Taste that? That's that fake sugar.
what you want to be real isn't always, but then what is it?
In this month’s horoscope, I wrote a lot about Mercury and Mars and very little (nothing?) about Pluto’s movement back into Capricorn. I don’t have a ton to say about that specifically, but I did think it could be useful to give a little overview of how I think about transits with the farthest away planets, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto (I also loosely consider this with some of the asteroids like Chiron and Ceres, but that’s less a practice of mine).
I generally don’t think about the outer planets influencing my life personally unless they’re conjunct, square, or opposite one of the angular points (ascendant, descendent, MC, IC) or an inner natal planet. Otherwise I think about them societally.
When they are talking to one of those places, I’m really only looking at exact, exact connections. Within the zero degree orb as the peak with maybe a degree on either side understood as the buildup and release of whatever impact there is.
I don’t get specific in interpretation. Pluto = transformation. Uranus = change. Neptune = dreamy. I might get wordier in my journaling because I’m wordy, but I hold that stuff really loosely. These are diffuse energies usually and, when they’re not, it’s not probably something you could have planned for anyway.
I don’t do astro-anxiety because I’m anxious enough and pay good money for medication that helps right-size that stuff. Not going to let outer planet transits upset that balance!
Giving you a heads up that this week’s newsletter is a little light on the astrology. I sneak a little in at the end, but most of this is some wandering around musing about why I feel specifically different about certain unobtainable male images from other unobtainable male images.
Let’s talk about how Instagram is h*rny but not sexy.
“Turning to the aesthetic in the case of queerness is nothing like an escape from the social realm, insofar as queer aesthetics map future social relations.” - José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
I mentioned last week that a major motivator for this sequence of pieces about Venus things run amok on the Gay Internet was this specific kind of Instagram account that has slowly infiltrated nearly every corner of the application. Obviously, this is influenced specifically by how Instagram presents the world to me based on my actions and how they influence its algorithm. So maybe I’m just telling on myself and revealing that Instagram thinks I specifically am a thirsty gay hominid who will reliably give eyeball time to pictures and videos of conventionally attractive men doing erotica-adjacent things. Maybe the rest of you will be like, “No, Fred, my Instagram feed features my family, friends, and inspirational media that propels me to being my best self. You’re weird.” Honestly, I’d love it, roast me.
There is a spectrum of form with these Instagram accounts, with some that are more overtly pornographic, playing out specific fantasies like the coach/athlete dynamic or doctor/patient. The posts come consistently, less concerned with an aesthetic and more interested in an erotic or fantastical presentation. A churn and burn approach, their audiences prefer quantity over quite the level quality. But these accounts still serve an important role in the ecosystem that produces the most finely-tuned aesthetic/erotic it boy accounts.1 They work as feeders for those more curated accounts, accounts like the ones in the gallery below. Their branding and their content strategy are more refined. These accounts might only show an almost naked man every few posts which translates to once every couple of days or even weeks. The interstitial posts might be made up of color blocks, oil paintings, skylines, roadsigns, office material, clothing, animals, women, Girls™, or a grainy security camera photo of a European smoking a cigarette. These accounts are supposed to be for something more than just getting you off.
I can’t say with any kind of confidence whether these are more common or have more reach than they did a few years ago. I first became aware of this format of curated aspirational, erotic content (let’s call it… eroticontent) on Instagram around 2020 and I’d say, anecdotally, that the gay men I know personally now have personal Instagram feeds that look much more like these in 2024 than they did in 2020. There’s at least some kind of reinforcement via feedback loop happening here. These accounts are informed by what gay micro-influencers are posting and vice versa, but if they’re mutually constructing these aesthetics then they’re mutually responsible for embracing the lean toward a consistent, erotic, and narrow aesthetic.
I’m having a hard time simplifying my impulse to parse this phenomenon into a single question. Because if the question is like: “Why do gay people post horny on main?” the answer is easy to give. If it’s “Is this good?” the answer is less easy but is less interesting. “How is this different from porn?” is closer to it, I think, but probably the more personally motivating question is something like, “How is this different from porn and why does it feel worse?”
José Esteban Muñoz says in Cruising Utopia that queer art has historically been infused with a sense of “astonishment” similar to the astonishment described in Ernst Bloch’s writing on utopia (Bloch is a frequent reference point through the book). He suggests that this astonishment is in service of imagining utopia. Muñoz goes on to use Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol among others to demonstrate this tendency toward specifically feeling delighted and excited and giddy. We see this in drag queens and our love of camp and the familiar unseriousness of so much gay creative work. Muñoz says, “Astonishment helps one surpass the limitations of an alienating presentness and allows one to see a different time and place.” The transformation of mundane things (a Coca Cola in O’Hara’s case and Campbell’s soup in Warhol’s) into fantastic things is astonishing and it gives hope of transformation.
The part of me protective of anything gay wants to make an argument that casts these horny photos on Instagram somehow in the same vein as this “pop art”. And there’s some use in this argument, beyond its deployment against sex-shamey, anti-porn eyebrow raisers. Obviously scrolling these feeds is exciting, in all the ways you’d expect. And they do bring together the mundane and the fantastical—here’s a photo of a pretty yellow kitchen and here’s a photo of two men sniffing each other’s feet. Scroll all you want and you’re not going to run into the gay basher you always fear. There’s a beautiful gay world in this little shining rectangle, curated all for you. The pleasure of a gay curated space.
Something else I can optimistically give credit to eroticontent accounts for is their audacity. On the one hand it’s not so audacious in the scheme of what you can put online, but the men in these photos, the people who “like” them or leave comments, those who re-share them, they all risk recognition, risk being seen as something universally held as evil: a gay slut. Putting aside the enmeshed issue of photos being shared around, reposted via curation without explicit acknowledgment and consent of the subject/photographer, when you see an erotic photo of a pretty normal looking guy on Instagram, it offers the thrill of getting away with something.
This thrill reminds me of how sex worker Aella describes some of the more extreme sexual adventures she organizes. She says it’s “like I’m calling some gigantic existential bluff, or something. If I can do this safely and happily in the face of so much societal chiding, what else can I safely and happily do?” If you can wear a jockstrap and a leather skirt and heels and makeup on Instagram, what else can you safely and happily do?
On the other hand, I am rarely more self-conscious than I am after I’ve scrolled through some eroticontent. Not just about my body, though that is central. I’m also aware that my clothes aren’t quite presenting what I’d like them to be, I’m worse at posing for photos than seemingly every gay man who’s ever been to Fire Island, and I’m bald but not the good kind.2 Aspirational content will always leave you most aware of what you don’t have, obviously, it’s in the name.
Still, my goal is not to advocate anything with regard to eroticontent. My brother likes to remind me of when Marx said something like “the job of philosophy has historically been to describe the world, our philosophy will change the world”. This is excellent rhetoric and a great goal and, I think, gets at something that should be all of our goals which is to take our principles and understanding of “the good life” and do our best to make that real. And yet, I love describing. I think the obvious caveat is that almost never is something just descriptive or just catalytic, but that’s also a boring caveat. My goal really is first to describe. When I want to influence I enter a different mode. At the very least I aim to keep these projects on different parts of the plate, not touching until they meet in the stomach where they have help from the appropriate juices.
So what’s different between eroticontent and porn and why does it feel worse? It’s basically that aspirational piece. Porn is mostly not aspirational, aside from the occasional body jealousy, but because porn is packaged as a fantasy I don’t think it’s as endemic of a problem. Eroticontent, on the other hand, though also built on the foundation of the erotic male body, makes you want to buy certain clothing, certain decor, and make certain faces in certain photographs. It influences your understanding of what is appealing. It’s not just a source of pleasure, it is advertising. These accounts are advertising, even when they’re not. I’m a little embarrassed that it took me as long to get at that as it did.
Eroticontent accounts live on the same feed as the ceramic bong small business and my sister’s friend’s babyshower and the Gazan genocide. So what they share feels real. It feels of the same world as these other things, reachable in a way that more traditional pornographic images aren’t. And, with that access, I think that these accounts do reach into our collective gay brain and tweak what they can. I think many of us invite it in, slurping up the advertising messages along with the dopamine, desperate for anything that will make life just a little bit nicer.
So, now toward the end, I shove a little astrology into the mix. As we’ve seen Venus moving out of Virgo and into Libra, we consider the mirror and what it shows. Venus holds the mirror up, but we walk in front of it. While we think we’re looking at ourselves we might be looking at some projection, some image that we want to see there or are afraid that we see there.
That influencer content and porn are such natural bedfellows is its own interesting consideration, one that I think we need to keep clearly in focus if we want to avoid some significant pitfalls. How often have you heard someone say that mimicking porn made them better at sex? How often, when someone first begins to explore their sexuality and share it with another person, do they have to unlearn a lot of ideas that porn taught them? Again, this isn’t to say that porn is bad, but it’s not an equivalent for what it purports to represent. The same, I think, is true of this aspirational eroticontent. It might look like a good life, but it’s made of slightly different stuff. You can’t actually hold your body in that position for very long. The material of the aspirational life doesn’t feel as good when exposed to reality’s limitations.
It feels like it should be such an easy thing. Just copy the style, taste, and aesthetics of the beautiful people and it will feel good. But it doesn’t.
I’m not at all settled on this topic, but I’m reaching a stopping point and need to hit send before long. Next week I want to zoom out a bit and do some more mundane astrology work on the sexual revolution, images, and what the stories in the sky have been when big changes in our culture have taken place. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
Meaning “taste maker accounts” not just the actual account @ItBoyTrends though that one counts too.
For the record, I look great bald and believe that 95% of the time. It’s mostly only after I’ve scrolled past a photo of John Kennedy Jr. for the tenth time that I start to question, and who can blame me for that.
rly like this one!
god it’s almost stressful to read !! but ty for sharing, I’ve felt this all before.