Generally
NSFW-ish.
A
great many years ago I was leaving college, and wondering, in bloke-ish
fashion, why nearly every hetero male fantasy has the woman in a skirt. Attractive
women are attractive in anything they wear – that’s why fashion models can pull
off nearly any absurdity on the runway, because, if you have the right genes,
it doesn’t matter what you wear: you’ll look good doing it.
My
analysis eventually confirmed that most of these male sexual fantasies are of
the ‘hit and run’ variety. Airline stewardesses, maids, nurses, secretaries –
these are ladies you aren’t supposed to be having sex with, or whom you only
have a very limited time, or a very high-risk location in which to do the deed.
Skirts offer easier access than sexy tight jeans and so it plays into the whole
quick and risky thing.
Even
in the common fantasies where speed/place/adultery isn’t a big part of the draw,
for example cheerleaders, the skirt still is an important part of the vision.
As Jackie Treehorn so eloquently stated:
And
with 85%
of males, in a 2014 study, fantasizing about having sex with someone who is
not their partner, that risqué aspect of on-the-fly, don’t-get-caught
naughtiness is important.
So
that’s what I wrote back then. I noted, finally, that different shades of this
basic concept are based on catering to different psychological fulfillments.
They represent archetypes of what guys want in their most intimate moments. Do
they want to be controlled, to submit their trust to someone else giving
directives and making decisions? Dominatrix. Do they want someone to take care
of them, soothe their fears, help relax their anxieties, and tell them
everything’s okay? Nurse. Do they want someone young and innocent, full of
energy and kind of simple who can look up to them (pun not intended, but it
works too well to leave out)? Cheerleader. Secretaries are submissive and
willing to take dic-tation. (I got a million of ‘em!) Stewardesses, like nurses
are to cater to your needs. Tennis instructors are young and peppy but they
control the balls on the court (here all week folks!), putting them more in the
domination side of the spectrum. College Humor did an amusing video, also in
2014, on the barista as sex-symbol (again, a service-based fantasy):
Millennials
consume a lot of porn – more than older generations, and usually on digital
devices (we don’t buy magazines, DVDs, and such, which
was one of my very first posts on here a decade ago). Of course porn is a
big part of the wish fulfillment we’ve been talking about. The fantasies are
played out in short online video clips which are easily “consumed”. Since so much of the fantasy is in the head of
the viewer they can fill in the gaps left out of a clip that’s only a few
minutes long. PornHub
(who else?) has some interesting stats on this (of a vaguely NSFW content,
of course – not in terms of imagery, but language). People in my age bracket spend about 9 minutes
watching porn per session. This is a far cry from the “golden age” of
pornography’s hour+ features, or even the 30+ minute story-based porn of the
VHS/DVD era. Last year Vice
did a piece on Millennial porn consumption that was well-cited. Basically we have less sex, and it is more
porn-like, which is pretty unfulfilling (ironically, perhaps, given that porn
is designed to fulfill fantasy, after all). We watch more porn, but it leaves
us miserable (which just may be this generation’s default, honestly) and seems
to mean we’re having less sex – real fulfillment seems ever more elusive.
* * *
This all
brings me to ASMR.
I was
introduced to the concept quite by accident. A co-worker back in 2015 mentioned
that she did reiki. I smiled and nodded, quickly checked for nearby exits – and
later that evening looked up “reiki roleplay” on YouTube so I could find out
what it was. (I knew it was some sort of spirit healing mystic energy BS but
had no specifics. Was it the same as ‘auras’? Was it somehow ‘psychic’? I was
curious.) I got results like these:
And this:
… and
this:
…and this…:
…and
on and on for about 200,000 results.
Obviously I was intrigued by this ‘ASMR’ since all the reiki people seemed to
whisper during their roleplays. But if today you type in “ASMR roleplay” on
YouTube you’ll get around a million results. Search for just “ASMR” and it
jumps to eight million videos.
I’m
not proud of what followed.
I don’t
experience ASMR – which adherents claim is a pleasant tingly sensation you get listening
to whispering and certain sounds (crinkling paper, latex gloves, spray bottles,
tapping on hard surfaces, and such). But the videos were hypnotic, and I ended up frequently watching them before bed.
There
is a clear trend in many of these, of “personal attention”, and really there’s
no way to describe it, so I picked three videos of this sort to include, to
give an idea of what these videos are all about. If you find them disturbing try to stick it out and watch for a couple of minutes:
As
the title of this blog post says: kinda creepy, and kinda sad. These three all have
millions of views. I’ll reiterate that I’m not proud: but in the evening I
inexplicably found attractive young ladies whispering into the camera and
pretending to stroke my face to be quite soothing. Whoduh thunkit.
Now,
I know I’m not alone in this, and a few other videos will make this clear, that
this trend ties in with the fantasies I mentioned previously regarding porn.
Take a look at these ASMR roleplays:
“ASMR
- MEDICAL EXAM - mouth to mouth resuscitation”
“Realistic Barber Role Play *Straight Razor
Shave and Mustache Styling* ASMR”
“ASMR FIRST CLASS Flight and SPA Service - Flight
Attendant Role Play”
“[ASMR] Gaming Store Roleplay”
I
think it’s safe to say most of these cater to male fantasies. I should note
though, that there are roleplay ASMR videos that are presumably targeted
towards women, for example:
“Beauty Brow Salon/ ASMR Trimming & Shaping
Your Eyebrows”
That
said – the number of hits on YouTube for ASMR “for men” or “men’s” is around 300,000;
whereas “for women” and “women’s” is only around is only half as many. A lot of these content creators, the ones who get millions of views, have
Patreon accounts and sponsors for products. By looking at the ASMR creators’ accounts
we can perhaps see that this is a largely male-oriented market. A typical video
produced by these young women, as a backer reward, is to read off the names of
their patrons, in ASMR:
(I embedded the videos above to underscore the visual point I was making regarding attractiveness, which is not needed for these, but still applies.) Note
the list of names is mostly male. Or try this one, from the gamer girl above:
Which,
by my count (thankfully she provides a list), has about 25 female names scattered as patrons throughout a *40
minute* video. Each name only takes a few seconds to say, so… yeah. The women account for about three minutes of the video, tops.
* * *
So,
by combining these two threads, the one of fantasy, Millennials, and porn, and
the second of male-directed ASMR fantasy roleplays, it leads us to a weird place. I
guess the question is, have we inadvertently, through ASMR, begun to create
emotional porn?
Unfunny
jokes have been around for ages, that, since women are emotional and men are clearly
little better than Neanderthals, that “porn” for women is a man who will
listen. Or cuddle. Or do the dishes. Ha ha – stale humor at its finest. These
are all examples, though, of displays of emotional intelligence. And with that I
wonder if male-oriented ASMR videos are doing the same sort of thing.
In
the world of online porn there is a huge business, like we saw with ASMR, of
patronage – young women with a video camera on their laptop who perform for
tips. Is the whispering of one’s name on
YouTube while lovingly gazing into the camera all that different? It’s an
emotional connection, instead of a sexual one, but as we saw – with many of
the roleplay videos they are the same archetypes as pornography. There’s ASMR
of school girls, yoga instructors, hotel clerks, masseuses, maids, police officers,
and on and on. And there’s a large contingent of cosplay crossover, so you can
get Harley Quinn or sexy aliens or some other fantasy female to whisper to you as well.
There
are only a handful of studies on this stuff – we don’t know how many people
actually get tingles when they watch these videos. But I feel confident, among
the 8,000,000 videos, many with millions of view apiece (apparently the
most-watched has been seen 18 million times) that they suggest, in concurrence with the plethora of
male-oriented content and male backers, that a lot of it is not so much for tingles but just to see pretty ladies
being virtually nice to men.
I’ve
been watching these videos for two years now, and they are proliferating ever more quickly, meaning attractiveness is increasing at an accelerating rate – with millions of views at
stake it’s no wonder. For a few hundred bucks in startup equipment, making a
few videos a month, you can earn a decent salary – if you become a top creator.
It may beat the alternative way for young women to make money from online
videos, though.
Which
is… sad. In a generation that already is so into porn, but for whom their sex
lives are increasingly unfulfilled, perhaps the trend over the past few years
of ASMR catching on is a way of filling the emotional void many people have
from their lack of meaningful relationships. Studies suggest that even people
who are having a normal amount of sex compared to previous generations still watch porn – the quantity of sexual
activity doesn’t seem to change folks’ porn-viewing habits much.
While
not a new idea (see Charlie Brooker or the film “Her”) we may be seeing the
first non-sci-fi version of this virtual connection. Instead of computers
trying to comfort us, we’ve opted for real young women – who stroke our faces
across an impossible screen. And if that isn't as or more tragic than substituting sex for pornography – I don't know what is.
