Round 3: #ThrowbackThursday
When you think about it, the real babes were the friends we made along the way
This post is by legendary Sean, whom I think of as a patron saint of crushblogging. He’s written an absolutely stunning essay - with his own original illustrations - and I can’t wait for you to read it.
Crushblogging hit us like a summer typhoon. Suddenly hot, moist, sultry; too intense to be entirely comfortable and then gone again leaving behind blue skies in its wake. We found joy and camaraderie in the heaviest PhotoBucket uploads and alarming abuse of caps lock, and then it all kind of faded into the miasma of having a full time job and having our attention spans melted by app developers. We were extremely young, now we are “youth-adjacent”. Our over emotional & hyperreal livejournaling transitioned into tumblogging then tweeting. Each has their charm, but what are we meant to do when we want a high quality rant, not only on hotties but on the terrifying effects they’ve had on those closest and dearest to us? The skies are once again heavy with the accent of a tropical depression. Hold on tight, it’s not our first time at the rodeo.
I want to start off telling you when I came out as gay, but I can’t because coming out is a lifelong experience. Kind of like the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disneyland, except they’re all singing about an extremely intimate aspect of your identity and the word “World” actually refers to your pool of prospective Tinder dates. There is, on the other hand, a tangible date for the time I awkwardly brought my inherent homosexuality up to my closest friend in Year 10 maths then immediately retracted it the next day, claiming I was just “kidding around”. There is certainly a date for the day I had to explain to my mother that she’d probably have to bark up other trees when it came to having biologically related grandchildren. But there’s no one day for me to compress this years long (and still continuing) muddled amble up and down the spectrum. You may pick up from my prose that I’m not massively intelligent and also not paying attention often; case in point is that it took someone asking me why I wanted to loudly and constantly remind them of my desire to make sweet sweet love to Morten Harket on a pool table for me to actually legitimately question my own preferences. It’s a process!! Anyway, in my muddling, I had a safe space to put out my objectively least attainable desires, and get base level positive reinforcement for my choices. I had crushblogging.
I joined Instagram in June 2014. There’s a date for you! People say it gives you low self esteem but I’ve managed to mitigate that by not following any celebrities or influencers. With the exception (maybe?) of this person who just posts all these pictures of cake all the time? Is that influencing? It’s influencing me to eat more cake. We have thirst follows and hunger follows too I guess? Wa-hey. The low-self-esteem-inducing aspect of Instagram, however, is also basically crushblogging boiled down to its purest form: it’s only pictures! And...it’s just hotties. It’s just all babes. You don’t even have to read the words if you don’t want to, let alone write any. Could be superficial, could be better that way.
Let’s jump back to rapidly dissipating youth: I no longer have time to offer you a critical analysis of my crush on Mos Def (this is not a funny joke - I once had a dream that we were leaders of a post-apocalyptic dystopian underground rebellion and have had a soft spot ever since but that’s a topic for another entry maybe) because now that I’m an adult I’m too busy trying to understand what investment is and getting diarrhoea from antibiotics. Is that relatable? What I’m trying to say is that at times of peak busyness, we can only fulfil the most baseline needs. Yet surprisingly, in some ways I’ve been able to keep this crushblogging jig up, albeit in a low maintenance way. Allow me to explain:
So first up, I lied when I said I don’t follow any celebrities, because there is one that I do follow. Paolo Roldan. He’s a Filipino-Canadian supermodel. He’s also a masc-for-masc masterwork. All of his stories are him talking in a bewitchingly deep voice about basketball and being super ripped - truth be told, I do not care about basketball or being super ripped, but it’s compelling because it’s him. Also he once designed a range of socks and underwear for the brand Bench and then modelled them and let me tell you, that was a Difficult Time to Deal With. He seems like a nice person but how can you tell on Instagram? Ultimately, it’s his perfect face that pulls you in. No line or feature is over exaggerated or messy. Everything is perfectly aligned and doing its job perfectly. He looks like one of those wiggly minimalist tattoos that all the cool kids have. Argh! Moving on;
Secondly, I have a very close friend who lives very far away, and also has an extremely unique communication style. One aspect of said communication style is his tendency to send me stories of another male model, Takuya Nakamura, on basically a daily basis. I would go as far to say that maybe 85% of the communication this friend sends my way is just pictures of unbelievably hot men with zero commentary deeper than an emoji or a pithy hashtag tacked on the end. Again, it’s hard to judge accurately from someone’s Instagram presence, but Nakamura seems like a little bit of a narcissist. Maybe even a lottle bit of a narcissist? If you think this post of his clearly visible dick is bad, wait til you get a load of the photo book that I guess isn’t porn but also most definitely IS porn that he did with Leslie Kee. I don’t have any links for that one, so Google at your own risk/pleasure! Back to my friend though: faced with a torrent of mostly fairly naked photos of literal underwear models, I was initially at a loss regarding how I should respond. I’m not sure if “fight fire with fire” was the appropriate route to take, but with the entire posting catalog of Paolo Roldan at my disposal, it was the one I took. And hence we have settled into a tidy rhythm of sharing the images of our respective models we deem best on a near daily basis. Not crushblogging, but something like the 2019 equivalent? “This is what I like,” we whisper without ever opening our mouths. “You can like it too, if you want.”
Ultimately, I’m not sure what the end goal of crushblogging as a concept is. All the long winded soliloquies are I suppose performative and inherently self centred, but there’s something deeper that kept us sweatily rapping at our keyboards in 2009 and that keeps me tapping the share button when I’m confronted with this deeply, deeply sexual slow motion video of a supermodel fingering a necklace while shirtless. And I think it’s related to that long, mixed up road I started walking down during that Year 10 maths class. I recently had the chance to see the new home of another close friend, and was confronted with a little dustbin tipped over and surrounded by used tissues when I walked into the ensuite of their room. “Sorry,” they ventured “it’s an OCD thing where if I drop one tissue on the floor I have to drop all of them”. Weird as it may sound, for me it was a standout moment of warmth and connection. I was diagnosed with OCD in 2016, and while the definition and experience of mental illness is a whole other can of worms that I won’t be cracking into this time, having a simple label to put on something that until that point I had to square away as “quirkiness” was a huge relief. And having the meaning of the tiny catastrophic tissue situation explained to me offered this little empathetic window that I could peek through and feel slightly, but noticeably, more at peace with myself. The horrific intimacy of one’s sexual identity runs along a similar (BUT DIFFERENT - seems I have dug myself into a hole equating sexuality and mental illness wa ha ha, oh no) vein.
Your desires themselves are in the spotlight. It’s unabashed, unashamed, raw infatuation blown up on a grand scale for all of us to enjoy. Love, in the purest sense, is directed toward beauty itself. Did I just reference Plato in a crushblog? I have definitely lost my knack for this. Anyway, while writing this I actually asked my friend what it was that he likes about Nakamura so much, to which he responded “I’m not sure that I do like him, but, model. He has an aura.” And here we are, sharing the auras. Safe within the confines of an ironically very public livejournal, a shared tumblr, the DMs of Instagram, and now here.
Could that be what this is all about? Have we created our own community and built bonds more intimate than we realised? Am I writing this like Carrie Bradshaw?
Maybe crushblogging has a deeper meaning than we all thought. Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe we’re all still just real horny.
Either way, it’s good to be back.