The Girl Who Stayed a Stranger

There was a girl on Abby Winters named Aydee who knocked me completely sideways. This was years back—around the time everyone still remembered who won the first Big Brother, when kids were hurling spinning tops at each other in playgrounds—and something about her lodged in my skull with a persistence I couldn’t reason away. She wasn’t performing anything. That was the whole appeal of the site: an Australian operation running on the radical premise that real women are worth looking at without surgical alteration, spray-tan, and seventeen different lights designed to flatten every distinguishing mark into smooth, symmetrical nothing.

I put out some kind of international appeal to find her. An actual public call. Looking back, this sits somewhere between hopeless romantic and genuinely unhinged behavior, but at the time it felt proportionate to what her face had done to me. Nothing came of it. She stayed a stranger, which was probably the outcome that made the most sense for everyone involved.

What I ended up with instead was a friendship with the people running the site, who responded to my infatuation with something like warmth and quietly handed me a lifetime free pass. I’ve made good use of it. Many late nights improved by what Abby Winters has always done differently—freckles, body hair, cheap afternoon light, the specific unglamorous honesty the rest of the industry spends enormous effort editing out. The categorical opposite of what most of the internet is producing.

They were relaunching around then, rebuilt and refreshed. The philosophy stayed intact, which is more than most sites manage. If you’ve grown tired of the bolt-ons, the identical faces, and the moaning calibrated for performance metrics rather than actual pleasure—it remains one of the better alternatives. I’d say that even without the free membership. Probably. And yes, I know the feminists have opinions about this paragraph.