These things, these kinks, these flights of imagination, are the impassioned obsessions of real people, everyday people. At least one of your coworkers, at least one of your family members. And that’s not creepy, that’s wonderful. Every one of those weird kinks is a shout of human individuality in a world that wants to reduce us down to buying patterns and demographic trends. “I am alive!” they cry. “I am not an emerging new style, I am not a market segment, I am not co-optable, I am not coming soon to a theater near you, I am not approved for all audiences, I am not available in stores, I am damn sure not fun for the whole family and I never will be.”

Maybe you don’t find that life-affirming, but I sure do.

This is why people become makers of porn, participants rather than consumers. If literally all you want is women with too much makeup and hairspray joylessly fucking men with statistically-improbable megadongs in a universe where pubic hair was banished by dark magics in 2001, then “mainstream” porn has you covered and you can safely be a passive consumer. For the non-mainstream other 95% of us, we must look elsewhere. If what you really want is something made by people who understand your desires because they share them, you’re going to wander into a gift economy, and once there, you’re going to be a lot more popular if you contribute.

This is, I am not joking, an improvement on the previous 10,000 years of human history. Before, people lived their entire lives feeling they could never be understood, either suppressing their weird kinks or, in a few rare cases, becoming Irving Klaw or Robert Heinlein. Now we have 21st-century technology, which smiles and says “There are people who will understand, if you find them and make yourself understood. Here are the tools to do it.”

We use those tools to keep Community on the air, and we also use them to create animated GIFs of Jessica Rabbit with a huge dick. If either of those things strikes you as a strange use of time and technology, that’s okay: it’s not for you. And that’s the point.

Full article here, by Noah Brand.