I began last year working on my overly ambitious Slumber Party Massacre project, which took months to complete, required tracking down various outfits and scouting out different locations, and wasn't ready for exhibition until May. Actually, it was ready in April, but April saw my anticipated attendance of an anime convention, during which I cosplayed Chii in an extravagant (both elegant and skimpy) pink dress. Between posting my cosplay photos (in addition to myself, also the girls in cosplay I took pictures of at the con) and the Slumber Party Massacre photos (along with their Behind The Scenes entries right here on this blog - parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), I got massively behind and ended up with a backlog of photos to upload for the majority of the remainder of the year - which I have only recently gotten pretty much caught up on.
However, I have the sense that I am evolving as a photographer (and model), and I'm looking into better and more efficient ways to exhibit my photography to the world. I have seen, in my work, a distinct strain of material that has uncovered itself over the last year, which reflects the sort of erotic (or pornographic, if you will) photo sets that are produced commercially, that you can find all over the internet. This type of photography has always undoubtedly been a large inspiration on my own work - websites like femjoy and domai and met-art, and the erotic art they produce. But lately I've noticed that I've been producing distinct photo sets (as opposed to loose art) that mimic the sort of themed shoots you'll see elsewhere, usually with me dressed in some kind of outfit (either sexy or girly), stripping off my clothes and posing erotically for the camera in various stages of undress.
For a while now it's been my desire to have a website to feature these erotic photo sets (some of which have gone unpublished), but my unfortunate lack of webdev skills (I impressed my computer teachers in the '90s, but technology has come a long way since then) and total lack of experience as an economist or entrepreneur of any sort has left me high and dry. I've also been increasingly inspired to try to somehow make my artistic talent work for me, in terms of earning money for the greater and greater amount of effort I've been putting into my photography. I'll be straight with you - I hate capitalism, but I don't have any choice but to submit to it, as I don't have the skills to live off the land on my own. So I can absolutely sympathize with the desire to get things for free (and it pisses me off that my work as a photographer is not valued monetarily in the way that other types of work arbitrarily are), but I've come to the decision that to value myself and my art and the work that I put into it means to put a price on it. It's up to you to decide whether my work's good enough to pay for, but I simply can't afford to continue producing it for free. So I either have to start making some money off of it, or spend my time doing something else that's more profitable.
And that's where XTube comes in. For the longest time I was reluctant to embrace openly pornographic sites like XTube, not because I bear any ill will towards them at all, but simply because I don't like to surround myself with raw images of genitalia closeups and gushing bodily fluids. To me, eroticism is about beauty and nudity, not the sticky, sweaty, grunting mess that characterizes sex. So it's simply been a matter of taste. But there are very few sharing sites that cater to the middle ground of eroticism, and most non-porn sites don't even allow content that involves nudity (let alone blatantly sexualized nudity). Flickr is the one major exception I've found, in that they allow pornographic content, but are not characterized as a website by it. However, flickr offers no options for users to profit off of their own content (especially if it's pornographic, which is an attitude that persists all over the non-porn web - blogger included, unfortunately), and in fact they actively discourage using their site for that purpose. But XTube has its own Amateur program which makes it very easy for me to upload photo sets (or videos, if I choose), charge a small fee, and profit off of them if they're popular.
So, it's taken me some time to warm up to using, let alone associating myself with, a blatant porn site, but I've joined XTube and as of this week, I have signed up and become verified as an amateur model. Now it's a matter of producing lots of good content, and seeing if I can make any money off of it. I'd like to advertise here on blogger, but my reading of their content policy leads me to the conclusion that that wouldn't be allowed, and I don't want to risk deletion, as I've enjoyed using this blog to post lots of good content about my philosophical explorations on nudity, eroticism, and sexual liberation. However, I have registered two other accounts - on twitter, and on tumblr - that I intend to use to keep my followers up to date on the sets that go up on XTube, as well as other things of an erotic nature that pertain to me or happen to catch my interest. So I encourage you to check those accounts out, and follow me, and hopefully as I begin to fill my XTube account with lots of new material, you'll find something you like, that's worth spending a paltry percentage of the money you make from whatever work you spend your time doing for a living. Thanks!
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