I’ve been thinking about the prospect of analyzing NSFW content for some time now. My general idea is that NSFW stuff will live on a site parallel to this one. With most of the content here being PG-13 at most I never want anyone to be confused about what to expect with regards to the explicitness of content. However, I have a number of friends and art acquaintances, among a broader range of people, that will be confused or interested to know my thought process behind doing this at all. Although many if not most artists will at some point draw something nude, sexual or not fit to be displayed in a middle school classroom, currently we are expected to perform all related critiques in private, or in a way removed from the internet. I want to dig into the missed opportunity here, the problem with the stigmatization of non-SFW material, and why this problem hasn’t been addressed, particularly from the perspective of the fine art community. I’m gonna piss some people off with my honesty here, but that’s not my intention I just think this topic is important and doesn’t get much attention.

First, I’ve identified a few key categories of content, or “nodes” as I’ll call them, that I want to define to help make all this more salient. Node 1 is pure SFW content where it’s never a question that the content can be shown to virtually any audience. Node 2 is content that may be suggestive or not fully appropriate for all settings but not necessarily because of nudity or anything sexual. Node 3 is where a lot of fine art content lives. This is where you can have a fully nude, typically non-sexualized (unless it’s for some grand theme) piece and no one bats an eye. Node 4 is content where let’s say partial nudity and sex come together to form what most of us would dub fan-service. This can be very close to Node 3 and they will often get lumped together even though they are different. Finally you have Node 5 with fully NSFW content. For all intents and purposes this is straight up porn, hentai or whatever you want to call it. Regardless of the artistic value, we are not generally allowed to talk about the aesthetic quality or nature of anything in this domain in a serious manner without having our artist or critique license “taken away.”

The problem that I find here, is that any contamination from a Node equal to or higher than 3, leads your work to be stigmatized and labeled as porn or porn adjacent, even if the label is totally unwarranted. The truth is, if a conservative parent walks into their 15 year old’s room to find them studying an old painting involving a nude model, the nuance of context and what is happening is quickly lost in some cases. Now I’m not saying that people are making the wrong choice here, or that people shouldn’t be free to shun certain types of content for whatever reason, the problem is that touching anything not clearly in Node 1 or 2 is playing with fire. Many of you will understand exactly what I’m saying without further explanation, but I want to articulate myself a little bit better here. The fact that something totally benign and non-sexual, explored even in the privacy of one’s bedroom can be generalized as porn adjacent, is a real problem. The more important issue is that much of what it means to explore with art is to explore life itself and the human condition, which sometimes involves not having clothes on, or gore or any number of things that are not sunshine and unicorns. To be unable to properly critique and analyze these things in public without losing your ability to be taken seriously is the problem.

Now I want to address the obvious legitimate concerns and pushback that one could raise here. First you have the dailymotion problem, where no one wants to be at work playing a clip of a podcast, and in the next moment hear moans from random pornographic material. I don’t know if DM still has that problem, but at least the conceptual problem of having no segregation between SFW and not is obvious, for reasons we need not state. The second issue is that some amount of modern, abstract art and photography uses what is basically porn suffused with politics, which as you could imagine does not make it any less explicit or potentially offensive. Now I want to add, as an adult and a fairly open person I don’t really care about SFW, or NSFW or political porn or any of these distinctions for myself, but I see the obvious need to be clear about what part of the playground one is on.

As a side-note, high level art critique, or critique of any level is fairly scarce on the internet in a way I never really expected before joining the space. It often feels like a dying art, but in reality it is something that stays in print and in the hearts and minds of critics going to physical galleries in very specific artsy locations. While there are some fine art people who could maybe address the “contamination problem” or whatever we want to call it, I suspect artists being the incredibly liberal, boundary defiers they are would rather tell conservatives and squares to screw off rather than productively figure out how we might address this issue. So I figure why not take a crack at this? Considering that the kind of content produced on AnimeExplicated is already incredibly niche, and the NSFW equivalent actually just does not exist outside of some weird deep web stuff, I think it’s worth exploring this gigantic universe of yet to be made content. Repeating myself a little bit, I think it’s a damn shame that beginners and masters alike have no place to discuss the mechanical and abstract elements of amazing artwork, be it SFW or not. Basically, I would like to attempt to make segregated, high quality parallel sites that tend to Nodes 1-2 and then Nodes 3-5 respectively.

Hopefully this makes some amount of sense and explains my thought process a bit. Again not looking to start any dumb arguments, I just think this is something worth thinking about. I’ll probably do a podcast as well where I touch on this in addition to talking about niches, identifying market or creative gaps, and fighting stigma with both quality standards and clear boundaries. Thanks for taking the time.

Note: I realize that I didn’t talk about it here, might get to this in a podcast, but there is also a large class of people frightened or threatened by sex and sexualization and that find any general association of their work with sex detracts from what they do. Mostly I think this is a “please get over yourself” situation. Sexiness is rarely about “objectification” because sex is something you do with living, breathing people not objects. The “objects” are an emulation of people. I know what people mean by objectification, that someone is seen as an instrument of sex rather than a complete person. The problem is that the person is the something sexy. An onahole will never be sexy. The idea that noticing that something is sexy or seductive makes it no less powerful or important, even in politics. Perhaps even the opposite is true since eroticism is a fantastic way to get people to remember a message(funny but true). I will say more about this later.