With mainstream pornographers saying the only unclaimed adult businesses are niche Websites, "deviant" sexuality is red hot. Demand for such content is intense and insatiable. Since it's considered to be taboo, there's often even more closetedness among BDSM types than other sexual communities. Many people are afraid or unable to fulfill their fantasies in real life, and the ratio of practicing men to women in the fetish scene is 10 to one, according to some sources. All of this drives people online to find outlets for their desires.
"BDSM and fetish sites are at least 10 percent of the adult online market, and there are tens of thousands of these sites if you include all of the personal pages," says Jane Duvall, editor of a self-named online guide to adult Websites, (www.janesguide.com). "Even women are willing to pay for this kind of material. It's one of the last taboos that women aren't supposed to like. They feel uncomfortable admitting to it, especially if they're looking for male dominants, which is very politically incorrect. Any time someone feels uncomfortable admitting to a desire, the online world is going to be their only outlet."
But many entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on this dynamic may unwittingly shoot themselves in both feet: this type of alternative sexuality can be difficult for "vanilla" types to understand, even if they've researched the subject. "BDSM is exactly the opposite of what it looks like to the outsider," says Reed Lee, a Chicago-based First Amendment attorney (www.xxxlaw.net) whose clientele includes kink Websites. "When you look at the scene, more people are identifying with the slaves than with the masters. And often it's the dominant who's doing the duty," laboring to fulfill a submissive's fantasy. "These people are playing with power."
Fetishes by definition can be even harder for vanilla folk to understand, since these activities involve arousal from things that aren't direct genital stimulation. Some people can achieve orgasm just from indulging in their particular fetish, while for others it's foreplay; similarly, some kinksters can be very particular about what turns them on, while others appear to be generalists (this is true for BDSM as well). For instance, one foot fetishist could have a penchant for kissing and licking a woman's bare toes and nothing else; another might need to smell a woman's feet in order to ejaculate; while yet another could get an erection from anything having to do with feet.
"There's different levels of intensity in water sports," says Kevin Lawrence, who runs Piss.com out of his home near Vancouver, B.C. "Some people are just voyeuristic and want to watch girls pee - indoors, outdoors, in a pot, wherever. Some people talk about holding it in for as long as possible, and then [letting it] go. Then there are people who pee onto each other and drink it," he says, lamenting that Canadian law confines him to the voyeuristic stuff. "I've looked at everyone else's pee sites and find that nearly all of them buy all the generic pee video feeds. Anybody could start a Website and buy all of the content that the usual suspects sell. But most of that is a fake brick wall and some girl lying on a bed in front of it pretending she's in a dungeon."
Since so many of the existing sites don't do it right, there's plenty of opportunity for more genuine versions to move in, especially if they're very specialized and use original content, says Jerry Berg, owner and operator of www.bdsm-list.com and www.women-of-fetish.com in Las Vegas. He notes that there's a lot of demand for depictions of women fucking men up the ass with strap-on dildos, and that the sites that currently show that activity don't do a very good job of it.
Customers can provide excellent guidance for creating original material, says Berg. "With the anonymity of the Web, a person can send in emails about exactly what they want, and because it's anonymous he can ask for his unrequited desire that he couldn't express otherwise," he says.
BDSM aficionados say it's fairly easy to spot a site run by someone who doesn't get it. "You see things on fake sites that you never see in real life - like a dominant wearing a collar," says Kevin, a Seattle-area submissive who runs DungeonNet.com, which lists some 5,000 BDSM and fetish Websites. "I think there will always be a noticeable distinction between the perverts and the poseurs. The vast majority of people who have SM fantasies never get to act it out. These guys will never know that what's on a Website is something that can never happen because they have no point of reference in reality to compare it to."
Another submissive gripes, "The word 'fetish' is getting bastardized by being incorporated with mainstream porn."
"It shows when the photographer and models don't like what they're doing, because fake fetish pictures are much less erotic than real ones," says Stefan, who runs FetBot.com and Domina.ms out of his home in Los Angeles. The former is a listing of some 3,500 different fetish sites, and the latter is a site design and hosting service for professional dominatrices. His portal won't list the poseur sites, which tend to have things like "porn stars pretending to do fetish, pretending to be in bondage and pretending to dominate someone. They're just doing it for the money, and they're not really doing SM. But these are going to be the biggest challenge for authentic BDSM sites, because the big [mainstream] sites have lots of money."
But the competitive threat might not be so great, others say. "There are professionals who see there's money in fetish and go there. But the person at fault is the male or female viewer who can't discern what's real. And in a short period of time, the people making money as opportunists would get turned off," says Eric Kroll, a highly acclaimed photographer who publishes his works in print and on his own Website (www.erickroll.com). "I don't go just where the money is, I do what I enjoy. My site doesn't do as well as friends of mine who are more focused. I appreciate almost every fetish, whereas most people can only get turned on by a myopic thing. And if I were Erica Kroll, I'd make more money. Any site run by a woman will do better than a site run by a man."
Kroll says he's interested in his models' sexuality, and asks them about their preferences before he starts taking pictures. While he likes to push boundaries and depict scenarios that are edgy and full of taboos, he encourages his subjects to play as they wish on camera so he can capture images of them getting off for real. If anything, he tries to talk the model out of doing a shoot, to challenge her to be enthusiastic about what's about to happen.
"When people suggest a scenario, I may change it a bit but I'll be open to their idea," he says. "Some of the pictures might be staged, but they're not fake. I want the lighting to be right, and I want the sequencing to be right. But I'm not asking the models to go to places they wouldn't normally go. My background is in photojournalism, and that's how I approach fetish photography. I'm trying to take the most sexual but least glamorous pictures. People don't want to see fake boobs anymore."
In addition to depicting models really enjoying kink activities, Kroll's pictures document his own personal life and relationships. And he presents this in a very straightforward manner on his Website - since he disparages the fake sites' tendency to bury things under several layers of navigation, so that viewers have to do a lot of surfing before they can tell whether the images are real or not.
"There's quite a difference between the type of attention paid to fetish imagery done by an enthusiast versus someone who is just an entrepreneur. For instance, having a corset upside down and backwards on a model is pretty dumb," says Fetish Diva Midori, a former professional dominatrix turned kink writer and educator, whose self-named free site (www.fetishdiva.com) promotes her own work. "Most of the sites out there are garbage. I don't have a lot of time to waste on bad fantasy when I have good reality at my fingertips."
Midori concedes that it's harder for BDSM and fetish sites to find good models because of the low statistical availability of attractive female models who actually enjoy kink. But that's no excuse to substitute variety for authenticity. "I am stunned with how jaded the consuming audience is. Instead of enjoying the amazing journey of one woman, instead of depth and breadth of experience, they'd rather see repetitive lightweight SM on a bunch of different faces. I'd rather see one genuine player go through 100 different experiences than 100 different women doing the same three things," she says.
So Midori sticks to informational and community sites. She uses the Web to communicate with other kinksters, purchase tickets for upcoming events, and shop for fetishwear. She notes that she recently helped in the planning of BondCon NYC (www.bondconnyc.com), a bon-dage conference in New York that was entirely coordinated and promoted online - and she also made the requisite travel arrangements online.
Her surfing habits are quite common among other members of the community. In fact, some people say that leather bars and fetish clubs are suffering because more people are finding what they need online. "Now when someone joins the scene [i.e., the BDSM/fetish community], they're told right away to go online to find information on events, play and safety, organizations, and ways to connect with other people. If you're not on the Internet, you're at a huge disadvantage," says Race Bannon, the San Francisco-based Webmaster and owner of KinkAwareProfessionals.com, a free listing of "sex-positive-minded" psychotherapists, lawyers, doctors, computer programmers, masseuses, and other types of service providers. Ten new practitioners join the list in an average week, Bannon notes, while qualifying that his site doesn't include professional dominatrices since they already appear on many other online directories.
Others agree that the Web is impacting leather and fetish clubs. "People are staying home after the Sept. 11 [terrorist attacks] and going online more and more," says Irene Boss, a professional dominatrix in New York who owns DomBoss.com and 17 other kink domain names. "The Internet is good and bad, but it can give people a way to hide if they don't want to deal with other people face to face. Sometimes the Internet can create so much fantasy for someone that they never get to experience the real thing."
Boss's main site has been online since 1994, and she claims it was one of the first female domination sites. She notes that the bona fide lifestyle Websites tend to have more of a history online, although it's too much of a generalization to say that all of the newer sites are less genuine. Rather, the older sites have survived because of their integrity. Even so, it can be hard to tell how genuine a site is until it's too late: after a surfer has paid for a membership to enter the site.
But free sites are a lot less risky. One really helpful one is Frugal Domme.com, which tells surfers how they can make their own dungeon equipment for a fraction of what it would cost to buy from a store. The site also sells modestly priced BDSM toys, all made by the Webmistress, Lady Lilith, a professional dominatrix based in Pacifica, Calif. She also promotes her one-on-one sessions on LadyLilith.com, and acts as Webmistress for the Northern California Ladies' Tea and Discussion Society, a group of female supremacists who throw parties catered by male servants.
Lady Lilith observes that "most of the BDSM porn sites are done by opportunists, but a few are done by real scene people, and on those the girls have actual marks [from beatings]. The really, really pornographic sites aren't put together by scene people. On a real site, you don't see much vanilla sex mixed in, but if it's there, the SM outweighs it by a huge amount." Then again, even sites run by bona fide practitioners meet careful scrutiny from other members of the community, she says. "You get lots of criticism about the techniques you use."
But frugality is a sign of a fake site, says one West Coast professional dominatrix. "I can tell an enthusiast site from an entrepreneur by the quality of SM equipment they use and by the quality of the rope work," says Ilsa Strix, a pro-domme based in Los Angeles. "I know the models and can tell whether they're into it - I can see their energy."
Strix is one of many pros who've added subscription-based content to their Websites that were originally launched to solicit clientele for domination sessions. Strix was one of the first to do so, and has her own category on Yahoo! to prove it - she started her site back when the portal still gave out free business listings.
Strix's first Website, ProDomination. com, is an altruistic venture. She decided that all revenues from the pay site would go toward starting a legal defense fund for other dominatrices. So far, she's paid all of the attorney fees for two cases that won on acquittal, both of them pro dommes who'd been unfairly set up by the police. Since the site was first launched in 1996, she's gotten 150 women of her trade to participate in the site, which continues to be a charitable venture.
But Strix's other sites are very much for profit, bringing in at least as much money as her one-on-one sessions with clients. She owns BDSM-video.com, SmokingDreams.com, IlsaStrix.com, and MistressIlsa.com - the latter being a free promotional site that was originally built by one of her slaves as a tribute to her. IlsaStrix.com was her original professional domination free site, but has evolved into a paid, members' site.
In creating content for this site, "the challenge is how to present reality in all its facets," says Strix. "I like to do real SM, not the fantasy. I don't want to just pose with models - I'd rather do real bondage, real flogging, and really getting into a submissive's head. I pick models who have a real SM vibe. I really try to keep the idea of creating this as an art project in the foremost part of my mind. And I may lose people from the site because maybe they don't appreciate it. But I'd like it to be the real thing, not just models posing." This creates still other challenges, she continues. "How do you present your life and still have boundaries? How do you create work out of something pleasurable and not have the pleasurable thing become tedious? How do you make something that's very personal and yet make it very public?"
However, mainstream adult companies don't always make bad parents of perverted properties, especially when the firm studies the lifestyle, or hires a well-versed kinkster to run the alternative site. Others tend to buy content from wholesalers and run them on their BDSM or fetish channels. But these options appear to be fraught with shortcomings: the canned, syndicated content isn't as good as the more original stuff; there can be culture clashes between outside kink experts and inhouse management; and a company's research could inadvertently fall short: No matter how much they study the subject, a personal interest in it is hard to fake.
(Perhaps affirming the mediocrity of major mainstream adult companies that own fetish or BDSM properties is the fact that none of their executives returned any of our phone calls, while all of the "genuine perverts" replied with alacrity.)
The problem may be even bigger than that, however. "The community of fetish/BDSM enthusiasts who have contact with each other in real life seem to have largely written off the commercial adult Internet," says Russell B., who runs the Seattle-based information powerhouse, Sexuality.org. "In some cases, they may be fans of commercial sites run by people who share their fetish and who have truly exceptional photography and fiction, but to judge by Seattle that seems to be uncommon. Instead, they tend to favor non-commercial (and often local) discussion lists for their fetish, and Websites for whatever real-life organizations they participate in. The few exceptions occur when a Website gives something of substantial value back to the real-life community it serves."
Regardless of the type of site, it's clear that Web surfers crave substance and genuineness, not random photos of models who aren't enjoying themselves or pictorials lacking a narrative or informational context. It's a standard that continues to challenge all types of adult sites, not just the kinky ones.
Jackie Cohen is a freelance writer and fetishist based in San Francisco.
