I deleted my gallery. Here's why, along with my take on the whole universe of WG art and fetishism, and my place in it. With some bad language. If you like it, feel free to link it.

It's long. If you're thirsty, get your drink now.

First, and most obviously, I haven't posted anything in ages, so it's not like anyone will notice much of a change.

Now then. I never throw anything out. I save ATM receipts, Post-it notes reminding me of dentist appointments that happened two years ago, and yellowed spiral notebooks filled with stupid cartoons I drew in high school -- some dirty, most not. But I've given serious consideration to deleting any record of my artwork from my hard drive. The only thing stopping me is the fact that, well, it's not really mine. I just colored stuff for other people.

But regardless of its exact nature, I couldn't get around the fact that I hate my art. That's partly because the old work just isn't as good as what I could do now; I've done a lot of non-arousing "normal" art in the time since my last post, and it's been good practice. Mostly, though, I hate my art because my art makes me hate myself.

I know, I know. We're all different, everyone is special, and you can't change who you are. Everyone has their quirks and their perversions, and whatever yours are, you can't change them. Whatever you like, you'll always like, so you might as well live honestly, in a way that lets you enjoy it. And that seems lovely until you remember that there are plenty of people who receive sexual gratification from activities that are illegal, or simply impossible. They don't get to have their fun, and chances are they'll never find a partner with whom they can be honest.

What I like (and anyone reading this can guess what it is, since they probably like it too) is neither illegal or impossible, but I can't see a way in which it is healthy or ethical. My fantasies, when you get down to their nasty core, revolve around meeting a woman in decent physical health who wants to become much less healthy, who wants to radically rearrange her life and mine for the sake of helping us get off. My chances of finding a partner who wants this are slim (though I've been lucky enough to meet a few), and my chances of finding such a partner who does not experience massive health problems because of our activities are virtually non-existant. Both myself and this hypothetical partner are evolutionary dead ends.

This rant has been building up in my head for years. It's not based on a sudden impulse or "awakening" of any sort. I have not found God, or adopted a strict code of sexual morals. I still masturbate pretty much constantly, and maintain a high level of enthusiasm for out-of-wedlock fucking. When I was much younger, hitting puberty and first becoming aware of what I liked, I asked God to make me like the same boring things everyone else likes. I've since heard stories about gay children of conservative parents making the same request. God didn't do anything for them, and He didn't do anything for me, and I even had the advantage of being straight.

I'm not killing myself over this. That would be stupid. The world has problems a hell of a lot nastier than mine, and if I'm not willing to kill myself over those, then I can over this, or at least endure it. A little bit of personal conflict doesn't hold a candle to an honest-to-god war. And anyway, I spent my childhood wanting a fucking jet pack, and I'm not about to die before I get one.

If a doctor develops some amazing therapy that could make me change, I would be the first one in line, desperate to love the same banal crap as everyone else. I envy the people who can honestly say they're aroused by the "Girls Gone Wild" infomercials. "But wait a second," you say, "Nobody's really normal! Everyone has something unusual about them." That's true. Nobody's completely normal, but a lot of them are pretty damn average. I just want to be in the majority for once, without having to fake it.

I'd hate to sound like I'm judging any of you. Maybe it's easier for some of you. Maybe you're more confident in what you like, or have found more acceptance from people around you, or just don't care what other people think. I don't really care what they think either, but I can't deny that they're still there. I can't deny the forced politeness my family exhibits when I introduce them to someone I'm dating. When the holidays come around, my mother will buy my girlfriend a gift, usually clothing -- a lovely gesture on its own -- only to be mortified when she discovers it's too small. My sister will invite her to the gym.

Likewise, I can't deny the destructive and anti-intellectual "community" which has sprung up around this preference. Of course it's full of foul old men who have no idea how to treat women like human beings, as well as sniggering teenage boys trying to pass themselves off as impossibly idealized women. That barely qualifies as a problem; it's par for the course on any internet-based community. This topic, though, brings out behaviors several measures worse. I can't reconcile my hipster-geek life, or my liberal do-gooder beliefs, with a culture that seems to idolize some of the worst parts of American society. People on these sites talk about McDonalds and Wal-Mart in tones of near-reverance, and obsessively parrot loathsome catchphrases about everything being "bigger in Texas".

I hate the insularity, the way people internalize and repeat the jargon until it seems like they've forgotten an outside world even exists. I've met people who spoke that way in real life, flinging about terms like "BBW" and "FA" in regular conversation. I wanted to smack the crap out of them. The only thing stopping me was my knowledge that I would probably lose the ensuing fight. I'm a skinny motherfucker, after all, and I quite enjoy being a skinny motherfucker -- and that failure to show solidarity is considered a strike against me in "the community". Why I would want this community's approval is beyond me, populated as it is with people who have never known a moment of introspection, leading small and unchallenging inner lives.

In the end, I had to ask myself who I was. Was I the clever, nerdy guy who loves overanalyzing pop-culture and drinking good beer and having long, confusing conversations with my friends and listening to Tom Waits and reading comics about everything except superheroes and dreaming of becoming the next Bill Hicks or Hunter S. Thompson or Neil Gaiman? Or was I the guy who gets to live out one stupid fantasy? Ideally I could be both, but ideal situations aren't exactly realistic. To spend any more time than I absolutely must in this community is to give my tacit approval to people who shouldn't have it, and ideas I find unconscionable.

I hope to be proven wrong someday. I hope that cool, intelligent people will show up, or at least make themselves more visible, and I hope they can continue having interesting and satisfying lives outside of this world even as they privately participate in it. I hope they can avoid becoming mindlessly fixated like so many people in the community. I hope people can understand themselves, and view their partners as real people, and operate with a basic knowledge of common fucking decency. I hope we can reach a point where we can start calling out the bastards who give us a bad name. Really, I suppose I just hope for an injection of passion and intellect and youth, with all the connotations those words used to carry before they became marketing tools or slurs, and for real enthusiasm to replace the insincere self-esteem-boosting we currently see.

I do not expect this to change anything.