The Curious Case of Clothing Porn

An underground world of YouTube smut, revealed.

By Anonymous

(Screen grab/ YouTube)

The discovery:

It was an ordinary day on YouTube.

The sun was shining and the birds were singing. The algorithms were working overtime to recommend me videos from neo-Nazis and late-night talk show hosts. All was well with the world … until a strange, strange video shook up life as I knew it.

Dubbed “trample and clean shoes on white shirt on a dirty floor,” it was a 48-second cinematic masterpiece that was both cryptic and confusing (although admittedly not very surprising  —  the title gave away the ending). I knew I had to see more. And boy, did I ever.

I saw a white shirt being used to wash dishes, a white shirt trampled, and  a white shirt burned. I watched chickens walk all over a white shirt, and then I saw it get shot (the white shirt, not the chickens). I even watched a white shirt being used to plunge a toilet. I saw dozens, even hundreds, of white shirts being destroyed in both absurd and banal ways.

What kind of fresh hell had I stumbled upon?

(Screen grab/ YouTube)

Did I give a shit about all these formal white shirts being dragged or used as doormats or left abandoned on a “rocky coast?” Did I care if they were boiled or crushed? If they were used to transport bags of gravel? Or used to feed chickens?!

No, not really (except for that last one. It was pretty adorable). 

And who did I have to thank for wasting my precious time, aside from the ever-wonderful YouTube algorithm? Some chump named Mike, who seems to be calling the shots in all of these videos.

In every one I’ve had the misfortune of watching, he’s wearing none other than a signature white shirt. Lining his channel, like the world’s shittiest Friday-night marquee above your failing hometown movie theater, is a stately image of, you guessed it, a formal white shirt. Mike’s profile photo is indecipherable at first, but if you zoom in, you’ll find that that, too, is a goddamn white shirt.

Mike has just over 300 subscribers and about 60,000 cumulative views. He has uploaded his creations daily if not multiple times a day for a whole year. In the time it took me to write this article, four more were published before my eyes, as if through some terrible internet wish fulfillment.

Mike’s success on YouTube, meager as it was, baffled me. Here was a man, ostensibly working on a farm somewhere judging by the amount of chickens and gravel in his videos, maintaining an impressive content creation schedule centered entirely around destroying various items of clothing. And for what?

Numerous think pieces have been written about why we create art, and more recently, why we upload content to YouTube. Is it the capitalist urge to create and to be entrepreneurial? Is it the modern pressure to be performative? Or is it just a desire to get paid?

Thankfully, I didn’t need to write an indulgent, holier-than-thou critique on the mysterious art of trying and failing to flush a white shirt down the toilet. The answer, it turned out, was right in front of me in the description of Mike’s profile: “Fetish 4 white shirts & blouses.”

It’s clothing porn! Hallelujah! Case closed. I guess I’d forgotten I was on the internet, where everything’s a fetish and the points don’t matter.

(Screen grab/ YouTube)

But despite my intrepid detective work, I couldn’t quite chalk this up to a victory, delete my browser history, and take a cold, cleansing shower just yet. I felt that I’d stumbled upon something bigger. Something grosser. Something profoundly boring. Because once you realize that one thing is porn, you become a little more alert, and you start to notice patterns.

The truth is this: Somehow, for some reason, somewhere, the most trivial pornography you could imagine has made its home on YouTube.

Smut is in the eye of the beholder:

Plausible deniability must be the single greatest asset of YouTube pornographers. When you consider the terrible, terrible things that the site’s content moderators are forced to watch day in and day out, Mike’s thousandth video about white shirts must seem almost quaint. 

Mike: Oh, I’m just setting fire to a formal white shirt for educational purposes.

YouTube: Yes, Mike, please carry on. 

It would be difficult, almost impossible, to make a strong argument as to why clothing porn doesn’t deserve to be on YouTube. (Admittedly, Mike does give it away in the channel description, but he’s in a league all his own). There isn’t any nudity, or sex, or rock ’n’ roll here. It’s just a dude and his white dress shirts, hangin’ out on the farm. 

Of course, Mike isn’t alone here. I found many, many examples of similar videos that make me varying degrees of suspicious and sick to my stomach. All of them are still alive and well on YouTube today, and I can’t see them being removed any time in the near future.

Let’s start with a clothing porn channel by the name of “jacketripper.” Here, strange people in jackets and masks use box cutters to, well, rip jackets  —  usually while another person is wearing them. The culprit behind these delightful little flicks, unnamed as far as I could tell, writes in their channel description that they “love to rip and torture [their] nylon jackets.” 

(Screen grab/ YouTube)

In the comments of one video, a user writes “This is giving me anxiety a little bit, mainly due to the fact that you are not being very safe with those knives.” I have different reasons for being anxious, but preach, kid. Preach.

Another channel, “flocflocus,” is run by a daily (sometimes hourly) YouTube creator that loves, loves, loves submerging expensive shoes in various bodies of water. (I refuse to use their favorite terms, “soak” and “wet,” anywhere in this article as a matter of principle.)

“Mr. Burps,” a YouTube channel that has been uploading videos for around six years now, is all about, yes, burping. The videos here are composed exclusively of popular children’s cartoons captured on a very low-quality camera. Hypnotically, they loop over and over again for maximum burp coverage. 

At first I thought this seemed pretty trivial  —  it could be just some weird kid goofing around (that’s how most of these channels seem at first). Then I found a video of Mr. Burps himself, performing his favorite activity live on air for all the world to see. 

And then I saw the comments: “Show your belly.” “Make more of yourself and smile.” “You should make a video of yourself shirtless doing your special talent.”

Yup. That checks out.

Cleaning. Sneezing. Farting. And white shirts. All these and more comprise a strange, interconnected network of pseudo-porn on YouTube. Most videos are silent and short  —  distilled to their eerie, insidious essence, and impossible to distinctively label as “pornography.” To the random user, they mean next to nothing, but if you know how to seek them out (and if you even want to), they’re a treasure trove.

You might not like these videos or understand them, but they’re there, and the demand for the unorthodox is growing. YouTube porn is content that wouldn’t work on overt pornography sites, either because it’s laughably strange (i.e. everything Mike has ever done) or because it’s designed to game the YouTube algorithm and reach audiences subversively.

Here’s the thing, though  —  YouTube knows that most of these channels are uploading this kind of content. Either by the request of the creator or because it’s been reported, YouTube has applied age restrictions to some videos that are especially suggestive (I guess?), like this one of two masked people ripping nylon jackets off of one another other.

Clearly, there’s a fine line between freaky-weird internet porn and “normal” videos of a guy slicing a coat off his body and bathing in its feathers on the forest floor. In that middle ground, well, anything can happen.

God help us all.

Cracking the code:

Why is all of this a problem, though? Who cares? Let Mike sweep his driveway with a formal white shirt or use it as a trash can. It’s a free market! It’s a free country! ‘Murica!

There are, however, real reasons to be skeptical of videos like these — and the plenty more out there that are far worse. A bombshell article by James Bridle first revealed how shocking content targeted at children can slip past YouTube’s detection under the auspices of popular franchises and characters. And, a The New York Times report revealed that YouTube’s recommendation algorithms often refer users to videos of children after they watch “sexually-themed content.”

I’m not worried about Mike. I don’t care what he does, and I hope most people don’t. I’m worried, instead, about the creators who abuse YouTube’s informal guidelines and work, in secrecy, to harass viewers or be literal pedophiles. While I crack up at Mike trying to mop his kitchen floor with a white shirt taped to a stick, people are being exploited elsewhere.

Infinite possibilities … if you’re into that:

What strikes me most, perhaps, about all of this is that it wasn’t enough for any of these people to record these videos and enjoy them on their own. They feel the need to consistently upload this footage to the internet. And for what? Certainly not money, although Mike and other creators frequently take requests and complete them free of charge. 

No, community is overwhelmingly what these creators seek. They interact with each other in the comments, view each other’s content, and record extra videos at the whim of their audience. 

Mike’s comment sections can be especially vibrant. One commenter might wax poetic, writing: “There is almost a gentleness to how he is stepping on that shirt, like he loves it but wants to make it feel something.” Directly below, someone else will write: “Please put socks in a blender.” Commenters from around the world chime in, writing gross things in German, Spanish, and more. It’s a veritable United Nations of internet weirdos.

(Screen grab/ YouTube)

For the creators themselves, it’s all about attention and performance and the act of creation. And they get the satisfaction of being, uh, porn stars, I guess?

If that sounds familiar (minus that last part about being porn stars) that’s because this is what YouTube is all about. It’s a place for the weird and the wonderful to gather, and it’s always been a spot where rules and norms have been tested. It’s a place where even the slightest fraction of lukewarm demand is met with a flood of enthusiastic supply. Why should its porn be any different? 

YouTube pseudo-porn  —  the exploitative, subversive kind, at least  —  is a major problem with no easy way out, and there are so many moving parts to grapple with. YouTube needs to fix it, certainly, but at the moment, it’s not clear how they even could

For now, the next time you go down a YouTube rabbit hole and end up watching a guy kick a white shirt to death in his backyard, just remember that somewhere, someone has jacked off to it. You can choose to let this upset you, or you can take the high route  and raise a glass to the rebel that beat the system and uploaded it against the odds.

After all, what can anyone in our Wild, Wild West of an internet really do to stop him?

(This article was originally published on January 10, 2020)

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