Need A Boob-Based Buzz For A Few Bucks? Try The Stimulant

We try to bring you as much artsy smut that's as thought-provoking as it is libido-provoking, but we can't compete with The Stimulant. This website has an enormous amount of sexy and sassy imagery taken by some of the coolest photographers around. That being said, they want you to pay for this stuff.

The Stimulant offers one free gallery every week, but if you want to dive into their huge stash of photos, you have to pay $9 a month. Sure, that's not a bad price for porn, but this isn't straight-up hardcore porn—it's mostly softcore material in which intriguing content and composition are valued above all else (oh, and there are some pictures by Terry Richardson, too). This website strikes us as a seemingly limitless coffee table book, but what kind of book asks you to pay a monthly fee? What a curious and confusing drug The Stimulant is. Let's explore.

Photos: Don't expect to see a video section after this, because there ain't no moving pictures on The Stimulant. By my count, there are over 700 galleries on the website containing God knows how many photos by hundreds of photographers. Admittedly, there are many duplicate galleries, but still, I can't imagine how long it would take one person to sift through all of these pictures.

Content-wise, The Stimulant looks like a Franken-Tumblr. You get fashion pictorals mixed with pornstar portraits, moody nudes shot with Polaroids, amateur couples recording their sex lives with close-up shots of their genitals interacting, and every now and then you go, "Oh snap, I recognize that picture!" because it was used for some edgy ad campaign. Snark aside, I had (and am still having) a lot of fun browsing the archives and clicking random galleries.

Stimulant's greatest strength is the sheer quantity of material they have from different photographers of varying degrees of popularity. We don't know much about photography, but I recognized a few of my favorite names (Dave Naz, MERKLEY???, and Ellen Stagg, for example) and I'm in the process of learning new names and styles.

Accessibility: Unfortunately, The Stimulant isn't much help with my artistic education. The website feels very clean and simple, but that doesn't make it elegant; it makes it lazy.

The homepage shows the featured (free for non-members) gallery of the week, four members-only galleries (the beginning of the archives) beneath that, then a small story-based gallery section (more on this later), and finally, some search tools that let you browse the galleries by photographer or category.

The photographers are listed alphabetically, and clicking a name brings up every gallery they have; this is only helpful if you're looking for someone specific or feel like starting at the top and working your way down. You pretty much have to blindly click on a name to see what their work is like, and then, if you're interested in them, there is absolutely zero information available. Sometimes The Stimulant links to the photographer's webpage, sometimes not.

There are six categories: Female Nudes, Male Nudes, Couples, Experimental, Photojournalism, and Fetish. You can check multiple category boxes to cross-reference, which is nifty, but it seems like the dearth of tags causes a lot of overlap. That is, the same couple gallery can be found under Couples, Male Nudes, and Female Nudes. On a related note, there is no search bar. None. What's up with that?

Continuing this bummer train, you can only view galleries as a slideshow, and the pictures you're not currently looking at are represented by thumbnails that only show you a tiny, random section of the full picture; for example, you won't know if the next image in the slideshow is smutty or not because all you can see is a piece of a man's ankle.

Things like this make The Stimulant great for those who are high and want to see some trippy shit with probably nudity, but to me, it's seriously frustrating.

Other Awesome, Somewhat Unclassifiable Stuff: The Stimulant has four galleries each called "A Date with ___," and they're fucking adorable. You click through the slideshow and you get to pretend you're on a date with some girl—usually with sexy results. My favorite is "A Date with Amy," in which you play Amy's new boyfriend, and together you drive to the places that remind Amy of her ex and have sex with her at each of them. It's a tad creepy, but that's how I like it. I only wish there were more of these!

If The Stimulant were better organized and offered the user more pathways for finding material, then it would certainly be worth $9/month. As it stands, I'd advise you to keep clicking around Tumblr.

· The Stimulant (thestimulant.com)