Hermann, I Have the Power

Running a blog long enough, you see what people actually search for. The queries come through your analytics like an unfiltered confession. Most of it is catastrophically horny. Some of it is broken in ways you don’t want to examine. All of it is real.

Do I have a stinking boyfriend? What does your girlfriend call her vagina? Why have sex with your ex again? These are the things people search. There’s a girl asking if she’d sleep with someone smelly. Another asking about her first lesbian experience. Mostly it’s just need masquerading as a search term.

Then there’s the celebrity stuff—Kate Moss’s breasts, Sailor Moon undressed, Nora Tschirner naked. The obvious stuff, except specific in ways that make you uncomfortable. Underage big breasts. 17-year-old boy lookbook. The specificity is what tells you everything. Not just wanting the thing, but wanting this exact version of the thing.

Some of it is pure damage. The government wants to kill us. My neighbor hears the staircase. My little ass. People working through something they can’t say out loud. Searching for permission or reassurance or just a name for what they’re feeling.

A lot of it is just weird. Pudding with semen. A girl peeing while standing. Too sexy for New York, right for Berlin. Sex during lawn mowing. Spinach completely naked. What does I’m rich bitch even mean? Who are the girls in Aggro Berlin?

What stays with you is the gap between the curated internet and this—the search box, unedited, the actual thing moving through your server logs. Desire and shame and boredom and the specific late-night weirdness that lives in people’s heads. An entire spectrum of human need, mostly unspoken, all landing on your blog for some reason.

You see enough of it and you stop being shocked. It’s not malice. It’s just the internet being honest.