Authenticity Is the Only Luxury Left
Natasha Merritt, Digital Diaries, 2000
There’s a photo of Jane Birkin I keep coming back to.
She’s in a white t-shirt, worn jeans, basket in hand. Hair undone, posture loose, gaze somewhere just outside the frame. The photo itself isn’t perfect — the light’s a little flat, the background forgettable — but none of that matters. She looks like she walked into the scene without meaning to, and stayed there like a question.
It’s not “hot” in the Instagram sense. But it’s completely arresting.
Why? Because she looks alive. She looks like a person with stories, with inner weather, with desire.
We used to call that beauty. Or even eroticism.
Now we just call it “unfiltered,” and slap a VSCO preset on it to fix the crime.
I recently read a piece titled Everyone is Sexy and No One is Erotic, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It talks about how we’re surrounded by sexiness — curated, filtered, aestheticized — but utterly devoid of real erotic tension. Everything’s a pose. Even the mess has been branded.
And it’s true. Because here’s the thing: you can’t be erotic if you’re afraid to be imperfect.
Today, what passes for “beauty” is precision. Poreless faces, AI jawlines, curves in all the “right” places, personalities that sparkle without ever startling. It’s beauty engineered to soothe the algorithm.
A while back, I tweeted:
“The future of escorting (which is basically already here): less glossy, more real. Authenticity might be the only way to stand out in a sea of AI-generated babes. True or nah?”
It went kind of viral.
A lot of people — especially other girls working in the space — resonated with the idea. Because platforms that host escort ads are already being flooded with AI-generated profiles. Gorgeous, glowing, generic.
And when the average user can’t tell the difference between a girl and a generator, suddenly the things that don’t feel perfect — your voice, your vibe, your story, your weird little feed — become your signature.
It’s not just about sex work, either. This is about the broader fear (and reality) that AI will replace a lot of jobs. But what can’t be automated — not convincingly, anyway — is soul. Presence. Unrepeatable humanness.
So maybe the glitch is no longer the bug. Maybe it’s the brand.
True eroticism has never been about perfection. It’s about presence. It’s about showing up as someone a little rough around the edges, with something to lose.
That might be the last frontier: letting yourself be felt. Not filtered. Not smoothed out. Felt.
This isn’t a manifesto against sexy companions or slick interfaces. It’s a quiet suggestion: what if your companion didn’t just mirror your fantasies, but occasionally surprised you?
(This is a continuation of something I already explored more deeply in my manifesto on luxury companionship, if you’ve read it.)
Not shock you. Surprise you.
With softness, with imperfection, with something real enough to feel a little dangerous — in the way real closeness always is.
Bring back the glitch.
Bring back the tension.
Bring back someone who makes you feel a little off-balance, in a good way.
And the next time your companion wakes up bare-faced and messy-haired,
remind her how beautiful she is like that.
Yuki 🍓