Meet Benjamin Fredrickson, The Wedgie Artist

Benjamin Fredrickson's work is no stranger to the male body, or to subjects surrounding sexuality and fetish. He's explored hook-up culture, stigma surrounding HIV, and has seen his work heavily influenced by the physique pictorials of a bygone era. And now, he's obsessed with wedgies.

Cropping up over his Instagram feed over the the last few months, Fredrickson has taken to creating highly stylized portraits of mostly anonymous models sporting wedgies. Something was initially discovered while shooting an entirely different project, this new infatuation has exposed him to a new world.

Here, in his own words, Benjamin Fredrickson tells Out about his new Wedgie series, the accompanying zine -- which is the first of many he hopes, -- and the fetish he never knew existed.

Benjamin Fredrickson on his Wedgie series:

This project came about while working on a different photographic project in December 2019. I've been fascinated by the male form and more specifically the male butt for many years and have been celebrating it in my photographic work many years.

More recently I was interested in playing with different fabrics and textures against the flesh. During a shoot, as I was photographing a model, the fabric slipped between his butt cheeks and created a wedgie, I asked the model to pull on the underwear and the fabric caressed his butt in such a way that I found very erotic and found myself very turned on by it. I instantly knew that I wanted to explore this further. The more that I investigated the wedgie and began to share this project through social media, the more the wedgie-fetish community surfaced and began to reach out to me with so much interest and support. I must say that I'm filled with so much warmth to know how much support I've been shown with this project, and it's only been about 4 months since it began. The exciting part for me is that I just began and there is so much more for me to explore. I can't wait for the warmer weather so that I get outside and make more.

I feel that wedgies are a fetish for everyone -- most people wear underwear. With certain fetishes I feel they are not as easy to break into due to financial restrictions, such as buying latex and rubber gear, spending a lot of money. Wedgies are accessible to people that wear underwear, and that's pretty much anyone; all genders and it goes beyond sexuality. Wedgies tap into sexuality in an interesting way, bullying, humor, dominant, submissive, pleasure, pain and the erotic, the list goes on and on.

I've found that the global wedgie community is quite large and diverse and has a great far reaching presence on social media platforms. There are personal Instagram pages that are available to all and private accounts due to censorship. I've chatted with people that have been deleted even though the wedgie is not pornographic but the community standards prevent them from sharing their content.

The community is new to me but my experience had been positive. The people that I've come into contact have been so supportive of the work that I'm making and it's inspiring.

I remember as a kid getting a wedgie from my older brother, it was until recently that I began to look at it in an erotic way. I love how the fabric spreads the butt cheeks. It hides the butthole and there is something so hot about that to me. It's sexual without being explicitly sexual in a pornographic sense. You can't get kicked off of IG for posting wedgies -- I've only had one image reported and taken down --so it's a creative way to create and share erotic images with people.

This project inspired me to make my first zine. I ended up making 50 of them in a limited-edition run that I FedEx printed and they sold out in 24 hours.

I'm really excited about how this new project has made me see and create in new ways that I hadn't thought of before. It's challenged to work differently and because of that I want to share this project outside of social media.

Funny story with trying to make this zine. I went to FedEx and needed help setting up the files and when the young woman behind the counter opened up the files she said flat out "We can't print nudity." There was no explicitly sexual nudity just some bare butts oiled up with wedgies. I spoke to her manger and had them printed thankfully.

I originally began casting this with friends and people that I've worked with previously. Now I have an outpouring of model requests nationally and internationally form wedgie enthusiasts and people curious about wedgies. It's really amazing, I'm booked and busy and hope it stays that way. I'd love to focus full-time on being a wedgie artist so I'm putting that out in the universe.

It's been amazing. I plan to keep making limited run Wedgie zines and explore making other products. I'd love to have a gallery exhibition of my wedgie project too.

I wanted to create a wedgie that didn't always involve a physical being like another person's hand or arm that pulled the fabric in the traditional sense. So here I made a contraption so it's still controlled by another person pulling on the rope, but you can't see it. The dominant/submissive roles are still there, just aesthetically different. I also like the way the lines of the rope look in the frame of the photograph , uncluttered and simplified.

Benjamin Fredrickson, the artist.