i used to lay in bed with my girlfriend, whispering these sweet nothings into her ear, in a trance, ‘till she fell asleep.
until one day, the demonic opportunist in my head thought: a lot of girls might like to hear this.
yes, i thought a lot of girls might like to listen to the sound of my voice whispering oh baby i love you so much you’re so special, you mean the world to me, i don’t know what i’d do without you, please never let me go, and a thousand other cliches like that, which, despite how tired they are, still have this weird power.
a role play-type thing, like i’m her boyfriend, like she just came home from work, and she had a rough day and so i’m laying down with her on the couch softly letting her know that it is okay and that everything is going to be all right, that kind of stuff.
pure audio, of course. my face is hideous.
at first it was cringe, of course, everything at first is cringe, the content hadn’t found its audience yet. i posted a video every day for a couple weeks, or maybe months, until one of them was deemed worthy of Going Viral.
it was a comfort clip. something about protection and safety and how i’ve got you all to myself, i don’t remember the exact wording, it was so long ago, but i remember it was dark blue and sincere and in a day it had been viewed by 200,000 people. that is the most people i had ever reached so quickly, it was difficult to process.
before i knew it, 200k was a bad video. it satisfied me for some time, to know people were enjoying (or at the very least watching) something i made, even if it was basically soft core porn, it was validating.
but i could never bring myself to read any of the comments. it felt like cheating on my real girlfriend.
at the time, tiktok would automatically show the comments floating up from the bottom of the screen, so if I wanted to watch my own videos, i’d have to physically cover the comments with my hand. i couldn’t bear to look. because i knew they weren’t all positive. i knew some of them were: this is so creepy and weird, there are kids here, what the heck is this?
“there are kids here” is why i eventually stopped. it really was just soft core porn. i really was just pulling out an expensive mic and crawling into my closet and going into a deep trance to conjure all these words and emotions from myself so that i could create soft core porn for teenage girls on tiktok. that’s the raw truth of the situation when i soberly recount it so many years later. at the time, it was writing; it was art. it stopped being art when i started planning to monetize it.
my next step would be to start streaming it and accepting “donations,” mostly from adults probably but surely also from severely underage girls with access to their parents’ credit cards.
i imagined parents finding these dubious transactions on their bank statements and logging on to their daughters’ accounts, messaging me, promising to track me down and kill me. i remember thinking that in this situation i would have retorted: you gave your kid the internet, not me. this is a scary place and i’m sorry this happened. please don’t kill me, Fred, Bill, Stanley, etc.
the account is still up now. the videos are mostly still there, except the ones that were automatically flagged for sexual references or themes. the account still gets several messages a day and I open none of them— until i’m feeling especially pathetic or lonely.
This is either a really elaborate troll or the cringiest shit I’ve ever read 👀