Wikipedia's Greatest Sex Illustrator Is an Anonymous Legend: Seedfeeder

Take a look at the Wikipedia page for fisting. I'll wait.

OK. Now check out pegging. When you're done there, have a gander at gokkun; after that, deep throating; and then maybe mammary intercourse, frot, tribadism, and tea bag (sexual act).

Those with a taste for the kinky are encouraged to check out gonzo pornography, and those with a taste for the stinky might enjoy anilingus. Top, bottom, and versatile is there for gay men and adventurous straights, and cum shot—well, let's just say if you're a fan of Kris Jenner or Liza Minnelli, it might be right up your alley.

Keep clicking: On woman on top you can see a woman on top; on erotic lactation there are two women, standing side by side. Threesome presents an almanac of positions and combinations, unlike missionary position, which is pretty much the same, no matter how you illustrate it (unless of course it's anal missionary). Before you command-W, be sure to pass by deep-throating for some impressive acrobatics, and if you truly can't get enough, pop into doggy style on your way out.

You have just taken a partial tour of the oeuvre of Seedfeeder, Wikipedia's greatest artist of sex acts. Greatest retired artist of sex acts. The pseudonymous illustrator, working as a volunteer, has contributed 48 of drawings of various sex acts to 35 English-language articles on the free encyclopedia by my count (and dozens more international articles), including fingering, oral nipple stimulation, and something called the Viennese Oyster.

(To see unedited, NSFW versions of some of Seedfeeder's most notable works, see our gallery post here.)

The Best of Seedfeeder, Wikipedia's Greatest Sex Illustrator

Across Wikipedia, dozens of articles on sex--from missionary position to mammary intercourse--are… Read more

His style is unmistakable, and nearly as striking as his subject matter: Clean vector graphics, gradient colors, blank and ominous backgrounds. Seedfeeder has written that he was inspired by airline safety manuals, with which he shares a kind of calming sterility. Instead of inflating their life preservers during an emergency landing, Seedfeeder's placid crash-test dummies are engaged in coitus, but the point is the same: Airline brochures and the Wikipedia articles Seedfeeder chooses to illustrate are both here to teach you about what it's like when you get fucked.

The legend of Seedfeeder begins six years ago with an image called Semfac01.png, still available on Wikipedia. It depicts a facial: At the left of the frame, we see a white woman, face unsettlingly forlorn, covered in semen, still dripping from the erect penis of a black man, standing with his upper body out of frame. It's maybe a bit rough, as would characterize the early style of any master, but the hallmark's of Seedfeeder's work are there—the gentle light, the quiet characterizations. Seedfeed uploaded the PNG in early July 2008. Within days it was added^[1] to the Wikipedia page for "Facial (sex act)."

A month later, a Wikipedian with the handle Exxolon came calling, in a message titled "Bukkake image" left on Seedfeeder's now-archived talk page: "Hi - we could use an image on this article too. Any chance you could make one? Thanks." A few days after that: "Image request - Pearl necklace (sexuality)." And then: "Also Anal–oral sex." Another Wikipedian, 62 Misfit, chimed in: "Also Coprophilia."

On August 25, not even two months after his first image, Seedfeeder was awarded "The Graphic Designer's Barnstar." Wikipedia's greatest sex illustrator had arrived.

Over the next several years, Seedfeeder worked tirelessly, fielding requests for ever-more esoteric sex acts and batting away criticism from other Wikipedians on his talk page—a public forum that serves as the site's main mechanism for communications between editors. His supporters called him "top notch" and "the prodigal artist," showering him with Wikipedia's so-called "barnstar" awards, while his detractors said his work was needlessly explicit, or misogynistic, or—in the case of the original facial image, with its big black dick and abused-looking white woman—racist. Several times, he pronounced his retirement from the Wikipedia game, then came back shortly after and churned out more images.

Meanwhile, outside the insular Wikipedia community, a cultish fascination with Seedfeeder was budding. In 2009, a popular online-art newsletter called B3ta devoted a section to the the "particularly prolific contributor of sex-related drawings." The Polish magazine Przegląd used his anal-oral image on its cover in July 2010, and the next year, a popular Reddit thread dubbed him "Wikipedia's great artist." At around the same time, journalists, a grad student writing a research paper, and a company looking to hire Seedfeeder began littering his talk page with requests—from the looks of it, none of them were successful—and last year, several of his works were immortalized on a Cracked.com list called "The 6 Most Terrifying Sex Illustrations on Wikipedia."

Seedfeeder's skill as an illustrator is self-evident; his gifts as an artist eerily clear. But his celebrity and notoriety are at least as dependent on his work ethic—and his luck to have found an artistic milieu uniquely well-suited to his work. A Wikipedia editor named Flyer22, who has worked on several sex articles, explained to me that drawings or computer animated images of sex acts are more likely to be accepted than photos, and that may be why Seedfeeder was able plant his works on so many different pages. "Our readers," Flyer22 wrote via email, "Are less inclined to call such images 'porn' when they think of them as simply drawings, artistic paintings or as cartoons."^[2]

Even more importantly, Seedfeeder understands and is receptive to his audience. When an image featuring a black woman wearing an engagement ring and white man with no ring was pulled down from the Wikipedia article on fellatio after complaints that it enforced "negative stereotypes of promiscuity in African-American females," Seedfeeder was there with another, less polarizing picture of a white couple to replace it. That interracial blow job, like several other of his works, is now absent from the English-language site, relegated to international backwaters like the Belarusian Wikipedia and Luxembourg Wiktionary.^[3]

Though Flyer22 sang the praises of Seedfeeder's drawings as educational tools, she was reluctant to acknowledge any purely aesthetic value. "I don't necessarily see what is aesthetically pleasing about them, except that some people find pornography aesthetically pleasing," she wrote. "Or, in the case that his images are of white people, some people have a prejudice there and would prefer to look at white people."

I turned to Paddy Johnson, a longtime art critic who edits the blog Art F City. Because Seedfeeder's illustrations aren't presented as art qua art, she declined to evaluate them as such, but did offer some insights and compliments about the images' composition. For one, they are anatomically correct: heads fit on bodies, appendages are appropriately sized, and "use of perspective is rendered effectively." A figure-drawing teacher would be impressed.

There's also that distinctive, artificial flatness. In 2009, Seedfeeder wrote on his talk page that he creates his illustrations using a Wacom tablet and Adobe Photoshop, and Johnson guessed that he achieves the look through use of a particular filter. "It appears to be a filter that lowers the pixel count, creating obvious gradients. Artists use these filters too," Johnson wrote in an email, citing the works of artist Alex Brown.

In particular, she praised an image uploaded in 2011 called Wiki-POV-pornography, which depicts a woman going down on a man as he films her with a camcorder slung over his shoulder. Looming in the background, we see what the camera sees: a tight shot of the woman looking up; the man's penis in veiny detail. "It's the most complicated image of the lot," Johnson wrote, "And does a good job monumentalizing the blow job."

Typically, Seedfeeder's characters have sex in a void. In Wiki-POV-pornography, they have a purpose: they are making a porno. We know this because the man is holding a camera. The use of props to create context and the simultaneous presentation of multiple perspectives make this the most ambitious work in the Seedfeeder canon, and if you think about it for too long, it almost starts to feel like a meta-commentary on his own illustrations or the porn they so closely resemble. Is the fellated cameraman a stand-in for the artist? The viewer? Both? If you'll indulge a fanciful comparison, it recalls a similarly monumental image by another master at the top of his game: Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas.

But who is Seedfeeder? The interview request I left on his talk page went either unseen or ignored, and the only information I've been able to glean about him comes from his communications with other editors, archived versions of his user page, and a brief FAQ. We know he's a heterosexual male, and that he's more interested in drawing women than he is in men. We know he's "the product of an interracial union" and that, as of 2012, he doesn't display his work online outside Wikipedia. He seems to have an interest in a particular brand of tequila. We know he's a native English speaker, and he is probably a mechanical engineer by profession. By his own admission, he's not a professional artist, but an "avid amateur."

Beyond that, concrete details are scant, but from his collected writings, a hazy picture emerges. Seedfeeder, like many Wikipedians, seems to have an almost religious devotion to what diehards tend to call "the project," coupled with a disillusionment about what he sees as a puritanical regard for sex and other controversial topics from his fellow editors. He is strident about his principles, and when sensitive issues come up—especially involving race or gender—he is dismissive and salty.

In 2008, a person commenting from an anonymous IP address wrote that Seedfeeder's facial illustration "contains what can be perceived as rape" and that it "could be perceived as racial stereotyping by the image of a dark skinned male ejaculating on a light skinned female." He responded disdainfully (emphasis mine):

As drawn, the female in the facial picture has a neutral facial expression, this was done intentionally. Facials are viewed as a pleasurable and harmless activity by some... while percieved as a hostile perverted act by others. The image was created to strike a balance between the two opposing points of view. The fact that the subject is maintaining eye contact and is not being physically restrained in any manner, should indicate some degree of willingness. As for the interracial aspect... the prejudices and concerns of the small-minded do not concern me.

Several years later, in a conversation with another user who had edited one of his images, Seedfeeder displayed reverential deference to Wikipedia's Creative Commons philosophy while lamenting that surrendering the fate of his work to the community led to censorship and derivatives that were "lacking in artistic ability":

I have uploaded the illustrations I have created with the full understanding that they may be altered or manipulated by fellow wiki editors. My "blessing" is not required. Though admittedly, to date, I have found derivatives of my work either to be lacking in artistic ability, or needless croppings to suit a particular POV agenda.

Seedfeeder's conflicted ideas about Wikipedia—this place would be beautiful, if only there weren't so many prudes, hacks, and cretins—are best summed up in a mission statement he published to his user page in 2008 (sic throughout):

What I feel to be Wikipedia's greatest asset, is viewed by many to be its greatest weakness; that the project is not censored and encompasses the entire human experience. For the most part wiki works. Where it breaks down is when censorship and POV rear their ugly heads.

Many Wikipedians may find the images I produce to be offensive, for which I apologize in advance. But there is indeed method to the madness. Like it or not, "distasteful" topics such as: sex, violence, and war make up a large portion of human existence. As a whole, we are very visual beings. Nothing makes a subject/event more real than visually experincing it. That is a simple truth. For those who would say "the discription is enough...", I have to ask: "Is it really?". Would you be completely satisfied with a description of the Eifel Tower e, the Grand Canyon or the Statue of Liberty? Think before you censor.

I first came across Seedfeeder after my editor made fun of me for not knowing what "pegging" meant. It's easy to imagine his fans in a similar situation, stumbling across, say, this double penetration image, and needing to know more. That's pretty much how it went for Joshua Haddow, a UK-based journalist and documentarian who tried to contact the mysterious artist in 2012. "The illustrations had this amazing appeal of running the line between diagrammatical, like something out of a biology textbook, and basically purposefully erotic in style," Haddow told me via email of his first encounter. "I mean, they're approved by the community to feature as part of educational articles on Wikipedia. However, if you look at the details, particularly some of the less vanilla positions—I'm thinking bukkake, gangbangs, frotting, that kind of thing—you can clearly see influence from pornography."

It's true: if you had a only a selfless, academic interest in teaching readers about the mechanics of fucking, why would you give your models perfectly plucked pubes, attractive physiques, and evocative o-faces? Seedfeeder's spiel about images of famous landmarks only rings true because he's talking this Eiffel Tower, not that one. Why does the bukkake article even need an illustration, much less one that looks like a still from a violent cartoon porno? The text description—"a sex act portrayed in pornographic films, in which several men ejaculate on a woman, or another man"—is more than enough to get the point across, and xHamster is right there if you're truly that much more of a visual learner.

But Seedfeeder insists he isn't interested in getting people off. When one editor asked him to illustrate a straight couple engaged in stand-up 69, closing the request with "I'd really like to see that," he replied:

I typically create illustrations (by request) for specific articles, not for a specific sexual act. While I have no doubt that you would "really like to see that", it doesn't appear to be a subject that is in any great demand. Though I have created other illustrations that could be applied to the 69 (sex position), I'm not sure how your new request would provide anymore knowledge or enlightenment to the relevant articles. Thanks

Still, controversy about explicitness and sexual power dynamics persisted throughout his career, as much as the arguments of a few anonymous people about a picture of a group of men masturbating onto a woman can be called controversy. That original, sad facial image, for instance, was at one point terribly edited to make the giver a white guy, and now sits near the bottom—in a section labeled "criticisms"—of the article it once topped. Much like the fellatio page, the facial article now features another, friendlier Seedfeeder image, in which the recipient smiles widely and wipes semen from her eyebrow.

For now, Seedfeeder's story ends with an image, too. In 2012, after several false alarms and complaints about Wikipedia's decision-making process, he exited the site for good, exhausted, leaving an illustration called Wiki-so-long.png as a final communiqué. One of only two works that doesn't expressly address sex, it features a freckled Asian woman blowing a seductive goodbye kiss to the camera, fingers extended like five stubby phalli. Below it, on a user page that designates the artist as officially retired, lies what reads like a cryptic, nerdy cunnilingus joke: "So long, and thanks for all the fish."

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^[1] The anonymous IP address that first added Seedfeeder's work to the page for Facial has very few other edits. One of them is to Seedfeeder's own collection of work on his profile page, indicating that Seedfeeder possibly, even likely, hoisted himself onto the Wikipedia sex-illustration stage.

^[2] The story of an exhibitionist Wikipedia editor named Jiffman, whose long battle to place a self-sucking self-portrait at the top of autofellatio page was documented by Jack Stuef in a piece for BuzzFeed, shows how difficult placing an explicit photograph can be.

The Epic Battle For Wikipedia's Autofellatio Page

In the underbelly of Wikipedia is an exhibitionist subculture dedicated to one thing: Ensuring that … Read more buzzfeed.​com

^[3] A bizarre side note to the saga of the fellatio image appears to involve a cameo from Elliot Rodger, the mens' rights-obsessed shooter who killed six UCSB students earlier this year. An entry on the article's talk page details an instance last year in which a rogue editor named ElliotR1 removed a photo that had temporarily replaced Seedfeeder's illustration:

No One Close to Elliot Rodger Seems Surprised He Turned to Murder

Yesterday's New York Times had a long story about misogynist spree killer Elliot Rodger, with… Read more

The actual answer to this is rather more surprising. It turns out that Elliot Rodger, who recently went on a stabbing and shooting spree in Isla Vista lately that left six dead, started a successful drive with his account (User:ElliotR1, who began by editing his father's article, and is the precise account name used by Rodger on OKcupid[1]) to remove the image on February 20 2013 with this edit. After threats and then the reality of a block to his account for trying to do the same sort of removal five times at footjob, ElliotR1 disappeared from the scene, but an IP filed an edit request on March 2 2013 for the same action.

It's true that Rodger used the same handle on OKCupid, and a perusal of ElliotR1's contribution history reveals that the first edit made by the owner of the account was the removal of an image from the article on the British journalist George Rodger, Elliot Rodger's grandfather. (The editor on the talk page incorrectly suggests George is Elliot's father.)

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