Virgin

by Halcyon

I want to tell you about a gay experience I just had.

Um…perhaps that sentence is misleading.
There is no whisker burn in my recent history.
No manly muscles taut against my skin.
No maleflesh has breached my portals.

The experience wasn’t sexual.
Well, not really.

I’m helping redesign a gay website.
So, although not *physically* sexual, it is still somewhat of a gay experience.

Quite frankly, it was the most “intimate” interaction with gay porn I’ve had to date. I’ve learned that its one thing to walk by a neighbor’s open doorway and see a gay porn movie playing on the VCR inside…its an entirely different situation to spending hours blowing up and cropping hi-resolution images of erect phallus.

The reason I am doing this penile processing is because I have been hired to do so through my consulting firm. My “services” were needed because the site was created and maintained by a company who has no gay staff.

Luckily, I’m close enough.

Even with non-porn projects, there are a lot of intricacies to designing a web site for someone other than yourself. But it is very often a part of the art of web design. One of the first questions I ask any client is “Who is the target?”
You need to know who will be seeing this and what do you want to convey to them.
Perhaps the target is a banking customer who will want to find his balance fast.
Perhaps the target is a potential customer who wants to know if you carry that sweater in green.
Perhaps the target is a casual surfer looking for sports scores.

In this particular project, the target is horny gay men. And the objective is to give them an erection.

Well, that is over-simplifying it. The objective is to get enough blood to go to their dick that they think, “my masturbation will be far more enjoyable if I have access to the content in the members area of this site.” (Hopefully, the loss of blood flow to the brain will make them easy to sway.)

It seems simple, but the art of Membership-based porn sites is vastly more complicated than you would suspect.
For example, I often hear designers mocking the crappy designs of porn sites. But what the designer’s ego often forgets is that the goal of the design is not to impress the surfer with elegance or beauty….but to get that surfer to plunk down his credit card. (I could say “his or her credit card” but, c’mon…who are we kidding?)

Sometimes an ugly design is be far more effective than a beautiful one. Kinda like how a gap in between a strippers teeth can sometimes make her 10X sexier than the girl with 5K in orthodontia behind her flawless grill.

You see, people have a deep psychological connection with their porn. For some people, they *need* to feel like it’s dirty. And for those people, a beautiful, clean design robs the naked pictures of their prurient value.
On some level they “want* to feel like a dirty, raincoat-wearing perv.
Think about it: Why did Pee-Wee jerk off in a public theatre when he could so easily have watched the film in privacy and safety? Because our porn desires are tied deeply to our psyches.

What does this have to do with my gay website redesign? If crappy design sells, why bother re-doing it?

Good question and it leads us to one of the most interesting elements in the art of porn design. Which niches will react to which style of design? As a designer, should your “Teen” site (18+ of course) be pink and blue and use bubble letter sorority font and have flowers? Or should you evoke the bleek vibe of 19 year old Ingrid – big bussomed and desperate for rent money in Eastern Romania?

The answer is both. Different strokes for different folks. One of the reasons why you get so many pop-ups is because the porn affiliates who market sites are rolling the dice in hopes that they will throw up some image or phrase that will trigger your reptilian boner mechanism.

Maybe the girl reminds you of an ex. Or your mom. Or maybe the particular curve of that woman’s breast ignites something in your subconscious.

The internet has done many things. But nothing so effectively as defining hundreds of bizarre sexual niches, and exploring the infinite variations within each. Porn used to evoke the thought of Playboy magazine or “Deep Throat.” Now we know that a man’s porn tastes are as varied as snowflakes.

Since I am a man who has a number of these triggers deep inside (and has consumed more than my share of pornography), I feel somewhat comfortable working with these elements in designing porn sites.

But the challenge becomes interesting when the trigger is not understood.
I.e. one of my clients runs a site called, “Wetscape.” It is a site for people into urine. (aka golden showers, pissing, or water play) Now, what exactly is the kink? What triggers the arousal? Is it the flow of urine? The wet clothing being soiled? Is it being pissed on by a woman or seeing her being pissed on by someone else?

Maybe it is the similarities to that cloudy afternoon in 3rd grade when 6th grader Randy Jacobs hopped over the divider of the urinal next to mine and…. You get the point.

Of course it is all of these for different people. BUT, and here is where it gets difficult, what are the trigger images, elements within each of these scenarios? What about being pissed on makes it magic? The expression on her face? The position of her body? The pattern of wetness in the fabric?

The fact that it reminds of that day in

These things are hard to fake. It takes a true aficionado to know this. And this is where much porn falls short (and why I have been hired to re-do a gay site)

The situation is much like the corporate punkers that were popular in late 80’s movies.
In every bar or “underground” scene there would be the guys with the over exaggerated punker elements like a dangling earring, a cutoff jeans jacket, and an anarchy symbol painted on by a costume department staffer following a sketch. They were so obviously not outfits put together by an angst filled youth who wanted to burn down the world.

And anybody watching the movie who knew anything about angst filled punkers could see right through the poseur punker actors.

The same is true with faking a fetish. The true fetishists will see right through you.

I fear that the same may be true with faking a gay website.
Although, I don’t really think I am faking gay. I am simply trying to appeal to the gay aesthetic. An aesthetic that I appreciate and (with the right number of beers) can be turned on by.

But from a project success standpoint, I worry that my straight-ness only allows me to appreciate certain aspects of the gay aesthetic.

For example, I found that all the photos I was selecting to use were of smooth, muscular models. No twinks, no bears, no amateur. In fact most were pretty circuit boys that should be on a speaker at the white party. (If you know what those are, you can not check the “heterosexual” box with a clear conscience.)

Will this find its market within the gay porn surfers?

And, if I let the dilemma evolve into a personal mindfuck: Did I select those particular pics because they contain gay attributes that could appeal to a straight guy (hairless, pretty boys) OR am I merely highlighting MY OWN gay fetish?

*sigh*

Visiting a glory hole would be so much simpler.
***

gay redesign draft #1
gay redesign draft #2