the werewolf is not about being genuine. Both are genuine expressions of frustration. Both are venting in the face of ideology that views me as Less Than. But the panther is an image I wasn't ashamed of. On the contrary, I want my mom, my dead grandmother, and the rest of the Evangelical Christian World to see that panther and hear why I'm so angry. I don't want their apologies. I want them to shut the fuck up and listen to what they're doing to me and millions of other queer people.

The notes for Angry share even more details about this venting and how it fits into my past work. But this is art that must be shared. I've been doing work like Ramses the panther on my Patreon for the last four years. As a recovering sex addict, I must add artist statements to all my sexually charged pieces. No matter how turned on you are by my pieces, to see them is to see an honest illustration of not only my fetishes but my sex life, my divorce, my addictions… it's all in there. Even my commission prints I sell at furry conventions are coming from my desire to help people in this fantasy world be their best selves IRL. I'd say only 10% of American furries care enough to stop by my table, but those that do stop almost always the kinds of people that I'd want to befriend.

V. Hitting multiple targets

Say you're an artist, either professional or wanting to be professional, and you're into a weird but harmless fetish. Say it's hindpaws (gross, haha). What do you even do with that? Do you avoid drawing it and let other artists fulfill your fetish? Do you make a side account and monetize your sexual tastes? Do you live your life disgusted with yourself for not being more normal? (No, definitely don't do that last one.)

Here's what a professional artists (or really, anyone) should do with their fetishes:

Step 1: IDENTIFY YOUR TASTES
Start saving any pics that interest you. Consider it a mood board. Can you see recurring trends? Pay special attention to related images that do not turn your crank. This is the beginning of truly understanding your inclinations.

Step 2: CODIFY YOUR TASTES
With your moodboard in place, start writing down keywords of what you're finding sexy. Let's look at vore. It's not just about eating:

-predator/prey
-masculine/feminine
-entrapment & constriction
-fluid dynamics
-teeth, lips, and mouth
-hard next to soft
-sharp next round
-facial expressions
-submitting to the release of death
-trophies or props showing a successful hunt
-obstructed forms

With all the emotional baggage I faced, it was freeing to be able to write a list of exactly what I found sexy. All clients of sexy images should be doing this if they want to get the most bang (ahem) for their buck.

Step 3: PLUG IN YOUR CONTEXT
There is always, always a reason behind why something is attractive to you. That space between finding something hot or simply fascinating can be confusing for creatives who, ideally, should be able to love the design underlying everything they render. I've loved messy and gritty textures, for example, ever since I grew up in an OCD household where even seeing droplets on a counter or floor felt like something rebellious. It is important to note that your keywords, by themselves, will not be sexual.

The depths of your tastes are never simply "boobs" or "penis". Keep digging. You are not simply a pervert or a sexual deviant. You are a human coming from a complex space, so act like it. Taking this step will restore hope and direction in the place of a fear of being "found out" for these kinks that you didn't even ask to have.

Step 4: FIT THE BIG PICTURE INTO YOUR CAREER
Take your keywords, your moodboard, and your context. Now that you know the themes at the foundation of your sexual tastes, see if you can inject that energy into your public-facing work. The keywords in Step 2 will apply to many vore fans, but those bullet points can apply to so much more. I truly believe vore artists want to paint better fluid dynamics (not just drool, but water), more believably sharp features next to soft features (not just teeth, but weapons and skin), and more dynamics involving power struggles (not just pred/prey, but interpersonal conflicts). See how those don't necessarily need to include vore to be enjoyable or worthy of studying.

When clients propose ideas close to your keywords, encourage those traits. If not, see if the job could benefit from adding the keywords to your commission. It's easier to do a great job when you're excited about said job. Your clients will know when you're excited, and your career will keep building that positive momentum.


VI. Conclusion

In my creative process, applying Steps 1-4 unlocked new levels of joy and energy in my personal and commission work. I'm more selective about my work now, but have found more selective clients excited to work for me. You can have that too. It does require bravery, to be unapologetic about all your tastes and your personal needs, before combining both into the same image. But not only does it offer you new potential, it will help your work stick out and gain the attention of people who want to know you better for who you are. I kid you not, people will actually pay you because of who you are at your core, because you trusted the public with your heart of hearts.

Like most porn, it's safe to say >99.9% of furry porn is not designed to serve as a type of journal entry, nor is it a vulnerable illustration of what a person truly feels or needs. This lack of vulnerability doesn't invalidate pornography's use or sex appeal. Most of the furry stuff I've enjoyed isn't about those deeper meanings. But it's such a shame to operate in the furry fandom, a space that compulsively shares our ideals, without normalizing this kind of work.

The world doesn't need more superficial cool/sexy work right now. It needs art of you, the actual you. It needs comics of the part of you dealing with the parts you don't like, paintings of you pursuing the sexual traits you want to embody. With time, I anticipate this cognizance  being more prevalent in furry, but whatever culture you speak to already has room for this. In case you haven't noticed, the world could really use some genuine vulnerability right now, and I'll be damned if that realness can't be super hot sometimes.

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This post is a huge summary of over five years of personal philosophy. I have it all archived in my Black Hare tier of my Patreon, where I process my more private and sexual pieces, all paired with artist statements, before putting them out into the world. It's the most popular tier on my Patreon and you should absolutely check it out. But any donation on my Patreon means the world to me, so please offer what you can afford if these themes are important to you.

You can also download BEOKAY: The Dark Art of Self Therapy for even more examples of Steps 1-4 in action. And if you can't afford the price tag but could use the support, you're morally obligated to message me for a free download code.

Thanks for reading, my friends.

Love,

-J