THE WEEKND
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FOUNDER/DIRECTOR Carine Roitfeld PRESIDENT/CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld
CONTRIBUTORS Tomás Aciego Marc Asekhame Harry Carr Eugenie Dalland Davit Giorgadze Dean Kissick Slava Mogutin Sean Monahan Niki Pauls Tiana Reid Andrew Sauceda Christian Stemmler Tina Tyrell Winter Vandenbrink
CREATIVE/EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Patrik Sandberg MANAGING EDITOR Shelby Beamon ART DIRECTOR Oliver Shaw PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR/CASTING Evelien Joos MARKET & ACCESSORIES DIRECTOR Jennifer Yee DIGITAL DIRECTOR Joshua Glass CR STUDIO SENIOR PRODUCER Sasha Bar-Tur SENIOR FASHION EDITOR Ron Hartleben ASSOCIATE FASHION EDITOR Daniel Gaines CONTRIBUTING MEN'S MARKET EDITOR EJ Briones CONTRIBUTING MARKET EDITOR Aisha Rae EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT Anna Wells Crowley DIGITAL ASSOCIATE Hilary Shepherd ASSISTANT ONLINE EDITOR Sophie Shaw ASSISTANT FASHION EDITOR Lauren Fern CONTRIBUTING FEATURES EDITOR Kaitlin Phillips COPY EDITORS Zachary Brown Traci Parks PUBLISHER Jorge Garcia ADVERTISING MANAGER Mandi Garcia ADVERTISING MANAGER ITALY/SWITZERLAND HAW Italy/ Alessandra Viganò MANAGING PARTNER ODIS Management PRESS & COMMUNICATIONS Nike Communications PRE-PRESS PH Media, part of My Logical Group ralph@phmedia.com PRINT PRODUCTION Logical Connections, part of My Logical Group greig@logicalconnections.co.uk DISTRIBUTION Logical Connections, part of My Logical Group adam@logicalconnections.co.uk CONTROLLED CIRCULATION Logical Connections, part of My Logical Group jim@logicalconnections.co.uk
SPECIAL THANKS 16 Models Paris Art List Tanya Alian Blank Studios Lillie Blaustein Dana Brockman Jasmine Burgos Carmelo Carolyn Bruch Greg Chan Click Model DNA Models Kyle Hagler Home Agency Honey Artists Hannah McAleer Next Models Popsicle La Premium Models RED NYC Courtney Richter Leigh S. Soul Management The Troopers Billy Vong Wilhelmina Models INTERNS Nneka Alaka Tyler Artis MaKara Blake Alexa Carlson Abigail de Fulviis Anna Hochstöger Grey Hoffman Valerie Hsieh Alyssa Kelly Irene Kim Stella Kim Nico L-A Olivia Mitros Giovanna Osterman Léa Perrine Bryan Pingarron Taylor Raschillo Sade Ari Stark Jordan Veitinger Davis Vergnolle Jeremy Weinstein Tori White
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EDITOR'S LETTER 24 It’s 2020 A.D. and ye olde adage that “sex sells” is now a phantom of the previous century. A confluence of factors has bubbled to the surface, successfully inhibiting our general populace from widespread copulation: access to and volume of digital pornography; the ubiquitous broadcasting of sexual violence and its reckoning; fears of reproduction; attacks against ethical methods of birth control; the abandonment of gender; accelerated detachment from intimacy; dependence on our cell phones; and the simultaneous evolution of the digitally enhanced Instagram physique and its reactionary, the destigmatization of real bodies—these are some of the developments that spring to mind. Couple these with an increased erosion of taboos and fetishes—a hypernormalization of kinks, the neoliberal conceit that nothing is unnatural or shameful—and we’re quagmired in a waking oxymoron: sex now feels as insipid as it is elusive. Even Brad Pitt, the zenithal sex symbol of the past 50 years, has resigned himself to the treachery of dating apps—“I’ll have to add this to my Tinder profile,” he joked, picking up his Screen Actors Guild award for best supporting actor in January. Meanwhile, the more we’ve flat-
tened ourselves into an easily searchable, mappable populace online, mystery has evaporated in unison. Online traces of humor or politics obliterate the potential for romance: for centuries we’ve been conditioned to want what we can’t have, so what’s the fun if it’s all instantly accessible? The other day an e-girl I follow on Twitter put it best, adopting popular meme-speak to beg mercy of potential partners: “Please don’t hold my Twitter against me,” she wrote, “you’re so sexy aha.” Her fear is a righteous one. Today’s hot-blooded male seems like he’d rather be having sex with his Jordans. For a few seasons, menswear has been slyly adopting codes of the sexual underground, both in fit, at labels like GmbH and Givenchy, and detail, seen in the clothes of 1017 ALYX 9SM and Daniel Lee’s Bottega Veneta. Shoe straps, lapels, bag clasps, and harness details are one thing, but the iconographic coitus of collaboration is another. Men’s fashion has hit a fever pitch of, for lack of a better term, sex between brands, and everyone is so far up each other’s respective orifices that today’s consumer is breaking a sweat. As luxury shifts in today’s market, we’re more interested in the collector’s items that make
great Instagrams than we are in pieces we’ll actually incorporate into our wardrobes, but it feels like all this is about to change. The end of 2019 saw the release of the enthralling gambling caper Uncut Gems, starring a sweaty Adam Sandler as a jeweler with an addiction for making big bets. Not only did the movie resuscitate a Midtown, tri-state, nouveau-riche opulence as a viable style direction, but it was a reminder of how the Weeknd (appearing in a sequence as himself) came to prominence as our generation’s poet laureate of sleaze. Crooning about endless nights, orgies, and drugs, an angelic tenor narrating a descent into depravity, the Weeknd has managed to do the impossible by ascending to the pop altar while simultaneously maintaining something acutely unpopular: a sex drive. In CR MEN’s last issue, we surveyed the 2010s for meaning. In this issue, we want to know what’s next: this issue explores the future of fetishes—in objects, style, physiques, behaviors, and digital domains. This being the era of abstinence, we felt the timing couldn’t be better. And this contrarian impulse has foundations in the erotic: it feels so wrong it’s right. — PATRIK SANDBERG
Clothing DRIES VAN NOTEN Shoes BOTTEGA VENETA PHOTOGRAPHS Davit Giorgadze FASHION Christian Stemmler
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WEEKND PARTY UPDATE THE WEEKND by Tiana Reid PHOTOGRAPHS Davit Giorgadze FASHION Christian Stemmler
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LIKE TO WATCH? PHOTOGRAPHS Winter Vandenbrink FASHION Niki Pauls
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THE FUTURE OF FETISH TEXT Dean Kissick ARTWORK Tomás Aciego
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TRACKING NUMBERS PHOTOGRAPHS Harry Carr FASHION Ron Hartleben
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ICONOPHILIA TEXT Sean Monahan
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GETTING CHANGED PHOTOGRAPHS Marc Asekhame FASHION Eugenie Dalland
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DOLL PARTS PHOTOGRAPHS Tina Tyrell FASHION Andrew Sauceda
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LAW OF DESIRE PHOTOGRAPHS Davit Giorgadze FASHION Christian Stemmler
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OPPOSITE T-shirt Y/PROJECT Jeans VALENTINO PHOTOGRAPHS Davit Giorgadze FASHION Christian Stemmler
WEEKND PARTY UPDATE PHOTOGRAPHS DAVIT GIORGADZE
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FASHION CHRISTIAN STEMMLER
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WORDS: TIANA REID It was showtime on a fuzzy July evening in 2011 and I was standing on the floor at the Mod Club in Toronto’s Little Italy for the Weeknd’s debut performance. I had never felt more alive. In front of his three-piece band, he was wearing an army print jacket rolled up to his elbows with a beaded bracelet hugging his right wrist. He seemed a little scared but no one in the audience cared. Four months after the release of the Weeknd’s debut mixtape, House of Balloons, we were just happy to be there, aglow in the presence of a then-mysterious artist music bloggers called “experimental.” Aliveness was wafting all around me. About 600 of us became a “we” for 90 minutes that night. We—a group of self-described misfits, young Canadian fanatics—were finally joiners. Just days before, the indie weekly NOW Magazine called the concert “easily the most anticipated first show by a Toronto act. Ever.” We were watching his every move. Drake was watching from the balcony, people whispered, and so were some major music execs. The very local singer Massari tweeted, “The man is a legend in the making. Even Puffys [sic] People are in the Green Room with us lol amazing!!” But there was nothing funny about the fact that all this hype was happening where we lived. For once we were not on the outside looking in, but inside and looking at each other. “The best word I can think of to describe how I felt that night is euphoria,” the Weeknd, born Abel Tesfaye, tells me over email. “All those screaming fans were there to see me and I was overwhelmed. I was terrified, nervous, anxious and then when I sang the first note I felt euphoria. I was comfortable. I knew I was gonna do this for the rest of my life but I’ll never be able to duplicate that feeling.” Up until that exact moment, the Weeknd had maintained a degree of mystery to the public, having anonymously released his music on YouTube in 2010. The Weeknd’s early work was clearly the result of some study, a temperature-taking of the contemporaneous musical landscape, which was peskily slaphappy. (In Tesfaye’s breakout year, 2011, Katy Perry, LMFAO, CeeLo Green, the Black Eyed
Peas, Kesha, Wiz Khalifa, Bruno Mars, and Maroon 5 were all hot.) Music bloggers suggested the Weeknd offered a softer darkness to the witch house or darkwave of the late 2000s (Crystal Castles, Purity Ring, SALEM—some of them also Canadian), but no one quite predicted the Weeknd’s role in popularizing a new sound—a rotund sotto voce croon, a kind of lost rhythm, a nihilistic exhilaration— that would seep into the gamut of R&B and pop music. We didn’t know that, as Toronto kids, we’d have to give ourselves up before we gave him up to the elephantine labyrinth of American pop culture. It felt like he seduced the whole city with his serenades that night. For one evening we embraced, together, the instability, wreckage, and psychotic failures inside ourselves. And like a first high, we, too, knew we were never going to get that feeling back. Twenty-one that summer, I might have been high that night but if I wasn’t, it didn’t matter because I felt high. The Weeknd’s first show was better than the hype, better than the drugs. In the early 2010s, this new sound altered one’s own experience of a reality that felt like it was about to burst. This was before standard beauty preferred a surgical look, before the synthetic opioid fentanyl was named a crisis, the summer before Occupy Wall Street, though class warfare had long become the routine of life. Everything was falling but the ride was long and twisted. Though I wouldn’t have put it that way then, being high was more than escape but rather a kind of mindfulness, a way to cope. As the Weeknd semi-sung on the gauzy but grave “Loft Music”: “They say my brain meltin’ / And the only thing I’ll tell ’em is / I’m livin’ for the present and the future don’t exist.” “I’m fucking gone right now,” the Weeknd’s lyrics urged in other songs. “I’m what you need,” he told us, and strangely, he came across as 100 percent earnest. “A balloon is nothing if not captured breath,” wrote the poet and scholar Nathaniel Mackey in his 2017 epistolary novel Late Arcade. House of Balloons, the Weeknd’s breakthrough mixtape, is an apt metaphor for what comes after a party: the balloons pop, and the captured breath spreads itself
31 around. The albums kept coming, mashing three of his mixtapes (House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence) into a compilation called Trilogy. What superfans distinctly memorialized as a discrete moment became repackaged, commercialized, and subsequently remembered as shorthand. It is not so much that with the studio albums—Kiss Land (2013), Beauty Behind the Madness (2015), and Starboy (2016)—the Weeknd got more pop, as in happy, but rather, he got wildly popular. “One of the most visible pop stars in the world,” according to Pitchfork. Along with hyper-visibility came the common narrative about his fatalism and depression, and though these stories were consistent, they became less relatable as the accolades piled up. His contradictory ego began to scream the loudest, some complained. Over the years, the Weeknd still maintained a bad boy persona through his accounts of the demise of the party. Is he still doing drugs? “I have an off-and-on relationship with it,” he says. “It doesn’t consume my life but occasionally helps me open up my mind, especially when I’m creating, but when I perform I’m completely sober and try not to even drink. I’ve learned to balance thanks to touring.” Being high is always bittersweet. Getting off drugs requires company, as in “Coming Down.” Love is a kind of withdrawal, as in “Blinding Lights.” Attachment demands numbness, as in “Can’t Feel My Face.” If taking a mental break from living with the terribleness of life under capitalism is glamorous, the turbulence of drug dependence hurt as much as it helped. The Weeknd’s last full release, the 2018 EP My Dear Melancholy—complete with piercing melodies, sound as dilated as pupils—felt in many ways like a fuckyou to all the purist critics who said, with disdain, that he went pop. When I suggested as much to Tesfaye, he responded, “I try not to read too many reviews, especially if it’s negative, but I never made My Dear Melancholy with the intent on saying fuck you to anybody. It was just how I felt at the time. The sonic environment felt fitting for how I wanted to tell that story. I feel like I have sonic ADD and I can’t just stick to one sound and I feel like it irritates
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34 a lot of listeners but it’s just how my mind works.” At just under 22 minutes, the title of My Dear Melancholy literally addresses his state of sorrow. The EP’s opening track, “Call Out My Name” begins with an off-kilter trill, flowing into a crooning sex cry. We found each other / I helped you out of a broken place. You gave me comfort / But falling for you was my mistake. The album climaxes with “Wasted Times,” a song where Tesfaye somewhat crudely acknowledges romantic regret. Since this is an essay about pop music, this is going to sound annoying, but listen: Freud made a famous distinction between mourning and melancholy. Both are responses to loss. Mourning has a love object (a person or abstraction), but melancholia descends into pathology, a painful lack of engagement with the world. It’s an apathy toward love. “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty,” Freud wrote in 1917. “In melancholia it is the ego itself.“ The Weeknd’s music suggests that melancholy is its own point. Sustained melancholia, a kind of narcissistic depression, is rarely considered an appropriate response to the world’s many shades of despair. Even diagnosable depression is meant to be medicated, fixed, or processed. The melancholic mourns something unconscious, and does so in a way that sucks at their ego, traps it, making a “fix” untenable. In a liberal-democratic society where the most-respected are the most-productive members, melancholia is psychopathological, and needs to be defeated at best or tempered at worst. In 2019, Tesfaye went back to his early days, playing the Trilogy-era version of himself in the Safdie brothers’ film Uncut Gems. “I’ve been following the Safdies for years,” he says, a committed cinephile whose current obsessions include Claire Denis’s carnal thriller Trouble Every Day (2001), Brian De Palma’s neo-noir slasher Dressed to Kill (1980), Eckhart Schmidt’s West German, ’80s horror flick Der Fan, and Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986). On the big screen, he plays it douchey, “a kind of almost satirical version of myself,” he says. His fictitious double refuses to sing unless he’s in black light. He performs
WORDS: TIANA REID “The Morning” and does lines with a white girl (Julia Fox) who comments on his erection. “He’s going to be major—even though he’s from Canada,” Julia says earlier in the film. The line is played for laughs. That “even though” is a bigger deal than it seems. Tesfaye was born to Ethiopian immigrant parents and raised in Scarborough, a region east of downtown Toronto, before he dropped out of high school, moving out to Parkdale in Toronto’s west side. For many of the young, black, brown, and poor people in Canada’s most-populous city, Toronto lacks industry connections of all kinds, affordable housing, and creative infrastructures, especially when compared to cities in the United States. In response to his upbringing, along with La Mar Taylor, Ahmed Ismail, and Joachim Johnson, the Weeknd now runs the nonprofit HXOUSE, a “Toronto-based, globally focused think-center” that works with young artists of many disciplines. Global capital obviously floods Toronto through real estate, technology, and development, but in an exorbitantly expensive rental housing market, the lofts of “Lost Music” are unaffordable. A condo company in Tesfaye’s old neighborhood of Parkdale, a 14-story new development, is eerily called XO Condos. Five-hundred-square-foot boxes, currently unbuilt, are being sold for upwards of $600,000 dollars. XO is, of course, also the name of the Weeknd’s record label, which includes Canadian hip hop acts Nav, Belly, and 88Glam. Today, ostensibly, he’s made it. "I feel confident with where I’m taking this [new] record,” he reveals. “There’s also a very committed vision and character being portrayed and I get to explore a different side of me that my fans have never seen.” He says that the first drop, the anti-romance song called “Heartless,” follows where My Dear Melancholy left off. “It was the first song I wrote after that album, so it felt fitting for me to put it out,” he says. “I play a character in the video who becomes compromised and then overcompensates with all the sins that Vegas provides. It’s a great introduction to the next chapter of my life.” In the music video for “Heartless,” set in Las Vegas, this new character, with his Lionel Richie
mustache, Herbie Hancock glasses, and a slappy grin, was in fact inspired by Sammy Davis, Jr. in the 1973 film Poor Devil. In one scene, he licks a frog. It’s an all-knowing corniness that can be a bit of a one-note gimmick, its arc to be determined by the forthcoming album. In the final scene of the video for “Blinding Lights,” which premiered in January, this new jittery nouveau-riche character stares into the camera but also beyond it, blood between his teeth. The look is a mix of Joker and Béatrice Dalle in that aforementioned Claire Denis film he loves so much, Trouble Every Day. After a journey through a hall of mirrors, a good high, a good ass-whooping, it’s hard to tell whether he’s laughing or crying. There’s something funny and something tragic in that ambivalence. This sense that we play characters both louche and garish feels like where we are at the turn of this decade, after years when it seemed no one had a self. The first time and only time I took a limousine, I was in Las Vegas. The limo was white and belonged to an older man my friends and I had just met. He did so much coke in his hotel room I thought he was going to die. He didn’t. We went to Benihana on the strip to eat. I didn’t. In other words, we fear our own power while we walk that thin line between playing a part and playing ourselves, unvarnished. Sitting here, with the agitated humming of my laptop, I cannot forget the feelings of alienation that first drew me to the Weeknd’s spirited cries and the drive to turn my ugly reality into goals. Perhaps it’s not clear that this is an essay written by someone who chases melancholy, someone who yearns after sadness even after she’s found it, even after she has learned the end of the script. I am often curious about how much time celebrities spend alone, not surrounded by managers and hairstylists and bodyguards and lovers and fans. “I spend most of my days alone now,” the Weeknd tells me. “I don’t like to leave my house too much. It’s a gift and a curse but it helps me give undivided attention to my work. I enjoy being a workaholic, I think, or I’m just addicted to it. Even when I’m not working I’m always somehow still working. It distracts from the loneliness, I guess.”
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THE FUTURE OF FETISH
THIS COULD BE US
S/S 2020 Today’s economy revolves around the circulation of desires. Our bodies, more than ever before, are now libidinal fantasy objects for consumption and exchange. You can see that in gym culture and plastic surgery culture; on Instagram, despite all its restrictions and censorship; on TikTok and Tinder and Grindr; and in pornography, too. In her 2017 essay “Pornhub Is the Kinsey Report of Our Time” for The Cut, Maureen O’Connor writes, “We are living in a golden age of sexual creativity—an erotic renaissance that is, I believe, unprecedented in human history.” There’s just so much pornography and in such innovative forms. But what’s coming next? Where are our desires leading us, and what’s shaping them? In 2015, British sex toy merchants Bondara commissioned a futurologist, Dr. Ian Pearson, to gaze into the future and write down what he saw for them. The Future of Sex: The Rise of the Robosexuals is his report’s title. “Vibrators have been around for over a century but now,” Pearson notes, “the vibrant sex toy industry doesn’t just make stand-alone devices but teledildonic devices that bring all the fun and functionality of computing and networks to sex too.” Maybe, one worries while reading this, tech companies will fuck up sex like everything else. Maybe they already have. Walter Benjamin wrote that the advent of photography would destroy the aura of the work of art and he was probably right. But how is technological innovation going to affect the eroticism of the human body, and our desires? In Toronto, a brothel recently opened where clients can pay by the hour to have sex with a RealDoll (a lifesize silicon simulacrum of a person). Aura Dolls, it’s called. Doll sex workers have arrived; the newest profession. Plans to open a similar establishment in Houston, Texas, however, had to be abandoned after the city amended its laws so that paying for sex with inanimate objects was forbidden.
In Japan, a great falling away of sexual activity involving more than one person has been met by a new blooming of disembodied pleasure objects: sex toys designed only for masturbation, and no longer made to resemble the human form or orifice in any way. This has long been true of countless vibrators, which are now joined by more recent inventions like the single-use silicon egg. No big deal perhaps. But given that technology is already fetishized to an ominous extent (think of all those unboxing videos, all those faces in the cafés and metros hypnotized by glowing screens), we might think twice about fucking it. We live in a cult of technology, and cults are often derailed by sex. The Bondara report describes a coming “internet of bodies” comprising contact lenses that beam fantasy images directly into our eyes with LEDs (or lasers), voices that speak in our ears, and “active skin” that can record the signals passing along our nerves and also play those, or any, signals back to us to magic up sensations of pleasure. This could be the future of sex tapes: influencers, models, porn stars, and amateurs recording their sexual experiences and selling those feelings in the cloud. If you and a lover are really having a great time together you might think, “Oh this is good, we have to record it.” This could be us. Great news for exhibitionists and voyeurs alike; but hopefully real sex won’t be replaced by virtual sex or, worse still, the push-notification oxytocin gratification of having others following and liking your recordings. In an internet of bodies, the whole person becomes an augmented erogenous zone. Sexual arousal won’t only be psychically linked to the presence of fetish objects and particular body parts, but also physically powered by technology and cyborg enhancements; before long, Dr. Pearson writes in his report, we’ll be able to “directly stimulate the septal area [of the brain] to create an orgasm
55 at the touch of a button.” The recent popularity of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response)—the YouTube video that leaves you tingling, the sloshing of the wine below the fry along the podcast—is but the first wave of pleasures on demand. A few steps on from emojis comes messaging someone an orgasm. A possible future of Tinder is no longer needing to meet up, not needing to leave the app to have sex. And maybe this will render the orgasm meaningless, or collapse society. But so much of today’s culture is already, essentially, about replacing real experiences with simulations of those experiences. The bulk of our online interactions with others have already been flattened down to a sort of fetish. We communicate with pictures of ourselves and our activity. Our bodies live in the cloud now, from which misty heights we broadcast them around the world as magical images to be worshipped or craved. While reporting on China’s selfie obsession for the New Yorker, Jiayang Fan meets a young Chinese influencer who shows her his workflow of photoediting apps and explains that “a regular camera can’t capture the whole of a person. It has no way of expressing the entirety of your beauty.” Your authentic self, he believes, resides in the portrait you craft. Much the same sentiment is expressed in SOPHIE’s song “Faceshopping,” in which she chants: “My face is the real shop front…I’m real when I shop my face.” So many people wish to make themselves into jpegs now. And what is an e-boy or e-girl really but a flattened fetish object designed for mass consumption? What is a dick pic, maybe, possibly, but a disavowal of the child’s horror at the mother’s castration? Our descent into the virtual world has contributed to the making of a new aesthetic of lifelessness and void: that’s
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56 how Hollywood blockbusters look now. How pop sounds. How influencers look, and how we visualize ourselves. Might this very quality of artificiality be the thing we’ve come to fetishize the most? Could that be what we’re most attracted to? Not long ago I saw a banner ad on Pornhub: a tired rendering of a father, a decrepit old CGI Boomer, kneels before a flawless virtual teen who looks up at him with disgust. The tagline reads, “Build your stepdaughter. Fuck her!” Freud, I feel, would have a lot to say about this; although quite what I’m unsure of. Videos have grown complicated also. On British journalist Jon Ronson’s 2018 podcast series The Butterfly Effect, he interviews a couple veteran pornography producers about how the industry has been transformed by the internet. In order to perform well online, they tell him, a scene should encompass as many distinct categories as possible: she’s a yoga instructor, but she’s also Czech, and halfJapanese, and a fashion model— with an anal fixation, and this
CR MEN is her first time, and she’s your stepmom, etc. “You’re trying to kill many birds with one stone now,” says one producer. “You’d be surprised sometimes when a title in six words covers five different niches,” says the other. Dirty movies used to have vaguely theatrical titles, but now they’re just strings of keywords and fetishes. Twentyfirst-century pornography is compound and search engine optimized; either that or incredibly niche. Sites like Pornhub, Ronson learns, also put their category thumbnails and names and so forth through continuous A/B testing to determine what makes visitors click through. And so, taken as a whole, they function as a sort of networked artificial consciousness: one that maps the world’s desires and responds to them and in turn helps shape them. Sometimes it finds that we respond to the most unusual things. And as computer animation makes it possible for anybody to construct their own perverse fantasies, things will only get weirder and weirder. The massive worldwide
popularity of hentai (animated porn, often from Japan) and the growing popularity of CGI erotica today isn’t just down to its cartoon unreality, but also what such unreality makes possible: the depiction of new kinks and fetishes that wouldn’t be possible in the real world. In the coming decade the adult industry is going to show us kinks that we haven’t yet imagined and didn’t even realize we had. Like painters breaking free of the real more than a century ago, pornography may be about to go through its own modernist moment, its own processes of abstraction and surreality. A flight from the real to the grotesque digital uncanny. “I’ve never seen so many legs spreading as I saw in Cats,” comedian Steven PhillipsHorst recently observed. “It’s a movie about scissoring, but more importantly it’s a movie about the future of sex. Lots of fur and few visible genitals. Everyone at peace with their castration.” Which is a joke, only, maybe…it’s also kind of true? Who knows where we’re going, or what we’ll make ourselves into.
WORDS BY DEAN KISSICK IMAGES BY TOMÁS ACIEGO
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88 A fetish is a noun. A person, place, or thing. Schoolgirls, bathrooms, latex; Beyoncé, Tulum, or Birkin bags. In an age of fandoms, personalized platforms, and drop merch, it’s unsurprising that our sexual tastes have taken on the same banal but weird informational properties as power memes. Digital pranksters/creative agency MSCHF cracked the code with their recent project thisfootdoesnotexist.com. If you text 646-760-8955, a computer generated footfake will be forwarded to your phone. The pics have that uncanny quivering quality that GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) images contain, somewhere between the grainy artifact effect seen in low-resolution JPEGs from an old digital camera and the fractal wobble of acid flashbacks. I’m skeptical that true foot fetish connoisseurs are getting off on the fakes. In the same way that Frank Ocean’s PREP+ club night wasn't really a sex party and Virgil Abloh’s luxury harnesses aren’t really leather gear, MSCHF’s foot pics are for normie dabblers, entertained by the inexplicable desires of
CR MEN others, but unable to go past ironic engagement. Fetishes and kink seem to be more mass than ever. But I can’t dissuade myself from believing this has more to do with our pornfilled internet and voyeurismoptimized social media than a true sexual awakening. For a fetish to be real, it must have an aura of authenticity. No one wants to play water sports with Gatorade. Unless perhaps they’re making a TikTok video. Recently, I was explaining the documentary Jawline to a friend. The film follows an aspiring influencer, Austyn Tester, as he attempts to use his growing social media following to escape his impoverished circumstances in rural Tennessee. She stopped me as I was explaining the plot to ask, “But wait, why is it called Jawline? Do they get surgery?” No, the teens do not get surgery. One of the managers featured in the film sums it up, “Talent is replaceable.” The boys of TikTok and YouNow swirl by with identical, conventionally attractive faces, fops of bushy blond hair and trademark octagonal, chiseled jawlines. Austyn Tester doesn’t
make it through the increasingly fraught filter of social media fame. His growth sputters out at only 30K followers on Instagram. More than your mom, but not enough to secure any game-changing brand deals. Like so many before him, Tester fetishized fame but had no understanding of the business models operating behind the curtain. He focused on those things he felt he could control: his body, his face, his personality. And like so many before him, he failed to transform his parts into a new whole. The internet has made so many things ubiquitous that were once rare. At the same time, it has the capacity to raise up one person or place or thing and focuses all the world’s desire on it, if only for a time. Like an alchemist turning lead into gold, one identical boy will receive fame and fortune, another will be left behind to fend for himself in the wilds of Appalachia. The rationale behind why this and not that remains inscrutable, regardless of what any consultant tells you. Celebrity, wealth, sex, and glory lie tantalizingly within reach. But no one can tell you how to get there.
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S/S 2020 The secret sauce of the internet has long been the copy-paste function. Anything that has been digitized can be infinitely duplicated. That this zero-marginal-cost reality does not extend to the physical seems to be the great tragedy of our times. This, of course, does not mean we don’t try. The rapid growth of merch as a replacement for style piggybacks on this desire. To be fashionable is hard, our bodies and affects rebel against the desire to be a clone, but accessorizing is easy. Literally anyone (with $395) can wear a Balenciaga baseball hat. The boom in merch, spraying everyone with the same viral bits and bobs of luxury ephemera, speaks to the fakeit-til-you-make-it dynamic of our times. The caps and tees and wallets and shoelaces are all pseudo-democratic. They are accessible in a way that couture or runway looks cannot be for all the obvious financial and physiological reasons. I am not a model and no amount of money will make me one. The fetish of merch presupposes that someday that will not be true. Like stock
options at a start-up or that inscrutable jumble of letters before the title of your job at work, the fetish is always a placeholder for something bigger, better, and more fabulous that lurks out in the void of the future. I never feel the creeping presence of everyone’s need more than when I am in the Bay Area. And no, it’s not the public nudity or the puppy play or Folsom Street Fair that pings my anxiety censors. It’s the merch-bedazzled professionals wandering around SoMa, the millionaires-in-waiting. I’m standing in the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and throw up in my mouth a little. I’m watching a crowd of holiday well-wishers swarm around an oversized Christmas tree, taking selfies, imploring strangers to help out and snap a group photo. Their clothing has that copy-paste swarm sensibility that makes my skin crawl: every belt buckle a gilded H, every loafer horse-bitten. Everything else maybe Everlane, maybe Loro Piana, maybe whatever. They’re drinking splits of Moët with little branded gold funnels. I mosey over to the bar
89 and buy one for $27 dollars. It’s plastic and room temperature. Not quite the same energy as a crystal flute or drinking straight out of a chilled champagne bottle. But hey, you won’t chip a veneer. No, I will not help you take a photograph in a Gucci belt paired with a floral tuxedo jacket. But, yes, I will join in this mini-Moët brand experience, this ersatz elitism. Like so many things, the whole scenario feels like Cosplay. Does anyone even like these things? Or are they role-playing success for their peers online? More than ever before, our lives are mediated by the desires of others, their tastes and obsessions and kinks. We’re overwhelmed not by the precision of algorithmic prediction so much as an onslaught of suggestions. Perhaps you would be happier with your friend’s shoes or your cousin’s vacation. There are other faces and belts and foot pics a Google search away. But for so many there is only the one. The one sex act or branded merch or online personality. We hone in on it because it promises more than it could ever possibly deliver.
WORDS BY SEAN MONAHAN
PHOTOGRAPHS MARC ASEKHAME
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