In my country’s crossdresser/transgender community, the current ‘hot’ topic of discussion is around crossdressing as a form of fetishism, and how to ‘educate’ the public about the different forms of crossdressing. And as you can read in my most recent entries, this is something that I give a lot of thought as well.
Documentation on the Internet, fortunately, is on the side of the non-fetishist crossdressers. After all, they’re the ones producing most of the documentation. Fetishists have no time to write — they just wish to enjoy their arousal when putting on some lingerie and spend their free time in search of a sexual partner who appreciate their fetish, and there are quite a lot of them, too. I seriously suspect that crossdressing as a fetish comes on the fourth place, after BDSM, sexual role-playing and rubber/latex/leather, although this list claims it to be #7 (but it’s not a scientific study!). As a fetish, crossdressing has increasingly become more and more acceptable in the past decade. I can seriously believe that in a decade or so, two male friends can chat over a beer watching a game on TV and casually say something like: ‘Oh, you crossdress for kinks? Me too!’ and laugh about their sexual experiences. It’s becoming as socially acceptable as any other fetish.
That naturally leaves us non-fetishist crossdressers — we who simply need to manifest our inner self-image as women — with a problem. How can we claim to be ‘different’? More specifically, how can we make the public in general, which is starting to accept crossdressing as an acceptable form of sexual fetish, that crossdressing, for us, is something completely different?
Some groups (like, for instance, the British Beaumont Society) are notoriously intolerant about that, and they have very strict rules to prevent fetishists from joining them. Those rules pretend to avoid that those groups degenerate into dating events, where men looking for sexual partners who enjoy wearing female lingerie while having sex will try their luck. The same applies to online groups as well. In my country, I have joined two forums (outside the omnipresent Facebook with its gazillion groups…). One of them required a relatively strict procedure for entry; the other was less strict. After several years, the ‘less strict’ group was crammed full of fetishists, who complained to the management that they were unable to post more ‘erotic’ pictures and videos of themselves. The management obliged: the restriction against pornography was lifted. You can imagine what happened. After a year, the forum had to shut down. Because, in truth, the quality of the pornography was not that high — there were far, far better places to access porn, even amateur porn. What mostly happened is that the non-fetishists quickly got tired of participating in what was now just a dating site, even against the wishes of the management, but that what was happened. So it became pointless to participate, unless one was, indeed, looking for a date. But even for that the site was not appropriate: there are way better dating sites. So it was a mediocre porn site and a mediocre dating site, with little interest, and, as a result, closing it down was the only reasonable choice. The first group, by contrast, is still around: it has less participation these days, because its most vocal members are now with their transition, but it is still around, and it still accepts the occasional member or two every month.
The point here is that it looks like the only way to keep the fetishists and the non-fetishists apart is by enforcing strict rules. However, like everything in life, there is not just black and white. Non-fetishist crossdressers also have fetishes of their own, and this is as natural for crossdressers as it is for cisgendered people.
I, for instance, cannot claim not to have any fetishes. They are, however, of a different nature, but that is not immediately perceivable, and has caused a lot of confusion among several people who contacted me over the years.
For example, I’m a smoking fetishist. This means that I do, indeed, derive sensual pleasure from the act of smoking as a woman. I have addressed this elsewhere, so I won’t bother you with details. Let’s just say that smoking fetishism is as strange to any non-smoker (or anti-smoker) as foot fetishism is for those who just think that feet are smelly and ugly and not worth of being part of a sexual fantasy. I don’t know what the current theory around fetishes is, but I think it’s safe to assume that they are a bit more than merely ‘current fads’. I prefer to explain all these things as something that is not ‘learned’ or ‘copied by example’, but that there is already a latent potential inside us, and a trigger is what makes the fetish emerge.
This is something that transgendered people are very familiar with. They have always been transgendered, even before birth (if science is right about that!). However, they might not have realized it, until some special trigger unlocks that potential, and then one might suddenly feel that they have always been like that, it was just that the ‘right’ circumstances never actually presented themselves. I usually refer to my first crossdressing experience as something that happened to me when I was 23 years old, or something like that (I don’t recall the exact date, I have a terrible memory): I was alone, away from my parents who were enjoying their vacations, while our own place was being painted; so I had to spend a few days at my (female) cousin’s place, and suddenly, out of the blue, I got this irrepressible urge to put on her lingerie — just because it was available. And, yes, I certainly got very aroused by that — and immediately regretted it afterwards, feeling deeply ashamed of myself, and scared of what I had done on an impulse!
Does this mean that I ‘became’ a crossdresser when I was 23 (or thereabouts)? No, of course not. I had tried on some of my mother’s clothes when I was a little kid. I dreamed of being dressed as a girl by my parents during Carnival, but was so scared that they would find out how much I would enjoy the experience, that I blatantly refused any attempts to do so. I loved a doll we had and sewed clothes for her — and for all the other plushies I had. I envied the other girls and their lovely long hair, while I had to wear mine short. I could go on and on, until I faced a small identity crisis when I was 15, and decided to suppress all those strange thoughts about being a woman, because I was completely scared about them, and, to make matters worse, I feared that thinking of myself as a woman would prevent me to get a girlfriend, which is what every (male) teenager wants most. The whole concept of lesbian MtF transexuality was, of course, absolutely unknown to me (in fact, when I was 15, scientists didn’t even believe such a concept could exist at all!).
But, no matter how much I suppressed those thoughts, feelings, and emotions, the truth is that the ‘right’ trigger just happened to reveal my true nature to myself. If I had never been at my cousin’s place by myself, I might just have started crossdressing much, much later — until the right set of circumstances happened again.
Similarly, I believe that fetishes happen in the same way. It’s obvious that, as a kid, I wasn’t a smoking fetishist — kids were not allowed to smoke, after all 🙂 But I definitely had the potential to become one. Of course, because my own mother smoked with a holder (she abandoned the holder when I was an adult), that image was definitely constantly in my mind. Later, during my teens, I would be fascinated with old classics where women smoked sensually — in the old days when smoking was fashionable, elegant, and glamorous. In my case, I associated smoking with eroticism. I tend to say that my earliest form of conscious crossdressing was to smoke with a holder — unknown to family and friends, of course. In fact, almost nobody in my family knows that I smoke: I wished to avoid them a huge disappointment; although I was never forbidden to smoke, my parents would be utterly sad if I picked up the habit. My mother died happily believing that both her offspring, in spite of her bad influence, never smoked. Or at least she thought I never became a nicotine addict.
In fact, I became much worse than that 🙂 Because addicts, in a sense, entertain the idea that one day they might just stop; they just lack the willpower and opportunity to do (or so they tell themselves). My case runs much deeper than that: I’m not merely an addict, I’m a smoking fetishist, and, as a result, I don’t want to stop. I might be forced to do so one day in the future, either because smoking becomes unlawful, or because of health issues, but, until that day happens, I will enjoy it as much as I can. This is definitely the same attitude I have towards eating (I love to eat) — especially chocolate (I’m a cocoa addict!) — and, of course, towards crossdressing. These are things that are part of myself, and I can suppress the urges, but not eradicate them.
However, smoking as a form of fetishism has also a strong erotic component — to myself and to all who share the same fetish. Perhaps by a strange turn of events, I decided that my YouTube channel (and Flickr timeline) would be for an audience of smoking fetishists. When I started doing that, there were not that many YouTube channels just for that; mostly people would just upload pirated videos from smoking fetishist websites. Very few fetishists would actually post videos and pictures of themselves (this is one of the reasons why some of my old videos have dozens of thousands of views, but recent ones just have a few hundreds: these days, there is a vast variety of smoking fetishist videos out there, most of them done by professionals and very good-looking amateurs).
Because smoking is so erotic for me, almost all my videos have a mildly erotic component as well. This is actually unfortunate, because it means that the whole group of people looking for a crossdresser as a sexual partner will get aroused by my videos. Smoking fetishism does not even make the top 10 list of common fetishes; it’s more likely on the bottom 10! But crossdressing, as said, is very high on the list. So what people see is a moderately erotic video of a crossdresser — if she smokes or not, that’s irrelevant — and, because it’s mildly erotic, they immediately assume I’m available for sex.
Which, as you know, I’m not. I still have practically zero libido. And I have absolutely zero interest in having sex with men (as defined by their genitalia, not their gender). But how can my viewers understand that, if all they see is a male crossdresser who is clearly aroused on the videos she posts all the time?
I have to admit that I’m naïve and tend to understand things very slowly. None of this was very clear to me. I assumed, completely wrongly, that most of the people who would watch my videos would come from the tiny crowd of smoking fetishists. A few, of course, are exactly that. But the vast majority couldn’t care less about the smoking aspect. All they want is to have sex with a crossdresser, and assume automatically, because I’m ‘willing’ to post mildly erotic videos of myself, that I’m also ‘willing’ to have sex with them.
This is so wrong in so many different ways that I’m seriously considering closing down my YouTube channel!
On the other hand, there is also something nagging at my back, and you’d have to know a lot of my background to understand me. During almost all my life, I never got compliments, neither in public, nor even in private. My friends tend to laugh at me or scorn me, not compliment me — both male and female friends. That is something I got used to since my pre-teens; I was never differently treated. My few past partners, before my current wife, would also be more willing to scorn me than to compliment me. My own parents, who I’m sure loved me, would not really hand out praise easily. They expected me to perform well in school, and have good grades, and get a good job, and be successful at what I did (which, until 9/11, I was). I found all that normal; I would also not ‘fish for compliments’ because I simply hadn’t been brought up that way.
So this is where I stood. Now suddenly, from 2007 onwards, I get in touch with a completely new reality. All of a sudden, a lot of complete strangers started complimenting me on my female image. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting that at all. I thought — because I’m conditioned to think that way! — that they were just being polite. Or, in some cases, just being sarcastic. Or — in most cases! — they were expecting that their flattery would actually lead to get me in bed with them. Whatever the case, I never assumed that any of those compliments were real, heart-felt — because that lies beyond my life experience.
Apparently, however, some of them are genuine. And that comes from the way they’re actually pleased about what they see on the screen. But, again, I shrugged it off after reading Richard Ekins. In his work, he describes how crossdressers engage in several contexts, and, depending on the context, this leads to a certain kind of stereotypical behaviour. I don’t presume to understand anything about sociology, but what little I gathered from Ekins’ explanation, this means that when crossdressers are in a group together (online or in the real world), they naturally know that everybody is, in fact, male. But because all present themselves as female, they role-play the role of women when in presence of each other: complimenting themselves, picking up things that are done right, ignoring everything which is just plain wrong, and so forth. You’re supposed to know the rules of the game when interacting with the group, and the ‘game’ is actually taken very seriously by the participants. It mirrors, in a degree, what genetic females do among friends: they’re prone to pick something they like and compliment their friends about it, while avoiding the rest. The difference between that and what crossdressers do is that we are in what Ekins calls an ‘open context’ — everybody knows that we’re male crossdressers, we all ‘read’ each other, but that doesn’t prevent us from pretending we just see beautiful women in front of us.
It is said that we crossdressers are too harsh on ourselves, and bad judges of our own looks and behaviour. That might be the case. But the reverse is also true: when among fellow crossdressers — or non-crossdressers who, however, admire crossdressers — we all play a role. We pretend to each other that we don’t know who we are, and, since we present ourselves as women, we interact with each other as women. Outsiders might find this strange, but that’s how it is within the group.
Smoking fetishists are exactly the same. Because we get aroused with the sensuous image of a woman smoking, both the performer and the audience also play their own roles: the performer is putting on an act, and the audience knows it’s an act, but still enjoys it, and comments and applauds as if the act were ‘real’. But for people outside the smoking fetishist community, this is not immediately apparent. They misinterpret the erotic undercurrents. Here is the difficulty: smoking fetishists are aroused by the sensuous display of the act of smoking, and the rest is pretty much irrelevant; it’s the smoking itself that is attractive, not necessarily the person doing it. The non-fetishists, however, are not aroused by the smoking (even if they are tolerant of smokers). They just see the ‘act’ and believe it is real, i.e., that the person engaging in the act is actually enticing others to get sexual pleasure and is willing to have sex with them. So they react accordingly — here is a woman wanting to have sex with me, let’s show our appreciation and get in touch with her.
Let me give you another example to see if I can make the point a bit more clearer. When J. Lo or Shakira dances on the stage, the audience knows it’s an act, an artistic performance. They dance quite sensually — but the audience, knowing it’s just a performance, are not immediately jumping on the stage and wishing to have sex with them, right there on the spot. Instead, they appreciate the show for what it is: a fantasy, nothing more than that, but one that is actually very sensuous and sexy, and definitely can entice arousal. But because the audience knows it’s nothing more than a performance, they will not start molesting the singers (a few might, of course, not understanding it’s an act, but these cases have mental disturbances of some sort). Just because ‘it’s merely an act’ does not mean that it is less attractive, rather the contrary. We might get videos of the performance. We might see them over and over again. Some might even masturbate while watching Shakira swaying her hips or J. Lo bouncing her bottom. Why not? It’s erotic, it’s sexy, it’s pleasing to watch. Some might even go so far and send those artists some comments over Twitter or Facebook, and say things like ‘oh baby you cannot imagine how much you excite me!’. But even those messages are ‘part of the game’. The artists know the role they play; the audience responds in kind. The artists (well, perhaps not J. Lo or Shakira, they have no time for that) might even answer, ‘thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed the show!’. It’s all part of show biz, and nobody confuses it with the ‘real life’.
However, with shows given by smoking fetishists, this might be quite unclear. Most of the audience might appreciate Shakira singing and dancing and understand it’s just a show, just a fantasy created to entertain an audience; but the same audience might not understand that smoking fetishists are also just putting on a show. Instead, they assume that ‘it’s real’, in the sense that ‘this person really wants to get laid’. Why? Because we have been conditioned for decades to assume that singers and dancers put on shows. But the public at large doesn’t have any clue about smoking fetishism and how they also do shows for their audiences. It’s just outside their experience. And that is not surprising, after all: it’s a little-known fetish with very, very few followers.
Consider crossdressing, which has so many more fetishists. Transvestite shows have always been popular in the past hundred years or more. The audience also knows, in this case, that this is really just a show. They might enjoy it, or be surprised and shocked, but they still know it’s nothing more than a performance. It’s only when crossdressing males are encountered outside the stage that questions are raised — if that person is crossdressing outside the environment of the show, what does that mean?
Therefore, the same thing actually happens when crossdressers appear outside the ‘show context’. Then we give out strange signals. Because there are so many crossdressing fetishists — both fetish crossdressers, and fetishists who love crossdressers — it’s very easy to ‘cross the line’ and say, ‘oh, if this person is on a stage, then I know it’s a show, and it’s just a fantasy, just a pretence; but if I meet her outside the stage, then maybe this person is really a fetishist, and then I can have sex with her’. This is the kind of thought that crosses people’s minds. Of course, some transvestite artists actually encourage that kind of thinking, although many don’t — it’s a show, they just get paid to perform, outside the stage they don’t even remotely think about crossdressing, or crossdressing as a form of fetish. It’s just show business.
Similarly, we don’t address Shakira on the street and say, ‘I saw your video yesterday, you were so sexy, do you want to have some sex with me?’ We know that Shakira just performs like that on the stage. Of course, a few (minor) artists may actually have second intentions when performing a sensual, erotic dance on stage, but this would rather be the exception, not the rule.
Because there are no real ‘shows’ from smoking fetishists for other smoking fetishists, naturally the public at large doesn’t understand what is fantasy and what is not. And it’s hard to educate the audience, because it’s so further away from their experience. In fact, they might even had the opposite experience, i.e. meeting a woman in a bar that deliberately smokes in a provocative way to attract sexual partners. It’s not uncommon, even though it’s much less common in our days. In that case, the whole innuendos present on smoking fetishism are absent. Smoking provocatively, in that context, means being available for sex. And that, of course, ruins the possibility of educating the public that there are people who enjoy watching women smoking as a fantasy or a show — because that lies beyond their own personal experience, and, as such, it’s not understandable (like, in fact, most fetishes are not understandable by anyone who doesn’t share the same fetish).
As a side note, the smoking fetishist community is actually quite tolerant of crossdressers. There is a good reason for that. Most of the videos for the smoking fetishist community are made by paid models. In most cases, those models are not smoking fetishists themselves. Some of them don’t even smoke regularly, they just do it as a show for a willing audience, because it pays — surprisingly, even though it’s a ‘minor’ fetish, there is a huge amount of websites offering smoking fetishism videos. Because those models look gorgeous when they smoke, they are pleasing to watch.
However, there is something lacking. Smoking fetishists can immediately tell when someone else actually knows how to smoke or not. It’s an art that requires some training and practice, like any other, and smoking fetishists know that and are able to appreciate the art and the performer that does that art. Unfortunately, because smoking has become a taboo, and smokers are slowly being ostracized (even though I’d say it’s not that bad these days as it was a few years ago), it means that the art of sensual female smoking is only carried along by few. A generation or two ago, mothers would teach their daughters how to smoke, and the art of smoking was propagated among generations. These days, of course, parents discourage their children from smoking (even when the parents are smokers themselves), so there is a discontinuity in this transmission of knowledge. As a result, most women who pick up the habit, in spite of their parents’ will, just copy the way others smoke. Until recently, that meant copying it from males, since more males smoked than females — a trend that has been completely reversed in some cases (like in my country, where a huge proportion of women smoke nowadays, almost compensating the huge drop of men who stopped smoking). Males and females smoke completely differently, and smoking fetishists know that very well. Models in videos simply haven’t been taught how to smoke properly, because, in most cases, they’re coached by men! Those video producers, however, have all the range of visual effects to enhance those videos, and know enough about a few key elements about smoking fetishism, that those videos still sell. After all, since it’s a fantasy, just a show, that is enough to produce suspension of disbelief to please smoking fetishists. We can watch regular movies and derive some pleasure from them even if we know that everybody is an actor, and all visual effects are produced by Hollywood studios; suspension of disbelief is what makes movies (and literature) enticing — we know it’s not real, but we can still enjoy it, by ‘pretending’ that it’s real. The same, of course, applies to smoking fetishism videos
But ‘hard-core’ fetishists want more, they want to see true smoking fetishists, who still know about the art of sensuous female smoking, and who actually enjoy smoking (instead of merely being paid to smoke in front of a camera). That’s why amateur videos made by smoking fetishists are popular. Unfortunately, as said, there are not many contemporary women who still know about the art and are able to give a convincing performance on video (even if they are, indeed, smokers). By a strange twist of events, it is curiously the crossdressing community, probably strongly inspired by the art as it was performed in the 1950s or 1960s, who carry the spirit of the art along. As said, smoking fetishists, because they are object/behaviour fetishists, do not care that much about the performer, but much more about the act. Of course, if the performer also looks good on the video, it’s a bonus, but not a requirement. Crossdressers who are also smoking fetishists look like women, they know how to smoke like women, they enjoy smoking in front of an audience (as opposed to being paid for smoking), and, as a result, in general, they give a reasonably good performance. The audience, even if they are heterosexual males with no interest in crossdressers or transgendered people, respond in kind. As said, they care little about who the performer actually is, they just want to get some excitement and arousal from the act of smoking itself.
And because it’s a performance, done in a specific context, the audience also knows how to behave accordingly to the ‘rules of the game’. Compliments, motivation, applause is part of the ‘game’, but what is being complimented is the act itself and how well the performer is managing the performance, not the performer herself. But, of course, in the role-playing context of a smoking fetishim performance, the two are mixed. Each side obviously knows exactly what is meant by those ‘rules of the game’. But an outsider, unaware of smoking fetishism as a sensual art form, is completely confused. All they can see is that there is someone on video who is doing sexy things (well, they might resent the smoking itself), wearing provocative clothing (or not at all!), and getting complimented by an audience. They totally fail to understand what it is all about, and, obviously, get it completely wrong. The nearest comparison would be watching a BDSM performance on stage without realizing what it is about; most people will be shocked, if they had absolutely no BDSM fetishes of their own.
When reflecting about this, I miss something in YouTube and/or Flickr. There is no easy, simple way that I can flag or label my videos as ‘for smoking fetishists only — non-fetishists, please stay away’. Of course I can put ample warnings everywhere. I can blog about it. I can provide links to explanations. But none of those will have any effect: people are living in an age of short attention spans and care little about information, all they want is pleasure, or, at least, strong emotions. This is the advantage carried by professional smoking fetishist websites: because they charge for access, only those who are actually willing to spend money to get access to smoking fetishist videos will join. It is similar to pay for getting access to, say, a bar or club with transvestite shows: the audience knows exactly what they are going to get, and they’re willing to pay to get it. While this model is ‘safer’ to the extent that it keeps the performance within context, it leaves the amateurs out of the picture. It also means that so-called ‘true’ amateur smoking fetishists (in the sense that they are really smoking fetishists, not merely paid actresses or models to perform an act) are left out of the picture — unless, of course, they want to go ‘pro’ and join one of those websites (it’s actually ironic that there are many websites announcing ‘amateur smoking fetishists’ and charge for access!).
There used to be ‘closed’ communities for smoking fetishists (some of which have, in the mean time, been shut down, like HolderGals). They had this huge advantage that they kept things in context. Such sites, however, require time, patience, and money to survive. Because the smoking fetishist community is so small, it’s rare that they endure the test of time — they tend, over time, to be abandoned by their creators. As a result, amateur smoking fetishists go to Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and popular ‘general-purpose’ social websites, which are unlikely to shut down, and create their own groups and communities there. The problem is that they are also widely accessible to a non-fetishist audience. And this means that misunderstandings will always happen.
So, this long post was just to say that there is a gap between fetishist crossdressers, and non-fetishist crossdressers, and it’s hard for the public-at-large to separate them. The only solution is to keep the non-fetishist crossdressing community closed to the general public, by introducing strict rules of access. However, just because a crossdresser is not a crossdressing fetishist, but merely someone who expresses their inner self-image as a woman, in private or even in public, it doesn’t mean that they might not have other fetishes as well. This is certainly my case. I don’t have crossdressing as a fetish. However, I’m a smoking fetishist. I cannot claim not to have any fantasies. Of course I have them, like everybody does. However, my fantasies are quite different from the ones that are more common among fetishist crossdressers.
Let me give you a typical example. I don’t mean to sound as if I’m stereotyping, but a common fantasy for a fetishist crossdresser is to have sex with a man who makes her ‘feel a complete woman’. In the vast majority of the crossdressing community — because most of them are crossdressing fetishists — this is the common view, that to ‘become a complete woman’ you need to ‘have sex as a woman with a male partner’. Of course there are variations on the theme; some fetishist crossdressers, for example, are also BDSMers, so being dominated by a male might be part of their fantasies. Others prefer sissification — forced femininity — and that might not even include the sexual act by itself, but merely humiliation. Both of these groups are actually quite large among fetishist crossdressers. As a result, it’s to be expected that the public at large, knowing just a little bit about crossdressing in general, assume that all crossdressers are fetishists, some of which even appreciating domination or sissification, and that’s what they are willing to give them.
In my case, my crossdressing is merely the expression of my inner female. As such, my fantasy is way different. My ‘ideal’ fantasy would be a romantic dinner in an expensive restaurant where I could wear my best dress, go to the opera afterwards, and possibly have a drink at a fancy bar, where the music is not too loud for conversation. And of course in that scenario I would have no problem in doing that either with female friends or with a male companion. Sex, however, would be completely out of the picture — it’s just not part of my fantasy. Smoking would surely be part of it, though — because I’m a smoking fetishist. However, such fantasy is not understandable by those who look at me and consider me to be a crossdressing fetishist. They might even play along with the fantasy — so long as it ends in bed. For me, however, that last step would completely spoil the fantasy, because it’s outside the context that excites and entices me. There might be a good reason for that, too, and that’s my body dysphoria. I can dress as a woman, I can behave as a woman, I can smoke as a woman, I can even flirt as a woman, and I can perfect all those arts to the extent that they are indistinguishable from what a genetic woman would do, but I cannot have sexual relationships as a woman (not even with other women!), because that requires surgery and hormone therapy. Anal sex is just anal sex; oral sex is just oral sex; neither are ‘sex as a woman’ 🙂 (even though women obviously might appreciate both as well) But this is something I cannot convey to sexual fetishists. All I can say, in much simpler words, is that my fantasy goes up to a point and does not go further. Beyond that point, the illusion shatters, and, as such, it doesn’t appeal to me in the least.
When doing my smoking fetishist videos, all I can do is to put on a good performance. As best as I can (and I believe I’m doing my best to improve myself as well), I strive to appeal to fellow smoking fetishists. Being one myself, I know what is attractive and what is exciting. Being lucky for having had the opportunity to learn the art of sensual female smoking, I’m willing to share my knowledge and skills with others, through my videos (and sometimes via some personal conversations and mild coaching, when asked for). I know what an audience of smoking fetishists actually like, and how to entertain them. And, of course, being a smoking fetishist myself, the whole performance is also very exciting to me (and it shows on the videos how excited I am).
However, what I cannot do is to change people’s perceptions. If someone is not a smoking fetishist, my videos don’t make any sense, because the context is lacking. All that the general public sees is a crossdresser who is excited behind the camera and is doing some sexy poses and moves. Therefore, they extrapolate my behaviour to a different context. Instead of being label as a smoking fetishist, I’m viewed as a crossdressing fetishist. Of course this leads to a huge confusion — no wonder!
Therefore, I’m seriously considering taking down all my videos and pictures from the Internet, and just putting them available for smoking fetishists. This will mean screening the audience. They will have to prove, through an interview and some polls, that they actually are smoking fetishists and understand the context of the performance. That is the main reason why I have so few pictures on Facebook; I took them all down when it was clear that I was attracting the ‘wrong’ audience. Setting up my website to restrict content to smoking fetishists only (well, besides a few friends — those of you who are actually reading this post and therefore understand what I’m talking about, because you are reading it!) will take some time, though, and I have to give it some thought. Hosting pictures is easy, since I have almost limitless web space. Video streaming is another story. I might have to change my YouTube channel to ‘friends only’, and somehow interface the website to automatically have members of the restricted area joined to my YouTube friends list. I’m not yet sure how that can be accomplished, but I believe it’s possible — it’s just a question of figuring it out. It will take time. I don’t know when I’ll be finished with the change.
If you’re reading this, you have nothing to worry. You’re one of the 50 or 100 people who will definitely be part of that list, because, even if you’re not a smoking fetishist yourself, you, at least, are now aware of the context of my videos, and will not entertain strange notions about them.
The public at large, however, will have to content themselves with merely a handful of selected pictures in demure poses.
