There are still a few of those tools around. Currently, my favourite one is Pixton, which has a free version with horrible avatars (and uses Flash, which will be discontinued later this year) as well as a new-generation tool with vector graphics that has contemporary-looking cartoon characters — in fact, these are very similar to the style used by the last incarnation of Bitstrips, shortly when they shut down their comic-drawing tool and replaced it with Bitmoji. To be honest, I like the look of Pixton’s characters slightly more, but obviously it’s all a question of personal taste…

Sadly for me, though, the non-free Pixton version is… well, not free! It allows you to do a few trials with limited content to get you going and drooling for more; unlike Bitstrips, which allowed you access to all content and all character poses and expressions, as well as design your own (inside the tool itself) and share it with others, Pixton is much more limited, although the fully unlocked version will come pretty close to what Bitstrips offered. Unfortunately, it will set you back some US$99 per year, which is more than I can afford for casually doing the odd comic strip when I’m in the mood. There is only the free version left — the one with the ugly avatars.

I have no clue what ‘pricing model’ I’d be willing to accept (probably none, at this stage); in any case, Pixton is also changing the way their free version is going to work — because it also uses Flash and it looks like they’re not going to replace it by something else and keep offering it for free. Instead, after replying to one of their surveys, it seems that they’ll use only the vector-based, non-Flash editor version around, but somehow limit even more how people can use it for free. We’ll see. In the case of webcomics, I’d say that visual impact is important, thus the move from ugly characters with a Flash engine behind them to a visually more contemporary look using vector technology (SVG) with a non-Flash editor is the way to go.

Here is a sample of what you can do with Pixton. It should be super-sharp both on a desktop computer, a tablet, or a smartphone. Yay for vector graphics!

You might think there is a very deep psychological explanation for this behaviour! I’m so sorry to disappoint you… the main reason is mostly technical!

For a long time, I had no smartphone with the ability to take selfies, so I used the webcam for almost all pictures (and videos) I took in ancient times (i.e. over a decade ago!). Then the company I work with presented me with a more recent version of an iPhone, with which I could take pictures with better quality than with the webcam — and it was easier to carry anywhere, on top of that.

There was, however, a catch: it was not that easy to see, on the tiny screen, if the pictures came out great or not. Sure, one can always zoom them out; but I’m old-fashioned; except on some cases, I usually can only decide if a picture is worth publishing if I can see it as others will see it, and that means on a laptop/desktop screen. So I would take a lot of pictures, carry them over to the Mac I’ve got, connect the cable, import the photos, and see which ones were worth publishing, and which ones were Just plain garbage.

You might imagine that in this age of Instagram this goes completely against the purpose of taking quick snapshots and publish them on the spot. Well, it’s not that easy. Some of the pictures I take at home (or inside the car!) have notoriously bad lighting. This meant loading them up on Photoshop and correcting them — at least, as far as it was possible to extract meaningful information from those very bad pictures. Sometimes there is really nothing you can do with a picture except discard it; that was particularly true with blurry and out-of-focus pictures, of which I invariably have lots.

A friend of mine tells me that she takes about 400 pictures to get one that she is happy with. I’m not that a perfectionist, but I totally understand her point. These pictures become public; they will be seen by hundreds; and the pressure and demand put upon us to ‘look our best’ on social media is especially true for people like us. It’s actually amazing how a slight twist of the camera angle can make me look ten years younger and much slimmer than I actually am — and that without need of using Photoshop! My face is also not perfectly symmetric, and that is especially noticeable in certain poses: I look so much better from one side than the other, but, of course, I do not always get the opportunity to catch myself on the ‘right’ side (and tmore often than not, I forget which one it is!).

Add to all that my slight body dysmorphia, and that means I’m especially sensitive to very slight changes in the angles or the lighting…

Now, all this means that it takes time to process all those images. A ‘short’ session might be a few dozen pictures, each of which needs to be carefully analyses, before I’m happy to accept some for further processing, or simply reject it because it would take too long. Usually, I would take the pictures late at night, and ‘process’ them early in the next morning, while having breakfast, and before starting to work. But as I went out more and more, this also meant more and more mornings processing images from the day before, until, well, it meant having to do that ‘every day’ (or at least that’s how it seemed!).

Technology advanced, and this brought advantages and disadvantages. For instance, Apple’s macOS comes with a wonderful tool called ‘Preview’, which is a real jack-of-all-trades, the Swiss Army Knife of image processing. It can open 3D models as well as SVG; it renders PDFs beautifully; and it allows simple image processing with just a few mouseclicks. It’s not Photoshop, not even by far — it has very limited editing capabilities — but it’s small, fast, easy to use, and does pretty much 90% of what I need. Photoshop, a heavy-weight for doing professional, studio-quality image processing, was quickly abandoned in favour of Preview which is so much more practical to use! (I still use Photoshop for complex image processing, such as creating the profile images for all social media, or creating animated GIFs, ‘fake’ images of myself — pasting my face over someone else’s body — or simply for those cases when I really want to use a picture, but the retouching needs are far beyond the abilities of Preview). And that accelerated the whole pipeline quite a lot — I could process more images in less time than before!

Still, there were many ‘rejections’ — pictures that were simply so bad that there was no hope of using them at all — but all that changed when Apple added another clever trick to their iPhone software: you could take not just one picture, but a quick succession of pictures with slightly different settings. I believe that professional cameras call that ‘bracketing’; I certainly remember a setting on one of my wife’s cameras that allows her to take 3 or 5 pictures in quick succession with different settings, and then pick the one which is best. The iPhone, by default, 10 pictures at a time, but I think there might be a way to do even more.

The advantage? Well, especially when holding the phone to take a selfie, with a shaky hand, this ‘bracketing’ trick will try to catch at least a few pictures where the focus just happens to be ‘right’ for a fraction of a second. That way, when selecting the pictures to approve, I would have far more choices, and it would be highly likely that at least one out of ten would not be blurred, and possibly even with acceptable lighting settings.

The problem, of course, is that I would have ten times more pictures to select… and on top of that, I would have ten pictures of each pose, which is even more boring to do. Oh, sure, sometimes this can be done quickly enough… but it would also mean that I might have, say, two hundred pictures to go through, most of them just slight variations but which nevertheless had to be analysed, one by one… well, you get the picture (pun intended!).

To make matters worse, I did not want my ‘Sandra’ pictures to get mixed up with the other ones. That meant transferring the images via an USB cable directly to a folder in the computer which was not used by all the other images. Oh, and it’s not as if I have many non-Sandra pictures; it’s just that the few I have I want to keep them totally separate; and, remember, ‘my’ iPhone actually belongs to a company that I work with, and my wife uses it all the time — there are certain pictures and videos I don’t want her to see and comment about.

At the end of the day, this was taking waaaaaaay too much time!

It’s just recently, after many software releases from Apple, that I finally got an easy ‘pipeline’ to get the pictures I want from the iPhone. So basically now everything gets sync’ed between all my devices, automatically, and in the background. I don’t want to sound like a cheap Apple commercial (you either love or hate their products; there is no middle ground!), but the newest software updates have brought much better handling of pictures — most notably, the ‘bracketing’ function has been replaced by a ‘Live’ function, which is a sort of mini-movie; you can later go through it, frame by frame, to pick which one’s best. But the old news is that the software will pick the ‘best’ frame perhaps 90% of the time, especially under bad lighting conditions. The current iPhone I’ve got even goes a step further: the selfie camera now has improved resolution and it features a sort of ‘flash’ — basically turning the screen white for a brief second and ramping up the intensity to maximum — which, in conjunction with the better software, manages to get far better images even in low light.

Actually processing the images is incredibly easy now. If all my devices have an active Internet connection, the pictures will get automatically sync’ed between them. This happens in the background but it doesn’t take long; usually, after just finishing a session and sitting in front of the laptop, it will have already sync’ed all pictures (and videos too). Then I can leisurely select the batch I’ve just taken and export them to a folder – and while doing so, I can even delete GPS data for the whole batch (instead of having to go through all images, one by one). If I’m not too happy with one image (because it appears blurred, for example), I can very easily enter the ‘Edit’ feature of the ‘Live’ mini-movie and replace the picture with a better one; this is incredibly easy to do. Also, the rest of the settings rarely need any change: because the selfie camera and the software which drives it are so much better, that the ‘average’ settings will work just out of the box, so to speak.

Once exported, I can delete the originals on the laptop – and they will be promptly deleted from all devices automatically. No more frantic browsing through all devices to see if any image is still somewhere on history! (I’ve narrowly escaped a few catastrophes because I forgot to delete some pictures from one of the devices! (And while I primarily use the iPhone, occasionally I use the others as well…)

So what ultimately happened was that I needed to go first through literally-hundreds of pictures – close to a thousand, in fact – until I came to the most recent batches, the ones that take just a few minutes. In total, my backlog was 1,287 pictures (well, after removing those that were not good for anything, even after retouching). And this was incredibly discouraging. I mean, I would start with some pictures, say, from last April, go through a hundred of them, finally pick the ten that would be published… and I had easily lost an hour. I kept picking up that task, get frustrated with how many pictures were left, and give up… to try again after a month… when more hundreds of pictures had accumulated… and so forth. I have literally gone through over ten thousand pictures just to select those 1,287 to upload to Flickr!

And, of course, there were still the videos to do.

The videos take even more time to process than the images, of course. Even though my videos are very short (some of you remember the days when YouTube placed a restriction on the size of each individual video), and I’ve changed the pipeline a few times (as video processing technology evolved!), there is some preparation involved.  First comes the introductory snippet, which I retain for copyright reasons (crediting the music composer, Kevin MacLeod). Because each video is different, I have to do that bit every time from scratch, based on a Keynote presentation — I have to drop the whole video into the small rectangle and trim it to just a few seconds. This gets now exported to QuickTime; and I have to take care to actually select the correct format. While most of my videos are done with the iPhone ‘selfie’ camera (so that I can have an idea of what’s happening!), some are not — I have more cameras around the place! — and each might have a different format; so, to make everything fit together properly, the intro video is always saved to the ‘right’ format for that particular video.

Then comes the ‘raw’ video. Sometimes I don’t need to do anything — just detach the audio, since it will be overwritten by the soundtrack anyway, and drop it in iMovie after the intro. But most often it needs some trimming, especially at the beginning and at the end. The lighting almost always needs an adjustment as well; fortunately, the ‘auto-adjustment’ tool works rather nicely and it’s rare that I have to use any of the other tools (which are simple enough to use but do not give the vast range of options present on the photo viewer I mentioned before). Sometimes, however, there is more editing to be done, and this may happen for several reasons, like, say, dropping the ashtray in the middle of the video, or sneezing, or something stupid like that. Also, when I’m filming in the bathroom, sometimes I cannot help myself, if you know what I mean. I know that I’m very strangely wired in the brain— but I’m not the only one!! — but I humbly admit that I get turned on by women smoking (that’s what smoking fetishism is all about!). So when I watch myself, well, uh, I see a woman smoking, even though it’s just me — and of course I know it’s ‘just me’, but I guess there is a wrong wiring in the brain which simply doesn’t care and gets excited anyway. Reflecting on what exactly is happening at that moment is something worth several dozens of articles — or possibly even a book or two! — and I really can’t explain what goes through my mind. I can’t even say that this strange form of narcissism is ‘more exciting’ than, say, watching other women smoking; I mean, an orgasm is an orgasm, and it seems ‘as exciting’ to me, with the main difference that when it’s my body, I can control what I’m doing in terms of smoking fetishism — I’m my own movie director, so to speak — and of course that means that the ‘plot’ is obviously tailored to my preferences, and that is way more exciting than watching some female models who don’t even know how to smoke showing themselves off on the camera. I’ve got absolutely nothing against watching models on camera, of course! But I always feel a little bit ‘cheated’, so to speak, when that happens; I ‘demand’ that whoever is doing a smoking fetishist video loves smoking as much as I do or else it simply doesn’t work for me (I’d rather watch good old lesbian porn instead!).

Anyway, I’ve derailed a bit…

To finish it off, the movie needs a soundtrack, which I pick among the music I like most from Kevin MacLeod (who so nicely gave us full access to his free music!); sometimes I do that randomly, sometimes the music has actually something to do with the video (even though that’s rare), sometimes I pick one music that is long enough to span the whole video. Whatever the criteria are (and I’m not very consistent!), the soundtrack almost always needs some stitching and trimming and fading out, whatever. iMovie does all that nicely and easily enough, although some versions are a bit more quirky than others.

Finally, the video gets exported. iMovie really doesn’t give many options, but the truth is that the resulting video will be huge — about 1 GByte for 2 minutes or so. It’s fine to upload that to YouTube — they will do their magic in the background, and the better the quality fed into YouTube, the better the results will be, something which I had to learn the hard way! Once I’m sure that the video has been uploaded, I then convert it to DivX, which will mean practically the same quality, but using less than a tenth of the size. At this point, the ‘raw’ video, as well as the video produced by iMovie, go into the Trash; I back it all to my home-based backup system, and on Microsoft OneDrive as well (in case something goes wrong). I’m close to the limits where it’s still free, though, so it’s plausible that I will have to find another alternative. Fortunately for me, I do have my own cloud backup system on my own server, with pretty much ‘unlimited’ disk space (well, until the 2 Terabyte disk fills up), but to be honest, I haven’t set it up properly yet (because I do do many things at the same time, I keep forgetting to do that).

Whew. And that’s it. I’m not at the point where each minute of movie takes one hour of processing, like on commercial movies, but I’d say that 15-30 minutes per video is not unusual. In more recent times, I have managed to reduce overall time by doing them in sequence, i.e. one is processing, one is uploading, one is being edited, and so forth.

Now… we all know that it is far easier to do a little bit every day than to do a mega-marathon of editing and publishing, so it’s fair to ask again: ‘why now?’ Is there even a reason?

Actually, there is. And it’s not even a very good reason, as you will see.

Recently, I got a message from YouTube in my mailbox. You might have noticed that almost all my videos will have some advertising here and there. I had no illusions about getting rich out of those ads, but when I subscribed to the advertising thingy, I had over a million views — which is quite a reasonable amount! (1.6 million as of today) You might be astonished with that number, and rightly so, because if you look up my latest videos right now, you’ll see that they have just a couple of dozens of viewers, a few hundreds at best. And I certainly don’t have that many videos online!

Well, let me explain what is not so obvious. I joined YouTube a decade ago — an eternity in ‘Internet time’! YouTube was launched in early 2005 and bought by Google in late 2006; I joined YouTube in June of that same year, before we even believed that Google would buy it! That is so long ago that most people alive today didn’t even know that YouTube existed before Google bought it; they haven’t gone through the painful experience of ‘merging’ accounts together (you’d have one for YouTube, one for Google, and these remained separate for several years) and the mess that this generated. Anyway. As you can imagine, before Google bought YouTube, it didn’t have the billion users or so. It was much, much smaller, and it lacked content, because not everybody had a webcam with good enough resolution — remember, the iPhone was only launched in 2007, so this was the pre-smartphone era! Of course a lot of people would post ‘stolen’ content (as they still do today), and YouTube would be after them very quickly, so there was a certain lack of original material. In fact, YouTube was competing with a few platforms. Vimeo, as an example, had been established in 2004, and by 2007 it was already offering high-definition videos, while YouTube was painfully struggling with anything above 320×240 (seriously!). It was not seen as a very ‘serious’ platform for video production (people would go to Vimeo or the now defunct Blip.tv for ‘serious’ content), but rather as a place where people with handheld Sony video cameras would post videos of their children falling into the swimming pool, or of cats slipping in the kitchen, or such similar, nonsensical, futile things. We still have them, of course (just with way better definition!), but YouTube grew so much that it became the social network to post videos (even though Facebook, Flickr, etc. all now support high-definition videos as well).

Before that growth became exponential, however, people struggled to find the content they wanted (before Google started indexing YouTube, it was way harder to find things that we considered ‘interesting’). So you have to consider the following scenario: few original content producers, with limited means at their disposal (YouTube also placed a very short limit to the size of the videos; I think they started by offering just five minutes maximum for free); a bad indexing system, so that it was hard to find anything; very bad definition, with most videos at 320×240 and a very few, done by people who followed YouTube’s official tutorials, who managed to get 640×480 videos to be displayed correctly (this required that you had software at your disposal that would encode the video just so).

In other words: there were few channels for smoking fetishists. Oh sure, there was a lot of pirated content — people who would join porn websites which featured videos for smoking fetishists, downloaded them, and uploaded them to YouTube. But those who were really into smoking fetishism quickly figured out that all that YouTube had to offer was low-quality copies of what they had already seen on porn websites. There was some original content, of course; and by ‘some’ I certainly mean ‘several dozens’ of channels; most of the smoking fetishist community would subscribe to all of them, and we would watch each other’s videos and make comments on techniques — and on the makeup and apparel as well, of course

With Google buying YouTube, however, YouTube exploded with new users — they came by the droves! And all these users would naturally want to see content that interested them, and that would mean that the few channels with original content would be literally swamped over with hordes of new users. And while it’s absolutely incredible to imagine this today, some of my videos easily hit 50K views (!), a few even going over 100K! And every week or so, when I posted a new video, I would once again get 10,000 users within the first minutes after releasing it, and a few more dozens of thousands over the week, until I posted a new video, and the process would start all over again; adding all that up, that’s how I very easily reached the million-views mark, with just two dozens of videos or so.

Then, around late 2009, early 2010, things started to change. Now YouTube became ‘interesting’ enough to be used by professionals, as well as very talented amateur hobbyists. The demands for quality went up; Google started to offer higher and higher resolutions; and the first YouTube celebrities started to host their channels and catch millions of views with each video (not totals!) and get some return on advertising. Google did also pay reasonably well for ads back then — I cannot quote the numbers exactly, but it was a fair and reasonable amount. Someone whose channel got a million views every time a video got posted, and did 2-3 videos per week, could easily live off YouTube with a couple of thousand dollars every month. It wasn’t a bad deal.

With more content being offered, and higher quality of that very same content, users would flock to whatever was popular. And we cannot forget that each and every YouTube channel competes for a few minutes of people’s leisure time — time they could spend reading a book, playing computer games, go out and watch a movie at a theatre, or, well, watch TV at home. This was still the time before Smart TVs could stream YouTube directly, or before people could watch high-quality video on smartphones while watching TV at the same time. Competition for leisure time is very tough, because naturally people will pick things based on moods, preferences, advertising, recommendations, and so forth.

The first decline I saw in viewers meant that most videos rarely hit the 10,000 viewer mark. And why? Well, there are simply not that many smoking fetishists out there, and my channel doesn’t really appeal to anyone else. The only reason I got so many views in the early days was because there was nothing else to watch. In other words: people didn’t find me or my channel because they wanted to, but rather because they were quasi-randomly driven to it, since, again, before Google started to apply their AIs to the ‘recommended videos’, anything could pretty much appear as ‘recommendation’, and ‘popularity’ was one of those. This is how it worked: a video gets watched, and the number of views mean that it ranks higher than others with less views. This means that this video appears more often on the list of recommendations, which in turn makes people watch them more, which increases the number of views, and therefore the likelihood of being recommended to even more people. This was why incredibly stupid videos often went viral very easily — not because people were actually sharing that specific video which they found funny or interesting, but just because the algorithm for recommendations was really very bad. It became a bit better when it took ‘tags’ into account — for a few years, the thousands of viewers I got did not come from the smoking fetishist community, but rather from the crossdressing community, since I always tag my videos with ‘crossdressing’. That means that my videos would appear on the list of recommendations for people searching actively for crossdressing videos. With a catch, of course: by then I already had a million views in total, so it was quite obvious that I would get recommended more often than others. And it even meant that my videos would appear on lists of people who had no interest in either crossdressing, transgender people, or smoking fetishism; I would just be high on the ranks just because in the past I had lots of views.

Google, of course, fixed all this. They were perfectly aware that ‘older’ users had an unfair advantage: because in the past they had so many views (since there was a limited choice of original content), they continued to gather more and more viewers because they would come at the top of the lists, while pros (or amateur hobbyists with talent and semi-professional studios) would have this wonderful high-quality, original content which nobody would see. So the algorithm was changed to favour these professional or semi-professional channels over the others; and this makes sense from a business perspective. After all, from those million viewers, only a tiny percentage are actual smoking fetishists; many would just feel insulted by my videos and had no problem telling me so; nevertheless, they would count towards my total amount of views! Google didn’t want that: they wanted engaging content, with people watching several minutes (or even hours!) at a stretch, because that gave ample opportunity for advertising — while those who would be sent to an ‘unwanted’ channel, watched a few seconds and went away, furious for being shown the ‘wrong’ content, would just screw up the numbers and give unfair privilege to older users with low-quality content (especially when it was meant for such a niche market as fetishist smoking!).

Google only makes money from ads, so most of their resources are fed into developing more and more sophisticated AIs to figure out what people really want to see. At this time, now approaching the mid-2010s, a lot of things happened at the same time:

First, Google slashed the payments for ads (that happened on Web ads too, not only on YouTube). The idea was that only top performers with incredibly good content and a very loyal fanbase of millions of subscribers would be able to make a living out of YouTube — because it was that kind of content that Google wanted to sell ads for. Nobody cares about ads on a movie with a smoking crossdresser; there are simply not enough companies advertising on that tiny niche market (except perhaps for porn websites — but Google, by that time, was also refusing to sell ads to porn companies). So ads on my channel would be ‘wasted money’ — in the sense that Google would still have to pay me a few cents, even though the ads were worthless on my channel — which Google would rather prefer to see spent on one of the really popular channels.

Then, of course, the number of channels for smoking fetishists exploded (well, all channels exploded). To give you an idea, I’ve just opened a page on a browser I never use, and I didn’t log in, so that Google does not know who I am and what my preferences are; and typed ‘smoking fetish’ on the YouTube Search box. My channel is not listed on the top 10. Not even on the top 50, nor the top 100. In fact (I didn’t actually try that!), I wouldn’t be surprised that I’m not even on the Top Thousand — in spite of having far more followers than many who are listed in the top 50 (and a bit less than half of #1), and most certainly far more views than them… while back in 2007 or 2008, well, there were perhaps just a few dozens, at most a few hundreds, of smoking fetishism channels, and I’d be listed on all those searches. Not even ‘crossdresser smoking fetish’ finds me anymore (note: if you try this out, remember to use a browser with history and cookies cleaned up and do not log in to Google — because if you’re reading this, it’s more than likely that my channel will come up on this search — because Google knows that my blog is linked to my channel, and Google knows what you’re browsing and what tabs are open and all that, so their AIs can easily spot the connection — and change the search results accordingly).

Why? Well, because nowadays I lose a dozen subscribers every week or so (most from accounts that were deleted, blocked by YouTube, or simply not active any more); the number of views on my recent videos are around the hundreds, not the tens of thousands; and I pretty much didn’t post anything in the past year, so Google naturally assumed that I’m ‘dead’ (online death, that is) and scarcely has any interest in me anymore

While, on the other hand, all those channels on the top 10 (or top 50, or top thousand…) are growing. They might not have the total amount of views and subscribers as I do, but Google pretty cleverly figured out that this means nothing. In other words: who cares if someone watches 5 seconds of your video and goes away because it has no interest for them? This barely allows an ad to be shown. No, what Google wants is people watching videos for hours, because, that way, every few minutes (just like on TV), they can sell an ad.

Thus, the new metric that Google uses to establish ‘popularity’ is not ‘views’, but rather minutes of viewing (they still give some attention to subscribers because these are potential viewers). This actually makes more sense, because it eliminates all those viewer watching your channel ‘by mistake’ — a few seconds, and they know they’re wasting their time and go elsewhere.

That’s what happened on my channel all the time (and it still does, of course, but not at the same levels as before). In fact, when one of my videos hit the 10,000-views-mark, it was almost certain that I would get hateful comments. This is not a coincidence: there are not that many people bothering to post hate speech in YouTube, even if it seems that way. In fact, the utter idiots at the lowest echelons of the human species are not many; but they spend a lot of time online, watching videos, and have a secret pleasure in annoying others (yes, that’s a mental condition). In my particular case, it would mean that: out of 10,000 views, 100-500 would come from my faithful subscribers, who know what they’re watching, and would see the video to the end (and sometimes give a word of appreciation or two!); over 9,000 would see my content by mistake, and disappear after a few seconds; and one out of ten thousand would be a jerk. Of course, the longer a video stays online, and the higher the number of views, the higher the number of jerks, but, seriously, there were never that many, even on the most popular of my videos.

Anyway. You can now understand two things:

1. How Google makes money, and how they have fine-tuned their search AIs to make sure that people’s limited time is funneled towards content where Google can place ads and earn their revenue;
2. Why my channel is technically ‘dead’ from the perspective of Google, YouTube, etc. even though apparently I’m doing fine (by the criteria of 2007!)

Now back to Google’s recent email to me. They explained to me that to keep the ads on my video, I have to comply with two criteria in the past 12 months:

1. Have more than 1,000 subscribers (easy-peasy).
2. Have more than 4,000 view hours (say WHAT?!).

To give you an idea: on the past 12 months, I have a total of… well, a little below 1,200 hours. Google has only started their viewing time statistics in 2012, and since then, the total amount of view hours I’ve got is about… 6200 or so (!). And each year I get less and less viewing hours.

I scratched my head and thought that these criteria are impossible to meet — the point being that my videos are very short (about 3 minutes or so on average; some are shorter, a few go up to five minutes). I believe that from all of my subscribers, some 400 are really active (fortunately, Google adds up the inactive ones as well). This means that each time I publish a video, I can expect, at best, 400 x 3 minutes = 20 hours of viewing time. That’s it. To be able to reach four thousand hours, I’d need to publish two hundred videos every 12 months, or very roughly, one video every working day (there are around 260 working days per year).

Of course, the alternative would be to dramatically increase the subscriber base (how?) or do much longer videos (tough! there is a limit to how long the typical smoking fetishist is willing to watch in a video! and my imagination is not that great)

You might say, ‘well, that’s tough, Sandra, but if you want to make a living of it, then you will certainly need to do a lot of videos… it’s only fair, after all!’

Really? Here is what Google owes me for January 2018 one month of viewing: $0.76. That’s right. It’s not even a dollar.

My estimated earnings for the lifetime is $85.65 (this has started in March 2013; I wasn’t eligible for ads before that; and remember that Google paid much better back in the beginning!). I never saw a cent of all of that, since Google conveniently only pays when you reach $100.

All right, but that’s just with 1,100 hours or so (for the past month). If I had, say, four times as much (to reach their criterium!), how much would I earn?

The math is simple to make: 1,100 hours earned me $9.30. I could expect, therefore, about four times as much: yay, $36 — and that’s before any taxes, or commissions, or whatever!

Assuming that I would really need 200 videos every 12 months, which would take, say, on average, half an hour of my time each… that’s 100 hours of work… for $36… or 36 cents per hour of work! There are countries where slaves earn more than that!

Ok, but that’s a worse-case-scenario — in practice, I don’t need 200 new videos every year; after all, there is a feature of the Internet era economics known as the long tail. Quoting Chris Anderson, former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and current CEO of 3D Robotics, a drone manufacturing company:

People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).

What this means in plain English is that even my oldest videos are getting more views, and the longer they stay online, the more views they will generate — and all of it adds up. Why? Because smoking fetishism is a niche market, and because my videos are ‘timeless’ in the sense that a smoking fetishism video of 2006 is as pleasing and exciting as a smoking fetishism video of 2018. In fact, pre-YouTube, early-Internet smoking fetishist videos were mostly cuts from past movies, especially those in the 1940s-1960s, which all feature scenes where women would smoke in a sensual way — so, in a sense, those ‘old’ video snippets still have an audience today. Of course, when they were freshly released, they generated the most views; but after years and years, the few views they got will continue to go on and on and on, and adding up to the total.

Theoretically (as people like Anderson foresaw), and given an infinite method of distribution at zero cost (which is the definition of the Internet in general, and YouTube in particular), videos would earn ultimately more from ads on the ‘long tail’ than on the beginning (i.e. at the moment they were released) — because there will always be some people interested in a very narrow interest, and watch those videos over and over again. That this is clearly not my case doesn’t ‘prove’ that the theory is wrong; it just ‘proves’ that YouTube is not a ‘perfect’ distribution medium. And as I’ve explained, this is hardly the case: YouTube not only shows ‘recommended videos’ according to a user’s personal tastes but it is also deliberately skewed in showing recent, high-quality content, which is trending high; this naturally makes the long tail far less attractive. Still, it’s not ‘zero’. I still accrue some views from insanely old videos, which pop over and over again on people’s recommended lists. This always surprises me, when someone decides to post a comment on a video made before 2010 and says ‘I love the dress you wore today’ or ‘you’re looking better every time’ (when the gallant viewer is most probably seeing all videos in a backwards timeline…).

The point is simply that it would take me a lot of time to keep up to the standards that YouTube ‘demands’ from me. On the other hand, I decided to make an experiment: if I release around a dozen videos in a very short time (meaning that my fans and subscribers all of the sudden get their mailboxes filled up with notifications every day, or even several times per view), how will this affect the number of views?

An image is worth more than a thousand words:

In blue you have the watch time in hours, in red the number of views. As you can see, in the days before I started to post new videos, the red line begins with 273 views, it peaks at 1316, and goes down to 528. There are two distinct peaks, and one less distinct — these correspond roughly to the days where I posted more than one video per day, and that meant quickly surpassing the 800-views mark. I would now need to stop posting more videos for a while and see what happens: will my views hover around, say, the 500-view-mark, or will they slowly drop back to 250 or so?

These statistics only help me to establish the following: to reach YouTube’s minimum requirements of 4000 hours per 365 days, this means about 11 hours per day on average. I can read directly from the graph above that this is reached with around 1000 views per day, which happened on those days when I uploaded 2-3 videos. As far as I can see, to keep the number of views at that level, I would need to upload 2-3 videos every day! Of course, at some point, the number of views might stabilise at around those 1000 views per day on average, so I wouldn’t need so many new videos uploaded per day — that would, indeed, be the point of betting on the long tail to keep generating enough extra views!

So, as you see, all that work… to be ‘allowed’ to earn US$3 per month!

That’s just insane! That’s how Google/YouTube really ‘exploit’ people — they get all this amazing content for free, sell ads, share their revenue with content creators, but… at the end of the day, you get just a few cents for all your work.

To earn, say, US $3000 per month (which would allow me to live really comfortably!), with the current amount of viewers and subscribers I’ve got… it meant getting a million views per day and not across a decade… and posting thousands of new videos every single day! Now obviously this is impossible: a day only has 1440 minutes, and with each video taking 3 minutes, even if I were awake 24 hours per day and uploaded directly to YouTube without any kind of editing and post-processing, I could, at best, generate 480 videos per day… and at that amount of output, it would easily saturate the ability of my subscribers to watch… remember, they would also have to watch those 480 videos, every day, round the clock, and do nothing else in their lives. Clearly that’s utter nonsense!

The alternative, of course, would be to get a few millions of subscribers — 3 or 4 million would be enough, I think. Having a thousand times more subscribers would certainly generate more than enough views every day, even if I just created 2-3 new videos every day (which would not saturate the subscribers, since my videos are short enough). There are certainly some channels around with millions of subscribers. I’m just not one of them — simply because there are not enough smoking fetishists around there!

In conclusion: all my work is for nothing — lol! But it was an interesting experiment: my theory is that with a little bit of luck, I would reach the 4,000 hours of viewing required by YouTube, and not be kicked out of their advertising programme. I guess I really overestimated my abilities! Still, the results were an interesting exercise in understanding Google’s business model with YouTube, and it’s clear now how they make so much money out of ads — the trick is basically persuading people to work for free for them, or at least for slavery wages, having hundreds of millions of content producers (and a billion consumers — the 1:10 ratio is quite common in communities built around content production) earning nothing from Google, but allowing a critical mass of producers among which a few hundreds will emerge with the ability to attract enough subscribers — and therefore being able to make a living out of it. But because Google encourages people to ‘become one of the few’, the elite YouTubers who earn enough from ads to make that their main source of income, everybody else is eagerly trying very hard to reach that level — and utterly failing, of course. In the mean time, however, YouTube accumulates more and more and more content, all for free.

(Of course I’m well aware of the costs that they also have with their infrastructure, and it’s huge — but not that huge. Remember, investment in things — machines, computers, Internet connections… — is always way, way cheaper than investment in labour. Successful companies shift as much as possible their costs away from wages and other employee-related costs, and push them into ‘things’. Technology allows that. But nothing beats convincing people to voluntarily upload content for free — slavery will beat technology easily enough. Combine both, and you can begin to understand how Google — and no only Google, of course; Facebook is not different — can make so much money.)

There is an old adage, originally applied to the United States, but which — I think — applies universally. Among every thousand writers, 999 write absolute crap, while one will be good enough to (barely) survive with the earnings from their writing. But you need to have the other 999 as well: it’s a question of critical mass. Now, among thousand writers who can survive from their work, one will be exceptionally good, and hit the bestseller lists. Note that they don’t even have to be ‘good writers’ in the literary sense of the word: they will only need to push out books that the public is keen to read. Those people will become millionaires with their writing. But most of them will still be writing crap — these are the authors that will be seen on airport lounges everywhere, writing bad novels, but novels that nevertheless attract millions of readers. Some will be good enough to win a Nobel prize. That’s how the pyramid works! So basically what this means is that you need a million authors constantly writing — most of them never earning enough to make a living, a few hundreds barely managing to survive, and one who will be a Nobel prize nominee. And that’s also why countries with a huge population, such as the US, are able to have a reasonably large number of professional writers — while small countries will simply not have enough critical mass for that. In my own country, for example, two decades ago, there were only two professional writers — i.e. those who could make a living from their fiction novels. All others, no matter how good they wrote, were amateurs in the sense that they had to have a main source of income to survive, and write only in their spare time. One of the two who were professionals won a Nobel prize in literature and died shortly afterwards, so we’re back to just one professional author (who does not write ‘literature’ in the fancy meaning of the word, so, while he will certainly continue to live off his writing, he won’t earn any ‘literary’ prizes). That’s the best our country can expect, and, in fact, the odds were against us — the more professional authors, of course, the more likely that at least one of them will be good enough to become the next Nobel prize in literature. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the vast majority of top authors worldwide are all native English speakers, or, at least, fluent enough in English to be published in that language; no other language achieves critical mass so easily, although Spanish comes close. Chinese (especially Mandarin Chinese) authors could obviously appear on the top bestseller lists easily enough — China has certainly a critical mass of writers! — but they have the disadvantage that nobody outside of China reads Chinese. To become serious candidates to the top bestseller lists outside China, they have to be translated first; but then they will compete with all other English writers out there — the hardest market to be in, since it’s the one which, by far, has the most writers!

Musicians have it slightly more easier — music is pretty much ‘universal’ and a Finnish heavy metal band will sell everywhere in the world (even in China) even though nobody speaks Finnish. Painters, sculptors, graphic designers, etc. also don’t have the language barrier, but they have other disadvantages… anyway, I digress!

To resume it all: posting pictures and/or videos takes a huge amount of time, much more than people realise, even though (at least with pictures!) it’s now much easier for me than, say, a decade ago. The huge backlog came mostly from not really having an incentive to continue to push content out there for the enjoyment of my subscribers. Thanks to Google’s change of policy regarding advertising, I made a ‘last effort’ to try to reach their minimum requirements, and see if there was some way to achieve them. I failed miserably (I wasn’t expecting anything else) but I learned about why I failed. So there is no ‘loss’ here: Google would only pay me around $1 per month for all the video content I’ve uploaded, and, since I never reached the US $100 (accumulated) minimum for a bank transfer, I will never get anything anyway.

This means that in a handful of days all my videos will have no ads any more, and it’s highly unlikely that they will ever get them back again, since, as I’ve shown, the time requirements to push the number of views to an ‘acceptable’ level for Google/YouTube requires way, way more time that I’m willing to spend — to earn around US$3 per month, at most (and getting paid every third year…). That simply doesn’t make any sense.

Instead, I’ve done my experiments, I’ve learned from those experiences, and my videos on YouTube will become ad-free (an advantage for most of you, I’m sure) in a few days.

The End. Wow, 8000+ words just to explain all of this. And I was hoping this would be just a small ‘update’ article…

Unfortunately, that created a problem over the years: how can you take a ‘fetishist’ seriously?

Here is my dilemma: I’ve started, long ago, when YouTube was still relatively new, to develop a channel there aimed for the smoking fetishist community. And why? Because they were, back then, very tolerant towards the transgender community. In other words: they couldn’t care less if I was transgender or not, so long as I was a smoking fetishist as well.

Smoking fetishism, perhaps differently from some kinds of fetishism, is what I call a ‘two-way fetishism’, in the sense that smoking fetishists are both interested in the fetishist activity and in watching other fetishist engaging in the activity. I know that this should be obvious, but it isn’t! For instance, a lot of people constantly watch shemale porn without no intention of becoming a shemale themselves! Indeed, there are a lot of so-called ‘voyeur’ fetishisms, where the fetishism itself is in the watching activity. In the shemale porn example, for instance, shemale porn actresses just have sex on camera because, well, they are either paid for it (if they’re pros) or because they enjoy it (if they’re amateurs). In the latter example, they might be exhibicionists, which is the perfect kind of fetishism that ‘fits’ like a glove with voyeurism — they are like two pieces of a puzzle, and work best when they fit together. The same, as you can imagine, applies to a lot of examples.

Whereas with smoking fetishim, most of the people who watch smoking fetishim videos are smoking fetishists themselves, or, at the very least, smokers. There are naturally exceptions, and I’ve met a few — non-smokers (but tolerant towards smoking) who enjoy watching smoking fetishist videos.

There is a huge industry of smoking fetishism porn videos, but smoking fetishism by itself does not need to be pornographic, although almost certainly it can be described as ‘erotic’ — for other smoking fetishists. For non-fetishists, of course, smoking is just plainly disgusting, and making out of smoking an art is pure nonsense at best, or a devil-inspired perversity which ought to get their perpetrators burn in Hell for all eternity…

There are also ‘erotic’ smoking fetishism videos available all over the Internet. They have, however, a problem for true smoking fetishists: these videos are filmed by major professional pornography studios, catering for their customers, and hiring gorgeous-looking actresses to do those smoking fetishist videos, according to the tastes of their customers. The problem here is that, generally speaking, with few exceptions, those actresses are not smoking fetishists themselves. A few are not really even ‘smokers’ in the sense of being people who enjoy smoking; they are just paid to smoke on video, and, while they’re not exactly gagging and coughing, it’s quite noticeable that they are not really enjoying to smoke — they just do it because they are paid to do so.

Now, we all know that pornographic movies, like (almost) everything else in the movie industry, are just pretension — the scenes are not depicting ‘real sex’, but just a form of fantasy, performed by actors. They are nevertheless exciting (or else they would not have an audience). But in some niche markets this is not enough: viewers demand more realism, and not merely ‘pretension’. We all know how good porn actresses are in faking orgasms, and many males (if not most of them) cannot tell the difference between a real orgasm and a fake one anyway, so, in the minds of the porn viewer, they are usually easily made to believe that the sex scenes are ‘real’. As for male orgasms on screen, well, they are much harder to ‘fake’, so porn movie directors just need to do additional takes until the actor gets an erection and ejaculates — or at least that’s what I assume they do, unless these days the porn industry uses much more sophisticated, CGI-based visual effects as well (it certainly is possible!).

With smoking fetishim, however, it’s very easy to see if an actress is just ‘pretending’ to enjoy smoking and is just being paid for looking sexy on a video with a cigarette in their hand; or if they are actual smoking fetishists and can convey the reality of the pleasure they have in smoking to their audience. True smoking fetishists are mostly interested in the smoking itself, not in how gorgeous the actress looks, even though, of course, the two combined is so much more erotic! This might sound strange for someone used to watch vanilla porn videos, but it has to be understood that fetishism, by definition, happens when the sexual erotism is diverted towards either an object or an action/behaviour which has nothing to do with sexual intercourse (although it might become part of it). Thus, feet fetishists get erotically excited by watching feet, and just the feet, the rest of the body (or what the person is doing while showing the feet) is completely irrelevant. High heels fetishists do not even need to see the foot, or the person; their erotic excitement is drawn towards the shoe as an object instead. Again, such fetishes are not rationally explainable to someone who simply does not have a fetish.

Indeed, smoking fetishism is very complicated to explain to those who are neither smokers (or, worse, anti-smokers) nor fetishists. I have explained before that there is an art of smoking, which, unfortunately, in these anti-smoker days we live in, is slowly disappearing — not totally so (because the dwindling number of smokers since the 1970s has stabilised, and, according to statistics, even gone up a bit, because even though the percentage of the population who smokes has been steadily going down, the world population is growing, and the net result is a slightly increase of the total amount of smokers out there — so, yes, Big Tobacco is still happily filling their coffers with gold and not in the risk of disappearing), but the number of people who see smoking as an art has certainly been much reduced.

And this is easily explainable due to the way how smoking is viewed by society. In the 1920s, way before any connection between smoking and decreasing health was established, smoking became a common sight among the fancy Bohemian parties, especially among women, who, until the turn of the 20th century, were disallowed to smoke (at least in public). Smoking was considered a ‘male’ pastime, for no particular reason except that males dominated society and therefore established the rules of what was supposed to be only enjoyable by males. There was a ritual attached to pipe smoking, dating from the 17th century at least, but even that ritual was a bit lost, as it implied mostly a need (in the sense of a sequence of steps that has to be performed in the right way to accomplish a result; just like, say, putting on some clothes) and not truly an art.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the concept of smoking as an art begins when women are starting to be ‘allowed’ to smoke in public, and this, of course, is reinforced by the emerging movie industry in the beginning of the 20th century. Women in the 1920s, indeed, turned smoking into something fashionable by starting to address smoking differently from men. It is to present-day society a bit baffling that smoking is a gendered activity, but it most certainly became one starting in the 1920s. Ironically, perhaps, as the global anti-smoking campaigns started in the 1970s — already half a century ago! — at about the same time of the great successes of the gender equality pushes by second-wave feminists, the way men and women smoke started to become much more similar. Not equal, but similar; and, nowadays, unlike what happened in, say, the 1950s, young girls will pick up smoking from their male friends and not from their mothers; smoking is, today, a borderline activity that happens outside established educational channels; and the consequence is that it begins to be done in secrecy, learned from others who also have picked the habit in secrecy as well, outside established social norms. In other words: women, these days, do not learn to smoke as a woman; they simply smoke as men smoke, because that is the only way they have seen people smoking.

As said, this is not entirely true, but it’s much more common to see women ‘smoking like men’ than before (meaning: half a century ago!), when smoking was clearly a gendered activity which had different norms and rituals for each gender role. And, of course, in the same way that women, from the 1920s onwards, have turned a lot of otherwise mundane activities into an art which inspires erotic undertones, smoking was not an exception.

In a world where fetishism is mostly a male activity (again, we cannot generalise, and there are certainly a lot of exceptions; for instance, many women have an uniform fetishism, i.e. being attracted to males in uniforms, such as uniforms from the armed forces or the police, etc.; women are as attracted to bondage and its paraphernalia as men are; and so forth), it is therefore not surprising that women, roughly in the past century, have turned so many mundane activities into mildly erotic acts. Consider how women put on gloves, or, better, how they put on their stockings; if you have watched porn videos where the actresses use such props, you can easily see how they have become sexualised! And while porn movies were certainly not so widespread in the past as today (mostly because having access to movies was not that easy), you can see how the glorious pin-ups in the 1940s and 1950s are so often depicted putting on their stockings and/or gloves, in deliberately erotic poses. In other words: while putting on underwear or even accessories were just seen as ‘utilitarian’ during the Victorian era (and in pre-Puritan times they had not thought about the issue at all), the roaring 1920s started to mildly sexualise, or at least eroticise, a lot of female actions and behaviour, which is not surprising, since this coincides with evolving notions about female sexuality and the role women play in society. Thus, while the bra was invented as a purely utilitarian piece of underwear by the end of the 19th century (when corsets were slowly being faded out, even if every once in a while they would make a comeback), we can see how the bra became strongly sexualised between, say, the 1940s and the 1960s, when the ‘bullet bra’ was specifically designed to enhance breast projection to an extent that we today would call ‘unnatural’; but voluptuous, curvy women were the image of feminine beauty in the 1940-1960 period, and that meant the bullet bra and a (partial) return to corsets (much more comfortable than the ones used in the Edwardian or the Victorian era) to accentuate the curviness of the female body. Today, as we have gone back to the notion of slimness as the ideal of feminine beauty (just as it was in the 1920s), the ‘bullet bra’ or the corset have dropped out of mainstream fashion — but both are still employed among niche markets where such heavy sexualised feminine items of underwear or shapewear have acquired fetishist overtones.

In other words: there has always been fetishism, and there always will be, but fetishism varies from culture to culture, and from time to time. Interestingly enough, from my limited perspective and understanding, what is considered fetishim in a specific time period seems to have been merely ‘erotic’ in the period immediately preceding it. To give two examples: in the 1940-1960 period, wearing bullet bras, perhaps a corset, and always using fake eyelashes was considered erotic and commonplace — it was expected that all women would wear that, and they knew that such a way of dressing/putting on makeup was considered attractive, even erotic, by all men. When feminists started to burn their bras in the late 1970s, and the fashion switched towards different designs in dress and overall attire, so that bullet bras and corsets did not fit any more in the feminine image of those days, women wearing bullet bras and corsets became a rarity, and images depicting such women quickly became fetishes for men still attracted to the ‘old’ image of female attractiveness. We moved on to things like the reintroduction of the push-up WonderBra in the early 1990s, when big breasts in skinny bodies became the new image of female beauty — and because such a combination is not very natural, unless one did breast augmentation, the alternative was the push-up bra to create the illusion of much bigger breasts. Today, at least in some social environments, having ‘too big’ breasts is seen as being ‘slutty’ and something that only the lower classes (or the porn actresses!) will deliberately ‘show off’ — of course, again, this varies from society to society, and from groups inside that society as well, but, generally speaking, we could say that porn actresses are mandatorily big-breasted and use whatever kind of bras that will enhance their cleavage even more because fetishism towards big-breasted women in skinny bodies — the image of female beauty in the 1990s — continues to be appreciated by a considerable number of men who are drawn to that image.

I do not want to be exhaustive in the list of changes in the feminine image — both in dressing but also in behaviour — but just attempt to explain that, before smoking as an habit became demonised, it was effectively used as an erotic tool by women, at least between the 1920s and the 1960s; smoking is a gendered activity, also starting from the 1920s, and there is much more to it than simply destroying your health by inhaling toxic, carcinogenic chemicals; even from a perspective of someone who enjoys smoking, they might not even be sensitive to the art of smoking as an aesthetic discipline, with its behaviour rules, and an intent that is designed to produce allure and eroticism — they might just see as something with an enjoyable, pleasurable taste, to which they are addicted, as they are addicted to coffee, chocolate, or even alcohol; there is not much to it.

And, objectively speaking, such people are right. Smoking in itself is supposed just to be a ‘taste experience’. However, we cannot simply ignore the historic context: smoking, when it was discovered by Portuguese and Spanish explorers in the 1500s, and brought to Europe, was contextually linked to ritualistic behaviour. Shamans, or medicine-men, would smoke in a religious context; we can still see the remains on that throughout the 19th century, when some tribes of Native Americans would smoke the ‘peace pipe’ to seal agreements to terminate a war. While the West mostly abolished such ritualistic behaviour associated to smoking, we nevertheless still keep a few remains of that — to this very day, smoking expensive cigars may still be part of, say, a wedding, or a very special occasion (like the signing of a big business contract), at least among those who are not radical anti-smokers. It’s not the issue of smoking cigars being a luxury that is truly important; since there are other luxuries (like drinking French champagne, for example) which are associated to very special occasions; it’s the actual act of smoking such cigars that is also important, and reminiscent of the way Native Americans also ‘sealed’ pacts or agreements by smoking a pipe together.

Such ancient memes linking smoking behaviour as a ritual to be performed in ‘special’ events have also been pegged to other situations and environments; the parties in the roaring 1920s were full of women freely allowed to smoke with their incredibly long cigarette holders made sometimes of precious substances, such as ivory, or tipped with encrusted gems and noble metals. Smoking, for almost half a century, was part of a glamorous lifestyle which turned the cigarette into a fashion accessory, and smoking paraphernalia (such as cigarette cases, lighters, or holders) became objects of jewellery.

Intellectuals, Bohemians, all sorts of artists, politicians, and the financial and aristocratic elite of the recent past were frequently (heavy!) smokers, in a world where up to 60% of all males did smoke habitually. What would be Einstein without his pipe or Churchill (or Fidel Castro!) without their huge Havana cigars? Until the fraud perpetuated by the tobacco companies was discovered in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and society finally got to learn the truth about tobacco products and their links to major diseases and forms of cancer, tobacco smoking was a habit that crossed all classes and (later) both genders, just like coffee, tea or alcohol. As such, being simultaneously a smoker and a free thinker was not only unusual, it was the norm.

But this is 2017. Things have changed.

At some point in the past years, my YouTube channel surpassed the million views. This would be surprising today, when only very rare videos become viral enough to reach such an astonishing number of views. But when I started that channel, there were very few videos for smoking fetishism; in fact, smoking fetishists tended to gather around our own online communities, in the form of text-only forums, with the sporadic link to a video download. With social media such as Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook, everything changed – people moved from their more obscure and feature-limited online social tools to the ‘mainstream’ social media, used by everybody else. In fact, the big advantage of those ‘mainstream’ social media are not only the extra features, but the notion that they cater to all tastes and all kinds of people.

However, there is a flip side to this, and the media is now constantly warning us about it: because what we put online stays online ‘forever’, people will be shadowed by their online presence, and judged by it. Nothing could show the dramatic effect of social media better than President Trump’s incessant twittering – once the message is ‘out there’, even if it gets deleted, someone will have made a copy, and come back to accuse us.

The ‘mainstream’ social media, because they have a business model based on profiling their users in order to sell that data to potential advertisers, have also got ridden of the concept of Internet anonymity. This had some profound consequences for those who were not so keen to publicly discuss their private life online with similar-minded people: such discussions now take place on different social media which do not care in the least about privacy issues, and force users to create profiles with their real data. Naturally enough, many don’t, and such profiles get deleted over and over again. It’s almost impossible to, say, openly and frankly discuss sex online among adults without getting banned by some company or another; I remember that when I first hosted this blog I had to ask the hosting provider if they were fine with having content which could be considered ‘erotic’ by some people; they answered that they were located in San Francisco, California, where everything is allowed; but of course this is not the case on many other places.

It’s clear that fetishism, as well as erotic content, must be part of the so-called ‘adult’ content. Unfortunately for the human population all around the world, it’s the US with its puritan, backwards, conservative rules which define what is supposed to be ‘adult content’ and what is not; in the minds of conservative, religious parents, sex is something kids are only allowed to be told about when they come of age, and, even then, in homeopathic doses. Needless to say that this is hardly the truth; teenagers, and even pre-teens, have always got access to so-called ‘adult content’ in secrecy, no matter what their parents did about it. There would always be a liberal parent allowing one friend to have some soft porn videos at home, or of having pin-ups showing off their gorgeous naked bodies on huge posters behind one’s beds. In any case, it’s not my place to discuss morality in the US and how puritan thought has shaped the way we use so-called ‘mainstream’ social media. The point here is that puritan thought still strongly shapes the attitude towards sex and eroticism; and that’s why it is more likely that a US President gets impeached because he may or may not have touched one intern in an inappropriate way, while other US Presidents can run amok creating turmoil and launching tens of millions of Americans into utter poverty, while abusing their power position, and nothing is done; so long as Trump keeps to having sex with his wife (and, ideally, not even with her…), he’ll be firmly in the Oval Office, no matter what he does.

But let’s get back to the whole point of this article.

Transgender issues, or gender issues in general (if we wish to include feminism, non-gender conformism, crossdressing, intersex issues, and so forth), are serious stuff. They are at the forefront of what might very well be the last battle for human rights — the remaining groups which still are ostracised by society, even among the most advanced, liberal, and open-minded societies in our planet. The battle is very slowly being won, but a lot of blood has been spilt in the long road to what we enjoy today. Naturally enough, those who have suffered or even given their lives so that the current generation of transgender people can enjoy a little freedom and some recognition by the law do take these issues very, very seriously. The fact that the transgender population is one of the smallest minorities among the Western world — when compared to, say, women, who are actually in the majority; or non-white people living in Europe and North America (and Australia); or even non-heterosexuals, who are at least 10% of the population — also means that there are few people to choose from to pick up the torch of freedom and bring light to these issues. It means that there are few transgender people who are thinkers, or philosophers, or academics in the field; or even doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists; not to mention being politically engaged and active, with a voice that can be heard. Think for a moment: how many transgender people do you know that are either news anchors or who are pundits or opinion-makers invited by mainstream TV to share their thoughts? How often did you see a transgender person on Stephen Colbert’s or Trevor Noah’s shows? Oh, sure enough, there are many transgender people politically engaged; some even get elected to office and, during their campaigns, they are able to make their voices heard. But such people are exceptions; the point is that they are very few.

As a consequence, if we wish those very few who fight and give their faces on behalf of the rest of us to have success with their endeavours (which are our own), then at the very least we should just humbly recognise their efforts and give them some moral (if not vocal!) support. But if we cannot even do that, well, then at the lowest end of the scale, what is expected is that we take them seriously, do not mock them, and, most especially, do not make their lives harder.

The LGBTIQ+ crowd faces a stigma which is very, very hard to shake off: they are, unfortunately, linked to sexual desire. This comes mostly from a perception, which is true to a degree in certain societies and environments, that male homosexuals have a lot more sex than male heterosexuals, especially those male heterosexuals who are firm believers in monogamy and already married — the kind that is conservative, puritan, and unfortunately hold the keys to law-making and opinion-making. They are also full of envy simply because, due to stupid self-imposed constraints, they force themselves into sexual frustration. Well… I’m of course adding my own explanation, but I have heard that argument over and over again, that even if it is not true, at least it is being repeated as a meme that is thought to be true. It does ring true: envy, after all, is a very powerful emotion, one that (unfortunately) leads whole countries to declare wars against others just because others have what they don’t.

But the LGBTIQ+ crowd is first and foremost as human as everybody else. Just pointing at and cherry-picking at their sexuality to stop respecting them and their opinions (and their fight for their rights!) is a very rude way of ignoring what they have to say, by simply claiming ‘it’s just about sex and therefore not serious’. John Oliver, precisely three years ago, interviewed on his show transgender Ugandan activist Pepe Julian Onziema, where, for me, the most shocking aspect of the interview was not knowing about the persecution that LGBT people face in Uganda because homosexuality (and also transexuality) became criminal offenses, punished by life sentences (the original bill mentioned the death penalty); but the way an interview in Uganda was conducted by the mainstream media where Pepe was asked ‘why are you gay?’ (subsequently reformulated as ‘why did you chose to become gay?’) and was faced with the ‘recruitment of youth to join the gay movement’, undermining the ‘core values’ of Ugandan society. It just happens that homosexuality is traditionally viewed with a certain indifference, if not outright tolerance, in most African societies; it is mostly due to Western anti-gay movements, infiltrated in Africa via certain ultra-conservative religious organisations, that a new concept – that of homophobia — was introduced in Africa! And it spread like wildfire: most African countries have now some form of anti-homosexuality laws (note: at least the Ugandan law was overturned by their Constitutional Court, because it was passed without a quorum, so the pressure on Ugandan LGBT people lifted a little bit), and, of course, it’s not hard to see how homosexuals are quickly blamed for the HIV epidemic, since ‘everyone knows how much sex they have’ (even though HIV in Africa spreads mostly among male heterosexuals who are culturally very promiscuous — but neglect basic protection, sometimes simply because they cannot afford it, or because it’s not easily available).

I’m just giving a few extreme examples, but it’s not fair to say that ‘the problem is only in Africa’. Of course not: from the US to Russia (say, Georgia), LGBT people are risking their lives when ‘coming out’, and even if the West has strong laws in place to fight homophobia and transphobia, that means little to a LGBT person who was beaten or shot to death. Sure, the perpetrators of such atrocities are judged and punished for their crimes, and sometimes the trial even appears on mainstream media, but for the victim, the knowledge that the judiciary system works, is of little use if they’re already dead. And this happens in the West, too, even, as said, in the most liberal countries (or US states); it’s just that most of those crimes of homophobia or transphobia are not given enough attention by the media. They might be all over the LGBT media, of course, but nobody but the LGBT crowd and their allies reads that. Once in a while, they get picked by the mainstream media; sometimes, however, that mainstream media simply gets it all wrong (as it happened in my own country eleven years ago), even though nowadays if they care to report similar news, it’s likely that they are a bit more informed…

So… yes, transphobia (and of course homophobia too) kills. People lose their lives even though the law is supposed to protect them. We can have good anti-transphobia laws, but enforcing them and educating society to at least understand that it’s not a question about hypersexuality, much less about a choice that someone makes — well, that is a challenge that is still ahead of us. I’m naturally an optimist and I can see that things are much, much better these days; it’s much more easier to ‘come out’ and transition, and much more tolerated, at least in many environments; but there is still a lot of ground to cover.

A while ago I’ve mentioned that I ‘came out’ to my best university friend — someone who is quite open-minded, being bisexual, polyamorous, and into swinging. By sheer chance, he had just met a trans woman at work (at the beginning, he had no idea she was trans, until she told him) who eventually became one of his girlfriends, so he was naturally a bit more informed about what trans people have to go through to get accepted. Nevertheless, one thing immediately caught my attention while he was talking about her, contrasting her to other girlfriends of his: that she was into very kinky stuff and, besides all the rest of her attractiveness as a person (being clever, witty, a good talker and listener, a good companion, and so forth), it was also clear that what she did in bed clearly outperformed all her other girlfriends, most of which were ‘plain vanilla’ and not interested in experimenting with ‘new stuff’.

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong in a trans woman enjoying her sexuality like anyone else! The issue here is this immediate link that springs into people’s minds, even in the minds of those who are very open-minded and tolerant: transgenderity means (somehow) better sex (or at least more sex). In other words: trans people are kinky. They might not have transitioned because of sexual issues, but once they have transitioned, they’re quite cool as sexual partners!

While I had encountered this association at several levels, it is still shocking when it surfaces within the context of real people (and not merely abstractions or hypothetical cases). There are fetishists who have an intense desire of having sex with trans people, because they are viewed as being ‘special’ or somehow ‘better’ in bed. They become sexually attractive because they are trans. There is naturally the curiosity of ‘experimenting’, in the sense that trans people are a rarity, and there is this knowledge that they were ‘different persons’ (even from a purely sexual perspective) before transition, and now they are ‘something else’. Heterosexual males, for instance, may see trans women as a dream coming true: a person who is physically female in all regards, often making a strong effort to look pretty and attractive (unlike so many cisgender women who simply don’t care about that any more), but who is wrongly believed to have somehow a ‘male’ mind of some sort which drives their sexual desire, and, as a bonus, there will never be the risk of having an unwanted pregnancy with them. Now, taking this description out of context, we can see how sexist it actually is, while at the same time incredibly offensive towards trans women, who are seen as a new, special kind of ‘sex toy’, perfectly adapted to fulfill all desires and wishes of a heterosexual, cisgender male.

Indeed, and although I’m very well aware that anecdotal evidence does not make a case, I have personally met a few cisgender males who, in search of more sexual partners (without fearing the unwanted consequences of a possible pregnancy), turned first to other males, but, not entirely satisfied with that preference of sexual partner, found out about transgender people, who were much more aligned to their own preferences. In other words: such males, while eventually labelling themselves as bisexual or at least bi-curious, have a clear preference for a partner with a female body; but they are also aware that the number of available women with similar sexual enthusiasm might not be that accessible as they wished; on the other hand, due to a lot of social conditioning, males share certain mindsets – even if stereotypically so – especially regarding sex, a mindset which women may or may not agree with. Trans women are therefore seen as the ‘perfect’ choice, since they have also been socially conditioned to think as men for a large part of their lives, and even if they identify as women, that social conditioning left its traces – or at least that is what those men assume – but they have a physical body of a woman and are able to please men as a woman can please them.

I know that this is not only complex, but wrong in many aspects, and in any case politically incorrect. Trans women are, for all purposes, women, and that is especially true in terms of their mind. Now, one thing is to state the factual truth, which, in the case of trans women who went through a medical-assisted transition, was established by a team (or teams) of professional clinical sexologists. The other thing is to deal with perceptions of others, which will have nothing to do with the factual truth.

In other words: we, as community members, can claim as much as we wish that trans women are women in all aspects (except for the sad truth of having been born with a body which is not aligned with their gender identity). Such claims, of course, are part of scientific truth and have been established beyond a shadow of doubt, and this knowledge has been asserted a few decades ago. But beyond the realm of science and political activism, people have their own perceptions of the truth. It is still very hard to shake off the idea that trans people go through transition for sexual reasons; if you have a few minutes to watch the video below, at least from the 2m10s mark onwards, you will see how hard it is for transgender people to explain why they want to go through genital surgery, and making very clear that it is not because of sex:

Put in a different way: society, somehow, expects that ‘serious’ transgender people give up on their sexuality… or they will not be seen as ‘serious’. Of course we know that this is particularly true in more conservative environments (where people are against the existence of LGBTQI+ anyway!), but such a conservative stance ‘spills over’ to the rest of society.

I’m not speaking as a hypothetical case; I’m actually speaking from personal experience! Among the dozens of fans that faithfully watch my videos and/or the stream of pictures posted on Flickr, it’s just a very small handful who understands that there are other reasons besides sexual fetishism involved in crossdressing. When faced with that issue, they will be baffled and ask honestly: ‘If you are not into sex, why do you publish videos such as yours?’ And that question, of course, haunts me, and will continue to haunt me for as long as I keep a presence on YouTube and Flickr (and some other places as well).

It is painful for me to admit, but I cannot be publicly and openly a smoking fetishist, having joined their community decades ago (not formally, of course, there is no such thing as a formal association of world-wide smoking fetishists), while at the same time pretending that my crossdressing is not sexual in nature. Any form of fetishism is, by definition, sexual in nature. While most people who crossdress and ‘show themselves off’ on YouTube and/or other social media are interested in transvestic fetishism (and that’s also the kind of audience they attract), there are exceptions that might cater for a niche market, such as what I do (and yes, I’m very well aware of a handful of MtF crossdressers, sometimes even transgender people under transition, who are also smoking fetishists and publish their videos online for the same target audience that I do). Even though the act of publishing erotic or adult content to a specific audience does not mean that one is interested in engaging in sexual intercourse with the audience, that is what is automatically assumed by everybody else.

I’m naïve enough to admit that such a link was not immediately obvious for me in, say, 2005 or so, when my first videos and images were made public. Consider the porn video industry as an example. Just because someone is a director of porn movies, that doesn’t mean that they want to have sex with all the actresses. They might want that, but if they are all pros, this will simply not happen. At the same time, the audience knows that — or at least most of the audience! — the scenes depicted in a porn movie are fantasy. They are not real; in fact, in recent times, some of the more ‘unnatural’ sex scenes are not even performed with an actress at all, but rather with a silicone doll (acquired from SFX people such as RealDoll); but porn actresses also have (human) doubles as well; so it’s all pretty much fantasy coming from the movie industry.

We turn back to what I explained at the very beginning. Smoking fetishists naturally enjoy watching (porn) actresses pretending to smoke. However, they are frustrated if the ‘pretense’ is not convincing. Here we get an effect that is also present on porn movies, and which is the rise of the amateur videos.

Consumers of porn know that videos are just ‘pretense’. The actors and actresses may be good enough to perform very convincing sex scenes, and the degree of realism that they portray will have an impact in how big their audience is. Some, of course, are not worried about the ‘pretense’ — i.e. that the actor is not really having intercourse with a human actress, or that the actress is just pretending to have orgasms anyway — if the scenes are convincing enough. However, for some people, this is not enough — they expect an even higher degree of realism. And here is where amateurs can actually ‘outperform’ professional actors, in the sense that home movies have today enough quality (thanks to the development of affordable high-quality video cameras, such as the ones present in high-end mobile phones, for instance) to show satisfactory images. Amateurs doing their own porn videos may lack the studio quality of a professional production, but they show real people having real sex, and for a certain kind of audience, this is much more interesting than having actors and actresses in a studio (no matter how good the directing may be). While porn stars are hand-picked for their stereotypical looks, the truth is that there are far more good-looking people these days, plastic surgery is relatively accessible, and amateurs get access to better cameras, better editing tools, and reach an audience on the Internet which the porn industry cannot beat (since even the cheapest porn video has much higher costs than an amateur video posted on xTube or similar amateur porn websites).

There is a whole industry of amateur porn as well; websites compile the ‘best stuff’ out there and redistribute it to an eager audience for a fee. In many cases, amateurs who are able to attract an interesting audience will be able to make a living out of it — either through ads or by having agreements with online redistributors. In essence, such people cannot be called ‘amateurs’ any longer, and for at least a decade or so, many porn webcam chat sites have included ‘models’ who are professional porn stars doing some ‘amateur stuff’ on their webcams and earning an interesting income even when they are between movie productions. Some might even abandoned the professional porn movie industry in favour of doing ‘amateur stunts’ on the web; others use their web presence, doing ‘spontaneous’ online shows for free, to promote their own professionally-edited porn videos. And these days it’s not totally uncommon to have porn stars to be live on adult webcam chatrooms, interacting with their audience directly; last but not least, both amateurs and pros are more than willing to do private shows to an audience for a price, something that is very appealing to those who are voyeurs, or, not being voyeurs, rather prefer to watch their favourite actress to do whatever they ask her to do on camera, than to pay for a flesh-and-blood prostitute to do the same, with the difficulties that entails (namely, eventual laws forbidding prostitution; and having the required time and place to engage in such activities). ‘Digital porn’ is a huge market, and it’s always claimed that up to 20% of all traffic on the Internet is porn of some sort, although there are no real serious studies about that. Nevertheless it certainly is a big market, and one that never fails to have consumers.

Thus, the two industries — that of amateurs and professionals — have pretty much merged into one, at least to a certain degree, and this should not be that surprising. Outside the porn market, we have YouTube celebrities which, after reaching a certain status (and millions of followers), might get their own TV show on cable network. This has certainly happened and will continue to happen; the same is true for musicians who become famous netcelebrities and then attempt to make a career in ‘the real world’, sometimes using a platform such as The Voice or similar, popular TV contests to perform on TV for even larger audiences. I keep forgetting which show actually demands that contestants have a YouTube channel, which is evaluated by the show’s organisers before the contestant is even allowed to appear on an audition. Such things will become more and more commonplace.

The porn industry is far more advanced in that scenario (which is not surprising; they normally are one step ahead of the rest of the world; we cannot ever forget that the first social website, predating Facebook for a decade, was designed for adults to set up sexual encounters), and the two realities have blended. Porn distributors began their own websites to ship DVDs to potential customers; but soon it was obvious that the Internet is one of the best distribution mechanisms ever invented, and it became much easier to stream DVD-quality video through the Internet to eager customers than to deal with the logistics of actual manufacturing of the DVDs, having enough storage, and people to deal with the handling and shipping. Instead, after a movie is produced, it can immediately be released online; there is no need to actually burn DVDs any more. But the reverse side of the coin is that if professional distributors and professional porn movie studios can do this, so can amateurs. Eventually, an amateur that becomes successful in attracting a large audience gets invited to be part of the ‘big distributors’ portfolio or even to have their videos professionally edited by a movie studio; and, reversely, as said, porn stars start to get encouraged to do free online shows to their fans on webcam chatrooms, in order to promote their own videos; and, finally, webcam chatrooms, although they are in a different business model than distributors or movie producers, are nevertheless willing to pay people to perform on ‘premium’ channels, which help them to pay the costs of bandwidth and software —giving amateurs a potential regular stream of income, effectively turning them into professionals; reversely, professional sex workers are often willing to earn some extra money in their spare time by offering their own premium channels to their fans, showing themselves off in real-time on such webcam chatrooms. On top of that all, consumers become producers, and producers become consumers: people interested in watching porn through the Internet may also become interested in producing their own porn, as amateurs, for others to see.

And here is where things become confusing. Because the barrier of who is an amateur and who is a pro, or who is a consumer and who is a producer, have been shattered by the age of Internet video, common assumptions simply do not work any more. How can a viewer of a premium real-time video channel know that the person in front of the camera is really enjoying masturbating for an audience, or if she or he is just doing that as part of a show, a pretense, just as it is done in porn movies? Porn stars ‘pass’ as amateurs, in order to attract the crowd which is keen on amateur videos because it is ‘real’ (and done in real-time too); while amateurs with extraordinary skills become regularly paid and dedicate a chunk of their time in online ‘pretense’ as well, just to please their audience and guarantee their paycheck from the webcam chatroom owners at the end of the month. So, from the perspective of an outsider, what is real, what is not; who are the amateurs, who are the pros; and who is ‘just a consumer’ and who is ‘just a producer’?

Naturally, this dilemma has affected my own YouTube channel. On one hand, back in 2005 or so, it was much clearer who were the amateurs, and who were the pros; but professional porn studios started to have a problem with smoking fetishism. Smoking fetishism is more akin to an art such as, say, ice skating or ballroom dancing (really!): there is a certain amount of techniques that smoking fetishists are supposed to be able to perform — and prove that they can do it! — and ingeniously build them into a choreography that is erotic and interesting, captivating an audience. Smoking fetishism is therefore a performance, and actually a rather formalised one, even if it does not seem to be the case; and this is mostly because smoking itself also has its rituals (the way a cigarette is lighted up, how ashes are disposed of, how cigarettes are stored in cases, and so forth). Smoking fetishists, therefore, do not merely enjoy the act of smoking itself, but the whole ritualised, formalised approach to smoking with an erotic undertone as a specific intent (for those who appreciate it, of course). In this context, it’s not enough for an actress (or a good amateur!) to simply light up and blow some smoke into the camera; there is so much more to it; and the audience knows that and demands that. This is what makes it difficult for professional studios: there is just a limited amount of professional porn stars who are also smoking fetishists themselves and who are knowledgeable enough in the art of smoking to pull off convincing scenes that are acceptable for the audience; and while this is a small niche market, nevertheless there is far more demand than supply.

One might ask why this is the case (since it clearly is not the case with other kinds of erotic content!), and the answer is simply that the percentage of smokers is slowly dwindling. Connoisseurs of the art of smoking will watch delighted old movies from the 1940s and 1950s, when the directors would tell the actresses exactly what was demanded of them when they smoked on the silver screen; the art of smoking was well established and well known, and this is why those movies, even though they are meant to be PG, are exceptionally erotic for smoking fetishists: they reflect a time when women were aware of smoking as an art which could be performed in an enticing, erotic way, and when movie directors knew this very well, and knew exactly how to direct their actresses to produce those results (of course, it also helped that most of those actresses were actually real smokers as well, and thus familiar with the whole codification of the art of smoking).

When reviewing some professionally-shot contemporary smoking fetishist movies, it’s often evident for the audience that the movie director is aware of the tricks used by their predecessors in the 1940s/1950s in terms of camera positioning and lighting (cigarette smoke, for example, needs backlighting, or it will become almost invisible and thus uninteresting); however, they often have to work with models and actresses who are either not smokers, or causal smokers, or, even if they are regular smokers (which is rare these days), they are certainly not familiar with the full codification of the art of smoking — and thus their videos always lack realism and credibility, and are therefore very disappointing for potential viewers. Also, some porn movie directors misinterpret the point of smoking fetishism: it’s not a way to ‘show off’ the nice attributes of the models, but what true fetishists appreciate is the technique. If the woman is attractive or not, well, that is just a bonus, of course, but true fetishists will be enthralled by the technique, not the size of the breasts — they can watch gorgeous female bodies elsewhere. Obviously a combination of both will work best, but it’s not necessary; and the professional porn movie industry, lacking realistic and convincing smokers, try to compensate by offering good-looking actresses instead. Smoking fetishists feel that they are somehow cheated by that.

I obviously cannot generalise — like all fields of human nature, no two smoking fetishists are the same! — but I can speak for an average audience of smoking fetishists. There are not many, and the few that follow my YouTube channel, know exactly what they are interested in. They couldn’t care less if I am a crossdresser, transgender, gender non-conforming, or simply a guy who dresses up as a woman to make a few videos. Instead, they are just interested in the smoking. And while they are a very tolerant and open-minded group (namely, not caring about what ‘gender’ I identify with), they are also very demanding that the art of smoking is performed correctly according to the canon. I’m obviously aware that I’m far below the threshold of what would be considered a ‘good’ smoking fetishist — I’m ok with a holder, but not without one; my dangling (holding the holder or cigarette in the mouth by clenching the teeth on the mouthpiece) is not convincing; and I’m very bad at doing smoke rings. If the art of smoking were an Olympic discipline, I would just score around 70% or so — well below what would be necessary for joining the Games But — and that’s the important point — my audience knows that I enjoy smoking, that I’m a ‘real’ smoker and not merely an actress pretending to be one, and that I even do some of the techniques in public and not only on video — this is, by the way, how the art of smoking was actually meant to be used: in public, not just as a performance behind a camera.

Unfortunately, there is a catch: on public, open channels such as YouTube (and this is also true of many webcam chatrooms, of course) it’s hard to select your audience. In other words, it’s a free market: you put your videos out there expecting to attract some people who will like them; while, on the reverse side of the coin, people attracted by a specific kind of videos will try to find them through searches. Sometimes there is a match — which can be rare when we’re talking about very small communities! The problem here is that, on one hand, to keep that audience happy, I have no choice but to make my videos public, so that they can find them; on the other hand, because they are public, they will almost immediately be misunderstood by watchers who are not smoking fetishists.

And those — clearly the majority! — are mostly of two types. Some, of course, do not understand the purpose of ‘transgender smoking fetishism’ and will either insult me in the comments or simply skip the video and jump elsewhere. Others, however, come from webcam chatrooms, where they are used to get others to do ‘shows’ for them, and eventually even arrange a few encounters in ‘real life’. In other words, because I’m crossdressing, I’m automatically labeled as a ‘fetishist’ of some sort; and because the videos are public, it ‘means’ (for them) that I’m available, in the sense of being potentially interested in having sex with whomever writes on the comments. This is merely a reflection of what happens elsewhere, and people coming from environments where this is clearly the case — for instance, where escorts are available online as a ‘preview’ of what they can offer; or where women willing to have intercourse are actively looking for partners by ‘showing themselves off’ on webcam. Those visitors are by far the majority, or perhaps I should say were the majority, because thankfully most moved on to people who were aligned with what they had in mind.

The public in general, however, considers those that engage in any sort of erotic activity to be ‘lesser humans’ than the rest of the world, which is assumed that is ‘sexually inactive’, or, more precisely, which keeps ‘sexual things’ outside the public sphere. Naturally enough, this will depend on the context, as well as on the country and the specific society, but, in general, those who are open and public with their sexuality, or at least with what they consider erotic, are viewed with suspicion, disdain, or contempt. They are not taken seriously. And this offers a challenge, one that I had to reflect upon for several months.

Let me give you a very interesting example. One of my online acquaintances, which I have met over a decade ago, is one of the most formidably intelligent women I have met. She has a PhD in philosophy, teaches at some university in the US, and — online, via the social 3D virtual world of Second Life — she gives weekly conferences on a lot of deep philosophical subjects, which I tremendously enjoy, and of course I’m not the only one. Her conferences, lectures or debates are usually attended by an audience of several dozen people online, which is possibly more than what she gets ‘in real life’, most of which have been eager followers and fans of her for many, many years.

This woman, however, has an interesting background story. Besides her obvious intelligence, which is immediately noticed after just a few seconds of conversation, she was also a beauty queen in her university days. Now, I cannot really confirm or deny such claim, because I have just seen a few — very few! — of her pictures in her 30s, and while they are artistic photographies (and not porn shots!), it is clear for anyone that she had a gorgeous body and overall looks. But her artistic photos have a different intention than merely ‘showing off’ her body: instead, they are images about the beauty of the human body, where she poses in the nude as an example. The difference between ‘nude’ and ‘naked’ is a subtle one, and I have long ago learned the difference (my own language, Portuguese, just has one word for both), which may or not be correct — I’m just repeating what I was taught: when English speakers talk about ‘nude’, they are talking mostly about an artistic representation of the human body, where the focus is not in the lack of clothes per se, but rather in the harmonious, aesthetically pleasing ratios present in the human body (and which, to an extent, are replicated on all artistic creations, but that is a discussion for another place…); while someone is ‘naked’ when they drop off their clothes in the attempt to entice or excite viewers by showing off their uncovered bodies. Nakedness has sexual undertones, while nudeness has artistic ones.

Now, this particular PhD philosophy professor was scared of remaining in debt forever while going through university; she knew that even if she got a regular job flipping burgers and cleaning tables, she would not be able to pay her tuition fees, and she would have no choice but to get a loan from a bank — which she was reluctant to do (as I understand the story, she might not even qualify for such a loan). So what did she do? Well, she sold her body: she would earn far more that way, have plenty of spare time to do her studies (unlike what would happen with a full-time job), and, instead of being broke and having to repay a loan, she did actually make a good enough profit that secured her immediate years after university. She was already very uninhibited about her body and had no problem posing in the nude for art and photography students as a model; the step of starting to work as an escort and later as a prostitute was not too big for her to take. And, as easily as she slipped in that role when it was necessary, once she got her tenure and a secure job at a university, of course she could drop her activities as a sex worker (while still continuing to pose as a nude model for some artists and photographers).

Did her colleagues and teachers know about that? And if so, did they approve? I have no idea, and I feel it’s rude to ask her so — either she’s willing to talk about the subject, or not. It’s part of her personal, private life, and nobody has anything to do with it. I also have no idea where in the US this happens, and if it was in a state where prostitution is allowed or not (in my own country, for instance, she would have had absolutely no problem in doing so — she could even give her customers valid receipts, charge them VAT, pay taxes and the welfare fees, and enjoy an early retirement thanks to being labeled as a ‘fast burnout job’). But it’s only natural that she wouldn’t want to wildly advertise the way she paid her tuition fees during her student days. Not because she is somehow ashamed of it — nothing could be further from the truth! — but simply because it’s not socially acceptable for a professor at a university to have been a prostitute. In other words, having in your CV (or resumée) listed as former job ‘prostitute’ will not open you doors.

So, she very carefully kept her daily life separated from her past. To this very day, even though it’s very easy to see that she has a vast and thorough academic knowledge in the field of philosophy — which you immediately get by sitting through one of her philosophy lectures and debates done online in Second Life — I have no idea of her real name. The very few nude pictures she has on her profile are not good enough for Google images to track her down (and she knows that perfectly, or else she wouldn’t post them). But, of course, in the privacy of Second Life, she is quite open about her past (at least with people she has met and talked to for a long time) — no one there would be able to ‘leak’ details about her past life to her current employers, since nobody knows her real name, the institution she currently works from, or has any proof (like pictures or videos!) of her former activities as a prostitute.

By keeping her private past separate from her academic present, she is able to be taken very seriously in her job. And this is how it ought to be: there is no written rule that a prostitute cannot finish a PhD in philosophy and become a professor at a university (or vice-versa!), but, unfortunately, in the society we currently live in, the two situations are somehow viewed as incompatible — as if her sexuality has anything to do with her intelligence, education, and academic training.

I know this is a rather extreme case, of course. But it shows my point rather nicely. By insisting to keep some online videos and pictures which had the smoking fetishist community in mind, and which are merely a ‘fantasy’ and understood as such by my fellow smoking fetishist community members, unfortunately the ‘rest of the world’ doesn’t see it as such. In fact, even non-smokers find some of my videos strangely attractive to them; they can ‘forget’ the smoking bit which bothers them and focus instead on what they perceive to be an erotic undercurrent emanating from those videos. In effect, they just see me as a ‘soft porn’ amateur actress; and, as such, they put me in the same box as all other people engaged in porn (soft or otherwise). In other words, I’m not really taken seriously.

Now, one may argue that ‘being taken seriously’ is overrated (Buddhists certainly think that way!). But we strangely live in an age when conservatives are becoming more and more extreme, and even liberals are shaking on their foundations and wondering if we have not gone too far — whatever is meant by that, of course. In particular, in this age of social media, it’s a bad idea to mix one’s private life with the public one. Before the Internet, you could buy porn VHS tapes, subscribe to porn magazines, have your own BDSM dungeon in the cellar of your Beverly Hills mansion, entertain group sex parties, and still maintain the image of the perfect gentleman or lady in public — simply because it would be highly unlikely that anything of your private life would ‘leak out’. We didn’t even have smartphones, and mobile phones lacked trackability, so we would use landlines to get in touch with the members of the group sex parties — and since those were with consenting adults, the likelihood of anyone listening in to one’s telephone conversation would be next to zero. Also, all parties involved would be interested in securing their privacy as well; sex toys and porn magazines would be delivered plainly packaged, etc. And of course not everybody would have easy access to cameras; we would not make selfies of ourselves inside a BDSM dungeon, and, if we did, we would have to bring them to a friend’s developing lab, because we most certainly wouldn’t want a random guy working at the photo lab to see what we were about. All these precautions were natural, but it was also much easier to keep them off the public eye (unless, of course, anything illegal would happen; in that case, it would be certain that the police would step in!).

These days, however, ‘privacy’ is a forgotten word. Our own watches can take high resolution pictures easily — and without anyone really noticing — as well as whole movies. Home appliances built in China have Wi-Fi sniffers built in. Smart TVs are able to be used by hackers to view what’s going on in your living room — some have cameras which the manufacturer never told you about. Google, Apple, and all major smartphone manufacturers track you down via GPS, and they can pinpoint you with increasing precision (soon, new generations of smartphones will use Europe’s own Galileo global satellite-based navigation system, which surpasses the US non-military GPS system in precision — and of course smartphones will use both). We communicate via a plethora of technologies, of websites, of protocols — sometimes even not realising what we’re doing. Companies track down our browser usage — as well as what TV channels we watch on cable — and profile us to give us better ads. Drones with 4K video cameras hover by our windows — even on high-rise buildings! — and can see exactly what we’re doing, even by night, since they can easily use infrared cameras. Technology that once was in the hands of the military or the security forces is now available to the common person; in seconds, or at least minutes, we can grab a part of a picture, identify a face on it, and see on which social networks they are registered — thus easily figuring out their name, and possibly even their address. Stalkers live in paradise, as they can easily figure out where their victims are, and track them by their phones; and the same applies to burglars which need to know when someone has logged off from home and is travelling to work (hint: they can look at the check-in messages on Facebook!). Fortunately for us, crime prevention also uses the same tools, and they have professionals using them, so things didn’t totally get out of hand — at least from the perspective of criminality!

But nevertheless we lost this ability of separating our private from our public lives. Both are now open for anyone to see on the Internet. Of course, we can take precautions: we can have different profiles, different online persona, each with its own set of configurations, logins, passwords, names, and so forth; only more sophisticated computer users will be able to draw a connection between both. Some people are paranoid enough to change not only their passwords, but even their email addresses and social profiles, twice a year or so; sometimes this happens because they are blocked, of course, but there are people who are aware of their lack of privacy and therefore are always eager to change everything — making it even hard for their own real friends to track down!

While a little precaution is certainly more than advised, often we cannot plan what will happen in the future, and it might be too late to correct a serious mistake one has carelessly made in the past. 15 years ago or so, I had no intention to ever meet anyone in public, dressed like a woman; so I thought it would be more than ‘safe’ to register myself in all sorts of ‘borderline’ social sites out there. While it was fun, for a while, to see some of my YouTube videos reaching hundreds of thousands of views (!!!), now I regret how easy that allowed some people to capture those videos on their hard disks and upload them to porn sites (yes, that actually happened). I mean, this is the kind of thing that we all heard about; we know it does happen; so it should not be a surprise. In fact, a decade ago, I would actually be very happy if someone was redistributing my content! That would have been awesome!

But now…? Well, now I have made contacts, reached out to new friends and acquaintances, and tried to establish myself as a voice in my (tiny) community. This is incompatible with the kind of ‘fun’ videos (or pictures) I made over a decade ago. Not for me personally — I’m not ashamed of those videos and pics, I actually enjoyed doing them, and I know that there are plenty of friends out there who enjoyed watching them as all — but rather for the community as a whole. When transgender people are so adamantly defending that gender identity has nothing to do with ‘sexual deviation’ (although of course sexuality is an inherent part of every human being!), people raise a few eyebrows when they see the sort of content that transgender people actually post of themselves online. Sure, that is actually very unfair: cisgender people post far more erotic content (involving themselves!) than transgender people, simply because they outnumber us 30,000 to 1 — and therefore produce oodles of more content. But it’s always a question of perception. If a cisgender heterosexual male or female post images of themselves doing a sexy pose on Instagram, they’re cool, or sexy, or perhaps just labeled as attention-getters, but, in any case, it’s always socially acceptable behaviour (for the norms that we have in this decade!). Whilst when a transgender person does the same… well, then it’s just a ‘confirmation’ that, deep down, all transgenderism is about sex.

This is naturally a form of discrimination. In other words, cisgender people are allowed to have a perfectly normal and healthy sexuality, and even if they ‘show off’ on social media, this is not considered a major catastrophe. Even former presidents of the US can get a picture of themselves hugging their wives on the beach — it might raise a few smiles, a comment or two, but… even presidents have their sexuality, right? So we shrug it off — unless, of course, some ‘red lines’ are crossed. But transgender people are encircled by red lines. Whatever they do, even if they just do a nose job and post a picture of themselves showing how well it went… well, it’s just about sex. Everyone knows that transgender people are obsessed with sex, to the point of even wanting those warts removed from their noses…

Grumbling and complaining is not worth much; after all, we didn’t make those rules. We just have to adapt ourselves and try to ‘fit in’ as much as we can. Now, I’m not a rebel in the sense of believing that the best form of changing society and its (stupid) rules is by overthrowing the social order — although I know several transgender people who fit into that label perfectly. Rather, I think it’s better to work ‘within the system’ and slowly establish certain rights mostly by setting an example for others (even cisgender people!) to follow. Cisgender women, of course, know exactly what I’m talking about: they know that if they want respect and acceptance from their male peers at work, they have to work harder and better than all of them (and therefore earning the fame of being ruthless, emotionally detached, and distant and aloof…). Males respect the toughest, meanest, hardest women out there — barely so — even though they do not apply the same demands on themselves. Men can be lazy and stupid and still earn the respect and admiration of other men, but women have no such privilege. And the same applies to transgender people as well: we need to be perfect angels, without the slightest hint of even having a ‘sexuality’ — we must be pure, asexual, living in the ivory towers of the most sacrosanct celibacy — and only then we might get a few cisgender people to ‘believe’ that ‘being trans’ is not ‘a sexual thing’.

That way we can avoid stupid questions like ‘so, when did you start being trans?’ asked in the same tone as one cisgender person would ask another when they started attending group sex orgies. It’s not the same thing, but the mainstream population still thinks it is. In a way, and perhaps thanks to the efforts of the LGB crowd in the past decades, the cisgender heteronormative society is starting to accept that whatever happens in the privacy of your bedroom is the concern of nobody except you and your consenting partner(s). This is obviously not universally held, but there is a certain degree of more tolerance; and perhaps the way social sites have been mostly used for dating purposes — even if journalists, media pundits, computer experts, etc. vehemently claim the total opposite — has softened or mellowed the approach to sexuality. I don’t know, it’s just my perception — in a sense, the kind of comments I sometimes get (or got) on my videos and photos tended to show just that, i.e. that people are ‘fine’ that I get sexual pleasure from dressing as a woman. In other words, fetishism becomes acceptable, and people do not need to be so ‘ashamed’ of their fetishes and fantasies any longer. The question of ‘when did you become trans’ is not meant to be offensive, but rather an expression of curiosity, a certain degree of tolerance towards an ‘exotic fetish’ which may be incomprehensible for the common individual, but nevertheless they are more favourable to the whole concept of ‘transgenderity as a sexual fantasy’ and accept it more. While in Uganda people might resent ‘gay people recruiting others for their organisation’ (!!!), in the West, we start having less issues about that, because we’re slightly more open to sexuality.

So long, of course, that it remains outside the public arena. Electing a transgender person — a ‘sexual pervert’ — for office is still something which isvery confusing for many people. While homosexuals already get regularly elected to important offices — far, far below the actual percentage of non-heterosexuals in the overall population, but it’s a start — transgenderity is still too confusing for a general audience. Yes, it’s fine to have ‘strange tastes’, but ‘choosing to be transgender’ and chopping bits off your body and adding others is really ‘too radical’ for the mainstream population…

There is still a long, long way to go to make people understand that transgenderity has nothing to do with ‘sexual’ issues, but gender ones; and it’s equally hard to accept that transgender people, just like cisgender people, also have a healthy sexuality. But one thing has nothing to do with the other — and this is the hardest issue to explain to others. It’s far easier to get accepted for having a ‘strange and unusual fetish’ than to make people understand that transgender people have no ‘strange and unusual fetishes’ when they express their gender identity — although, of course, they may also have other ‘strange and unusual fetishes’, just like everybody else, because we are all humans, and we all have our sexual fantasies.

Even very open-minded people like my bisexual, polyamorous friend are slightly confused about the two issues (but to give him credit, he’s quite willing to learn more — most people simply make up their opinion and are impossible to convince otherwise). He does understand that there is a difference between ‘gender identity & presentation’ and ‘sexuality’. Nevertheless, he thinks that there is no coincidence that his transgender girlfriend is into very kinky stuff (as he so graphically puts it, without getting into details, of course — what he does with her is shrouded in their privacy!). In other words… he might accept that transgender people have, or had, gender issues; but he cannot deny that they’re awesome sexual partners, and that somehow the two things must be connected.

To be perfectly honest, I have often thought the same. While it’s quite clear that among the crossdresser and transgender communities there is an extraordinarily large amount of asexual individuals — or as close to asexual as possible, without any disrespect meant towards true asexual individuals! — there is also a much larger group that is into… ‘very kinky stuff’. In fact, I have seen some anti-transgender ‘studies’ (not peer-reviewed articles, of course) which deem to have established strong correlations between an above-average amount of hypersexuality, fetishism, and a high degree of sexual fantasies (with a lot of imagination!) among the crossdressing and transgender communities. While such ‘studies’ must always be questioned — some correlations are virtually worthless, such as the decrease of pirates linked to global warming  — what matters here is the perception by the general public that such a correlation actually exists. And it’s certainly true for many cases; such as it is true for many cases of cisgender heterosexual people, of course. Some humans simply are more inclined towards one extreme, others to the opposite extreme, but the average guy is somewhere in the middle — and the same holds true for transgender people as well, of course.

Nevertheless, it’s the perception that counts. And because of that, I have made a difficult decision.

Originally, I have posted on my website links to all my pictures and videos. The idea was to attract more visitors to them — and to my site as well — thanks to the many searches made by people on Google and other search engines. There was some sort of ‘cross-marketing’ going on, if you wish: some people might be searching for ‘serious’ discussions about transgender issues and find my blog, but also find some of my videos or pictures amusing; while others, who are fans of those silly videos and photos, might have found my blog ‘by mistake’ and therefore also take an interest in the kind of things I write about. I have, in fact, found a few scattered cases where this actually happened. But here’s the problem: they’re just few. In fact, very few — a handful of exceptions to the norm!

So it became increasingly obvious that linking both things together wasn’t a good idea, after all. I know it’s ‘too late’ to unlink them. Also, in recent months, the plugins I used to retrieve the pictures from Picasa and post them here started to fail — thanks to the deliberate changes that Google is making all the time, until they finally break everything they did, and nothing works any more as it should (if you ever wondered why Google never really overtook Facebook and other social media, in spite of offering the same technology, now you know: the main reason is that Google keeps breaking stuff, and that means that developers get tired of always having to keep up with the constant and deliberate changes introduced by Google… anyway, I digress). On top of all that, I have a huge backlog of material that needs to be processed — almost half a year, in fact — and, mostly because my depression is getting much better and I’m able to work more and have less time free for ‘other things’, and because I’m also doing far more pictures and far more videos because I dress as a woman so more often than before… I cannot keep up easily with all that! What a perfect excuse, therefore, to deliberately introduce a dramatic change on my website!

From now on, I will have the links for my videos and pictures on a protected area of my website. And yes, that means that you need to be a registered user in order to see those images and movies on the website – although they will continue to be freely available (for now) elsewhere on YouTube, Picasa, Google Photos, Flickr, OneDrive, etc. (each of these sites has different ways of access and permission levels). And I won’t simply let anyone get registered; I will only accept my old acquaintances (and fans!) that have been patiently following me online for the past decade and half (or so). Of course you can ‘become’ a new fan/acquaintance, and that means looking me up on the many social websites out there where I’m registered and chat a bit with me. That’s all that is needed

It’s possible that I might change my policies again in the future: I might, at some point in time, make all my images and movies completely inaccessible. Well, what I mean is that I will remove public access to them; but some people obviously have already made copies of them and uploaded them elsewhere (a friend of mine pointed out to one social site which has parts of one of my movies; and I’ve managed to track down that very same movie to another site…), so it’s not as if they will disappear ‘forever’ from the Internet: they will just be less visible. But I will nevertheless have proof of having created them in the first place and be able to track them down, one by one, and ask for their removal… even though I’m very well that this will take ages!

The point is just to make them harder to find; the smoking fetishist community, which is tiny anyway, knows very well where to find them, since they have been following me for quite a while. But those who do not understand the canons of smoking fetishism as an art form – one that involves a performance, a fantasy, which is just imaginary, not real – are always assuming that by publishing my images I’m showing my willingness to engage in sexual intercourse with anyone in the world. Over the years, this became wearing. It’s time to stop, or at least to start making some progress towards stopping that.

So, dear reader, if you have read to the end… welcome! You know that the changes will not affect you, and that you will continue to have these unthinkably long, endlessly boring essays to read — I won’t go anywhere, and I’ll see you again on the next article, where you’ll watch how deeply I’ll drag (no pun intended) you down the complexities of trans* taxonomy. Cheers and a kiss! 

This is most definitely something I don’t want to see. Google is too clever.

So I’ve decided to remove my pictures from Google+ — like I did with Facebook a while ago — and just have them privately on Picasa. They will also show up here on my website, which has little traffic, and is only seen by people I know.

Now I have to try to limit how much YouTube and similar things post to my Google+ timeline… years ago I complained about Facebook’s confusing lack of privacy, but Google+ seems to be even worse. Imagine, there is no way to select all posts on the timeline and mark them private for friends! You have to delete them manually, one by one…

My apologies for the confusing mess. The Internet gets less and less safe every year. *Sigh*

In the past few weeks, my life has become rather hectic, and I’m on 4-hour-nights-of-sleep again, and I know what that will mean: a few more weeks of these, and it’s time for collapse. Last year it meant fainting and visiting the hospital for some tests; nothing was found except extreme fatigue.

This year I have to cope with dealing with my demented father, who survived my mother’s death in August, but it has been hard to get him happy — and takes an insane amount of my time. Time that, as you know, is incredibly precious to me. Because now I also have to deal with a wife who needs a ride to university every day, now that she picked up her studies again. Since she’s in the ‘night shift’, it means she can’t get public transportation back, and I have to stay at an office nearby while I wait. More time wasted, but at least I can work a little while she’s at her classes. But it also means even less time for what I’m supposed to be doing, which is fully focusing on my PhD. Which I’m not.

This naturally leads to deep frustration, because, once more, I have completely lost control of my life. And naturally, when I’m frustrated, I get my ‘urges’ more strongly as before. In fact, for the past weeks, I haven’t thought about anything else.

I’m not a shrink but I think I understand my own behaviour perfectly. It’s almost rational: when I feel that my life is just getting hopelessly tangled, and being so much at a whim of others, then it’s when I restart thinking about ‘living a different life’ altogether. I mean, if you have followed my entries here, you know that I’m always saying how impossible it would be for me to simply throw everything away and start from scratch. But during these intense weeks, when I have little else to give me some personal pleasure but to dress a bit, then sometimes ‘starting from scratch’ seems not to be such a bad thing to do. I mean, it can’t be worse!

Then, of course, my more rational side steps in, and obviously I question myself, and think: ‘This is just because I’m feeling down. Lots of people feel down because they exaggerate their worries and think that there is no way they can feel better. But this is not the case: it’s just my mind amplifying what looks to be bad and makes it worse, and looking at transition and just seeing the bright side of it, but forgetting about the rest’. This gives me some comfort and I usually plod along more content.

Having skipped some of my dressing sessions, my alternative is usually just browsing the ‘net for transgender issues and stories, and try to keep in touch here and there on the many TG online communities where I still have accounts. But a few weeks ago something quite interesting happened: I came across a link, posted I don’t remember where, about transgender/transformation comics.

Now I can’t say I’m a comics ‘expert’ — in fact, I’m not even an ‘amateur’. I do have a couple of bookshelves with European comics. I do follow a few webcomics I happen to like. But that’s all I know. If you asked me what are the top ten best comic artists in the world, I would probably be unable to list a single one. I don’t even know which are the top ten webcomics of the last decade, although I suspect that Girl Genius and PhD might be among them.

As a teen, I had been completely surrounded by artists — friends and some family. Some of them were actually rather good, and a few continued their careers in the art scene. I wished, at some point, to do the same, and draw my own comics. I even do have some formal training in drawing (long forgotten!) but the truth is, I have zero talent. For a while, I toyed with the idea of becoming a musician, and I do have some formal training in composing and piano playing, but, again, my utter lack of talent plays against me. So I pretty much gave up on anything ‘artistique’ and just became a computer geek instead; computers are very forgiving…

I still wrote science-fiction stories for a long while. Ironically, I even got an award and got published occasionally. Don’t bother to look it up, though — all my former publishers have long since gone bankrupt and disappeared. After a while, I just turned to blogging and academic publishing, where all the writing I had done as teen and young adult was not completely wasted. And then I sort of stopped writing fiction, because, seriously, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do a career out of it, either. Again, my lack of talent haunts me across all areas.

But I still occasionally do some fiction. Some of you know that I’m an active Second Life user. Second Life is an open-ended virtual world, now going for ten years, where you can pretty much do whatever you wish. The identity of alter ego over there is still unknown to most people, even after some 9 years have elapsed, and I also occasionally blog about Second Life (not so much as before… because every time one post comes up… I get calls from my PhD supervisor telling me to stop blogging and write my thesis instead!! Social media suck!). Some 5 years ago, I did a small experiment: using a sequence of images taken from Second Life, I wrote a silly story to go with them. This was actually well received — sort of ‘fan fiction’ if you like — so, three years later, I did another one. It occurred to me that my long-standing wish of doing comics might be possible to do using screenshots from Second Life. Unfortunately, that takes a lot of time, and I gave up the idea.

What surprised me was that a lot of people — and I mean really a lot — are, indeed, doing volumes and volumes of transgendered/transformation comics (where guys turn into girls and sometimes vice-versa). Seeing that this might be just a tiny niche, I was actually amazed at the huge quantity of high-quality material that has been produced for the past decade or so, and of which I was never aware. On one hand, it’s incredible how many TG artists there are (I cannot claim that all are TG, but most are); and it’s also incredible how big an audience there must be for all those comics, since many of them are paid, and a few artists can live out of their work (and accept commissions).

A whole world opened to me. So, if you’re into comics, take a look at TG Comics for starters. Many of the great artists are also on DeviantArt, like my current favourite artist, Smooch/cluedog/Zoe Crockett.

Stories vary a lot, in terms of interest. There are a few subgenres that seem always to be popular. I came across TG fiction — not comics! — by mere chance. A friend of mine, around 1995 or so, before we had search engines, gave me a link to an archive of porn/erotic fiction, the Nifty Archives. At that time, I was still struggling with my crossdressing and somehow in denial about it, so I was rather fascinated to see that there was some TG fiction on Nifty. My favourite one was the Joe Bates Saga (author anonymous), which stopped after 58 long chapters, although some fans created several possible endings. This is a story based on an ‘almost possible’ setting: while there is a science-fiction element to it, the author tried to make the transition believable, as well as the struggles of the main character with her new body, and how s/he had to learn and adapt.

This is by far not the only popular kind of storyline; from pure fantasy (a magic spell turning you into a woman), to Marvel/DC-comic style superheroes who have the power to switch genders, to nano-bots/nanites or super-high-tech DNA-changing machines, there are plenty of devices out there in all those creative minds to get a story going. Some are meant to be parodies and are pure fun; many, of course, are merely ‘masturbatory fiction’ — the plot is meaningless, all it matters is to draw women with an infinite libido which want to have sex with everybody in their new bodies. But the ‘serious’ plots also turn into quite interesting comics, like She’s Me, where the main character wakes up unexpectedly as a woman, and the whole story is about figuring out how it happened — and trying to convince her closest friends, doctors, etc. that she’s the same person as before. So you pretty much get the whole range of possible ideas, many of which are repeated over and over again, picked up by different scriptwriters and comic artists. Some of those stories even become animations or movies!

After spending the past weeks browsing across so much art, I finally got inspired. I thought that I could commission a story written by me. Unfortunately none of my stories (except some really old ones, buried deep in stacks of ancient floppy disks) are strictly TG, or come even close, so I had to write something from scratch. And that’s what I spent the past week doing. I practically didn’t do anything else.

I’m not going to show you the result, for several reasons: it’s a script for a comic, not really something supposed to be read — but to be put into pictures. I have contacted just the right comic artist saying that I would be interested to commission some work for him, but explained that I had not much money to invest, so this would be a very, very long-term project — probably taking some ten years or so.

Of course, so far, she has not replied (yes, she’s currently going through transition, so it’s fair to call her ‘she’ now), and I can imagine that she will not reply at all, or just say she’s not interested in doing anything like that, even as a paid commission.

I have not given up yet, though. I can be ‘subtly persuasive’. I might launch a campaign somewhere, saying: “Please accept Sandra’s commission and do her comic” Maybe if I gather enough Likes on Facebook or on YouTube, she might think it’s worth doing. On the other hand, she might feel insulted (artists are fickle!) so I’m still on the waiting stage, see what happens. I have several alternative plans, one of which is just to ask her for a few illustrations, and turn what was a script into a complete novel (should be some 150 pages when rewritten as a novel). We’ll see.

During this week, I couldn’t think of anything else but complete the story and send it to the comic artist for review. I slept little. I didn’t work. I couldn’t dress the whole week, but, ironically, I even got two new things (a coincidence, I thought both would never arrive before Christmas), that I’m wearing now — a new wig, allegedly made out of human Remy hair, although I seriously suspect it’s not (but at least the fibre is incredibly thin and looks very, very realistic); and a new corset, because the old ones are getting deformed with too much used. Now I’m using a waist training corset, which use spring-steel whalebones, and should be incredible tough and keep everything in place. While not perfect, I can certainly say it does wonders for my figure!

I’ve also been toying with a base from Kryolan. It’s a bit tricky to use, but it should be completely opaque, and absolutely sweat-proof (it’s used by professionals on TV which have to endure hot spotlights). My point here is that, during the warm months, I usually ruin my makeup because of all that sweating. Also, I’m a bit tired of having to apply a layer of red lipstick to cover the beard shadow, wait, then another layer of foundation, wait… and then start applying the rest. Kryolan shortens the process and should remain in place longer without looking too artificial or ‘cakey’, although it’s meant to be used if you’re behind a camera and not in public. As said, I’m trying it out, to see if I get used to it or not.

All that just built up my expectations for the weekend. Saturday I finally managed to finish everything on my story, sent it to the artist, and now I can relax while trying out a lot of new things.

It has been quite relieving in a sense — but also strange in another.

I’m usually good at keeping a balance between my ‘urges’ and my work. I can ‘disconnect’ them and just focus on whatever is more important; a stray thought might still bring me back to Sandra, but, in general, I will spend hours thinking just of my work or any other task at hand. This is what kept my sanity and my balance for so long. Every now and then, of course, I let my feminine side ‘loose’, both in my mind and in my body, by crossdressing — but that’s kept in check, as you know, I can do it only just twice per week or so.

The past week, by contrast, was a bit… overwhelming. I was not only thinking about the story in itself, but about transgenderism in general. All my waken moments were about that and nothing else. If I wasn’t actually writing the script, I was getting inspiration from TG art, or checking some facts up as references for the story — or constantly looking up the tracking numbers on the things I had ordered. At the office, where I wait for my wife while she’s at the university, I was always wearing at least a bra and a corset (at that late hour, there is usually nobody else around, but I go out for a smoke on the fire emergency staircases). I mended a few old clothes, and tried out two pairs of shoes which I had bought; I bought some new jewelry; one day, in fact, except for the wig and makeup, I was pretty much dressed from below the neck to my toes.

This was a strange feeling. I told myself to stop often. Sometimes, one or two of my colleagues would stay late as well, and I was actually relieved, because that was a good reason not to crossdress (even partially) at the office. But the truth is that even there it was really, really hard to think of anything else. If I got too tired, well, then I would just browse more TG art for stress relief.

Now I have to admit that I’m quite tired, and, of course, my work is a week late. But this intensity was sort of strange for me: I used to be like that as a teenager, when I was either writing another of my stories, or doing some computer programming. But it has been a long time since I did that in my adult life. And never by filling my mind with transgender thoughts at such intensity.

No wonder I’m tired, but also happy — my work was completed, and now it’s all in the hands of the comic artist. If she doesn’t answer in a week or so, I will have to go to Plan B

Wish me luck.

This is naturally not universal. Many transgendered people feel the strong urge to become a slutty female, even after transitioning. So many, in fact, that there is a whole industry around that. Others, sadly, are driven to the streets in order to survive, and while all they wanted to enjoy was their new feminine self, they have no other choice to become sex workers to be able to eat and pay the bills. No small wonder so many are not willing to go that route.

Well, this is about something else. Many of you are aware that I’m sometimes available at Cam4 or xHamster. I do that mostly to spend some time while waiting for some of my CD friends to arrive. It’s always fun, because these sites are clearly for pornography, and the last thing in my mind is to do some strip shows there. In fact, as I’ve explained before, all I do in them is to smile, smoke, and engage in conversation. I do nothing else. Surprisingly enough, I often get full rooms that way, even when I’m using the bad webcam from my laptop!

Both these sites accept tips. Gold or premium members are allowed to”buy” tips which they give to the performers they like most, hoping for a private show or thanking them for doing something “special”. Whatever the reason, webcam performers can earn some money that way, and I noticed that I already had US$5.30 on xHamster. You might think that’s not much, but when you realize that it’s all I might have by the end of the month to eat for a few days before getting my student’s grant, it becomes more important. And for three times that amount, I can buy a new dress or some lipstick.

So, well, today I signed up for these two sites as a “performer”. This is just an euphemism to describe the oldest profession in the world: getting paid for sexual activities. Even though all I do is to smile, smoke and chat, for some reason this might be exciting for a lot of people — enough for some to be willing to part with a few dollars. So, why not?

The encouragement came mostly from a CD friend of mine, who looks gorgeous on webcam (and I mean it, I’m not exaggerating). She is a closet crossdresser, and a rather irregular one — wasting months without getting ever dressed again, and then, all of a sudden, remaining glued to her webcam for days at a time. She’s very amusing, has a brilliant humour, and is fond of doing all kinds of kinky things on webcam. And she has the body and the looks for doing that — she’d be prime candidate for a full transition turning her into a supermodel without anyone noticing the gender she has been born with. In reality, she has absolutely no intention of transitioning — the thought is completely alien to her — and has no need of hormone therapy or surgery, she’s just that kind of T-girl who naturally looks like a woman without doing any special effort, and she can even pass without any makeup. Gosh, she’s so lucky! (How I envy her!)

At some point in time, she started joining a lot of paid webcam sites as a “performer”, and made regularly a few hundreds of dollars every day. And she admitted that she didn’t even need to do strip jobs most of the time, and would only reserve them to special customers who were quite willing to pay for the privilege. At that time, I understand that she was financially not doing very well, so the extra money was a treat to her. Later, as her financial condition improved, she avoided the “business” for a while, even though now and then she still logs in to those sites.

Well, I’m not really interested in taking such a huge step. Both Cam4 and xHamster work slightly differently, with the tipping scheme. Viewers are not really “forced” to pay for the girls they want to watch; they just spread a few tips around on the girls they like most, but there is no obligation to do so. While private chats can definitely be arranged for a certain amount of tips, this is all up to the girl and their eventual customer. I suppose that these sites use that kind of system to avoid being labelled as a full-fledged prostitution organisation. It’s more like paying a drink to a nice girl in a bar — that doesn’t turn the bar into a whorehouse.

On the other hand, of course, one cannot expect to make a lot of money this way. Which I’m not expecting to do. Still it might be enough to cover the hosting and maintenance fees of this website — which would be great! — and, who knows, I might be able to buy something for myself once in a while. I don’t expect much more than that. I also don’t wish to be glued in front of them during all the time I’m dressed, but just while waiting for my CD girlfriends to come online — there are often several “dead” moments where I have little else to do but write on my blog or keep up doing my (always late) work. So, why not use that time for having fun chatting with strangers, charming them, and accepting some tips?

I’ve submitted my application to both websites today, and now I’m waiting for their approval. We’ll see if I can test this out the next time I’m dressed — which won’t happen until next Sunday, at best.

This pretty much means that while your country might forbid discrimination against homosexuals and transgendered people, in practice, discrimination still happens. Sometimes it’s blatant, sometimes it’s far more subtle — so subtle, in fact, that it escapes being noticed.

[shashin type=”photo” id=”1541″ size=”small” columns=”max” order=”user” position=”left”] Driving around crossdressed is fun. In my country, and in most democratic countries, this is perfectly allowed. Let’s skip the issue about being transgendered or not; you have the right to express yourself freely. Specially in the privacy of your car, of course. Legislation protects that right of yours to dress pretty much as you wish, unless you’re hiding after committing a crime. So this means that if a police officer stops you and asks you for your ID, you have nothing to fear from them: you’re not doing anything forbidden by law.

On the other hand, a transphobic police officer might give you a hard time. He might claim, for example, that you don’t look nowhere like the picture on your driver’s license and force you to go to the station “to be identified under better lighting”. And give you a hard time about it, harass you, call you names, and so forth. What can you do? If you’re very open about your crossdressing, you might file a formal complaint. But that means going to a court, stand on trial, and affirm “Yes, your honour, I’m a crossdresser and I was driving crossdressed on that night, but I didn’t drink and my car was in order” in front of witnesses, friends, family, and possibly even a TV station. Most crossdressers are not that open about their crossdressing. So you will swallow your pride, pay whatever fines are presented to you, apologise, and get back home as soon as possible, forgetting everything.

That’s harassment and discrimination. That’s why we have the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia: it’s not to claim for more rights and equal rights, but to raise awareness about the rights we already have. Police officers, in the above example, are not allowed to give you a hard time just because you are dressed in a “queer” way. If there aren’t any real charges against you, your choice of dress — assuming that it doesn’t present a driving hazard! 12″ heels might be considered a hazard (after all, in some countries, you cannot drive barefoot, either, because your feet might slip from theopedals) — is part of your freedom of expression. Both you and a hypothetical transphobic police officer know that. But the transphobic police officer also knows that crossdressers usually won’t complain or even press charges. So they’re free to abuse you — and that is, plain and simple, discrimination.

Now I’m fortunate enough never to experience this. On the other hand, discrimination can be far more subtle.

Many of you know me from my YouTube videos. On them, I take special care to be within the Terms of Service. My videos are not pornographic: I don’t strip, I don’t show any more “flesh” than allowed. In fact, a video from Shakira, Lady Gaga, or Jennifer Lopez is far more sensual and erotic than my own “hottest” video. Several Disney movies have characters that are way more erotic than me, and still get a rating lower than PG (think Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?). While videos with people smoking might be frowned upon in certain communities, YouTube actually doesn’t forbid them (yet!) since smoking is allowed in all countries on Earth, at least for adults. Sure, for the smoking fetishists, my videos might be very exciting. For those who love crossdressers, they might be mildly interesting. For the rest of the world, they will be mostly indifferent. It’s only for the transphobic community that my videos are frankly disgusting. It’s not because they’re videos of a woman smoking — there are gazillions of those on YouTube. Many of those videos are even fake. It’s because although I post videos of myself as a woman smoking, while not actually legally being a woman. This is what makes a transphobic person tingle all over. Because they cannot do anything about it, they just insult and harrass me — discrimination! And they know I cannot do much about it, because the only option I have is to file a harrassment suit against them, and that’s not only very expensive, but it means public exposure, which I’m not that keen to have.

Besides YouTube, however, I’ve also been a Blip.TV user from the very beginning. I loved Blip.TV for four reasons. First, back then when Blip.TV and YouTube were young, Blip.TV had far better quality. It also allowed videos to be longer than 10 minutes. You could automatically get some ad revenue from the videos. And finally, it exported them automatically to iTunes. When Google acquired YouTube, they gradually improved the quality of the videos, and currently Blip.TV is not so much better. Also, Google now allows larger videos. Getting ad revenue is a problem… in my case, it seems I cannot get rid of some alleged copyright infringements (I’m innocent but cannot prove my innocence easily — YouTube’s technical support takes a long time to review my claims and usually ignores them) and haven’t been accepted as a YouTube Partner yet. And I have yet to test the podcaster options on FeedBurner to get the videos uploaded to iTunes.

Blip.TV did all of that automatically for me, so I naturally used it: all my videos were simultaneously on Blip.TV, YouTube, and iTunes.

This week, however, I got a short message from Blip.TV. They simply stated that they were sorry, but terminated my account because I violated their Terms of Service.

Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I have dealt with Terms of Service for over a decade now. So I carefully reviewed it, and sent an email back, showing them, point by point, where none of the forbidden content applied to my videos. They don’t have a very long list, so this was easy to claim. I got a mail back after 24 hours saying that “my content was not appropriate” and showed me a paragraph explaining that Blip.TV is designed for “Web-based video series”. I carefully replied saying that all my videos have a theme, are split in episodes, and have a common layout and presentation, and are also regularly uploaded. So they are definitely within the concept of a “series”. They are all about myself and my hobby as a smoking fetishist. Sure, I watched many other series on Blip.TV, and saw that they were all produced by expert video professionals, while I’m a humble amateur, with very low-end production facilities and low-quality equipment. But the only reason for not being in strict conformity with Blip.TV’s guidelines was that my “series” was not professionally produced. On the other hand, Blip.TV doesn’t explicitly state that amateurs are not allowed. They imply it, but they don’t state it. After all, if you’re a professional video producer, why are you wasting time and money putting a series of costly-to-produce episodes on Blip.TV, where you will just earn a handful of dollars from advertising?

Still, the termination of my account has a side issue. I had been getting some revenue from ads placed on my content, and those, of course, are a share of what Blip.TV gets. By cancelling my account I’m unable to get my money. But all the money Blip.TV made from selling ads on my content is for them to keep. So, in a sense, I was victim of a fraud, too. Obviously we’re not talking millions or even thousands of dollars here; my videos on Blip.TV were barely watched. But it’s the principle that is at stake: after encouraging me to subscribe to their services, later on, for no apparent reason whatsoever, Blip.TV is allowed to terminate my account without reason and keep all the money. I get nothing. It’s not the amount of money that is at stake here, it’s the principle behind it.

So, of course, the “violation of the Terms of Service” was just a pretext. At some point in time, a transphobic employee of Blip.TV reviewed one of my videos, was disgusted by it, and terminated my account. That’s simple. He knows I’m not going to file a complaint on a court because I don’t want any public exposure.

It’s against this kind of thing that LGBT associations fight every day. The International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia is a reminder that while we have laws to protect our rights, transphobia still means harassment, abuse, and discrimination. While my case is certainly a peaceful one — I was not hurt, I didn’t lose my job, I’m not in the gutter struggling to get a hot meal — I nevertheless was deprived of a (very minor) source of income and refused to participate in a global community of video producers, amateurs or professionals, who lovingly serve a community of fans. All that because someone hates transgendered people.

We should not forget that discrimination comes in many forms, many of which are rather subtle and will continue to go on, no matter how strong the anti-discrimination laws are, and how well they’re enforced. Minorities like transgendered people, who have to fade into the background and avoid public exposure are particularly vulnerable to discrimination, because they are unwilling to “fight back”. We could, if we wish, but we don’t, because we don’t want to put all our lives at risk through public exposure. So it’s not just in the streets that transgendered people are being discriminated: it happens on the Internet as well.

Why?

You can simply say it’s simple discrimination: transgendered people aredifferent, and since they’re different, they’re always a target for discrimination. That’s obviously the simple explanation: you hardly need areason to discriminate others, since it’s purely irrational. Logic and reason will only tell you that every other human being is just like yourself, so its pointless to discriminate at all — but, alas, human beings are everything but logic and rational…

So I’m never much surprised at the insults and nasty comments. In fact, they are a good practice! The less I get affected by those, the happier I am I’m very fond of irony and sarcasm and usually reply like that — e.g. to “you fucking tranny!” I usually reply “actually, I only fuck women”

But a pattern has emerged. First and foremost, almost all people who write the insults are male, heterosexual, and usually young. Country or culture is normally not very important; all react in pretty much the same way, although some cultural influences will show in the degree of the insults (Anglo-Saxons tend to be much freer in expressing their views, since freedom of speech is something in their culture which is often above politeness A Japanese, for instance, would never dream to be so unpolite to strangers in public).

Women, for instance, might simply not comment at all. If they’re on a website to find a date (and so many are!) they might be intrigued and ask nice questions. Many find it hilarious, and women are so much better at making connections — they sometimes ask simple questions like “where did you get that dress?” or “how do you keep your hair in such a perfect shape?” (I have to explain that it’s a wig ). They’re aware I’m not a genetic girl, but they just find it amusing. Some — specially if they arevery beautiful — surprisingly might find a crossdresser (one that looks reasonably well) a “rival” and can be pretty much insulting too, although they’re far sharper in their insults.

Why a rival? Well, popular tradition still considers all crossdressers gay. So, in their minds, we’re competing for men. And unlike plain homosexuals, we’ve got different tools to compete, namely, the very same ones that beautiful genetic girls have: our looks, our dresses, our glamour, our personal style, our whole image.

While of course a lot of crossdressers wear women’s clothes because they are, in fact, attracted by men (specially the kind of men that like crossdressers, of course), that’s hardly universal among crossdressers. Surprisingly, it’s also a cultural thing. In my country, for instance, an absolute majority of crossdressers I know (online) tend to get attracted to men (and actively hunt for them!) while dressed; when they undress, they tend to get attracted to women. Outside my country I see the reverse happening: of course many are attracted to men, but the majority just like to crossdress, that’s all (like myself). I might tease with a guy just because that’s what’s expected by women — it’s just part of my feminine image! — but I have absolutely no interest in going to bed with them.

Genetic women seeing us a “rivals” don’t know that. So even if they are perfectly aware that we’re crossdressers, they treat us simply as rivals. Thus the naughty comments. However, I should say that this is quite rare. Most genetic women do not see us as rivals. They might find us funny and amusing, and not much more than that. Or simply ridiculous and not worth paying attention. A few, however, find us very interesting — online, I certainly can claim to have a lot of good, faithful, online genetic females as friends, who simply respect me and just find it intriguing that I like to crossdress, specially when I explain that I’m actually only interested in genetic women. I wouldn’t go so far as saying that this might be attractive to them (although of course in the BDSM world this is also a popular fetish!!), but definitely intriguing.

No, the majority of people who insult crossdressers are really just the (relatively) young males. The younger they are, the more insulting. At first, this might be surprising. If the popular culture says that all crossdressers are homosexuals (duh!), we wouldn’t be “rivals”, so there would be no point in being angry with us T-girls. Even if some guy is clever enough to understand that we’re not after other guys after all, they would dismiss it: most women like guys that look like guys — and we’d not be “competing” anyway. We would only be “competing” among the few genetic women that might find a crossdresser intriguing — which would obviously not be the right kind of women these guys are after.

So, why the hate?

Besides the simple, straightforward answer — we all hate what is different — there is a slightly more subtle one. Most people you’ll ever know in your life (specially online!) are, in fact, way more insecure than they appear. Crossdressers that “come out”, either online, but specially in public, arevery, very secure about themselves — they have to be, since it takes a lot of courage to be a crossdresser in public! So we might think that everybody else is pretty much like we are — they just have it easier.

That’s hardly true. Most people will never admit how insecure they actually are.

So what happens is this. Some guy comes across your picture, either on a webpage or on a public chat. As a crossdresser, you give out all those signals males are trained to catch: glamour, style, sexy. Or, well: slutty, available, easy. Whatever your personal style is, the point is that you’re emulating female “signals”, and guys are receptive to them. They might for a second get confused — thinking you are, in fact, a genetic woman.

A second is all it takes. Before the male brain starts to react rationally, its subconscious is already stimulating the pleasure areas. “Sexy” triggers “passion” — all it takes is a quarter of a second, while rational thinking might take longer. So suddenly this guy is, well, for a lack of a better word, getting horny. He visualises himself, even if just for a fraction of a second, having sex with you, because he captured your signals and is now responsive to them.

Then rational thought kicks in, much delayed after the emotional response. And it tells the guy: “Warning! That person is not a genetic girl! She just looks like one!”. If you have a low self-esteem and are still insecure about your own sexuality (which definitely is more frequent when you’re younger), this is a powerful override of the initial impulse. In fact, it’s so powerful, that the pleasure will all be channelled into hate instead. The guy has been deceived. He was anticipating some pleasure with someone he thought was a girl. Now that he saw the reality, that pleasure is gone — instantly. Immediately it is replacement by a suffering of loss — thanks to that ugly crossdresser, a moment of pleasure is rendered useless, and now this guy is furious at this loss. So the second reaction is to turn hornyness into nastyness — and become offensive and insulting.

But it goes even deeper. After this rush of primary emotions is over, rational thought goes even further. Now this guy analyses his initial feeling over and over again. And he’s troubled: how on Earth could have he fallen in for a guy? If their own sexuality is not on the safest grounds — say, having recently broken up, or being in general not very successful with women (because, well, they’re jerks and don’t know better) — they get confused. They ask themselves if they might not have a homosexual strain somewhere hidden in them. This they utterly reject. And it will just lead to more confusion. If they’re straight, how could they possibly have looked twice at a crossdresser? Many will now be angry at themselves — for “falling into deception” — but immediately channel all that hate towards the object of deception. Who knows, they might have made a nice comment in public chat (or to a friend who is watching the chat) like “hey, that girl looks great!”. What will his peers now think of him?

Humans react a lot depending on their peer pressure. Admitting (even if only to yourself!) that you actually found a crossdresser attractive, even if just for a second, is a way to feel “less male” for some reason. And that cannot be. So the reaction is to back-pedal as fast as possible, and publicly claim otherwise. Even if it’s only to themselves. But in truth it’s pushing out this simple message: “I’m a straight male, I have no doubts, I was deceived, crossdressers are the spawn of Satan because they can deceive us, but now I’ve seen the Truth, I’m bound by my male honour to warn everybody (who is male and straight) to stay away from that Evil Creature”.

In fact, what most don’t realise is that for a male, being attracted by the image of a pretty female, is anatural phenomenon if you’re straight. Guys get excited and masturbate in front of drawings and paintings of gorgeous-looking females; they get horny with 3D computer models of the female body. The fact that “it’s just an image” never crosses their minds. They find it perfectly normal (and of course it is!).

So long as either a) there is a real, genetic woman behind that image; or b) there is nobody behind that image (ie. it’s just art).

We crossdressers are actually just artists. We shape and paint our bodies to create the art of illusion of a female image. That female image, however, is fully “animated” by our mind: so it’s way more than just a cartoon or a drawing or a computer-generated movie. We talk, we move, we look just like women. And of course, we give out the “correct” signals for males to find that image appealing. So, guys finding us “interesting” is definitely something most heterosexual males should consider “normal”. Heterosexual males have their brains “wired in” to detect pleasing female faces and figures, and that’s all a crossdresser is trying to do: get a female image.

Now try to reason with a young male who is still on very shaky grounds on his own sexuality

Well, I try a different approach. Fighting hate with hate is never a solution. Although I prefer to reply with irony and sarcasm, I’m aware that this will fail to register with most people. No, a far easier solution is to ignore the idiot and continue a witty and clever conversation with whomever is willing to chat. What usually happens then is that the idiot starts looking silly; there will always be people around who are sure enough of themselves, have no problems or doubts with their own sexuality, and are more than fine in answering back — sometimes with jokes, sometimes with serious chat, often with curiosity. When that happens, the offensive moron will be isolated and making a sad, pathetical figure of himself — and he’ll stop (and often leave). I managed to do that on some chatrooms where I started by being kicked out for being a “tranny”, but after an hour or so, I slowly succeeded to turn from “Spawn of Satan” into just another ordinary person who is fun to chat with.

It naturally helps if you’re not actively seeking sex online, of course. Which is always my case; instead, I much prefer stimulating conversation, being in touch with fellow human beings. Sex, well, specially online, is totally overrated. If you’re really into porn, you’re far better off renting a movie done by pros