“The Net plays host to a range of formerly unimaginable erotic specialisms, but we know this one is a joke, if only because of its (compressed) air of innocence.”
- The Independent, referring to the Body Inflation Home Page, the predecessor to BodyInflation.org (March 4, 1997)
When I first embarked on my career as fetish webmaster, this site was hosted on my America Online account. AOL had rules that prohibited pornographic content, but these rules weren't terribly clear and inconsistently enforced. So I erred on the side of safety so as not to endanger my account status.
At the time, the result seemed somewhat paradoxical. This was a fetish site with no sexually explicit content. For many people the concept of a fetish is so inextricably bound to sex that they couldn't imagine that the site was real.
This was years before Rule 36, so they can be forgiven for their error.
Once I moved to my own server, I was free to host a wider range of material. But whenever I brought up the possibility I was met with significant resistance. Some people were just fine with their inflation porn being nudity-free. In fact, many preferred it. So for most of the site’s existence there was not a nipple to be seen. I rejected any images that featured nudity.
Eventually, for various reasons I’ll save for a future post, I decided that such a prohibition didn’t make much sense. Although I was worried that the site would be swamped by explicit content, after over a decade of puritanism I started approving nude pictures that were submitted. I made no announcement. They just started showing up in the gallery.
My fears never materialized. For all of my concerns about nudity changing the character of the site, the actual impact was negligible. The first one was VladDrake’s Parade; someone commented “Wow, she actually lost her top,” but aside from that there was no reaction.
To this day, there still isn’t much sex in inflation porn. There’s a goodly amount of nudity, but not a lot of sex. For a long time, I assumed this was driven by inertia. BodyInflation.org’s culture was already well established and probably slow to change. But the same pattern shows up on other sites and even in paid content.
It’s a pattern I find interesting. I have no doubt that my work appeals to the prurient interests of its target audience. But for the vast majority of people, those who aren’t inflationists, it doesn’t register as pornography.
You're quite welcome.
I both love and hate looking back at that old site. Times New Roman? Black text on a blue background? What was I thinking? And I have trouble remembering what it was like scrounging for content back then. In those days, I only updated the site every few months.
Before knowing of this site i thought to be the only person with this fetish!
Thanks from Italy, Luther!
Back then, Wren-spot was covering most of the expansive porniness. Used to be able to get Wren-spot via archive.org. Looks like the current owner of the domain put in an exclusion via robots.txt. Archive.org respects those retroactively. Which means we lost the archive of that. Site isn't even held by someone meaningful, just another domain squatter. Looks like they be trollin' now.
Yeah...ha ha...um, it's a joke...ha.
I appreciate not being attacked in articles like that, but I always wonder what they think when (if) they find out it's actually exactly what it looks like.
I have tried to write a few explicit stories here and there but they are more difficult. The pressure in a lot of inflation porn is less sexual and more tensile.
You know I'd worship you if you had omniscient and omnipotent god-powers LV!
I have no issues about my fetish: I know this is porn, that the stories I write are porn and other people play with themselves while reading them, male and female. Other people may not see it as porn, if only because they would find it weird that this is a fetish. But...everything is somebody's fetish, somewhere. Thats human sexuality for ya.
You're a wise man and a horny man. I can keep my hand off if it while I read this site. I'm very oral and touchy feely. I'm always looking for a reason to touch a guy
I remember in those days the porn world was still very vanilla--mostly straight sex, thin porn stars with normal sized breasts/implants. After a while, the porn industry figured out that while fetishes don't have as large an appeal as vanilla porn, they have a very dedicated following of repeat customers. In the porn biz, repeat customers are the highest quality traffic you can get--you get a much better return on advertising and affiliate programs because the renewals make up for the acquisition costs. So the "niche" porn market was born. But it was still pretty much the same raunchiness as normal porn but with categories of big breasts, plumpers and pregnant. I could go on and on about this stuff, because I started wren-spot partly because I was obsessed with proving it was possible to run a high bandwidth fetish site without charging money for it--so I did a ton of research into affiliate programs and free/cheap resources for porn webmasters.
In recent years, I've seen the rise of more nonsexual fetishes thanks to amateur do-it-yourself clip sites, so it's not just inflation that has that peculiar nonsexual tendency.
I think body Inlation and sex are inseparable. Body inflation itself is sex in itself. By this I mean the real practice of pumping the body as such or its individual parts. Performing this procedure in clothes and not naked does not carry a special kind of emotional charge for the real fetishist and those who watch. It's just like licking ice cream through the glass. A body inlation session must be related to sex of a specific type. The inflationary person should be naked and exposed to all parts of the body. Not only the pumped ones. Sexual acts can be performed before, during or after filling. I am subjected to sexual activities, always naked. Everything that is done to me is shown live by the webcam on a public broadcast. Well, but the latter is something you have to like and not be afraid of. The show gathers a huge audience because it is unlimited. I think so and do so. Everyone has their own view on this and everyone decides. Thank you to the trolls and others.
I'd just like to say thank you for the link to your old site. I know all of the stories are here by now, but there's an odd sort of nostalgia to seeing the exact image of a site I spent lord knows how many hours reading over and over again, back when I first found out this was something other people liked, back before even YouTube was a thing. I can now officially confirm through direct experience that it's possible to be nostalgic for ... let's just say arousal. Quite a trip, this is.