The Authenticity Tax
Someone’s neighbor uploaded a homemade video to YouPorn—cluttered apartment, some cartoon character visible in the background, audio quality of a phone call from 2003—and the general expectation is that this constitutes entertainment. I’ve made too many deliberate choices about every other part of my aesthetic life to accept a zero-standard approach here. Here is what I found instead.
Abby Winters has been running for over a decade out of Australia, shooting natural and mostly non-professional women—regional accents, unretouched bodies, the kind of crooked teeth that signal a genuine person rather than a produced one. There’s a specific nostalgia to it if you ever spent time in Australia in your early twenties, crammed into beach houses with women named after flowers whose faces you can still see when you close your eyes. Some of the archive is genuinely beautiful. Favorites: Rebekah, Carlie, Madelief.
Suicide Girls is the canonical starting point: tattooed women, softcore shoots, and a community section where members post record collections and travel wishlists alongside the general public display of their aesthetic convictions. The women are the kind you’d give a wide berth on the street—not because they’re threatening but because their commitments are visible from distance and you’re not always sure yours travel that well. The site has been running since 2001. Worth a visit on a braver day.
Ersties is a German art school project—photography and film students who built it so their classmates could strip on camera within a context that felt vaguely legitimate. Some of them need the money. Some of them are the Steffis of the world: the ones in the psychology program I was always too nervous to approach at parties, who turn out to be doing this because it suits them rather than out of any particular need. Production values are intentionally rough. The performers look exactly like people I’ve met at 4am in Berlin, which tells you everything you need to know about whether that’s a recommendation or a warning.
The retro option is Porn Pros: American mainstream from the 1990s, synthetic in every dimension—bodies, lighting, sound design, the keyboard-and-saxophone score underneath everything that makes the whole enterprise sound like a minor medical procedure. I find something almost fond about it. It has the quality of a first experience—the first stolen burned CD at fifteen, the immediate ruination of a wall, the dawning comprehension that this is apparently what adults do with their time.
Yasumasa Yonehara has been documenting Tokyo party culture and throwing pictures of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese women across various platforms for years. CexWork is his subscription portal, offering closer access to the same aesthetic—stylized, vaguely strange, shot by a man whose primary attachment appears to be to his sneaker and vintage toy collection. Fully alternative, in the sense that the word no longer means anything.
Man Royale is for when female anatomy isn’t the category of the evening, which happens, and an honest inventory shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Muscled men, explicit acts, high definition. Everything on this list but with men instead of women. Moving on.
Richard Kern has been VICE’s house photographer for a particular kind of image for years—women in fluorescent-lit bathrooms, phones wedged into improbable positions, lying on damp fabric in cold light. New Nude City is where the more explicit work lives, behind a subscription. Sasha Grey appeared there. So did a lot of other women who might be sitting across from me in a coffee shop right now, which is either an exciting possibility or a genuinely unsettling one.
Cherrystems commits hard enough to the bit to achieve something. Animal masks, enormous frames, color-block scarves on people who look like they dressed for a party that ended three hours ago and never went home. The site solicits submissions. People I know have ended up on it, with automatically generated contributor names—Skinartia Cottontail
is apparently a real one—which suggests whoever runs the editorial side is having more fun than anyone else in this industry. Don’t scrutinize the faces too closely.
Teen Karma is really just an Olga Khrushchyov retrospective: a nude model from the early 2000s who was briefly ubiquitous on the internet before that entire genre collapsed under its own weight. She’s in her thirties now, living somewhere outside Moscow, mother of three. The archive is still up. Engaging with it feels like masturbating directly at a decade rather than a person—at a specific, expired era—which carries a flavor of melancholy I don’t entirely know what to do with.
The final option, for those who find everything above too mainstream or insufficiently obscure: Urban Outfitters. The sex toys are shaped like vintage records and discontinued Casio watches. The roleplay costumes are printed with contemporary graphics and cryptic slogans. If nothing on this list addressed whatever specific drive brought you here, what you were looking for was probably a clothing store all along.