Absence of a web model

Angela Devi, an Indian-American web model/porn star, may or may not have committed suicide several months ago. I just learned this a few days ago, purely by accident.

There is considerable discussion among her fans as to whether she really committed suicide, or whether the poor woman just wanted to retire from adult modeling and faked it, or whether the web site owners actually 'owned' the name "Angela Devi" and retired it (the suicide was discovered on April 1, I believe, which makes me suspicious). There's a death certificate floating around, along with arguments about why it's a fake, etc, etc.

Anyway, I mention it because I've been an occasional 'consumer' of her images in the past and even bought one of her DVDs some years back. I'm really attracted to Indian women, and even though she had enormous implants, which isn't my thing, she had a warm and funny personality in her modeling that was quite a departure from the usual sort of stuff one sees. She wasn't afraid to be silly; she typically would directly address the camera, talking to her fans in this unaffectedly charming if slightly dingy kind of chatter. She seemed like a really sweet person, to the extent that one can judge these things.

I hope she just decided to retire. It's an odd feeling, wondering if she's dead. I had, obviously, no actual connection with this woman other than one distant business transaction through a website. But I desired her, envisioned her, held her in that special place in my mind that is reserved for 8th grade slatterns and beautiful women seen on buses and Indian-American web models. In other words, she was a sexual fantasy object for me, and I want to insist that there's both more and less to that than we usually think there is.

Less, because after all, it's only sex. There is no reason to think that because an action, thought, or emotion involves sex, that it is indicative of the most deeply real parts of one's psyche. Because of the repressive Christian attitudes towards sex (ghod that was facile) and because of Freud, we tend to think of that which is shameful and hidden as true because it is shameful and hidden. Hence, if you have a sexual secret, that is what you really are. I think that's wrong. Why aren't my politics, or my aesthetics, or my friendships the marks of the "really real"?

But I think there's also more to this business of sexual fantasy objects. I won't say they're connected to the sacred or anything like that; that would be absurd and what does "the sacred" mean now anyway? But choosing to see a person that way, to cast them in that part (and I'm leaving considerations of moral agency to the side here) means that something has resonated. That resonance is something worth honoring, I think, and sometimes it's worth honoring more than others.

Let me be frank. Sometimes I have very violent sexual fantasies. I usually don't have names or sometimes even faces for the bodies in those fantasies. But Angela Devi didn't inspire that sort of thing in me - she made me smile, and sometimes she made me come.

Well, her representation/performance made me smile and come - that's an important distinction. Because who was she anyway?

I have no idea. But here's the thing - that doesn't stop me from fervently hoping, in a way that makes no real sense, that this isn't true, that she's alive and just needed to get away from the persona. Why do I feel this sense of connection? Why care more about "Angela Devi" than about "Marilyn Monroe" (another false name) or Kurt Cobain or Ian Curtis? What is that trace?