Purpose-Driven Porn

Purpose-Driven Porn: My journey from being controlled and terrified of sex to using sexual energy for good

Content Warning: This material includes brief mentioning of sex abuse, suicide, and suicidal ruminations. 

Patrons and public friends, hello!

Before reading, it’s important that you understand: this will not just be a message for artists, and it will not be a message just about sexual content. The non-creators and least sexual among us, I’m not ignoring you here. This idea is applicable to you all. We’ll focus on pornography for now, as the sexual themes in my work are informed by years of navigating and cross-examining cultural cues from my own inherited sexual repression.

And please stick around until the end for an important call to action. I do need your help.

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We Are Connected

It’s almost supernatural to render your sexual tastes into a creation that is then sent across the world, plugging you into the sex life of someone you’ll likely never meet. Many mature content creators are weirdos that went from feeling unable to relate to others to sharing their fetish to thousands of eager consumers. What a big psychological shift, expecting to never sexually relate, only to later find many people who like what you like, who also encourage you to share your sexual tastes with them! Once you find your tribe, you cease to be weird until you wander outside your found family.

As romantic and redemptive as this sexual connectivity can be, it’s not all roses. Porn creators and commissioners often hold love-hate relationships with their fanbase: weird interactions, threats, and more. Fans can even experience a false sense of ownership born from a lack of fluency with in-person interaction and sex. I imagine most porn creators and specialty artists alike have received weirdly defensive and overbearing messages about what the creator should or should not do based on the consumer’s individual tastes.

Humankind has a complicated relationship to sexuality, a volatility more present in some cultures than others. Much of America holds an uncanny balance of sexual obsession and sexual repression serving as a stressor on society at large, and this is especially true in sexual interactions. This reduction is why sex work can be so dangerous. (This is also why a black trans-femme sex worker is the most likely demographic in America to be murdered.) Any trans artist, as well as any artist trying to create porn outside of cis standards—just as one example of a power minority—has an extra layer of problem-solving to anticipate in their social and commercial endeavors. 

Regardless of your gender or cultural background, as a NSFW creator, you may be too scared to share your true self in your art. Or perhaps you learned that creating porn hasn’t built the kind of fanbase you were hoping for. If this is you or someone you know, you’re not alone.

Virtually all of us have a timeline of our relationship to NSFW content.
Here’s mine:

- Consuming porn in fear, shame, and isolation. Fearing eternal damnation

- Digital exhibitionism and sexual exchanges with strangers online

- The creating, leaving, joining and then leaving again of Sex Addict Anonymous groups

- Creating chaotic but elucidating erotic private work of the fetishes I was terrified to acknowledge in my own life

- Publishing illustrated prayers on my sexuality and spirituality where my peers and family could see

- Giving talks on the untapped potential of porn in an art-centric community 

and finally…

- Posting this photomorph of a monkey guy taking a selfie while unapologetically jackin’ it.

Ever since making the monkey character in that image up there, my relationship to both the furry fandom and to my own body has expanded into new territory. And so, against my initial plans, this post will touch on my history with sexual content before segueing into actionable advise for the specialty artists who feel their work—and work-related relationships—lack value.

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My Son Is a Sex Pervert

I found the furry fandom in 2002. Or more specifically, I found furry porn in 2002. Its utility I’ve detailed in other places, so let’s skip to when I joined the fandom, as an active participant, some 4 years later. At age 16, I stalked the posts of a now dead 18+ furry message board, which included, among threads dedicated to furry porn, a topic exclusively for nude selfies. I had to make an account to see if the blocked images were actually naked photos people were just posting, and that’s exactly what they were. Some of these nudes were *clutches pearls* sexual. Compared to my mainstream porn-informed sensibilities, most of them were unconventionally attractive body types. I was appalled by the brazen quality of these strangers, and naturally, also jealous.

“You can’t post nudes here!” my heart yelled, “You’re not sexually attractive to me! Only people I find sexy should be naked.” I was a kid going to a space that isn’t for him, projecting my self-esteem issues onto those who can’t relate. That may be punchable, but my heart still goes out to that poor, dumb kid stuck in a world that kept him from knowing himself. I was too young to post and too scared to make friends while doing something illegal, but this was different than all the studio porn I saw in browsing infinite pay site previews. These people just posted this stuff because they wanted to. 

What if my mom caught me on Yiffstar, learning about these people? When my browser history showed my mother that I was reading the FAQs for a sex quiz game on the Atari 2600, she called me a “sex pervert” and grounded me for weeks. Though this is a cuter and more momly way to say “sexual deviant”, it didn’t make me less scared of punishment. We never had conversations, only one-way talks where I was told what to not do while not being allowed to question or learn anything. This was because my mom didn’t learn, either. She just obeyed. This taught me any learning I had to do was going to be on my own.

After weeks of being on the Yiffstar forums, I did something crazy. I posted in the introductions topic. I said my name was Blackjax, a black cat cyborg. I liked the idea of a black cat because it was so mysterious, and I imagined that he had a robotic arm, just to be sure everyone knew that I was different. People responded in their furry ways, both embarrassing me and encouraging me through RP nuzzles, floating, bouncing, or whatever the hell else furries do in these kinds of spaces. I never posted in the explicitly 18+ topics, but I did enter debates on religion and held other flaccid conversations. What I did was definitely against the forum rules, but I don’t feel too threatened by sharing publicly that I engaged in under-age Christian apologetics on a furry porn site. 

My initial aim in the furry fandom was to get some pocket change, doing something sexy and cool, while feeling the charge of a secret online identity. And so, under legal age for viewing porn, I made an account on Fur Affinity just to create porn. My first two submissions were rule 34 of 2 videogame characters I was crushing on. (Since you asked, it was Kevin from Seiken Densetsu III, and Lynx from Chrono Cross.) These were not drawn well. I recall one character accidentally looking like he was pooping because I didn’t know how to draw or colour dark brown genitalia surrounded by light brown fur.

Minutes after submitting, a sobering notification hit me from my inbox. One of the first people to follow my account and fave my images was someone I saw naked on Yiffstar. From ignoring my own teenage hangups while desiring to bully others, my jerk self thought his nerdy gamer screen name correlated with his being obese. He didn’t know I was underage, and he didn’t know that I already saw him naked. I knew the internet didn’t forget, but this illustration proved that I needed to change as soon as possible if I wasn’t certain that my art and behaviors were something I was proud of. 

So, a naïve but well-meaning young Jonathan said to himself, “I guess I still want to do sexy and cool things, but porn is out of the question. It’s bad for me and no one else needs it either.” Kevin and Lynx were deleted and in that moment I prayed for forgiveness and dedicated to only doing artwork that Grandma would like. Much later I’d learn that my Grandma is not a perfect judge of character or art, and that doing only art she would like would be my running away from doing the right thing.

A Continued History Of Fappers Remorse 

My dream of being an entertainment industry artist, much like my furry freelance work, was to do cool and sexy art. I dreamt of working in a studio, on something many people would enjoy, something people would respect. Concept art for games didn’t work out for me, so about six years ago, I made a shift in my art career: to make my furry commissions as personal as possible. This emotional investment made it hard for me to understand how or why I should do personal work for myself, but it was thrilling to be that deeply invested in others. Doing art about myself didn’t make sense, so there’s no way doing art about my sexual identity was even a possibility.

And as a recovering sex addict, I may have enjoyed and regularly consumed porn, but I also faced “fapper’s remorse” at every conclusion, and my relationship to porn was encouraging destructive automatic thoughts that became more and more prevalent. I was told any time I masturbated that I was cheating on my future wife. The smartest kid in my Church youth group told me that a Christian authority he trusted said you shouldn’t date until you’re sober from a porn addiction for at least 2 years. 

Plenty of you must be reading this and thinking, “Jonathan, can you please stop being so hard on yourself?”

“No. (: ”, he’d have responded. His identity took that shape back then, and despite failing, he’d rather carry that cross than go wonder how tiny his frame of reference was. His history with porn was intrinsically tied to his desire to do right by God, while simultaneously navigating a stifling upbringing and a teenage sex drive in real time. Based on this culture he grew up in, there was no way past Jonathan could separate sexuality from repression, porn from art, cultural narrative from absolute Truth.

In trying to exclusively produce content that fulfills those evangelical Christian parameters, what space is there for sexual pleasure, or even for self-discovery?

Was the only moral entryway to that journey through a closed, heterosexual marriage?

Does that mean God doesn’t want anyone outside of a straight closed marriage to orgasm, ever?

If something feels natural or good, when is that a good-enough reason to pursue it? 

These questions I pursued in earnest… while constantly being addicted to porn, of course. 

Exhibitionism

My first sexual interaction with another person was kind of rapey. It happened ten years ago, from a friend. To be honest, it was an interaction that my sexually repressed self definitely wanted on some level. Yet, I also knew it didn’t feel right and I hadn’t verbally consented. It was also right after the friend and I were talking about an unhealthy sexual behavior he engaged in just earlier that day. My emotional space, tastes, and immaturity meant the interaction was largely one-sided too. The morning after, I jumped back into his bed to ask if I could get another hand job. Even though I felt strange about the interaction, I was so invested in this feeling that I couldn’t imagine saying no.

I don’t think this friend meant any harm to me, but it definitely changed me. I’ve talked in BEOKAY about how this interaction taught me something untrue: that all gay men (including myself, perhaps, if I chose to act) are hypersexual deviants denying God’s will for their lives. It took me six years to deprogram from this untruth, even after meeting queer people who I felt I could trust. And ever since that [mutual?] abuse with my friend, I could still find physical satisfaction in masturbating, but an orgasm involving someone else, even via webcam, became much more desirable to me. And with my desire to technically “save myself for marriage” when it came to penetrative sex, I felt camming was my only shot at a sex life that fulfilled these arbitrary conservative Christian parameters. (If that concept leaves question marks around your head, feel free to look up “Purity Culture”.) 

The first time I cammed was either the night of or night after that sexual encounter. Whenever it was, it was on a roulette site. Most people weren’t there for masturbating, I assume, and most penises on cam were statistically likely waiting for a woman to be happy to see them. This is what made camming so exciting for me: you know when you’re into someone else that serendipitously found you attractive. Like any social context, camming has rules. Masturbating on Roulette sites is only safe if it’s within TOS and is age restricted, but after that your presentation affects how the camming goes. It became obvious in my first time that starting by showing your face, torso, or genitalia on cam, all have different functions. The most rewarding experience for me was often someone showing their face exclusively, checking the safety of their area after being aroused, and then fulfilling their desire to masturbate with me. Face and microphone have a whole other level of intimacy involved, probably because they’re individual identifiers, and every time you cam there’s a chance that someone will record it and publish it against your will. Trusting strangers is a helluva drug.

Eventually I got to an older man (one of my few types), and our mutual attraction was enough for him to join me before I orgasmed for him. It was the first time I got to be sexy on my own terms, and had someone viewing me as an object of desire. It felt thrilling, and it felt disgusting. I used the chat window to instantly express my regret, how I did wrong by him, how sorry I was. He tried to talk me down but it didn’t work. I said goodbye, closed my laptop, and went to bed. Minutes later, I went back on the site because my adrenaline was still pumping. I saw his webcam in the middle of my fast skimming, and felt an even deeper shame knowing he probably saw me coming back to my own vomit. From permeating exhaustion, the last thought before I collapsed into sleep was “What am I doing?”.

Camming was a trend I continued for years. I only stuck to the free sites, where it was never about acting for money. I found what angles worked, which kinds of screen names implied my tastes, and learned more of the “rules”. I learned I was both turned on and turned off by infidelity of the other person, that men in bisexual contexts were more attractive to me than in gay spaces, and that I could be validated or humiliated during any of these sessions. Sometimes I was the most popular person in the room, and sometimes I’d finish without anyone finding me desirable at all. Intense highs and lows were common. When I’d find a respectful person, and we’d built up each others confidence with our attractions and mutual orgasms, that felt like belonging to something important and worthy of understanding. I wish that kind of positivity was the norm, but it definitely wasn’t.

The basic trends and functions of camming didn’t change until a few years later. And on rare occasion it blossomed into important in-person interactions, but this was well after my marriage was open and then terminated. And today, camming represents a more of a hindrance than a frontier to the worlds I want to explore. 

Why Won’t You Just Be Sexy

I drew and published my first commission of a male nude figure (which is different than doing a female nude) in 2012. 

You have no idea how much I struggled over this scrotum. Let’s ignore that it’s weakening the composition by creating a tangent on the horizon. I felt like omitting that scrotum was disingenuous, but I was also so scared of including it too:

What if it looks like I’m overthinking the genitalia in the art process? 

Is it too obvious that I took a nude reference photo?

What if I get unwanted attention for this?

What if people reference this image as hypocrisy when I turn down nude commissions?

Aside from the last point, which applied to someone who was abusive towards me, none of my other concerns came to fruition. It’s not a timeless image, and it wasn’t very extreme, but it was an important moment in my career and personal development, even if no one else knew.

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The gravitas of this ball sack started over a year prior, with personal work that I had never published. My good friend’s girlfriend, and my classmate since 8th grade, had just killed herself. Between escapism by binging Dark Souls (bad idea), watching Vanilla Sky and Children of Men back-to-back (also bad ideas), and being only one of three people that wasn’t surprised by that funeral, I needed to vent some heavy feelings.

The image in question, and notes from its publication, after sitting with it for a half year:

During a particularly stressful late-night, I resolved to draw something sexually explicit without any expectations. With enough time the drawing morphed into a figure, and then a character of a kangaroo. I had drawn him before, but this time things were way different. Despite my aim, its posture and demeanor suggested little interest in sexual provocation. Now it is returning my gaze in judgment, disappointment, and humiliation. The direct nature of the image grew out of my control, and the character received a life of its own, yet again, outside of my intentions. If you read this metadata know that I kept this image because of how important it was, and I'm sorry if it caused any wrongs. The kangaroo and I are both not okay with what happened.

I tried to draw this character looking sexy and confident, but it was just angry, maybe even condemning.

He looked at me as if to say, “Jonathan, this isn’t you. What are you doing?”

I almost cried, “I don’t know! I’m angry and horny and scared and confused! Why won’t you just be sexy?!”

Truth is found in this frustrated sketch. For whatever reason, I felt it important enough to upload on Fur Affinity, with a statement on my feelings at the time. It was my hope that the condemning stare from Kelly the Kangaroo (shut up) may translate to an audience. It’s been 8 years since that drawing. Back then I labeled it as THE UNFORGIVING GENIUS, a prototype to my ANIMUS SOLO series also highlighting sexuality and sensuality, often with nudity.

Thots and Prayers

So what happened to bring me through that repression and into a sex-positive art career? The truth is that I had my back up against a wall, and I felt like I’d either trust my God to direct these sexual feelings I had in my art or I’d just off myself. This took the form of the black hare named Resin. I painted overtly sexual and dark themes as a prayer to be freed from my suffering, and wouldn’t you know it, my prayer was answered. The images I created were sexual in nature, but they were still spiritual.

Every time I posted something that vulnerable and sexual in nature, I first hid them behind my Patreon with an artist statement like the one you’re reading now. With my confidence bolstered by supports who understood my efforts, I eventually published beyond my donors: public art sites, furry con dealer tables and art shows, and a professional illustration convention, my public Facebook account, all these places saw ANIMUS SOLO and Resin. It meant trying and failing to explain to my mom how art of a goat man autofellating could be God-honoring, but that’s a small price to pay for expressing freedom in my art and my spirituality.

This may have been spiritual in origin, but this was not the kind of spirituality one can bring up at their local Bible study. My immediate family, who followed my art posts on Facebook, couldn’t understand my excitement, nor could they see the work as spiritual or even artistically worthwhile. Confused at best and condemning at worst, we started growing further apart. Despite this disconnect, and despite a standard of secularism one would come to expect, the fantastical art community and furry fandom seemed to better appreciate even the churchier notes of my journey. Having found my tribe, I went full speed ahead, and continue to be surprised by all the new things I learned about other cultures, my identity, my tastes, and my God.

My goal, in this life, is to live as completely as possible, taking every opportunity to serve others on their journeys to be complete. No one can be that for all people, so I surmise the likelihood of my potential goodness in any given discussion, and then move on if I have nothing to offer. In making even my most erotic work an open testament to this priority of mine, all discussions funnel into purpose and providence. If someone, my blood family included, doesn’t want to talk about that, they’re going to block, ignore, or unfollow me. I used to think that was bad, but if someone isn’t willing to have discussions about what I find most important, they’re not worth my time. I’m done seeing rolled eyes after offering the truest parts of myself. I am open with my everyone about what matters to me, and so my audience self-selects. This gives relevant viewers the chance to recognize that we’re already friends, but also repels the kinds of people who only offer asspats without helping me assess myself critically. I would have to do many wrong things to change that kind of momentum.

Apple Buttholes

If you’re an artist sexually attracted to a concept—lets say feet—and the only thing you produce is work about finding feet to be sexy, your art’s legacy by choice will only be “they do hot feets”. Your art’s identity is full of sexual stimulation, and it’ll bring sexual pleasure to others too, but it will begin and end there unless you decide otherwise. 

Is that bad, to dedicate your art solely to a single thing you like? Ignoring the pun, no. I don’t think that focus is objectively bad. I think there’s something poetic about falling in love with one idea and dedicating your life to it. But is it the most fulfilling role art could have in your life or others?

I choose to believe you can have so much more than just tapping into fetishes—or even general interests—and that aiming for more is rewarded handsomely by affecting positive change. Fortunately and unfortunately, affecting positive change is completely down to how you interface with your interest. If you’re sharing this specialty art publicly, while never asking where your tastes come from, nor introducing that question to your fans when it comes up, I can say in confidence it’s not the best way to foster edifying relationships or to develop dynamically as a more complete person. It also denies you the potential to create even hotter stuff, if you’re always on autopilot. 

As an NSFW creative, even Patreon has gone on record  to say that you will experience greater instances of theft. Your majority of Patreon members will likely be “subscription-based” rather than “altruistic”, if your emphasis is on creating pornography. Concordantly, the majority of your interactions with your art fans on other platforms will care more about a shared fetish than who you are as a person, so long as that’s all you offer. 

And again, I’m not slamming porn, here. And it’s not just sexual content that has this issue. For the sexually uninterested readers here, this dynamic affects those who creates work for pleasure but never use art to understand themselves or the world around them better. Sexy or platonic, if you don’t know what’s important to you and why, and your work isn’t framed as sharing who you are, you’re extremely lucky if your work initiates any deep and valuable relationships at all. 

If all you did was art of trains, mountains, or maws, you can still affect positive change in yourself and the train-mountain-maw fandom (?) at large by being intentional. The only reason why all of this sounds so bizarre is because esoteric specialty content— especially porn—virtually never serves the purpose of encouraging presence and intention. And—like middle school Jonathan—most creators don’t even know they can aim for it.

The purpose of every piece of art is not objectively to be a gut-wrenching soul search. Art functions as fun and joy, as stability and stimulation to the autist, and as means of sharing your love of your Overwatch main. But if you’re doing this art-thing often and you’re left wanting something else from the experience, if your social spheres aren’t bringing you the encouragement and structure you desire, you are exactly the person I’m talking to. If you’re just here to draw dicks, snorkeling furries, or hind paws, or train-mountain-maws, and you’re on top of the world, please don’t take this as a suggestion that you need to change.

For myself, without ever going deeper, it does feel like ketchup on a steak, using the wrong end of the fork, or only eating the butthole on the bottom of the apple and then throwing the rest out. I want to eat more than the apple butthole. I can’t condemn those with different priorities from mine, but I do wonder if they’d change their approach if they knew what else they could have.

So… What’s That Monkey Have To Do With All This?

Here’s the piece in question. MJ, Monkey Jonathan. Maybe you’ve met each other. The first post on MJ also covered some basics on how powerful and diverse fursonas can be. If you’re short on time, the tl;dr is that MJ is me. He’s a straight-up avatar whose imagery is designed to share my real life experiences. My body, my environment, my clothes, my experiences, pure non-fiction. This image, however, takes it to the next level. If it wasn’t obvious already, it’s a Photomorph. 

Photomorphs, Photo-manipulations, Morphs, Photomanips… this technique has a few different names. If it wasn’t self-explanatory, the work is a photo that is digitally painted over. This was a goal all along for MJ, in my journey to keep him as true as possible to the experience of my being. This is why the settings aren’t glamorous, and why the last two images of him were selfies in my bedroom. And my bedroom is a mattress on the basement floor with a mirror, some shelves for clothes, and fabric draping dignity over the otherwise exposed water heater and pipes. I’m not materialistic and don’t need more than this. The last thing I want for MJ is sending a message of something that I’m not.

My body has been the reference for my fursonas and other art for the last 8+ years, so what changes with a photomorph? There are three points that make this another benchmark in how I interface with my art, audience, and self:

1) Funnily enough, I was first worried about what other artists would think. I was raised thinking that photo assets were basically lying, or that using them meant I was compensating for a lack of talent. I recall a mini-scandal featuring one of the most prominent concept artists out there, when he was disingenuous about his photo asset use. As a then budding concept artist, it made me too scared to approach any photo usage at all. For those interested, this is not a legitimate concern in the AAA concept art mulch industry, as mentioned in this talk by art lead Shadi Saffadi. However, on matters of what’s most effective and virtuous in your own art techniques, I recommend trusting your gut and your most esteemed peers.

2) My history with exhibitionism and art with penises still affects my feelings on this piece. I’ve never really done an in-depth dick study before. I can probably count the number of obvious penises I’ve painted in my whole career on only two hands, and less than half of those have been erections. But let’s be honest, it’s totally different to have a painted over photo of my erection as the center of the image. Before breaking the chains placed on me by conventional porn, I thought that I was not only unsexy but that I had a tiny penis. I assumed I was sexually defective, between my penis size that I perceived as small, and the erectile dysfunction I faced from my porn addiction. And back when I thought I needed cis-penises to be sexually aroused, or back when my size was part of my physical incompatibility with my ex, this was an incredible weight on my self image. I hated stigmatizing my own body in this way, and featured an erection to rebel against my fears and own this part of myself that I only liked sometimes.

3) Photomanipulations I had initially viewed as moral compromises to my teenage sex drive. A human body with an animal head allowed a much younger Jonathan entry into sexually objectifying without fearing eternal damnation. Human porn was bad, especially if poor innocent women were involved, right? But even a woman with an animal head superimposed, and fur textures painted on, that’s far less damning. Male subjects, on the other hand, deserved to be objectified because everyone knows that men are perverts. Plus, the taboo of finding a man sexy made it desirable. If they were being all muscular and confident, as photomorphs often are, that was living proof that gay didn’t equal “sissy”. In the past, I had completed several Photomanipulations of my own body, though my shame compelled me to delete them before anyone would have a chance to see. No more shame, I’m taking the plunge.

After my history of thinking I was ugly, navigating my sex addiction, camming with strangers, and being married to someone who didn’t find me sexy, it took a lot to bring me to the point of doing a photo manipulation and posting one online. Trusting myself in a polyamorous relationship after the open marriage I didn’t want was a big step forward. Another step forward was to model nude for a life drawing session at Eurofurence 2017, to bring a platonic dimension to my own nakedness. Being in therapy and accepting my sexual tastes where they are but choosing to redirect my excitement back to my partner is my current set of steps forward, an open goal serving as my entry to any of my sexual elements outside my relationship. I’ll be expanding on this more near the end of the post.

If you want the uncensored high res MJ photomorph, he’s posted here on the Black Hare tier, where you’ll be treated to a 4+ year backlog of mature content with artist statements. It’s also the only place this uncensored image will be published, if my audience would be so considerate. (It’s already been leaked at least once, so if you don’t respect keeping it there, please at least link back here with your cross-post or paste the artist statement on that page.) 

Standards + Time = A Healthy Fanbase

Creating this image was a lot of fun, but getting here was far from easy. It took years of emotional homework to discover and deconstruct my sexual tastes, which evolve even today. Because of the discussions I have in streams, at convention tables, in image comments, and posts like this one, this development is a constant inevitability. One friend observed this as a bubble of realness and vulnerability that surrounds me. If you want to interact with me in my spaces, you have to enter my bubble. You may not be ready for it, and you may not even notice it at first, but commentary in my spaces will always gravitate towards my priorities: loving and understanding you, and my trying to relate to the most important parts of what you’ve shared.

If you choose to interface with me through my art or my online presence, I’ve decided that it will be on my terms. You can decide that too. And you can create work that promotes those terms. You can have image descriptions that emphasize it. You can respond to even unrelated comments in ways that makes it about what you need, and that’s not bad. It’s your art and your spaces, so please treat it like it is yours! Those things plus time equal a fanbase where the most faithful members care about you as a human being, not as an art vending machine for their pleasure. If you claim and protect these spaces as yours, it actually makes it viable to be vulnerable. No longer will you have to burn out by offering your soul in too many directions. Focus on your space and make it known that it’s yours. I can’t promise that it will be big, nor can I promise that it will happen quickly. But I can promise that it will be yours.

The possibility of an art career where most drama doesn’t reach you, where shallow people are repelled and replaced with substantial folks that help you attain your personal goals, that’s real. You have that, even while creating or sharing commissions of majority sexually overt content. While I can promise it is worth the effort, I can’t sugarcoat it: you’ll be treading a path in life almost everyone else misses, a path most people don’t even have the privilege to access. If your life doesn’t look like that now, it also means taking inventory of the relationships that hold you back, and replacing them or allowing them to be people who meet your needs. It means asking trusted ones what sort of signals you’re putting out. It means never sharing or writing things unless said things set you up for success. This path rarely treaded can be scary, and it’s a patently un-furry thing to do, but you won’t be the first to do it.

Sadly, living an artful life towards your priorities will not always be peaceful. Some people can’t respect that kind of dedication. Some people are even threatened by me personally, especially when they think how much I care about others is a façade. This minority of negative interactions I cannot stop, nor can you. But you can challenge someone’s cynicism by continuing to care beyond their expectations. If they can’t absorb your motivations as a positive influence, they have their own homework to do, far away from your space.

I’m confident about how much I care, but my virtues can’t tell how the internet will respond to this photomorph, nor can it tell me what role photomorphs will play in my future. My intelligence and experience is so limited, so all I can do is my best. But you, dear reader, what’s your bottom line for why you create? Is where you are now with your creations everything you ever wanted? Is it everything you could ever have? I’d love you to leave a comment on the space between where you are and where you want to be. 

Post Script: Monkey Epilogue

It’s been about ten days since publishing the censored MJ photomorph on FA and the uncensored version on Patreon. I also shared the uncensored image with artist statement to a few relevant friends. Here’s what happened in that short amount of time:

- Someone joined the Patreon to access the uncensored image and immediately shared it in their Telegram group chat . The leak did include a link to my Patreon with a suggestion to support me, which was nice, but someone in their group shared it with at least another group, where a friend notified me of what was happening. The original leaker was naïve enough to assume that my work would stay in their group. When I urged the leaker to post the artist statement as well, they obliged, which is where I ended that conversation. I will never know how far the uncensored photomorph has spread by now out of context. If you see it, please link back to this text to give people a chance at reading what it’s about.

- In the middle of our (still ongoing) financially stressed space, I was scared of using my body for money. I wanted to do this photomorph as a celebration, not a response to financial desperation. I don’t stigmatize the world’s oldest profession, but I did need to ask myself how different that position would be from a type of sex work.

- I blocked comments on FA for the first 24 hours, because I knew the people who really wanted to would comment elsewhere, or revisit the submission. Got a few nice comments after the initial block. It makes me want to unblock the MJ Feet pic too, now that I’m not so nervous.

- Over 180 people clicked the link behind the paywall. With 2 new $10 patrons, that’s actually a good conversion rate.

- I shared it with a few friends for whom it was relevant. They were inspired by my courage, and some of them wished they could do something similar. A second friend had done a masked photo shoot recently, and shared some of the photos for my future experimentation.

- A furry porn friendquaintance of mine, whose body paint + mask work I find compelling, reached out to me because he loved the photomorph so much. The conversation moved to discussing a photomorph commission, which was a dream of mine I didn’t even know I had. We then discussed how his religious beliefs and sexual ideals didn’t relate to his current work, and what sex positivity he could bring in an edifying way. He found my image to be one of the most erotic images he’s ever seen, so channeling that standard into his personal needs will be an exciting part of our future together. In the meantime, we’re going back and forth with little observations on The Bible. 

- Sasha and I talked about the selfie and what it means for our relationship. I continue to feel grateful that these things bring us closer to one another, even when our entries into sex were so different from each other. The fact that the selfie was taken while I was preparing for sex with him makes it a nice little reference to that bigger picture, but that was a detail I had initially saved for the uncensored Patreon post. I hope mentioning it here helps you appreciate another dimension of it.

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Call To Action

Hey, if you liked this post, I need your help. If you have zero moneys to give, I still urge you to follow my Patreon at no cost whatsoever. I bust my little butt to get quality content here on a monthly basis for free, so you can get updates right at your inbox without spending a penny. As an NSFW creator, Patreon limits my exposure, so sharing my work with your friends on Twitter and elsewhere is a very important and free way to keep me going.

If you’d like to donate 2USD/mo—that’s 6 pennies a day, and less than one fancy coffee per month—that’s my most popular tier. It grants you exclusive original sales and discounts in my online store that pays for itself in a single purchase. The Black Hare Tier  is where you’ll get the uncensored MJ photomorph as a high res, and many other posts with exclusive content, so even if you donate once and then cancel, it’s a great deal!

If you don’t do Patreon, you can always send tips via Paypal to jonathanvair(at)gmail(dotcom).

If you’re looking for a big, sad, vulnerable pile of divorce, addiction, recovery, art therapy, and spiritual commentary, I have something else you can purchase. If you can’t afford it and could use it, DM me and you’ll get a free copy. I need your money right now, but there’s no reason I’d hide a valuable resource from someone who can’t afford it. 

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If you’re still reading, especially if you don’t know me personally, I need to mention what your Patreon pledges are going towards, and how important it is that you help now if you’re thinking about it:

My partner and I are in a difficult financial position right now. We’re spending hundreds per month to guarantee the safety of our friend stuck between countries and down on her luck. I owe about 500/mo in high-interest college loans. We just choked on a 3k hospital bill for an emergency room checkup, resulting in a clean bill of health, because we were scared when Sasha couldn’t see a heart specialist in time. We recently learned we may lose 12k in gross income since we weren’t guaranteed a position in selling at next year’s biggest show [EDIT: found out yesterday we made it in, but Sasha was waitlisted from our second biggest show today]. And before our financial situation turned dire from circumstances beyond our control, I purchased a new chair I had wanted since 2012, and my partner ordered a new phone after over a year of one that doesn’t consistently charge. Even with our combined Patreon sales and generous donors, we only cover our rent. We cook and garden religiously to be thrifty, we rarely go on dates or eat out, and we do only one vacation per year, an art convention we just returned from. I’m currently on a plane to a wedding in Indianapolis that I can only afford due to using flyer miles, while Sasha stays at home to continue work on our collaborative series and apply for a local juried art market.

I choose to be transparent with money matters because I know this changes how you view our situation, my writing, and my art. It affects what it means that I spend hundreds of hours on free content for you all. Now, towards less experienced creatives trying to figure out how all this works, those numbers I shared can be critical for their future plans. As creatives, we don’t get anywhere by hiding what our struggles look like, and in our art community, a rising tide lifts all boats. Even though you don’t need to see my bills, it might be useful to know that your money actually supports people who are doing their best for themselves and others, and not people who are spending capriciously and selfishly. (I will buy $4 bottles of wine or order a pizza once a month if I feel shitty, though, but it’s really good pizza.)

My love and thanks for your time and energy,

-J