Tantansariam: INSEX 1998

The first three years of INSEX are quite unique.

The photos and videos feature a raw aesthetic with touches of found footage that add charm.

The photos straddle the analog and the raw pixelation of early digital photography. The footage has the noise of Sony camcorders so common among amateur filmmakers in the 1990s and 2000s.

The central idea of INSEX and the work of PD has always been there. It's possible to notice the specificity of PD's artistic work even in the early years of INSEX. And the coolest thing is that it's possible to follow the maturation process of PD's art even in these early years.

I would actually say that the first three years of INSEX are the most artistic; the quest to increasingly showcase the eroguro in PD's performances is clear.

The experiments with restraint, torture, humiliation, and pain are visceral, epileptic, they twist your stomach in a desire to ask:

What the hell is going on?

But you still want to see more of what's going to happen.Not that PD's later works are any less visceral, but the entire body of work that makes up INSEX's pre-2000s oeuvre makes these photos and videos unique.Because they're over 20 years old, many of these photos are glitched, giving the impression that we're looking at secret photos of some killer from the 1990s.

Something that further reinforces this snuff atmosphere

is that the models participating in these INSEX performances appear to be extremely normal women.

For your information, when PD began his first work for INSEX, he placed newspaper ads saying he was looking for women over 21 to participate in something sensual.

I don't remember exactly, but I think a total of 200 women responded to his ad. However, he conducted four interviews to select only the models most psychologically prepared for the job.

I think that of the 200 applicants, less than 50 made it onto INSEX's first modeling team.

Because of this, many of the models who participated in INSEX during its first seven years (1997-2005) only performed once, and then returned to their normal, boring lives as mothers, teachers, students, secretaries, supermarket cashiers...

During those first seven years, PD and INSEX sought out ordinary women to be their victims.

Thinking that the women who performed were ordinary women makes me much more excited. Many of these whores suffered what they suffered only once, as a unique experience of torture and abuse in a safe environment. They suffered a session of torture, abuse, and rape as a life experience, consensually and safely.

To think that these whores, as ordinary women, wanted and accepted to go through this only demonstrates how we, if we were in the position of torturer and tortured in a controlled and safe environment, would torture ourselves, and be tortured.

Through his videos and photos, PD invites us to be the torturer of beautiful, ordinary women, the ones you meet at the supermarket, the pharmacy, on the street, even your son's teacher...

He makes you start to imagine what it would be like to torture her? What would it be like to take the little whore from the pharmacy cashier and make her suffer?

Or, what would it be like if I, an ordinary whore, without much money, without important relatives, and from the countryside, were kidnapped?

If I were so violently abused, what would my breasts look like when stretched with weights?

What would my pussy look like if they stuck the torture instruments used on witches in it?

There's a documentary about Insex, where some former models are interviewed. Many of them talk about it; some wanted to experience the violence of abuse, the pain of being tortured, the pain of having their nipples pierced with pins, the pain of being tied up for hours.

But they had no place to express these fantasies.

Insex was that place.

The videos from this era are particularly charming.

The noise, the low-saturation image, and the tape's track markings make everything seem more mysterious and profane. It seems like something pulled from the "Deep Web" (in fact, many of these supposed RedRoom videos or photos are actually taken from INSEX videos) or something lost in the early days of the internet.

But there's one truth to this: INSEX's trajectory is directly linked to the internet.

INSEX was the first BDSM site on the internet, the first extreme BDSM site, and it has always used the internet as its medium. In its early years, the PD hosted "live" sessions where site subscribers could watch the performances live, suggest tortures, and chat with the models and the PD