Belle Delphine, F1NN5TER, and Commodity Transness

Attempting to pull something useful out of the sound and fury.

May I Be Forgiven for the Discourse in Which I Am About To Partake

Recently minor internet celebrities Belle Delphine and F1NN5TER (henceforth referred to as Finnster or Finn) made a series of innuendous tweets suggesting a yet-unpublished (at time of writing) explicit collaboration. This announcement was greeted by celebration from the celebrities' fans and denunciations from their haters. The ability of everyone on the internet to be wrong about things continues unabated but I nevertheless believe it is possible to draw out some insight from this discursive leviathan.

Dramatis Personae

Finnster begat his online fame as a Minecraft youtuber and was accursed with more followers by producing a series of videos where he appeared progressively more feminine though makeup and clothing. He now presents online in a high-femme appearance, frequently joking about the contrast this makes with his continued male identity. This contradiction was most clearly highlighted in February when he was banned from Twitch for drawing too much attention to his chest which moderators considered to be a violation of their rules regarding "female-presenting breasts."

Belle is the Hideo Kojima of e-girls, her content is far too dense in ideology and meme to be fully considered here. She is a popular e-girl, made famous for her surreal memetic content and looking like a character from a porno about sleep paralysis demons. Forced to transition from mainstream social media to explicit content in 2021 she now intermittently produces OnlyFans content that adopts and fetishizes aesthetics ranging from stereotypical depictions of loserdom to cosplay of Pixar characters.

What and Why?

It is not unusual that these two would fuck or film that fucking in order to put it on the internet, nor is it unusual that doing so would draw derision from the peanut galleries of Twitter. Finn has been held up as synecdoche for the way that societal transphobia reterritorializes trans gender identities as alternate modes of cisgender expression; he has been made to serve as a locus of debate over societal perceptions of transness. Belle for her part has been accused of supporting everything from pedophilia to rape. In publicly performing sexual intimacy they synthesize a discursive dialectic; the anger of the hapless Neoliberal subject is fetishized (in multiple senses) and reflected onto the object of these two internet personalities. Neither Belle nor Finn can undo the damages they are accused of promoting so they are only discussed in their relationships to broader societal trends. The controversies that surround them are founded on accusations of the effects of their content and not their own actions. Have they been sufficiently aware of the evils of the world? Have they done their best to condemn them? Are we as consumers allowed to consume what they create?

Belle and Finn are both mythological figures as much as actual people. In theory they have government records regarding their births and parts of their lives not subject to constant public scrutiny but in practice those are vestigial elements attached to the ghosts of neon-colored Zoomer femininity. The alchemy of publicity that produced these online personalities left the flesh and blood persons subordinate and weak compared to the newly-produced virtual automata. Both have been sexualized so constantly that their OnlyFans can be classified as hyperstition; both of them make a living off of their digital personalities continuing to live in the minds of viewers. They are the subjects of a Parasocial Realism, the same movement that turns people into shibboleths and artists into awkwardly-shaped containers of their artwork. Every celebrity is now split into the relationship they have to each of their audience members, relevant only as long as the imaginary friend or confessor of whichever demographic they have been conveyed to by the dark sea of algorithmic recommendations.

I believe in the power of discussion; I have spent most of my adult life studying subjects that are traditionally taught through discourse, from radical philosophy to theology. I also know that discourse cannot be meaningfully had when we all scream at each other from our respective moving cars, that any position with sufficient nuance to consider anything close to the real world is incommunicable in memetic form. My hope then is not to establish a correct position on these issues but rather to understand the form of the discourse, to connect opinions to persons and not to digital ghosts.

Putting a Hook in Leviathan’s Nose

Trans people have a long history in pornography, again as a synthesis of a dialectic; we are perceived as desirable even as the transphobia of the assumed viewer marks us as different. We are fetishized, made into an Other that cannot exist outside of porn complete with a cornucopia of slurs to highlight this distinction. By bringing this contrast of marketability and person-hood to the fore Finnster provides a target for the displaced anger, a name and face to the complicated problems of societal perception. Finn's tweets are similarly responded to regardless of if the overt message is sexual. He is feminine enough to be banned from Twitch for accidentally drawing attention to his breasts but not enough to fit neatly into the category of "trans woman." Belle likewise is not alone in being subject to controversy locating her actions within a broader system of misogyny nor conflating her fans with the perpetrators of that misogyny. When she is criticized for wearing fake braces or selling porn that portrays her being kidnapped it is only as the most visible result of existing trends in porn, for allowing others to be insufficiently ethical in their consumption.

The appeal of the pair to an imagined straight male viewer fetishizes (in the Marxist sense) the commodity of attention, turning it into a relationship between images and reflections. The anger we feel as subjects to the unjust systems in which we all exist in turn falls back on itself to become commodity attention, mere reactions to images. A hypothetical Finn who was more trans and a hypothetical Belle who kowtowed to more of the demands found in her quote-tweets would still be fucking for imagined straight cisgender men as the supermajority of their audience. Likewise a transphobic Finn or a Belle who more openly sought controversy would face no more consequences from anything other than market forces possibly reducing the income from their OnlyFans. All relationships involved are mediated by market forces rather than a system of morality.

Finally when they fuck Finn and Belle produce a new commodity, commodity transness. The categorization of sexuality and gender is subordinated to the needs of marketability; the solidity and solidarity of identity in opposition to societal expectations melts into air. The performance of gender is rated according to its market value and not its personal resonance. The possibility of intimacy becomes subordinated to the possibility of a peep-show audience. In a world where one of the biggest controversies resulting from legalizing gay marriage in the US was over whether gay people could be sold wedding cakes it is hard to imagine any form of identity or relationship that cannot have its complexities stripped away seeking a minimum viable product.

I will continue to imagine however, I will make that which is seemingly plain esoteric, place beliefs in relation to one another, and read depth into images. The monuments of discourse we build today will be lone and level sands by tomorrow but I will still be here. My gender is not a performance devoid of context but an artwork to be analyzed holistically. My sexual desires are likewise not separable from a broader understanding of myself and my place in the world. Assuredly this is also true of Belle and Finn, however much the static commodity of their image reads to the contrary. When they fucked I only hope that they found each other beautiful.