Still Waiting
What is a drawing?
Plenty of answers could come out of a question like that. The question itself is simple and yet so sweeping that the reply shifts with whoever you ask.
An art critic might shrug and say art. A visual designer might call it a tool for dressing up the street. And to ordinary people who just like looking at porn, the answer might be nothing more complicated than the thing that gets me off.
Broad question, obvious spread of answers.
As for me, I wanted to call it a tool for making imagination visible.
You take something other people have thought about, lusted after, and give it form—even if only in two dimensions. A few curves from my hand become a woman’s arm. Blocks of flat color settle into skin. Every time my hand moves, life seeps into the background, into the figure.
Watching what you imagined take shape is a genuine pleasure. That was why I liked this work. Sometimes it felt like I was the creator of a little world; sometimes it was enough just knowing someone else looked at what I’d made and reacted. That was probably why I never put the pencil down even after bombing the art-school entrance exams.
And that hadn’t changed just because what I was drawing now was porn.
“Nice.”
I smiled at the string of reactions lighting up my phone.
Five days already since I’d taken the commission from HopelessCase. In that time I’d shown her the finished piece, and I’d posted it to Paxiv as well. Luckily, the response this time was good too.
That was HopelessCase first—roughly from a chat about two days ago.
She seemed to know the going rates well enough—probably commissioned other artists now and then. She kept praising the bang-for-buck quality of my work.
I could have done without the masturbation report, but… well. Knowing she was satisfied definitely felt good.
Paxiv was the same story.
Looks like my strategy was working. Draw a decent two-shot, make the situation filthy enough, and these people would eat it up whether or not there was a woman in the frame. Followers were ticking up little by little, views too—hard not to be happy about that.
Of course, it wasn’t universal love.
Ten thousand people look at the ocean and you get ten thousand oceans. One piece of art splits into a dozen different takes. The two people who’d commissioned me so far had gotten what I was doing—but with a girl who wasn’t even that hot taking up half the frame, of course some people were going to hate it. A few of the women didn’t mind female bodies as such; they just didn’t like them eating into the page count.
Nothing I could do about that, though.
You can’t please everyone.
Time to choose and focus. The people who wanted it would find it. No point grinding my nerves down chasing a different audience.
So the direction stays. I made the call and closed Paxiv.
And then the emptiness hit all at once.
Normally, finishing work meant happy time—my little reward to myself. But ever since Hitobi and Paxiv had flipped into gay central, I hadn’t had a proper session. Dig through the porn sites and the AV libraries and it was almost all videos focused on men… try to jerk it to that and all you get is a brutal post-nut clarity. So I was sitting on a pile of unresolved want. Every time I zoned out, my little guy started screaming to be played with, and it was getting genuinely awkward. No decent material, and the urge just kept stacking.
For a second I wondered if I should just take care of it with my own work—but unfortunately I was not the type who got off on his own drawings. Before anything could get hot, my eye snagged on the parts I didn’t like. That arm from earlier looked a little too long. The eyes sat a hair off-center. Moments like that, I wanted to scrap the whole thing and start over. To anyone else the difference would have been invisible… but that was how I was. So my own art was useless for relief.
I almost teared up.
Kh—!
I could sort out everyone else’s urges just fine, and I couldn’t drain my own dirty water. What kind of contradiction was that? I was basically a frigid whore. That was it—I was a cyber male escort with anorgasmia. Doomed to service other people’s lust while never touching my own. The misery of it blurred my vision.
I want to have sex too…
Ping!
I was wallowing in that little tragedy when an alarm cut through the cracks in my awareness. Messenger. I flailed a hand at my phone and found a message from LegalizeRape.
LegalizeRape… no matter how many times I heard it, that nickname was trashy.
The content was simple enough.
Looks like the part-time wages had finally landed. We traded the occasional KakaoTalk like this. I hadn’t planned on it, but a few rounds of commission talk and we’d gotten friendly fast. Shared subject matter, conversation that actually flowed—perfect for killing time. It had been a little awkward at first, but a week later things were comfortable in all kinds of ways.
…Maybe a little too comfortable.
She didn’t used to be like this.
When she’d first come for a commission she’d been almost shy, careful. One week later the kid had corrupted into a nonstop stream of dirty talk. It felt like watching a pure child get soiled. Not that anyone who showed up ordering porn drawings had been that pure to begin with.
“Anonymity really is a superpower.”
No face across the table—so of course she could say whatever she wanted.
Anyway, I answered. A little spark of anticipation fluttered in my chest.
Last time we’d talked, she’d said the second her wages hit she’d put in an order. The only reason she was pinging me on Kakao was to commission something. And sure enough—
“Oh.”
Two, even. A full hundred-thousand-won job. A little sound of awe escaped my throat on its own. Fresh paycheck energy—her spending was generous. I nodded, obviously. No reason to refuse. I fired off a clapping emoji and a bowing emoji back-to-back. My personal thank-you.
After that came the brief for the request. She described the composition and the scenario she wanted; I started blocking it out in my head.
This piece was a man and a woman on their way to a motel. Her taste was baked in here too: the woman was being half-dragged along. Threats, intimidation—whatever it took; she wanted it to look like the man was forcing her there. The woman half-terrified, the man grinning at the sight of it. One of his hands clamped on her breast, and every flex of his fingers made her flinch. Even so, she couldn’t move because of the eyes around them—she just endured. And at the end of that motel road, merciless sex.
True to the nickname, the request was pure filth. She seemed to have a bit of a masochistic streak herself. I said I got it, said that much was doable, and accepted on the spot.
The second one she’d figure out and send later. I nodded easily again. I needed time to draw anyway. What mattered was the hundred thousand won landing straight in my account. Thinking about my balance finally hitting six figures, the happiness wouldn’t quit.
And that was the end of the conversation.
One commission in. Money in. All that was left was to draw. But I sat staring at the stalled chat window, lost in thought.
The subject of that thought was this:
“Hmm…”
What did LegalizeRape look like? The handle was crude, sure, but we talked easily, and she seemed to be holding down a normal life just fine. Suddenly I was curious about the person on the other side of the screen.
“Hmmm…”
Not a productive line of thinking, of course. Anonymity existed to protect whoever was behind it, and digging when you had no idea who was back there was a great way to get burned. But me, right now? Nearly two weeks of forced dry spell, my little guy screaming to be played with. What was running my head wasn’t reason—it was Little Buddy. And if it meant getting my dick some attention, I was willing to put up with a little trouble.
What the dick-hijacked brain said was this:
“Should I meet her?”
Come to think of it, this was a gender-reversed world, and around here I was on the handsome side. Those two women in the elevator last time had proven it. I hadn’t thought much of it then and their reactions had confused me, but looking back at home I realized—that was the fluster of seeing someone you found attractive. The way I freeze for a second when I see a pretty girl. The way my eyes drift on their own toward a good body. They were people just like me, so of course that look had landed on me for a moment.
Which was why meeting her didn’t seem like such a bad idea. If things went well, maybe it even went as far as sex?
“No, but there’s still risk involved…”
I kept turning it over. Reason and Little Buddy went to war over the phone in front of me. A vicious back-and-forth unfolded inside my skull—Little Buddy’s camp saying shut your eyes and just meet her once, Reason’s camp saying there was no need to throw away anonymity and step forward. Real-life meetups were genuinely dangerous. Especially in my line of work, you had to be careful with your face. NSFW artists sat in a half-illegal gray zone in Korea; the second you became identifiable you could end up with a criminal record. One report and it was straight to the cops. Of course, someone who commissioned me under the name LegalizeRape probably wouldn’t… but still. Caution was warranted.
“Ah, whatever. Online meetups are still too soon.”
In the end, the scrap of remaining reason won. Right—I didn’t even know what she looked like. What was I trying to meet her for? I’d never done an online meetup in my life. This was a method to put on hold.
“Hahaha. Come on, even so.”
I let out a hollow laugh and shoved the phone away. No matter how thoroughly my brain had been paralyzed by my dick, there was no need to take on that kind of risk over one cock.
With LegalizeRape, I’d keep things as they were. That was my call for now.
A real-life meeting was the last resort. The method you used when your brain wasn’t half-colonized by Little Buddy—when it was fully gone.
So it still wasn’t time to meet.
“Hahaha…”
For now, at least.