To the creators of this community

Gorrister

About 70% of my artwork is fetishistic so I usually keep my stuff online and don’t tell many people IRL. I’m not embarrassed by it, I just don’t feel the need to explain myself to others if I don’t have to. The fetish shit is just a hobby I indulge in on my free time like any other interest. I don’t care if it’s considered taboo or whatever, the internet has always been full of porn. I specifically like drawing giant stuff since there is a dearth of it and it’s my favorite thing.

When I have actually shared with IRL friends and partners in the past, they mostly just think it’s funny and move on honestly. Sometimes they even admit to similar interests. When I was younger I was a lot more afraid of opening up about that stuff since I hardly understood it and I thought I was alone, but seeing others make content I liked helped me realize it’s really not a big deal.

Kondo

Thanks for all the insight! It’s interesting how some of you mentioned that it’s unlikely for people to find out about your size fantasy works. Considering how we live in an age where information spreads so quickly, I thought it’s probably easy to get caught if you don’t cover your tracks extremely well…

Still, there are some technicalities I need to figure out: I thought that maybe I should adapt a different artstyle for my SW content than my regular one. Or should I just go with what I know instead?

Jitensha

@kondo I think it would be hard for most people to put two and two together and realize you are the same person. Remember, they’d be having to visit both your public spaces AND your SW/kink spaces…which would make me think, maybe they’re into SW too. But the point is, I think the chances of someone knowing exactly who you are by looking at artwork is astronomically low.

Technically not an artist but I do keep what I film private from friends. I tell my partner I’ll be back in a few hours when I scamper away and shoot someone. It’s basically just become a job. Covid hit and it almost became my only work. I shot right up to lock down and right after it lifted here. Literally the day before had to explain to police what I was doing in a park with a camera under one of my guys. They were just checking that everyone knew hanging out wasn’t allowed the following day.

I’ve had to explain to my accountant when I’m doing my taxes, he knows it’s selling videos online, he doesn’t know what KIND of videos.

godqueen

While I make videos rather than drawings, over the years as things have grown (haha), I’ve had to figure out what to tell different people in different circumstances. With partners or potential partners, I am very straightforward about the fetish and making videos, mostly because I’ve always wanted to date people who like me for myself, rather than for who I am pretending to be (people also have different levels of jealousy, and I wanted to make sure a person was comfortable with me doing that before getting involved).

However, with friends and family I tend to be more vague unless I know that the person is kink-friendly and will not out me in ways that could be used against me. Usually I tell people that I either do “video editing” or “edit porn” or “edit fetish content” and I don’t elaborate unless people seem empathetic and genuinely interested rather than folks who seem like they just want to gaze at a spectacle of something that seems weird to them.

In terms of advice for not wanting to be associated with the fetish irl in regards to the other art you create in the same medium, I would probably just try to think of ways you can separate and safeguard your works (both in physical form and on the internet), and for your own safety planning, think about what would happen if xyz found out, so you have a plan for any unpredictable things that arise (this will also help you figure out things you might not be accounting for planning wise). For example, many years ago I had a family member open up a piece of mail (since I share a name with someone else in my family) for a payment from a fetish website that led to a rather awkward conversation lol, but at the end of the day, the world didn’t end either. I’m sure a lot of folks do this already, but even something as easy as using a separate internet browser for your fetish (that isn’t readily accessible on your computer) is a good safeguard.

Kisupure

I keep them very separate. There was a period a number of years ago when I thought I wanted to reconcile all my online lives, then realized that it would be a bigger logistical and mental nightmare than keeping them separate. Even if I did start getting “horny on main”, I would feel the pressure to self-censor some of my weirder, harsher, or more experimental stuff. Also the stuff that’s more personal to me - in other words, I’d feel like I’d have to be a “content creator” and all the baggage that goes with that rather than just an artist and writer expressing and exploring himself without shame.

In fact, it was the space created by keeping these worlds separate that led me to discovering that I was FTM and that I needed to transition. Not getting horny on main could very well have saved my life!

I do use different styles for different spheres of my life. For one thing, my mainstream work is very analog. I’m a conceptual painter who works on commission, as well. You can’t really get much further away from smut than that. My kinky art is all done digitally anyways, and I permit myself to be sketchy and lazy. I even have an entire brush pack that I basically reserve for smut now. It’s fun.

I don’t really talk about sex or sexuality very much with anyone IRL, though I’d like to change that in situations where it’s appropriate rather than feigning stoic disinterest. There’s a lot of reasons for it, but it was because most of the friends I’d made in public school wound up being ace, or just never dated or talked about dating. My family didn’t talk about sex very often either, and my parents were both pretty body-averse people that kept very hush hush. So I never learned how to be open about it, and combined with crippling dysphoria in my teen years that I also didn’t know how to talk about, even thinking about having sex as a woman made me feel disgusting!

That said, my partner knows and has zero problem with it, though we’ve never really acted anything out in bed. I used to have a few friends who knew, but they’re long gone. If someone asked me in plain english if I had a thing for giants or really tall men, I don’t think I’d lie. It’d be easy to turn it into something understandable. Something like “duh, the more man you can get the better!”

Olo

@kisupure Nothing drains a kink faster than having to be its ambassador.

Kisupure

@olo God, yes. I just want to play with my brain legos.