The defining entertainment industry story of 2024 was the collapse of Hollywood, the “death of movies,” to quote the L.A. Times. The defining story of 2025 is, to quote the Times again, “Will the work ever come back?”

Taking some time off from politics (because everyone and their retarded uncle is opining on the new administration, and it bores me), I’m gonna devote the next four columns to an in-depth exploration of that question.

This week: “Fortune Favors the Fetishist.”

The “death of movies” has nothing to do with “wokeness.” If it were just a matter of too many movies with trannies and blacks, the problem would be fixed, because execs are in such a panic right now they’ll try anything, even jettisoning DEI (indeed, woke writers and showrunners are complaining that the open studio doors from 2020 are now soundly closed).

The problem, in a sentence so key to the Times piece that it’s used in the title, is that “the audience has moved on.”

It seems the audience has moved on to other things…. People have other things to do with their screens. They prefer to spend their time on YouTube and play video games on their phones.

That’s from the June 10, 2024, Times. This is from my Sept. 19, 2023, column:

So what are “the kids” spending money on? Not tickets to Batman vs. Flash: Revenge of Emperor Fuckwad. Not Netflix subscriptions. They’re spending on videogames…. A large portion of the audience has moved on to videogames, Twitch, and OnlyFans.

See, that’s why people read Dave: prescience.

The thing is, though, if you compare the 2024 Times piece to my column from 2023, you’ll notice a difference: While trying to be cutting-edge, the Times is actually behind the times, obsessing about YouTube, which has already been eclipsed by sites like Twitch (for gamers) and OnlyFans (for fapping).

In 2024 OnlyFans saw $6.6 billion in revenue. The site’s currently valued at more than $18 billion.

Singer Lily Allen told Variety last year that as popular as her music is, she makes more money from selling online photos of her feet.

“Imagine being an artist and having nearly 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify but earning more money from having 1,000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet.”

That’s the actual quote from Allen.

You cannot compare your appreciation for music to a foot fetishist’s appreciation for feet. Whatever type of music, whatever song, whatever artist is your favorite, your desire to hear that music is simply not comparable to the compulsion of a fetishist to whack off.

Lily Allen has been forced to face this reality: Yes, many people love her music. Also yes, the deviants who like her feet will pay more to see them than healthy-minded people will pay to hear her songs.

You’ll always make more money by appealing to the compelled as opposed to the inclined.

When I lived with porn girl Kera Lynn (“Kirsten Lee”) during her prime when she was 21 and the top draw on PornHub, she’d average five grand per film. But her real money came from fetish fans. There was a wealthy Connecticut attorney who asked only one thing of Kera—videos of her as a mermaid. In exchange, he was a faucet. In 2017 he bought her a $60,000 truck so huge it didn’t fit in my two-car driveway. Whatever she asked for, she got. Yet he never met her in person, and they never slept together. He just liked fapping to her as a mermaid.

I’ve known a few bimbos who’ve turned to escorting (against my counsel), and I’ve known a few who’ve turned to fetish modeling. And I can’t counsel against that. Because paying for fetish modeling is perfectly legal, while paying for normal sex isn’t. If all you want is to bed a bimbo, the law says you can’t exchange money for that. But if you want to watch a foot fetish model stomp on turds, you can pay for that, no problem.

The law favors the pervs. If a hetero man wants intercourse, he’s gotta work for it. Earn it! But if a deviant wants to get off by videotaping women’s feet, the law says free market!

And the deviants pay well. Making out with Debbie Beaverbrook or LaQwanda Stankass is easier than asking those girls to stomp on a raw egg, then have a dog lick their feet. So because the fetishists demand the unorthodox, they pay better.

Fetish-catering is the future (for now). Passive experiences like movies large (Marvel, DC) and small (Kevin Sorbo and Gina Carano fight Old West desperados) are passé. Not that things won’t morph again at some point; they always do. As profitable as fetish videos are to the girls who do them, the problem with having fetishists as customers is that they grow bored.

I knew a 21-year-old girl (white, somewhat attractive) who, in 2020, was raking it in with ASMR videos—monetizing the hell out of eating food in front of a camera, fully clothed.

Of all the surreal moments in my life, in the top 20 is Jared Taylor and Mark Weber coming into town for dinner, and me showing them my ASMR fetish girl and the look of shock on their faces upon learning that you can become wealthy by slurping noodles in front of a webcam. It was hilarious, like watching Christian missionaries’ first contact with a Cook Island tribe of naked savages.

ASMR Girl: “Mmmmm…(sluuuurip)…these noodles are good…(sluuuurrrrruuup)…remember to like and subscribe!”

View count 10,000,000 and climbing.

Weber: “Oh dear.”

Taylor: “Oh my.”

Me: “It ain’t our world anymore, boys.”

But that was 2020. The web girl’s fans have moved on. She’s 26 now; who wants to see an old lady slurp noodles? So she came to me wanting to segue into “real” acting. But when I gave her sides and some critical notes regarding her reading, she stormed off in a huff. Her fetish fans never critiqued her slurping! How dare I be anything less than worshipful of her acting?

You’re going to have a generation of these girls who, once the money’s gone and the first crow’s foot appears, are completely unequipped to make money other ways. Not when you’ve had a year or two of making it with no effort, eating cake or posing as a mermaid or stepping on gerbil shit barefoot.

The fetish biz is at the same time foolproof and not foolproof. The risk for the girls is that they grow older and their fans look for someone new. The reward for the girls is the nature of the fetishist to constantly require new content and ever more extreme thrills. You ever notice how every time a kiddie porn perv is busted, the TV news is always like “investigators found over 10,000 files of child pornographic material on his computer”? It’s always some massive number, but it’s that way with legal fetishists, too; you just don’t hear about it because it’s, well, legal. But they always need moar content!

So when the girls are young and purdy, they cater to the fetishists en masse. As they age out, and thus lose quantity, they have to zero in on quality—a small number of guys looking for something more personal (customized videos, the kind of direct interaction offered by OnlyFans). You trade monetization via massive view count for monetization via a handful of wealthy fetishists.

This principle doesn’t just apply to the sexual world; it goes for politics, too.

Political fetishism is a thing. That’s how I knew Musk wouldn’t sink Twitter when he took over. To be sure, he’s turned the site into a garbage dump. But I’m talking about the leftist doomsaying that the site would fail in terms of users. That hasn’t happened; the site’s numbers remain high.

Let’s pause to understand the word “fetish.” It comes from the Portuguese feitiço, meaning “spell.” It was first popularized after the Portuguese encountered West African ungabungas and their mud-and-stick gods. That’s how the word got its definition as “an object believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner.”

But the original meaning of the word, “spell,” also applies to the modern-day definition, “an obsessive devotion; an interest in an activity or object that makes someone spend an unreasonable amount of time doing or thinking about it.”

Something that casts a “spell.”

That “something” can be an idea. Musk kept Twitter alive by catering to the most extreme rightist fetishists—Nazis, deniers, Jew-haters, the most deeply entrenched ideologues the right has to offer. In an interactive forum.

Interactive fetishism. That’s Musk’s formula. X is OnlyFans for Nazis.

Hegel studied fetish gods among Africans, noting that the fetish is “nothing other than the fancy of the individual projecting itself into space, the human individuality remains master of the image it has adopted. If any mischance occurs which the Fetish has not averted, if rain is suspended, if there is a failure in the crops, they bind and beat or destroy the Fetish and so get rid of it, making another immediately, and thus holding it in their own power. A Fetish is merely a creation that expresses the arbitrary choice of its maker, and which always remains in his hands.”

I disagree (Hegel, you dumbass). I do not think the fetishist, whether in terms of an African with a goofa doll, a man who likes having his balls whipped, or an ideologically obsessed Nazi, is “in control.” They’ve been overtaken; they’ve surrendered themselves to the fetish. In the case of the African or the Nazi, if the fetish fails to bring good fortune, they don’t “beat or destroy the Fetish and so get rid of it, making another immediately.” Rather, they cling tighter to it, their surrendered mind rationalizing why the fetish did not fail. Events failed; nonbelievers failed. Or they failed for lack of faith in the fetish.

I’ve never tried to talk an African out of his mud god, but I have tried to talk Holocaust deniers down from their ledge, and I’ve been unsuccessful most of the time. I know a spell when I see it; I know “no longer in control” when I see it.

Politics is not downstream from Hollywood. They’re two separate entities, joined by the fact that they’re both experiencing the same crisis: Interactive fetishism has uprooted the old models and unsettled the old guard.

Candace Owens is making way more money as a Nazi fetish doll than she ever did getting gub’mint welfare. There’s little difference between sexual fetishists and political ones. They’re obsessives, and obsessives are the most reliable audience, whether they’re masturbating to a foot video or a “happy merchant” cartoon. If you want to make money, cater to fetishists.

That’s the situation.

For now.

“The audience has moved on”? The audience always moves on.

Hollywood won’t die, but it is gonna have to come up with some new tricks.

We’ll pick that up next week in Part II.