No discussion has been more recurrent here at UMD than the one over innocent / clothed wam, vs nude / hardcore wam. It's a debate that will likely go on for as long as there is a community that merges content of both types in one place. I am not going to go into the debate itself right now, but I've been thinking about how imbalanced the proponents of both sides are in how often they express their views.

If you were to only read the forum over the years, you could well come to the conclusion that the majority of users prefer fully-clothed wam. You'd think that most of us are actually turned off by any type of nudity, and are disgusted when we see spread legs, hardcore sex, or any male actor in the scene, even if he's only the prop through which we are meant to live the scene vicariously. Not only are these clothed-wam aficionados vocal about their preference, a lot of them have suggested over the years that I amend the "acceptable content" portion of the Terms of Service to make the entire UMD ban nudity and sex, or at least reorganize the forums or enforce labeling rules so that they can avoid even seeing any of it by mistake. I've been asked many times to create a filter on the entire site which will prevent any of this raunchy stuff from appearing in the site listings, forums, or photos, or advertisements.

But if you get a look behind the scenes, you see a significantly different story. Running a site like this, I've always gotten to see what people are actually doing. I see what pictures they're viewing, what videos they're watching, what sites they're visiting, what ads they're clicking, what pay sites they're joining, and recently, what downloads they're purchasing. I've gone to great lengths to share this information with everybody in the community, and now you can see for yourself, as I always have, that what people do around the site is at odds with what the vocal majority usually projects.

Everybody can check-off all the preferences that they like in their profile settings, and the UMD counts them all up and makes a bar graph here. You'll notice that "nudity" is above "fully-clothed." Twice as many people, in fact, have selected "nudity" as have selected "fully-clothed" as one of their preferences. Read the forums, and it seems like there are way more full-clothing lovers, but this bar graph says otherwise.

Take a look at site-wide user searches. UMD remembers everybody's searches and adds up the most popular ones here. Here again, people are doing specific searches for "messy sex" more than "fullyclothed." To be fair, searches for "nudity" trail searches for "fullyclothed" but only by a couple of points (this may fluctuate by the time you read this).

Looking at the downloads store, the top sellers have nudity and sex. Mud Pool Sex has been an outrageous seller, even though it's the highest-priced item on the store at $21.00. Well-done clothed scenes also do very well, especially the ones where the models wear nice clothing, and the ones that bring back nostalgia of classic wam like the entries by Haley. But sales of the xxx stuff seems to dwarf them, seemingly regardless of price.

Running the UMD's advertising system, I see what ads get clicked. Here, it's a different story, as ads that show models that are fully clothed get clicked the most. The better and more expensive the clothes, the better the click-through ratio. But also, the very most raunchy ads also get very high clicks. In fact, there was controversy not too long back, where some people were offended at how far one of the ads went, and asked me to take it down. I made the decision to leave it up, as it barely squeaked within the boundaries of what I want this site to accept, but it was within the boundaries nonetheless, in my opinion. Despite the very vocal outcry from UMD members on the forums and privately, this ad was one of the most highly-clicked that we've ever run. Go figure.

In the first couple of years that this site existed, the debate over nude vs non-nude was already alive and well. So much so that I built a whole separate UMD called "UMD Filtered" that only contained completely PG-rated links. I knew for sure that people demanding a site free of any hardcore material or nakedness would flock to that site. They didn't. It was a waste of time trying to maintain both sites, so I dropped the filtered version. As I learned php (a programming language that makes web sites dynamic), I was able to integrate preferences into the site that allowed people to filter all nudity from every aspect of the site. Despite the irony that people wanted an adult content filter on an adult site, I took the time to build this feature. It was complex and involved changes to every corner of code on the site. But nobody even used it.

Some people wonder why adult sites with wam, and wam sites featuring nudity and hardcore sex are popping up so often. A lot of people consider this content to be not wam at all, and think these sites are getting it all wrong, and should leave the niche to be catered to only by "real" wam producers who make "tasteful" scenes with full clothing. But obviously the sites are supplying a demand that must exist, or else they would dry up and go away, right? People are joining these sites, purchasing these downloads, and eating this raunchy content up, daily. Looking at the availability of this stuff on the market speaks volumes without even looking at all the stats, searches, and user prefs graphs.

So what gives? I'd still say that about an equal number of people here enjoy innocent wam as nude wam. But nude wammers just go about about their day and enjoy the content that they find and like. They never complain about too much clothing. They don't revolt when they see advertisements that don't show explicit sex and bare boobs.

I have a theory that for some of us, wam is a fetish, and for others it's a novelty or preference. A true fetishist is more serious about all of this than another person, who may love it but isn't quite obsessed over it. I think that more clothed wammers actually have the fetish. Others may get turned on by it or enjoy watching it but they don't claim ownership over it and get protective over it like the real fetishists do.

Another theory that I've had is that a lot of people who like clothed wam are secretly ashamed that they even have a fetish in the first place. They exclaim their disgust of nudity and sex more as a self-affirmation that they themselves are not perverted, than out of genuine disregard for that side of our fetish. But if you like sex with your wam, there is really nothing you can do to justify it. You just enjoy it and avoid bringing a whole lot of attention to yourself. Just a theory; What do you think?

Perhaps I'm missing something in all of this analysis, so I hope some of you comment and add your 2 cents!