Beautiful Agony
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Beautiful Agony is a paid-subscription erotic website featuring head shots of user-submitted videos showing the participant having orgasms, without providing any visual description of what technique is being used or revealing anything below the neck and upper chest. Both men and women are featured on the site.
In 2003 Richard Lawrence and Lauren Olney created the initial video series. In 2004 beautifulagony.com was established as a commercial website. The site is owned and operated by Feck Pty Ltd in Melbourne.
The logo of Beautiful Agony is underscored by a quote of the French expression "Facettes de la petite mort” (faces of the little death) due to the facial gestures and sounds that a person makes when experiencing orgasm, and the French expression for orgasm.
Although the majority of clips on the site involve masturbation, a limited number of clips also show participants achieving orgasm through (off-screen) oral sex and, in a few cases, sexual intercourse (although the partner does not appear on camera).
Most contributions include a separate short film called a "confession" of the individual discussing their views on sexuality and sharing descriptions of their sexual experiences. The confessions are typically set in a public place with the fully dressed subject responding to questions asked by an off-camera interviewer who often can not be heard. The site also includes a third series of clips categorized as "overkill" which include return appearances by past participants, extended Confessions, and clips that do not conform to the site's mandate, such as clips that more clearly show intercourse taking place (although these clips still do not contain nudity). Several Overkill clips posted in the spring of 2007 were shot for the British sexually oriented travelogue series Sin Cities, whose host, Ashley Hames, is shown interviewing one of the female participants (Hames taped his own Beautiful Agony session which was included in the main section of the site).
Other adult sites owned and operated by this company
- I Shot Myself
- I Feel Myself
- Sonic Erotica
In popular culture
The band The Sun used Beautiful Agony's clips to make the music video for the song Romantic Death.
A fan made video also used clips from the site for The Joy Formidable's Austere. This video actually irked the band since other, less sexual videos (including their own official video) have been overshadowed by the video's success.
