21st century cautionary tale - documentary about online sex and gender culture

[AmaryllisNightAndDay]

Warning: I found this equally educational, disturbing and distressing.

"F1NN5TER: The YouTuber Who Became a Porn Star" is a YouTube documentary.

It covers a five-year period and a lot of different platforms and characters. It starts in about 2019 with a popular online gamer who starts taking dares to dress up as a girl on a Minecraft channel (make-up applied by his girlfriend) and continues with viral videos, livestreams, wealthy creeps, dodgy channels, attention-seeking algorithms, foolish young people egging each other on, financial incentives large and small to do stupid things large and small, sugar daddies, cross-dressing, cross-sex hormones, facial surgery, BDSM, cissification, OnlyFans; and armies of fans cheering the shitshow on public social media channels while the creeps circle and encourage.

Then there's a 25K donation to National Centre for Trans Equality (US) and 50K to GenderGP. And increasing mental health problems and alcohol abuse. Documented and recorded and livestreamed - if not actively filmed then you see it in the chat. The story crosses mainstream media with a report in the Times (charmingly described as a UK newspaper dating back to the 1700s) about the GenderGP payment by F1nn5ter's "sugar daddy" in exchange for F1nn5ter doing as he was told in a deal made openly on social media.

The presenter himself stays neutral and balanced, is careful to make it clear this is just one story and not to over-generalise, shows the clips and tells the story. He shows a world where boundary pushing is paid in clicks and attention and then in cash. Where the boundaries between online and offline, between image and action, between joke and bribe and turn-on, are all blurred. Where the same person can be joker, victim and exploiter.

When the presenter says "These lines were slowly crossed" that about sums it up.

Fascinating and disturbing

I think the general public is often unaware of just how manipulative the people who like to 'crack eggs' can be. It also blows the 'always felt like a girl' narrative out of the water.

F1nn5ter is British and about the same age as my own DC which made the story that much more relatable.

It looked as if he always had some kind of attraction to cross-dressing and submission and especially to the attention it got him. And after his first girlfriend his partners seemed to be male but trans so confusingly they were also referred to as "she" so I guess he is same-sex attracted.

But the pressure he was under and the manipulation were also shocking. And all "in plain sight" yet under the radar.

There is a massive thread about him on the antipodean fruit farms if anyone wants to know more.

With some of these guys, the idea that they are same sex attraction can be a bit of a misunderstanding.

What can often be the case is they are attracted to the affirmation of their "femininity", or the transgression, etc.

The attraction isn't to a person of a particular sex, or even a body of a particular sex, but to an object playing a certain role for them. With AGP the object is their own body, imagined as a woman, and the role the other person plays is in affirming that fantasy.

The creation of other people as sex objects is pretty much par for the course in sex hobbyism. Which is supposedly ok now, personally I think it's actually very negative in terms of mental health for everyone involved. People sometimes mistake this as being gay or bisexual, but I think it's actually totally differernt.

That's a good point. I am not sure in this case as I don't know any more about F1nn5ter than the documentary says.

Being used as someone else's sex object is especially a danger for young feminine gay men. Ritchie Herron said something about being glad that he was online before people could share images and video as he attracted some similar attention.

Thank you, that's a really helpful post that puts words around something I also believe.

In many ways I think current "progressive" politics have their thinking about sexuality and sex backwards. Sexuality (by which I mean ones focuses for sexual arousal/sexual interest rather than ones base orientation) is far more fluid then is usually acknowledged, far more reasonably considered a spectrum, while sex is simply binary and fixed.

Before seeing this video I thought of organisations like "Gays Against Groomers" being mainly about "don't associate all of us with them". But after watching this documentary I'm seeing them as gay men trying to protect younger and more vulnerable gay men from exploitation. Like women's (feminist) anti-porn and anti-prostitution for the gay community.