Look at the below screengrab and tell me the first thing you notice:
āThat is a man showing off his tiny baby birds,ā is the response from exactly 100% of you, āI see the hatchlings on the lower right and this appears to be from a TikTok account called āFat Hen Farms.ā 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.ā
Not so fast. See, there is something curious occurring in the–let me double check here–nine thousand comments under that post:
Thatās right: though you totally failed to notice it, the viewers are almost entirely focused on the bulge in the farmerās 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, Jasonās controversial novel Iām 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. Theyāre placed on a floor or bed so they can adorably chirp and stumble fuzzily around their ownerās legs…
…followed by a comment section populated entirely by oblique references to the farmerās towering dong:
With many posts spamming, āaināt nobody looking at those damn turtles!ā 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, hereās 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 āunalivedā and āseggsā specifically to avoid filters that suppressed even mildly PG-13 content. But thatās 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. Letās pause here for a totally unrelated 1943 magazine ad for Cannon Towels:
āHold on,ā you ask, sensing that I am restraining myself from whipping out some kind of existential horror that will totally ruin the mood, āwhat 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?ā
Well, I didnāt talk to the guy because Iām not a journalist and also didnāt 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 itās one of the final pillars holding up the economy. āAellaā 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 Masterās 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 weāre here to talk about today.
Obviously, I am not judging any of these people. If their true passion is erotica, then theyāre engaging in literally the oldest form of performance art and the second thing humanity invented after clothes. If theyāre doing it purely for financial reasons, then Iām judging them even less. This system will grind you up and spit you out and if the only thing youāve got to wedge into the gears is a thick, beautiful pecker, then youād be a fool to let social convention hold you back. Modesty and restraint didnāt build this machine and it sure as hell wonāt 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 doesnāt release their data, no one knows the real number) and I think itās a mathematical certainty that many of them are not pursuing it as their true artistic passion. Also note that the vast majority donāt earn enough to pay for a single DoorDashed meal a month. Again: This is about the game, not the players. The only way youāre going to survive this system is to become the kind of thing the system wants. āNot me!ā you say. āI shall rebel!ā Thatās 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, letās calm ourselves with some subtle, tasteful bulge:
In fact, go ahead and stop reading now if you donāt 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, Iām not filming bulge content, yet, but to a private person thatās what the āput your big stupid face right into the cameraā 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 Iām 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 didnāt invite them to, the metaphorical leaked nudes. And Iām saying this knowing that, as an unremarkable 50 year-old dude, the audienceās ravenous desire to breach my walls is about 1% of what Iād be experiencing as, say, an attractive young woman.
Iām 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. Iām 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 Iām enraged, or terrified, or powerless. And again, this is coming from someone who has it easier than 99% of the creators out there. Sorry, letās again try to reset the mood with some soothing bulge action:
Earlier, I said the above bulge was the future and I meant it. Thatās because that bulge is, both literally and metaphorically, the one element of the creator economy that canāt 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 canāt give the audience the vulnerable flesh-and-blood human behind it, the āauthenticity.ā This means any artists who wish to continue getting paid will have to thus prove their humanity by letting those layers be peeled away. Youāve 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 youāre 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 canāt provide.
āThatās not true,ā youāre saying, āAI can absolutely generate nude babes and girthy hogs, Iām looking at hundreds of both right now! And have been for hours!ā No, youāre still not getting it: The thrill for the audience isnāt in seeing skin, itās in the violation, the crossing of boundaries, the sense of power and ownership. AI has no such boundaries to violate. And Iām desperately trying to keep things light here but the dark side of sex work isnāt 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 Westās wink-wink double-entendres. But part of his game is knowing that most viewers donāt know itās a game at all. They donāt know heās a porn guy; they enjoy the bulge because they think he doesnāt know theyāre looking, that theyāre seeing something he didnāt intend for them to see. They think this gives them the power in the relationship and heās 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 artistās 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 āauthenticityā 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.
Jasonās controversial novel Iām 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.