With the topic of kinky drawings being discussed in The Bondage Gaze episodes with Achilles Heel Art, expressions of our fantasies inevitably came up. When someone depicts anything fetishistic, it manifests people's fantasies into reality, making them tangible things for the seeing, hearing, and feeling world. When kinky media lacks particular things that you fantasize about, the ability to convey your fantasy in a drawing, photograph, or video let's you not only realize your fantasy, but put it out in the world for others to see and take what they will from it.
My Thoughts About AI Art
Of course, this topic inevitably led into a discussion of AI art. When I first became aware of the Bing AI generator, I had fun with it. I was intrigued by how it showed what I and other people are into. For those who don't know, these generators are like search engines where you're prompted to give instructions to produce an image you'd like to see. So, if you're using this to generate a kinky image, you have to verbalize what you want to see: who you want in the image or what you want him to look like, how he should be dressed, etc. Doing this really puts what you're into right in front of you, which is really cool, but might also feel a little confronting for people who are used to having to take tidbits of different visuals and scenarios to build a more tailored fantasy in your mind.
The time I played with the Bing generator, some wonky images inevitably came out of it, but there was also some pretty realistic images too. However, none of it actually turned me on. This is going to sound cliche, but what was missing from AI generated bondage images was the actual human element. It didn't take meeting with someone and tying them up to produce the images. The pictures weren't of anyone I knew personally. The pictures looked too perfect to the point of unrealistic. I think the difference between the slick, and sometimes goofy looking, perfection from AI and the less than perfect content that people create, whether if it's a drawing or a video or photograph of a session, turns out to be a bigger deal to me than I assumed.
I'd love to have a better quality camera that allows me to take professional grade pictures with. A camera that would enable me to get pristine stills out of video I've recorded with it. I'd also like to be able to capture my wildest fantasies that I otherwise can't because of financial or logistical limitations. But even though some of the AI stuff I made looked cool and I can probably make better images with a generator I paid for, there's just something hollow about AI.
This really emphasized how much I like the realness of the lower quality stuff that I and others make because imperfect art, at least when produced by a human, has character. When something that a person creates falls short of perfect, like when baked goods taste homemade or when Polaroid pictures look grainy, it makes the end product more interesting and creates a particular vibe. This is why people still use black and white or sepia tone filters even after color, digital, and HD photography became the standard. Even though part of this vibe is nostalgia, the character that little flaws add to media makes the media more interesting and relatable to us because we're fallible creatures. Making things like bondage content also takes some kind of experience to create it whether it's real experience and time with friends, honing a particular skill and talent, or even hiring and directing people to realize a vision.
My personal hangups about AI aside, I believe that it at least gives people who don't have the artistic ability to convey their fantasies or the financial means to commission fantasies from artists access to that realization. I also understand that for some, especially people who don't normally have sessions with other people and have to rely on fantasy to get what they want, AI seems like a viable way to illustrate what they're into. If you can't draw or write and this is the only way to make your fantasies come to life, now AI can help some people with that. It feels antisocial to cut people out of the equation and let robots do these things instead, but maybe some good would come out of that or it would at least just be another adjustment, like when autotune in pop music just became another stylistic choice that people accept now.
Manifesting What We're Into
In our discussion with Achilles, I couldn't help but think about how most kinky artists seem to have an interest and objective to manifest theirs and other people's fantasies into existence.
For example, a lot of mainstream media has scenes that evoke fetishistic sensibilities (bondage scenes, characters wearing certain kinds of outfits and gear, showing feet or maybe even foot play, etc.), which is why screencap culture is a thing. However, since mainstream media isn't fetish media, these kinds of scenes are rather limited in detail and don't go all the way with doing fetishistic things we like. This gives people who create kinky art a platform to get into and emphasize the fetishy things we'd like to explore in these fictional worlds since the original media doesn't do that for us.
As someone who's into particular types of clothing and moderate-to-heavier bondage, I even find that a lot of fetish media doesn't provide everything that I'm looking for either. Where mainstream media often falls short of good fetish content like quality and plausible bondage, different types of fetish media often have very narrow focuses on some things and leaves out other things I'm into. Since I'm into clothing and bondage, content I consume is either clothing focused or bondage focused. Even though the two things sometimes overlap in fetish media, they don't overlap as much as I'd like or in the ways that I'd like.
There's a good amount of mainstream scenes of men in suits bound and gagged, but mainstream media is obviously limited. There's bondage content that sometimes includes suits and clothing I like, but there isn't as much attention to detail for the clothing. There's both fetishy and non-kinky clothing content, but that would never include bondage. So, what I have to do is mentally combine these things to scratch all of my itches. Therefore, I feel like a lot of my drawings and things that I make manifests my ideal content and shares it with the kink world. My hope is that whatever I produce scratches the same itches for other people or maybe inspires others to go a step further towards creating their own content.
Conclusion
I find the lines between fetishism and creativity extremely thin, which is why so many kinksters feel compelled to create media that expresses their fantasies. Then, being able to realize them in any way makes them something we can actually experience.
I feel like kinky fantasies get trapped inside our heads, then we have to let them out in a way that's tangible to us and other people. I find that drawing a bondage scene allows me to appreciate all the little visual details like how lips curl around a gag or how the collar of a shirt that's been ripped open by someone else rests on a chest. For stories, I feel like I get to capture and emphasize subtle moments of what might happen during a home invasion or even a consensual bondage session. When I share things from actual bondage sessions, I get to appreciate the memory of the session, as well as play with how the visuals could tell a fictional or sometimes real story.
Aside from expressing ourselves, seeing ourselves in people's artwork, or even just getting our rocks off, I think what makes all of this important is the fact that a lot of queer cultures and queer individuals are often faced with the fear of erasure. Queer erasure has taken place at different points in history and attempts at it are happening today. As long as there are people and systems that want to hurt queer people, our voices, art, history, scientific discovery, etc run the risk of getting eliminated with hopes that new generations won't understand us or find us.
I feel like most queer people consciously or subconsciously fear being erased to some extent, just from existing among friends and family who have no idea about queers and queer life and don't want to know. Many of us remember a time in our lives when we were isolated and felt alone because we had no idea that other gay or kinky people existed, so when we discovered kinky media and found spaces where other kinksters convened, we instantly felt at home. What our opponents want is to make every queer person feel scared and isolated, so they can assume that they're the only weirdos that like the things they do because they can't access any others who are like them.
So, when we find our respective places that feel safe, we want to shout our desires from the rooftops. This, in addition to our personal obsessions towards things we fetishize, seems to explain why kinky art is such an important thing. Since kinky art adds tangibility to our queer fantasies and puts it out in the world, it creates an artifact of our history and shows that we exist and we've been here.
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