Some of the links in the blog are 18+

If DeviantART were a town, you would drive through it extremely quickly with your doors locked and your windows shut. And even then you’d have to stop just outside MySpace to scrape the sequins and foreskins from the bumper.

I was chatting to model Chrissie Red about the thoughtless and often very personal comments that can appear at the bottom of a photograph on sites like DeviantART, and the idea came up to do a bit of a rant about it.

I threw this out to some model friends, and got a really interesting perspective from some very different models, on what it’s like to be on the receiving end of those really thoughtless, not-so-constructive comments. Stuff like: “You look like a man,” or “She looks anorexic,” or even “What a slut!”

How does it feel to read that about yourself? Does it affect your self esteem? Should it bother you? Do you care?

Now, there are some really great artists on DeviantART. Then again, there are some really nice people that live in Moss Side.

Certain pockets of DeviantART are so strange and odd to those outside each individual sub-culture, that it wouldn’t surprise me if you could buy mouse mats of people inflating their own genitals with bellows. Or a mug with a picture of somebody dangling from their garage ceiling by their nipples, and if the urge took you, you could do unspeakable, adult things to it, take a photo of it on your telephone, post it on DeviantART, and some wobble-job would probably ask you what you ate the night before, to get it that particular consistency and colour.

If the scientists that invented the internet in that little laboratory at CERN all those years ago, knew that this was one of the many ways in which the Internet was going to be used, they would have briefly considered locking all the doors and burning the building down.

And you know what? All of that is absolutely cool. It’s not a danger to society, or a symptom of anything sinister. It’s just people being weird and having wanks about stuff. That’s what people do. They probably do it slightly more than they did before DeviantART was invented, but there are worse hobbies. Like Farmville. And there is worldwide poverty and large-scale climate change and stuff, and some dweeb slamming his wang in the refrigerator door and taking photos of it is neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things. Even the Devil doesn’t give a shit about stuff like that. He’s like ‘Well, it’s DeviantART. I just let them get on with it,’

Chrissie and many other models that appear on DeviantART do not go trolling on other people’s photographs to tell them how disgusting they think they are.

Chrissie does not, on seeing an extreme close-up of the end of a man’s penis with a face Photoshopped onto it, type ‘’That looks like the Annoying Orange off Youtube, after he’s been left in the bottom of the ‘fridge for six months. You massive nutter,”

WARNING: Some things cannot be unseen.

You looked didn’t you?  Well you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Or “Your wife’s suspenders are doing your wrinkly arse no favours mate. You look like a plucked turkey in a basque, and there isn’t enough eye-bleach in the world to put this right,”

She doesn’t do this because it’s rude and thoughtless and hurtful (and she probably has less time on her hands than people that read up on nailing their own genitals to tables). It’s very direct and it’s very public. But when she reads her own comments, and those of her friends, people have said things like:

“I wish I was there with some trimmers for that bush!”
“Nice image, but she looks like an anorexic on her deathbed,”
“Your model’s nipples look weird,”
“Your model needs to eat,”

Creepy pube comments aside, these are directed towards a model that looks like THIS:

And this:

Oh, and this:

She’s a very tall bird is Chrissie.  And she’s very slim.  But her BMI is 19, which is within the ‘normal’ and not unhealthy range, according to doctors.  She’s not anorexic, and doesn’t have the same body shape as somebody that is.  I’m no boob expert, but there is nothing wrong with Chrissie’s.  And she’s erm, quite happy with her natural, perfectly normal bush thank you very much.  No vajazzles or stripper waxes for Ms. Red.  So what goes through people’s minds when they write this kind of stuff?  If you’ve got any clue on this subject whatsoever, please feel free to comment at the bottom of the page.

Chrissie tells me that she expects this kind of bullshit from ‘old men being pricks’ but not so much from photographers. Particularly young female ones, who you might have expected to have more of a clue about what is and isn’t an appropriate comment to make about another woman’s body.

What’s really creepy is when some random guy (sometimes a ‘photographer, sometimes not) will make a sleazy comment about the model, and the original photographer will agree with him and have a conversation about it:

“Here’s Kate looking hot & bothered,”
“I wish she was hot & bothered with me! I’m jealous,”
“Yeah I’m a lucky guy!”
“I wish I had your job!”
“I do love my job!”

Erm guys, this is public. Don’t talk about your model as if you personally rubbed the baby oil into her ass crack. You sound like a virgin. Or as Chrissie would say:

“Shut the fuck up, you high-fiving fuckwits,”

There are a lot of people outside the modelling world that would say ‘Well, if you don’t like the comments, don’t appear on the Internet with your norks out,’

Well, whatever job you do, you will encounter bits of it that you might not like.  It’s OK to talk about it or read or write about it sometimes.  It doesn’t mean you’ve failed, or that you should quit.  Sometimes it’s just good to remember that it isn’t personal, and that everybody gets their share of thoughtless, nasty, throwaway comments.

http://www.chrissiered.com

http://www.purestorm.com/profile.aspx?id=Chrissie_Red

Photos by Rory Quinn