Karely Ruiz: Hedonic adaptation (Part 3).
The Karely effect quantified in physical appearance tells us something very peculiar:
Karely Ruiz’s sexually attractive anatomy could be said to be 70% conservative and 30% liberal. However, that 70% is built on the illusion that her body is natural even though we all know that that 70% has been reconstructed with plastic surgery.
The liberal 30%, however, are the accepted imperfections of her physique, namely that she wears braces, that she doesn’t wear make-up as much and that her body is heavily tattooed. Here tattooing in terms of traditional beauty detracts from Karely’s classical and conservative look.
If we compare Karely Ruiz with Mikayla Demaiter, the Canadian model who is quite popular, though not as popular on social media as Karely, we can see that, in contrast, Mikayla Demaiter’s physique, equally cured with plastic surgery and filters, looks more professional, she has no braces and no tattoos. Mikayla Demaiter looks like a more classic, refined and conservative type of woman’s look.
Mikayla Demaiter’s anatomy of sexual attraction could be said to be 99% conservative and 1% liberal. The 99% is built on the illusion that her body is natural although we know that like Karely, it has been reconstructed with plastic surgery.
The liberal 1%, however, are the imperfections of her physique, namely her poses are very stiff and she rarely smiles. The very fact that the perfection of her body is based on surgical reconstruction even though she looks perfectly natural also adds to her liberal 1% of imperfections. Basically, Mikayla Demaiter has fewer physical imperfections than Karely.
Now, a woman’s physique is always connected to her visual ethology manifested in her character. Even when Mikayla Demaiter’s physique, following standard patterns of beauty, looks more polished and perfected, Karely has several elements of her ethology that reinforce the attractiveness of her physique much more than Mikayla’s.
Mikayla, as a traditional model, interacts with her audience mostly by posing but rarely by talking to them. This gives her the unverified image of being a bimbo without necessarily being one.
Karely in this sense has a partial advantage. Even when Karely was initially very shy the interactive nature of her amateur modelling on OnlyFans encouraged her to show her personality and character. This is how her audience discovers her as a very sweet, honest and modest girl.
So, if we add Karely’s devotion to helping abused and abandoned animals, coupled with the help and love she shows for her disabled sister with brain damage that has her paralysed in a wheelchair, and also the financial help she continually gives to her parents, we can say that Karely is idolised more for her physique when we add all these traits of her natural behaviour.
All this has given Karely a story that has gone beyond the image of an OnlyFans model. However, these things that work in Karely’s favour and don’t work so much in Mikayla’s favour bring other sets of problems on a private level to Karely that tarnish her own image.
It is clear that behind the doors of an OnlyFans account of an erotic model one can find everything from the most sensual to the most pornographic, but it is equally clear that Karely’s job on OnlyFans is to sexually excite her fans in the most direct way.
The OnlyFans model has all the freedom to be explicit in her direct private interaction with her fans and it is she herself who creates and sets her own limits.
In contrast, when the OnlyFans model is on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok she has to follow the restrictions set by those platforms regarding sexual content. This has created a very peculiar behaviour in relation to what we call explicit or graphic content of a sexual nature.
In the same sense that physical violence has moved into the space of speech and the exchange of ideas under verbal violence in the age of social media, the pornographic has moved as part of the prohibitions of social media into the space of the sensual under the forced conversion of the erotic into the vulgar.
And I repeat, perceiving the vulgar and pornographic in the sensual presents the same difficulties as perceiving and feeling physical violence in another person’s contrary and scathing opinion.
Never before has the internet made us so subservient to the principle of hedonic adaptation. Hedonic adaptation refers to the notion that after positive (or negative) events (i.e. something good or bad happens to someone), and a subsequent increase in positive (or negative) feelings, people return to a relatively stable baseline level of affect.
Once the pornographic on social media does not have what we see on pornhub or on the private channels of OnlyFans but is insinuated in every possible way under the absence and longing of the pornographic, hedonic adaptation creates in us the pornographic where it did not used to be and where factually it is not and could not be.
That is why the videos and images of Karely Ruiz with Santa Fe Klan have been seen by some as vulgar, pornographic and without anything sensual or erotic. Karely and Santa Fe Klan only hinted at having consummated everything that two sexually attracted people could consummate in a hotel bed.
The fact that they implied it without explicitly showing it (touching a woman’s buttocks and breasts is not evidence of consummation of sex) is not evidence of vulgarity and pornography.
It is something different, for example, when someone like Jeff Koons is allowed to create an installation at the Met entitled, Made in heaven, in which together with the famous porn star and political activist, La Cicciolina Koons tried without much success to exorcise the pornographic from the pornographic by means of his artistic and performative histrionics.
It is like putting an object in a gallery from which strong hallucinogenic gases emanate and expecting the audience to perceive it artistically by “completely abstracting from the hallucinogenic gases.
In the midst of public pressure we sometimes respond to something not so much by acting out what we say but by reacting with irony to scathing criticism. When Karely tells us:
“I came into this world to bill in a thong and give kisses”, there is some honesty in what she says but at the same time we know that she is reacting with sarcasm to her critics given that in her own words Karely has claimed to have motivations not exclusively reduced to billing in a thong and giving kisses.
Still, given the state of hedonic adaptation on social media, it is perfectly normal for Karely’s attitudes to be seen as vulgar and pornographic. Equally, if Karely does not carefully observe the growth of her liberal side against her conservative side, she is likely to jeopardise the stability of her financial and mental future if she allows herself to be reduced to the erroneous image of the charismatic, honest and good-hearted influencer whose only service is to make others drool sexually over her body.
In contrast, Mikayla Demaiter, who, as a model, is much more conservative than liberal in her physique than Karely and therefore, if she does not carefully watch the growth of the conservative side of her physique as a model against her liberal side, is very likely to jeopardise the stability of her financial and mental future just by allowing herself to be reduced to the erroneous image of the classic traditional bimbo with no brains.
Both Karely and Mikayla will have to go beyond the well-known clichés of OnlyFans models and runway models if they want to give their careers a long future or perhaps even transition or blend into other careers.
What is certain is that the cases of Karely Ruiz and Mikayla Demaiter in the modelling world show very clearly that you cannot be not only an extreme liberal or an extreme conservative, but you cannot be 50/50 conservative or 50/50 liberal without either of these positions ending up being ideologically suicidal.
The minimum acceptable percentage for either position would be 70%. Anything below 70% puts us at extreme risk of inconsistency, extremism and above all hypocrisy towards our own ideas.
