BEAUTIFUL AGONY (MALE)

The Agony Principle

Beautiful Agony began as a multimedia experiment, to test a hypothesis that eroticism in human imagery rests not in naked flesh and sexual illustration, but engagement with the face. We wondered whether film of a genuine, unscripted, natural orgasm - showing only the face - could succeed where the most visceral mainstream pornography fails, and that is, to actually turn us on. 

Yes, Agony is here to turn you on. But it will do much more than that. 

Considering porn has had a few thousand years to evolve, alongside other streams of culture - you'd expect it to be refined and sophisticated. Yet instead of developing in sophistication and nuance, it has become a brutal and charmless rendering of human sexuality. It's like the people who make it, don't really understand it. While they've been very entrepreneurial and driven the uptake of new technologies, pornographers have forsaken the essentials of eroticism in favour of clichés and an obsessive pursuit of extremes. 

Not taken seriously as a valuable cultural genre, the porn industry has lacked real production talent and been, for the most part, exploited for short term profit. What other industry has invested so little in the quality of its product and the customer experience?

So in 2003 we started Agony, kicked off with a handful of videos made by curious friends who liked our theory. The results amazed all of us. It soon became obvious that Agony had to endure, so we started to charge subscriptions and pay the contributors, and implemented a scheme to divide part of the excess revenue amongst them all. Submissions then began to come in from all around the world. 

A couple of years later we extended the brief of Agony to also look into the minds of the contributors, and find out what turns them on. We added Confessions, probing inquisitions where contributors are asked to bare their souls about all things sexy. You'll find these videos way beyond fascinating; they're a very candid and sometimes hilarious insight into human sexuality of the early 21st century. 

Agony has been dubbed "the sexiest web site you'll ever see", and excerpts are on display all around the world in places like the Museum of Sex (NY, NY), the Hollywood Sex Museum, and the family educational Nemo Centre in Amsterdam. French composer Jean Michel Jarre composed a tribute to us on his 2007 album Téo & Téa, and we've been featured in magazines from Vanity to Fair to Playboy, and the subject of numerous academic theses. 

But without your help, Agony is in danger of extinction.