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 wearing a white t-shirt, worn jeans, a basket in her hand. Her hair is undone, her posture loose, her gaze drifting just outside the frame. The photo itself isn’t perfect. The light is flat, the background forgettable. But none of that matters.

She looks like she wandered into the scene by accident and stayed there like a question.

It’s not “hot” in the Instagram sense. But it’s completely arresting.

Why? Because she looks alive. Like someone with stories, inner weather, desire.

We used to call that beauty. Or even eroticism.

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, polished, aestheticized. And yet real erotic tension feels almost extinct. Everything is a pose. Even the mess has been branded.

And it rings 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 engineered to sparkle without ever unsettling anyone 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 women working in the space, felt it. Escort platforms are already filling up with AI-generated profiles. Stunning, luminous, interchangeable.

And when users can’t tell the difference between a person and a generator, suddenly the imperfect things start to matter. Your voice. Your presence. Your story. Your weird little feed. Those become the signature.

This isn’t just about sex work. It’s about the wider anxiety around AI replacing human labor. What can’t be automated, at least not convincingly, is soul. Presence. Unrepeatable humanness.

Maybe the glitch isn’t the flaw anymore. Maybe it’s the point.

Eroticism was never about perfection. It was always about presence. About showing up as someone slightly unfinished, 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?

Not shock you. Surprise you.

With softness. With imperfection. With something real enough to feel a little dangerous, the way 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 🍓