It happens fast. Twenty-five seconds to be exact. You're in a car, driving around, when you suddenly spot her. She's wrapped tightly in cellophane to a sign pointing to South Beach. She doesn't struggle. She looks at every passing car without even a hint of embarrassment. Is it some sort of prank? A new marketing gimmick from the Miami Beach tourism board?
Nope. It's porn. Well, erotica to be exact. There isn't a tit to be found in the video described above. But GirlsIMetAt.com (link NSFW) -- GIM@ for short -- isn't looking to produce material for a quick jerk. It stays in your head all day long, popping in your subconscious, arousing you when you least expect. It's porn for intellectuals or "modern pornography" as Christopher Cumingham, the site's founder, describes it.
Cumingham won't take sole credit for GIM@, referring to the creators as a collective "we." When pressed to say who is included in this "we," he quips back, "You have the girls, the programmers, the creative direction, the distribution. It's a brand and a business, but you need someone to keep everything together."
The South Florida-based site differs greatly from its other local competitors -- Reality Kings, Bang Bros., Nerd Pass -- in that it steers clear of the tired "gonzo porn" genre. Instead, it's highly erotic without being overtly explicit.
"I like absurdity a lot," Cumingham explains. "I heard a while ago people were making money by just blowing up balloons, so I like exploring that. I flew in a girl from Berlin and based this whole production around her and we found ourselves in [Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden] blowing up balloons. It was so absurd to me that plane tickets were paid for, rental car -- you know expenses."
"I think it cost $30 to get into this retarded garden for like four team members. And all of a sudden you find yourself in this one millisecond where you are like, 'Holy fucking shit! I'm standing in [Fairchild] in Miami with this girl who flew half way across the world to blow up this balloon.'"
A self-admitted porn junkie, Cumingham says that "being so desensitized from watching so much repetitive porn, which never really changes much, I find these niche fetishes so interesting."
And it's obvious. GIM@ is littered with videos exploring these "nu fetishes." The videos include scenes such as a pair of hands simply washing a rubber ball, someone cleaning a dirty floor, and a girl crawling into a confined space to apply watercolor to her face -- the exploration of what can be construed as sexual seems endless. Still, you find some of your more conventional fetishes -- piss play, voyeurism, public masturbation -- here as well.
"We called it nu fetish because we wanted to feature fetishes that everyone has but might not be aware of."
Cumingham's aspirations seem loftier than being your average porn director. He blends art and pornography together, blurring the line between the two. Does art instantaneously become porn when someone pays $24.95 for a 30-day membership?
"Lesbian porn is how straight men imagine women having sex. You also have that make-believe hipster Suicide Girls shit, which is also a dress-up party. I've never seen anyone put any thought [into porn]."
GIM@ doesn't try to fool its viewers into fantasy. It's voyeuristic and real, and Cumingham's team of collaborators is ready to push that further with eventually spinoffs like BoysIMetAt and CouplesIMetAt.
"The boys will be doing much of the same of what the girls are doing, to be watched by girls or boys."
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