It seems like it should be unnecessary to point out that models are human beings, but a lot of people seem to have difficulty with this. Nobody is as beautiful as their best photo or as hideous as their worst. Ugly may go to the bone, but beauty is still only skin deep. All true.

The nature of digital interaction makes the relationship of humans with their images more difficult. Once upon a time, my unsavory pals and I could hang out at our punk rock group house and, if someone said a model in some of the trannie porn in our living was not feminine enough, nobody’s feelings were going to get hurt.

Today, a lot of people seem to be polarized in their responses to imagery, in particular in their responses to sexual imagery. On the one hand, there are people who callously and casually critique a model’s weight or body parts in public, even though the human being in those photos is going to see those comments. On the other hand, there are people who, on some deep lizard brain level, feel that, if they have seen someone’s hoo-ha, even someone who was paid to show it to them, that person is practically their mate.

It does not make you respectful and/or feminist, if you pathetically slavishly agree with everything someone ever says or posts because you have seen naked pictures or video of them, especially members of your gender of preference.

It does not make you intelligent/ and/or nonconformist, if you aggressively criticize all erotic media and the people who appear in it, especially members of your own gender.

Someone can appear in updates on your favorite website or the boxcover of your favorite DVD or the cover of your favorite magazine. You can appreciate their work and that is awesome. But they probably are not rich for life off of the work you enjoyed (or didn’t). The world has enough pain in it. Don’t be cruel to someone who was generous enough to share their naked selves with you. Just don’t be a lapdog either. You know that whole rather walk beside me and be my friend thing? Treat models like human beings.

In the internet age, most of us become somewhat reduced to our avatars and how we come across when typing. Nonetheless, models are still human beings and no more or less human, no more or less right, no more of less deserving, for having had more pictures taken of them than the average person.

A lot of models are afraid to go interact in public because people online can be so critical and most models know they are not as beautiful as the best photos where they were lit well, made up just right, dressed in clothing they may not own, shot with good composition, and post processed to perfection. In real life, people tend not to say the sort of rude things they write when in keyboard warrior mode. But, after seeing one’s best efforts nit-picked to death online, not just models, but most creative people find it more difficult to interact IRL.

Photos of models or real world parties or whatever are posted here from time to time. If you have something nice to say about them, by all means do. If you don’t have something nice to say, please don’t fake it, but don’t go out of your way to be a dehumanizing cruel jerk either.

The thing I love best about photography is the way it can capture and preserve a moment.

Most of my ephemeral moments have gone unrecorded. When I got to college, it was my twelfth school in twelve years. Moving that often gave me many qualities I like about myself, but it also meant that there were so many people, so many communities, so many adventures, and so many times in my life which evaporated with nothing to show they ever took place. Just my memories with no one to share them with. People who do not move can at least have conversations about “remember when . . .” but my friends and compatriots were scattered across dozens of countries.

I always loved when people showed me their photo albums and yearbooks and explained the most important images. Oscar Wilde once famously said, “After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, which is the most horrible thing in the world.” Oscar was speaking of absinthe, but pictures are a lot like the green fairy that way. Sometimes a flattering photograph represents a loathsome situation and sometimes a hideous photograph is a reminder of something wonderful.

I reminded myself of what is most important about a photograph, while going over the scans for the two most recent photo galleries by Forrest Black and yours truly. These galleries are bittersweet. While I was going over the final edit to put the pictures in the BlueBlood.net system, one of the people pictured instant messaged me to tell me she had just had a nasty break-up with the guy, also pictured, who she was with on this particular Halloween night at Bar Sinister. Two of the girls Forrest Black and I shot that night became mortal enemies shortly thereafter. Over a guy, of course. There are pictures of people from multiple bands which should have broken bigger than they did in there. Heck, there are pictures in there of someone I used to really like who eventually was nearly singlehandedly the main reason Forrest Black and I all but totally quit rock journalism and photography. Occasionally shooting musical friends and high dollar jobs, Forrest Black and I probably still shoot more rock work than most of the knobs wandering around Los Angeles claiming to be rock photogs, but we used to do so much more and feel so differently about it. These two galleries also feature a girl I thought could be a great mainstream model, but she never followed up the contacts I gave her. There’s the promoter, who was one of the first people we ever covered in Blue Blood in print, who just closed his most recent venture. The list goes on. It was a fabulous night, even though we broke the camera we were shooting with. This happens more often than I’d like in a nightclub setting. I’m not even sure where all the pictures from that shoot are because the ones we shot on a second camera seem to be MIA.

Regardless, there are so many people here I have felt such fondness for. Dreams and relationships may wither or shatter, but our photographs preserve one hot moment.

There is even one person in our photographs here who is dead now. He was a nice person, talented and fun, and he passed away far far too early. Some of Forrest Black’s and my photography was used in his memorial service, but he never got to see these pictures. There are many things I feel there will always be time for, but sometimes the clock stops. Rest in peace, J.D. I guess there was a reason you had to wear a shirt which reads, “Die young; stay pretty”?

So, as many of you gentle readers probably know, in addition to running general entertainment sites and multigirl membership sites such as BlueBlood.com, I also run a number of membership sites for individual superstar Blue Blood hotties. At the moment, we are just about to launch a new one. The design has been pretty good to go for some time. Forrest Black did an absolutely killer job on it and the hottie who the site is for is awesome sexy fun and I’m dying to unveil the site. But we are having some trouble with the banking people, although I am a professional so I’m going to do what is needed to make the site go live, I am having some feminist issues with it.

Essentially, in order to be able to accept credit card or check or phone payments online, a financial institution of some sort needs to facilitate the charges going through correctly for the correct product. There are a lot of different methodologies for this and different companies have wildly different policies, but the salient point for what I want to talk about is that the banking people can ask a site to make changes before the site will be able to accept credit cards and such. I have no problem with this in general. Obviously, it is good if there are people paying attention to make sure that it is difficult for criminals to make money from doing terrible things to women, children, animals, even men. But the banking people refuse to process credit cards etc. for a lot of perfectly legal and perfectly ethical and decent content as well, including even some things which could run on prime time network television without outcry. The rules are sort of specialized and idiosyncratic.

I do kind of have a problem with the cultural bias some of the banking people seem to apply. It may not be their fault, in that Visa or MasterCard or whoever really might have a problem with some of the types of content the banking folks fret about. The billers are supposed to essentially function as a liaison between a company like Blue Blood and a company like Visa. Visa, for example, does not deal directly with the people who accept their cards. So it is the billers’ job to fret about what will freak out the credit card and check and phone people and I do kinda pay them to do so. Nonetheless, it sometimes bothers me which things do and do not get approved.

In the case of Blue Blood sites, the main things the billing people have asked us to censor over the years are the actual real fantasies of women we shoot. Second place is actual real stories women we have shot have shared about their personal sexual adventures. Part of the problem getting billing approval for our newest solo girl site is that, to me, one of the really exciting things about this particular woman is that she is all about exploring her sexuality and pushing both her own boundaries and other people’s boundaries. It is kind of difficult to communicate this exhuberance in a censored interview. I am also just really troubled by trimming down a person’s answer to questions about what turns them on or what they’ve actually personally done. Most recently, the billers held up the approval process on this newest solo girl site for the third time because they ran across the expression “lite choking” in the text of the interview I did with the subject of the site.

Apparently, they felt it was too “extreme” to have a woman talking about being turned on by being choked just a little bit. Now, they process for all sorts of gag porn sites where women perform fellatio which is done so hard and rough that the women weep and choke until they literally vomit. And it is all captured in colorful video and pictures. So how is a text representation of choking fantasy different in a more problematic way from a video or photographic representation of choking fantasy where a performer really is being choked? It comes down to what is directed at the male consumer. Hands around the throat for a little bit of breath control or mild strangling is primarily about female pleasure and female orgasm. Brutal fellatio is about male pleasure and male orgasm. Hence, “lite choking” is “extreme violence” but puking on penis is acceptable.