Look at the below screengrab and tell me the first thing you notice:
“That is a man showing off his tiny baby birds,” is the response from exactly 100% of you, “I see the hatchlings on the lower right and this appears to be from a TikTok account called ‘Fat Hen Farms.’ This is very wholesome and I thank you for showing it to me, Jason. I am constantly sickened by the crass depravity on this site and, just between the two of us, I think literally everyone here but you is an irredeemable piece of shit.”
Not so fast. See, there is something curious occurring in the–let me double check here–nine thousand comments under that post:
That’s right: though you totally failed to notice it, the viewers are almost entirely focused on the bulge in the farmer’s shorts, hinting at the kind of hog that would take home the blue ribbon at the county fair followed by a lifetime ban from competition. Take it in, friends, for what you are gazing upon is the future:
Before we go any further, Jason’s controversial novel I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is finally out in paperback, get it at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop or wherever you like to buy books.
This gentleman, who lovingly raises various birds on his small farm and writes children’s books about them, has ridden this glorious rocket to five million followers across multiple platforms, or about 20% of what he deserves. His TikTok is the big one where, every few days, he posts a new video of his most adorable birds, usually Button Quails. They’re placed on a floor or bed so they can adorably chirp and stumble fuzzily around their owner’s legs…
…followed by a comment section populated entirely by oblique references to the farmer’s towering dong:
With many posts spamming, “ain’t nobody looking at those damn turtles!” which has become a meme among his fans:
The owner of that farm and schlong is Bernard Henry, he is my personal hero and if you are worried that I am objectifying this poor man who just wants to raise his birds in peace, here’s his OnlyFans:
And now some of you are shocked because, as a platform, TikTok is so famously prudish that it gave us teen slang like “unalived” and “seggs” specifically to avoid filters that suppressed even mildly PG-13 content. But that’s part of what makes Mr. Henry such a hero, he is upholding a proud tradition of slipping a certain kind of art past the narrow-minded prudes. Let’s pause here for a totally unrelated 1943 magazine ad for Cannon Towels:
“Hold on,” you ask, sensing that I am restraining myself from whipping out some kind of existential horror that will totally ruin the mood, “what exactly is the business model here? Is this guy using his frankly alarming shaft to prop up his farm, which is more of a hobby? Or is he only doing porn out of desperation until he can get the quail business off the ground? Or is he a dedicated porn guy who, knowing how most platforms treat bulge content, started raising the baby birds purely as a fig trunk to disguise his true intentions?”
Well, I didn’t talk to the guy because I’m not a journalist and also didn’t want to make it weird (and I would have made it weird), but I can say that using porn to subsidize your true passion is now so common that it’s one of the final pillars holding up the economy. “Aella” is a writer and data scientist who lives off the millions she has made as a camgirl and escort. Zara Dar is an engineer with a Master’s Degree in Computer Science who gives lectures about neural networks on Pornhub. A guy named Sean Gatz grew a following doing home renovations, then added porn to his portfolio and immediately made Lamborghini money.
This is what we’re here to talk about today.
Obviously, I am not judging any of these people. If their true passion is erotica, then they’re engaging in literally the oldest form of performance art and the second thing humanity invented after clothes. If they’re doing it purely for financial reasons, then I’m judging them even less. This system will grind you up and spit you out and if the only thing you’ve got to wedge into the gears is a thick, beautiful pecker, then you’d be a fool to let social convention hold you back. Modesty and restraint didn’t build this machine and it sure as hell won’t save you from it.
But, also, I think this has to be in the top five most cyberpunk dystopia trends playing out right now, right behind parents having to explain to their children that their doll died because the AI company supplying its personality went out of business.
In Jack the Ripper-era England, 1 in 16 low income women were sex workers and nobody throws that number around as a sign that things were going great. It has been estimated that 1 in 50 American women under age 45 now have an OnlyFans creator account (OF doesn’t release their data, no one knows the real number) and I think it’s a mathematical certainty that many of them are not pursuing it as their true artistic passion. Also note that the vast majority don’t earn enough to pay for a single DoorDashed meal a month. Again: This is about the game, not the players. The only way you’re going to survive this system is to become the kind of thing the system wants. “Not me!” you say. “I shall rebel!” That’s perfect, the system loves rebellion most of all. Our most profitable film franchise is specifically about communist aliens overthrowing evil capitalists and you can take your whole family to the theme park for only a few thousand bucks. Sorry, I know things are getting too heavy, let’s calm ourselves with some subtle, tasteful bulge:
In fact, go ahead and stop reading now if you don’t want to see me get all worked up about the state of the industry and just want to spend the rest of your day daydreaming of fuzzy hatchlings and swaddled tubesteak. Tell yourself this was only an article about a social media farmer whose cash crop is bulge and let that delight you.
…
For the rest of you:
Any creator in this current media landscape can tell you how hungrily the world tries to peel you away in layers.
Not to make this beautiful bulge article all about me, but some of you know that I worked anonymously for the first several years of my writing career beginning in the late 1990s (working under the pseudonym David Wong), then reluctantly let them put my real face in an author photo, then even more reluctantly let my voice be heard on the Cracked podcast (which definitely took some convincing). A decade or so after that, I let myself be talked into trying my hand at video and today have about 1.5 million followers across TikTok, FB, Instagram, YT and several others. Not one in 10,000 of my viewers know I have ever written a single word of text. I literally have the exact same job as The Rizzler.
Sure, I’m not filming bulge content, yet, but to a private person that’s what the “put your big stupid face right into the camera” era feels like, discarding one layer of privacy at a time in the name of keeping butts in the seats. The first layer is the end product of your work, the next is your personal identity and the next is the private, vulnerable truth behind that identity:
The audience always wants more, to keep peeling away. The tougher the rind, the more desperately they want to wedge a fingernail under it. Strangers look up my address, they want to know if I’m married, or have kids, or if my physique is natty. The more guarded the boundaries, the more they (wrongly) assume there must be something fascinating just on the other side. They want to force themselves to whatever level of intimacy is the one I didn’t invite them to, the metaphorical leaked nudes. And I’m saying this knowing that, as an unremarkable 50 year-old dude, the audience’s ravenous desire to breach my walls is about 1% of what I’d be experiencing as, say, an attractive young woman.
I’m not trying to make my fans all sound like obsessive stalkers, I know some of it is just natural human curiosity and some just (incorrectly) think my personality will be more interesting than my work. I’m the same way; I follow celebrity gossip and dig for dirt about messy breakups just like everybody else, only my obsession revolves around old cable shows where elderly men hunt cryptids.
But, not to be overdramatic, there is a certain tiny percentage of the audience that wants to kill me and eat my corpse. At least metaphorically; I see them sniffing around for any hint of controversy, digging for old offensive jokes or disgruntled former acquaintances. I get their weird messages full of shrieking insults and inscrutable demands, doing everything they can to get some kind of a reaction. All of it is just an attempt to peel away what they see as the final layer, to get me to lose control and show a side of myself I hide from even my loved ones, to see what I look like when I’m enraged, or terrified, or powerless. And again, this is coming from someone who has it easier than 99% of the creators out there. Sorry, let’s again try to reset the mood with some soothing bulge action:
Earlier, I said the above bulge was the future and I meant it. That’s because that bulge is, both literally and metaphorically, the one element of the creator economy that can’t be stolen by AI.
The robots can spit out competent books and paintings in seconds but they can only reproduce those first couple of surface layers, they can’t give the audience the vulnerable flesh-and-blood human behind it, the “authenticity.” This means any artists who wish to continue getting paid will have to thus prove their humanity by letting those layers be peeled away. You’ve already seen how painters who used to just post pics of their work to Instagram now upload videos of themselves doing the painting, and how the algorithm only boosts the artists who look hot while doing it. If you’re an attractive woman today making literally anything from cosplay to cupcakes, your inboxes will fill with creeps asking for your OnlyFans, rooting around for the bonus material the machines can’t provide.
“That’s not true,” you’re saying, “AI can absolutely generate nude babes and girthy hogs, I’m looking at hundreds of both right now! And have been for hours!” No, you’re still not getting it: The thrill for the audience isn’t in seeing skin, it’s in the violation, the crossing of boundaries, the sense of power and ownership. AI has no such boundaries to violate. And I’m desperately trying to keep things light here but the dark side of sex work isn’t just the fact that a certain percentage of sex workers are doing it out of desperation, but that many of their customers get off on knowing that. When the creeps message creators asking for their OF, an angry response is just as good as the nudes. They still managed to peel off a layer.
And that, dear reader, is the genius of Bernard Henry. Yes, his carefully-chosen shorts are, for many, performing the same function as Mae West’s wink-wink double-entendres. But part of his game is knowing that most viewers don’t know it’s a game at all. They don’t know he’s a porn guy; they enjoy the bulge because they think he doesn’t know they’re looking, that they’re seeing something he didn’t intend for them to see. They think this gives them the power in the relationship and he’s happy to let them think that. And, hey, a little bulge-gazing never hurt anyone.
But not everyone can play the game so deftly. If you know my work, you know where this ends: Once the audience expects the inner layers of the artist’s humanity to become part of the content, then those inner layers must be reshaped and repackaged accordingly. Instead of a person who makes content, you go about turning yourself into content, optimized to the core. Eventually, even your inner thoughts are just processed feed for the algorithm, the equivalent of that YouTube thumbnail face:
And at that point, the “authenticity” itself will be so algorithmic that the machines will finally be able to replicate it and we humans will finally be free to turn off our screens, go outside, and touch bulge.
Jason’s controversial novel I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is finally out in paperback, get it at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop or wherever you like to buy books.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Eric Christian Berg, who was gracious enough to allow us to document his tiktok videos for this article.
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