June 1, 2012

Support Kink.Com LIVE Cam Models

With love and solidarity with the Kink.Com cam models, I am reposting this open letter.

I was a cam model with Kink.Com back when they first started the cams back when they literally chained us to the bed. The models at KinkLive have to be on set 1 hour prior to their show time and they are expected to act as ambassadors of the Kink.Com brand when they are on camera. The models do NOT have control of the ban button and have to request that an abusive chat member be put on a time out or banned from the room. The discretion is left to the model handlers. The models will be expected to engage in high level BDSM activity during chat. This includes (but not limited to) electricity, corporal punishment, hot wax, intense clamps, bondage, and more.

Web camming does not have a guaranteed rate but the models are working from home, in charge of their own BAN button, likely to receive a better % show cut payout, and set their own hours. The Kink.Com Live cams now require that a model be UNCOMPENSATED for her early arrival, must remain for the entirety of the show,  must act as an enthusiastic brand ambassador at all times while their live image is broadcasted freely on the website UNCOMPENSATED, and be prepared for a member base that expects a higher level of pain and intense activity than other web cam websites.

Support Kink.Com LIVE models. Tell Kink.Com what you think on their forums (free registration) or email them.  Let Kink.Com know that good faith bargaining, professional workplaces, and fair rates are important for your pornography viewing. Here’s a note from Maxine Holloway:

This past month a severe pay cut was given to the women who work at KinkLive.com. They needed to save money and they did it by taking it from the models. Instead of staying quiet and taking what they were willing to give us for our work – we united, stood up for ourselves and are taking action to get what we deserve.

During this process I was let go from the KinkLive department.

If you care about worker’s rights, specifically sex worker’s rights, please repost this letter far and wide.

-Maxine Holloway

* * * * * * *

Kink Live Models
1800 Mission St
San Francisco, CA 94110

May 16, 2012

Peter Acworth, Founder/CEO
Jessie Lee, VP Talent
John Sander,  VP Marketing
Melinda Perales, VP Human Resources
Tim Lewis, VP Head of Production
Sheila Gunn, Kink Live
Kink.com
1800 Mission St
San Francisco, CA 94110

Dear Mr. Peter Acworth and kink.com executives,

This is a letter from the models who work regularly at the KinkLive.com website. SWOP (Sex Worker’s Outreach Project) is sending this letter on our behalf. There have been some very recent policy alterations within the KL department that are having dramatic negative effects on the models and the department as a whole.

These changes came very abruptly and seem to conflict with the Kink.com Values Statement, Business Practices and Treatment of Models Policy, which seems to be alive and thriving in other departments in the company.  We have all been very proud to work for a BDSM company that so explicitly states the rights of models. These are a few lines from the Kink.com Values & Business Practices that we feel have been disregarded within the KL Department:

-We operate with honesty and integrity.
-We treat one another with professionalism and respect.
-We encourage candid, direct feedback.
-Models are given explicit rights.
-Directors are given explicit rules.
-Models are well paid and treated as professionals.
-Kink.com has an unusually low turnover of employees.
-Kink.com has a reputation in the adult entertainment industry for respectful and fair treatment of models.

As KinkLive models, we work to uphold these values and trust that our company does as well.  The recent changes have shaken that trust.

The changes occurring in the KinkLive department include withdrawing our flat rate and instilling a commission-only earning system, which makes our pay-out percentage rate much lower than other competitive cam sites.  This is particularly alarming because we are expected to do so much more with our bodies than models on other sites: bondage, electricity, implements, fucking machines, pain endurance, humiliation, domination, etc. Plus we act as live advertising and website “tour guides” when people are browsing the Kink.com site to possibly purchase a membership or shoot.

Under the new payment system many models will no longer be able to earn a living wage working for KinkLive.  We love our job and do not want to be forced into leaving the company to seek gainful employment elsewhere.  Although many of us shoot content for various Kink sites, as well as other porn companies, KinkLive provides steady, consistent work that keeps many of us afloat.  We would regret losing the opportunity to have an interesting and challenging job that forms the backbone of our income.  We also do not wish to jeopardize our ability to shoot content for other Kink sites; it is KinkLive that we are taking issue with, not Kink.com as a whole.

Furthermore, we are frustrated by the lack of transparency surrounding the change in policy. There was not an official announcement from KinkLive to its models about the new rates until May 7th, well after certain models had already had their wages altered by the new system. Some models were only informed through other models with no information coming from staff at all. Various models were given contradictory information regarding the new payments, making it difficult for us to determine exactly what our wages are.

The email sent to us on May 7th states, “The new pay structure is effective for most models on June 1, 2012”.  Not only were we informed of the change less than a month before the date it becomes effective, we also are not being told which models are included in “most models”, or what is happening to those of us not included in this oblique majority.  We understand that KL is going through “growing-pains” but the way this was handled came off as very unprofessional and disrespectful.

Since this department has been “operating at a loss for two years” (from the email just sent from KL on 5/7/12) it seems that some advance warning would have been a great way to demonstrate the fact that “Kink.com has a reputation in the adult entertainment industry for respectful and fair treatment of models.”  Now we are left with dozens of women who have had their monthly income severely or completely cut without any notice. Honesty and integrity about this issue could have prepared us to make financial changes in advance of the new policies. Prior communication would also have fostered cooperation with us to assist in promotion, increase in revenue for the KinkLive department and prepared us for this change in policy.

Another new development at KL is the restructuring of the rules for public chat to allow more explicit acts in the free chatroom.  These new guidelines originally were not laid out for the models, or even mentioned by the staff to the group as a whole with any clarity. Word of this spread by mouth and even by Kink.com members. Whether or not this is a positive change, we as models need to be told clearly what alterations are being made to our shows.

In closing:  We, the undersigned models of KinkLive.com, are not satisfied with the new payment system and the ways in which the company has brought it to our attention.  We ask to move forward on one of the following options:

1.  KinkLive will reinstate the former payment system of  a minimum payment per cam show for all models.

2.  KinkLive and the models of the site will negotiate a commission-based percentage payment system that will make working for KinkLive viable for all models while making KinkLive a profitable department.

Regardless of the outcome of this situation, we wish to be kept informed of decisions pertaining to our jobs and to be treated with professionalism and respect.

Thank you, Mr. Acworth, for taking the time to hear our grievances.

We designate a SWOP  representative and contact person for this matter. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
The Kink Live Models
*Specific names have been left off of this letter for fear of losing current and future employment with kink.com

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May 18, 2012

A Slave’s Journey: The Training Of O

Julie Night outside the armory

Julie Night leaves the ordinary world before entering The Armory As Underworld

“The Hero’s Journey” is a pretty standard narrative structure. It is also known as the monomyth or the underlining, cross-cultural structure of how we tell certain stories. There’s a lot about Joseph Campbell that is grossly overblown but it is an incredibly helpful model for understanding stories and why we tell them. When it comes to mythology of this nature, we think of the grand epic poems like The Iliad and The Odyssey or The Wizard Of Oz or Star Wars. We don’t really think of porn as ever stepping into the territory of mythology despite the fact that sex is fucking epic and we inextricable to the human and personal saga.

There was a time when The Training Of O was a hardcore, XXX, BDSM manifestation of the hero’s journey. Given that it’s about BDSM and leather sex, we’ll call it the slave’s journey because in this instance it plays out to similar ends. A lot of great work has been done on the website and I am not alleging that this is a list of “the best” TTOO shoots. I have no idea what “the best” would be. I would say that out of what I’ve viewed, these would be the shoots that best exemplified the hero’s journey and took on an ethereal quality where it was evident you were watching something different than your average porn.

In contrast, I would say that content currently being produced on TTOO under a new director is something more a “Slut Soldier’s Bootcamp.” It’s infinitely less Jungian and much more military in nature. Thing of it is, even during Mogul’s tenure the creative winds changed direction and that alone indicates a kind of intellectual and artistic merit. If it were just 4 days of a chick being beaten and fucked, it would look and feel exactly the same ESPECIALLY under the same director. Even someone without film training can pick up on the changing flow of production. In the case of TTOO, members debate to varying degrees of civility the evolution of the website and its evolution over time and leadership.

What is the slave’s journey and how is it composed?

1. Setting as character

The above shots are from Julie Night’s 4 Day Training Of O. The shoot opens with Julie in street clothes on Mission in front of the imposing Armory. Kink.Com has not always been housed in the former House of War. In fact, TTOO came about as Kink was in the process of acquiring the Armory. Bobbi Starr, now a director at Kink.Com, was the first slave to be trained and her shoot is the pilot of the series. You can see all of the power and potential of the shoot to come but in retrospect it is missing a member of the training staff: the armory itself.

In a “hero’s journey” the setting is vital to the story. We have to establish that the protagonist has exited the ordinary world and has gone somewhere new where the rules don’t follow a familiar logic. Alice must go to Wonderland for her coming of age and Dorothy travels to the Oz. The setting is full of strange characters who may be friends, enemies, or an ambivalent mix of the two but moreover the setting itself somehow breathes with its own energy and intentions. The landscape of the journey is a teacher just as much as its occupants. It is a reminder that who we are is highly contingent upon our context.

The start of this training really nails the departure from the “ordinary world.” Julie Night, a seemingly ordinary girl, walks up to the giant building and almost like magic the massive door rolls open. The exterior is bright and brilliant, the interior is dark and dank. Waiting just on the inside is our host, James Mogul, wearing all black and waiting for her on the other side of the threshold. Even though it’s just a dramatic establishing shot, it communicates a lot. We get to see Julie Night take in the darkness in front of her, accept it, and cross into it. Watching the door roll down slowly to seal her inside the belly of the beast with James as a guide makes the scene intense from the get-go. We know we’ve left the ordinary world and we’re following her as she goes to the underworld.

 

When you’re looking at 5 days in the Armory-the first two dedicated to active training, a break, and then the last two for second half of the training-and full days of diving deep into some crazy ass BDSM, you’ve moved into total consciousness altering territory. People pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to have this kind of experience at spiritual retreats, martial arts training, etc. When you’re holding the space that way for 5 days, you aren’t just two models. You are forging a mutual reality and little by little the cultural programming you came from starts to feel like a memory and you are endowed with new logic and reason. It’s behavior modification. The hero’s journey is something we not only use to frame stories, it’s how we frame our own life experiences and we often seek out opportunities to shatter our egos in search of a greater personal truth and relationship to the world.

Claustrophobia is the the focus of the training and because of some interesting editing and shot composition, what James does in the immediacy of the scene’s actions is flattered by the way the space of the armory is interacting with her as well. We make our own monsters and both James and The Armory are like chameleons of fear always changing their color to match the interior of her phobia.

The wooden box is now a cliche on the Kink.Com website but in this early manifestation it is endowed with incredible power. At first, it is the box of the armory with the one cutaway entrance and the rolling gate. Then it is the the claustrophobic dark boxy boiler room and the one spotlight directed on her face. A box over her head with a window. Perception and framing are visual motifs as well as tangible manifestations of fear. It’s not just the Mogul is putting her in boxes, the rooms are boxing her in and so is the camera–so is our gaze.

2. Mogul as a trickster guide.

James Mogul is definitely the dominant in the situation but he has a kind of humility the re-positions not only his place in the hierarchy but the whole hierarchy itself. He’s in charge of the scene in front of us but he’s a part of something bigger himself. Sometimes he is the sadistic psychologist, other times like an orderly who has read over an asylum inmate’s case notes, or perhaps a conductor in an orchestra of pain. His personal kick is a devoted slave who will suffer beautifully for him. Whatever his kick might be, he’s quite bound to something. “We all answer to someone…” Desire humbles us all. It’s one of those physical reactions we have no power over experiencing. Whether or not we can act on a desire reveals our privilege but feeling that wave of desire wash over you is  reminder that your ego is not always in the driver’s seat. Human nature is bigger than our conscious mind can handle.

The TTOO has these moments where the slave is bound, beaten, and being fucked and still manages to push one of his buttons with her eyes, tone of voice, or understanding of what is transpiring between them and you can see his cock get hard in his pants. There are times when his face takes on an appreciative smile or he whispers something to her that is beyond our earshot. The 4th wall of porn is momentarily and deliberately shut down because he was not addressing us, the audience. He was speaking just to her.

3. Descent Into The Underworld, The Slave’s Journey

The TTOO is introduced with glass shattering. The shattering of the ego and the slave identity that is built up can be seen in stages that really reflect the monomyth. There is a rapid crossover from the known world into the unknown world of the Armory and the return to the known world is often signified with a return of “normal” privileges. The model will often be dressed in lingerie or fetish clothing, the scenes are more traditionally sexual in nature, and the confidence of the woman going through the acts is high lighted often by a brighter room that is slightly less stark than it was at the beginning.

The training of Sabrina Fox is a wonderful depiction of this. Much like Julie Night, Fox puts in earnest and good faith effort into transparency and articulation. Julie Night is wildly successful in her phobias and tribulations but Sabrina certainly has her struggles particularly in Day Two. The physical exertion leads to her becoming ill but she recovers and returns to the training. At 28 minutes into the video we can see her come to the edge of a full on panic. With a hood over her head and buckets filled with water over a large bamboo beam, she still steps up onto a block to balance them under incredible stress.

Those instances are almost like the cycle happening in a moment. It’s no longer just an ordinary physical act. How often do we balance unstable weight on our shoulders in the darkness? When does it cross the threshold and become endowed with greater meaning? There’s a period of time where it is the dealth/rebirth mark. Sabrina sobs into the hood and just a hair away from everything coming to a sudden end, Mogul compels the camera closer and has Sabrina remain in that claustrophobic tomb of a moment before unveiling the hood.

There on the other side, he puts out his hand to catch her tears from the catharsis which is an incredible gesture and one much unlike any seen in later shoots, Mogul or no Mogul. Maybe no one else needed to have their tears held in the hand of their trainer the way that Fox did that day. Either way, he allows for the moment to overwhelm her into a form of transformation before we see her face change and resurface for the next bout of training and the next set of skills to be learned.

The 3rd day is often very intense because it is the halfway mark. This is when pain and protocol are more smoothly integrated into the subject’s sexuality rather than being practiced in isolation. (Wax-on, wax-off into a smooth martial arts skill, if you will.) It’s also when more warmth and color start to enter the shoot. The model slowly earns more clothing, the settings become a little lighter, and a unique relationship between the trainer and the trainee starts to become forged. The 4th day is about showcasing the prize. It’s like the return to more traditional porn, as well, although far from being vanilla.

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May 7, 2012

Musings On Farmhouse Conference 2

From the Archives of Mayhem, photo by Sleek Images

I am just home from a preternaturally awesome conference in Los Angeles, CA called Farmhouse. I’ve been to a lot of conferences and as a whole, I tend to enjoy them although the exhaust me. MomentemCon in Washington D.C. was a marvelous affair and I think I shall always file it as my first big family reunion of sex positive feminism and its cousins, second cousins, in-laws, and maybe even a few party crashers, too. I learned a lot and had many a tremendous moment and I was also very much in my comfort bubble.

One of the reasons why I agreed to speak at this crazy little thing called Farmhouse was because it wasn’t but it sounded like a cool idea that I could get behind. I wanted to meet the kind of person who looks out at their backyard in Hollywood, CA with a massive avocado tree casting a fruitful canopy across the space and could see a bunch of people getting together to break down walls and rocks in their brains at a conference. At the same time, I didn’t really think I fit into a very tech-centric conference in Los Angeles. That’s my home town and one that I left because I never felt like I belonged in it. I was intimidated by speaking with a tech satellite event and tangled complicated knots about coming back to old haunts of social and cultural incompetency.

I’ve put a lot of personal work into not running away from things like that. Anxiety is a motherfucker and L.A. gives me a lot of it. That’s the place that civilized me, by and large, produced those early fundamental experiential moments that are etched so indelibly into your brain you take them utterly for granted. Moreover, I literally did grow up in L.A. underneath two large avocado trees that were very likely cross-pollinated over the century they have grown in such a relatively close proximity quite accessible by the L.A. public transit system. These were ideas that ran through my head as I rode a train from Oakland to L.A. Union Station over the course of 12 hours.

Farmhouse was the best conference I think I’ve ever been to and the realization of this hit me in one of those rare and precious times where happiness is a full body experience. Everyone filters the world into something we can navigate. Asking what “reality” looks like is just like asking what the internet looks like. The way the internet looks and interacts with you has a lot to do with with what you’re running, the hardware and the software and the experiences both have had since they first powered on and started to take a look at this universe that humans have created. If you’re a running a committed and positive, “I’m going to get something personally valuable out of this experience,” personal web browser, you’re going to see that which is personally valuable. Part of confronting my anxiety issues was recognizing the kind of project I was going to do and making conscious software decisions that would help facilitate my optimum user experience. I made a choice to stay committed to positivity and listening to people and staying as open as possible to their ideas without letting my very unhelpful anxiety corrupt my network and limit my experience.

The theme of the conference was mapping. The theme of the people was really about navigating your own way. Not one of the speakers got up and laid down concrete directions on how to get from Point A to Point B. No one recited a recipe. Somehow, everyone (and hopefully me) managed to convey a profound truth about navigation. An L.A. tech scene when everyone knows that it’s based in Silicon Valley, why a 5 year old girl in Haiti after the earthquake put in substantial work to acquire money through begging from strangers to ride a bicycle, anarchy on Twitter and how mapping can be hostile to the territory, why Skid Row isn’t just a few street blocks you can identify with a pin, getting across the country powered by absurdism, emerging collective hacker spaces and constructing a network of collaboration, literally inventing a new way to leave planet earth and see the stars, how a theory by Einstein pushed someone as a performance artist, and how the map to invention really is like building a Rube Goldberg Machine.

Thing of it is, when I got up and talked about how the gender map actually hinders our navigation of the world and ourselves and threw in a few nuggets about the queer porn revolution, my whole universe did something funny. It got bigger and smaller at the same time. When your topic is sexuality and when you do make explicit hardcore pornography, you get cordoned off from pretty much everything. In the field we call it the sex ghetto. It’s hard to get your message out when it will always be caught in the filter . The collective reality of our times says that everything I make and do is simultaneously the root of all evil and also devoid of meaning.

Especially because I just had a front end collision with the walls of my work when Visa threw down the hammer or processing credit card payments to the website I run with my partner because there were photographs of me putting rosaries in my vagina. The fact that those photos were constructed for a narrative project on what masturbation can mean to an individual and a visual exploration of the joy I experience during self pleasure and the way that religion has influenced it  rather than something reckless. The photos were actually taken for an art project and my partner and I did make the conscious decision to post them in the context of a porn website but our porn website also covered our personal video and photos of Occupy Oakland and its horrific early raid. Part of my porn site mission is about finding my way to authentic and unrepressed sexuality and that means not mimicking the sexuality of someone else. Politics, religion, poetry, music, movies, and other “non-sexual” things are an indelible part of that and I do not consider my rosary pictures of porn site journalism of Occupy to be belittling these ideas. My whole world is in every single orgasm I’ve ever had in my life.

There was a moment where I felt stupid and terribly small for not getting out there and just busting out my deeply passionate manifesto of how committing social suicide by doing porn and destroying my reputation as a reliable citizen in impeccable social standing is why I came to understand that it is imperative that I chase down every single one of my dreams. I didn’t know it when I did it at the time but I did do it and it was exactly what I was supposed to do. Society is never going to let me back into it. Thing of it is, where can you really go in life if you frame what you’re capable of doing by what anyone will let you accomplish. There is no Google Map for your dreams.

The idea of getting off the map and guiding yourself through dedicated and disciplined self-awareness was heavy on my mind not just because of the conference but because of the challenge being told I could not post pictures on my website because this giant machine with way more direct power over my life said that I couldn’t. The idea of not posting those pictures was never really an option in either my mind or Ned’s and he had the brilliant idea of how to address the situation by re-mapping the website. This was a concurrent event and when I left for the conference it was still a little shaky as to whether or not the new map was stable and whether this banner of overcoming an pretty big obstacle was still standing.

Given that my life has been about wrestling with this problem, I did want to talk about it and I did not do so up at the microphone. In the past, that moment right there would sink me. All I would see is yet another time in my life when I didn’t get up and go with the fire in my belly and speak my present truth. The name of my website in that story is rather irrelevant to what I wanted to share about censorship. Then this crazy thing happened: all kinds of people came up to me to talk and not a single person was anywhere near being inappropriate and genuinely open and excited for an opportunity to come and talk to me about their experiences with gender and porn and the boxes we take for granted that don’t really exist at all.

I didn’t miss my opportunity at all. In those awesome moments of connection I felt as though I pulled myself from what would have otherwise been an emotional nosedive.  On top of this, I was checking in with the website pleased to know that things were still standing and that my community is infinitely bigger than the “sex ghetto” because I am connected to everyone that I don’t know. One of the speakers towards the end of the night, Nova Han, started talking about the bee theory which, whether or not it really was Einstein’s theory or not, it a brilliant thought experiment for connection via action.

Boom. There it was. There it fucking was. This guy, Shane Becker, is living his life independently of me and doing his thing. He moves to Los Angeles and he moves into this cool house with a great backyard and this giant avocado tree and he envisions a bunch of people getting together and trying to figure out, essentially, what it means to do your human thing. Most people just look out their window and see their property. He gets this idea and because life is weird and I wind up getting an email to come down and take part in this plan. But before I shook his hand for the first the time and before we were connected through another guy out there in the world doing his thing and talked through email, we were already connected. Dreams, bees, and avocado trees–boom.

I actually had to go walk for several miles which I accomplished at swift pace because it felt impossible to verbalize just how enormously big and small everything felt all at once. When I had that moment I was stone cold sober but I tripping balls just listening to people and feeling suddenly porous to the world. This kept growing exponentially because other people were hitting a similar peak for a lot of the same reasons. The conversations were electric and it felt as though the wifi signal had gotten into my brain and I could navigate all kinds of ideas at once.

It’s a hard thing to verbalize and despite moving beyond repression and running around and talking to people about avocados, man, and this wifi in my brain because those are really feeble and rudimentary tools for conveying how profound it is to tap into those energetic moments when you’re having a peak emotional experience.  Those moments are so important to have and I utterly bask in them. They are the emotional nutrition to build the muscles of progress. The problem is every attempt to convey that is just a metaphor. Rather than likely confusing people in a ridiculous attempt to stuff an experience like that into rhetoric and ascending into a hypermania, I headed to the bar quite deliberately so that I could actually reign things back into just being happy enough to smile, laugh, hug, and keep coming back to the marvel that it occurred at all. I can maintain the pace of the connection better (though still far from skilled) if I’m hugging people and expressing deep gratitude for the role they’re playing in this full bodied happiness I’m experiencing than if I suddenly rope them into editing what is, effectively, something like 100 You Tube videos playing in my head all at once.

I wish I could construct a map for why this was the best time I’ve ever had a conference but there are no concrete plot points I can relay to you. An abundance of what I experienced was about what I willfully wanted to experience but that’s not the whole story either. The speaker lineup was really fantastic and what stood out to me was the fact that no one gave a “presentation” so much as they really spoke with passion and conviction. The trite way to say that is “from the heart.” I’m accustomed to conferences where I learn something quantitative and measurable. A fact, a skill, a technique gets passed on and I’m grateful for every single teacher I’ve encountered on my way. This conference taught me things I cannot effectively measure or define for any of you.

The power and gratitude I felt towards every single person I interacted with was not about fetishizing them so much as feeling awe in the face of the immensity of human networking. I guess that’s what the word namaste might be signifying, to greet the preternatural potential of every individual on earth, to act with love for all the people. That word is a great meditation for pausing for a moment and willfully and consciously suspend the instinct of your ego to interpret their humanity before they’ve begun expressing it to you and to exit an engagement by reaffirming that we really are all in this life thing together and not to retreat from fierce compassion.

It’s just a conference but it was also glimpse at the meta and every glimpse can be distilled into rocket fuel. The coolest part of making rocket fuel out of a most excellent experience with people is using it and projecting that energy forward into something.

Here I am at the end of another long read, already over 2,300 words. I’ve tried to convey something I felt at a conference listening to people from totally different fields, some of which they invented for themselves, but every one of them being innovated and resolutely reverent of the human experience and it shook me to the core. My writing here is in one way a total failure because they cannot have transported you there to how I experienced the conference. I do know of someone who can do a much better job of expressing that reverence. What I should have done is just shared this video of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and my wishes that everyone in the world could experience it and to keep working towards making it more and more possible for people to do so in the ways that I have the tools and resources to do.

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May 5, 2012

Sleep Sex

I’m not a morning person. That’s why I told my partner Ned to either come on me before heading off to work in the morning or to physically initiate sex. Ned prefers that I put in a morning sex OK the night beforehand. I tell him to err on the side of “initiate sex” and accept that I’ll tell him to sod off if it’s really not OK. Our relationship is such that those are my boundaries with him. We’ve jumped 30 foot waterfalls, we lived in a tent for a month during a hurricane season, we have a 2 year old mastiff/lab puppy we’ve raised together from the time when she could fit in my arms. I’m happy to negotiate and put in a morning sex request the night prior (like a wakeup call, I dig) but the whole thing of it is I’m not a morning person. You don’t want to ask me anything in the morning. The person you need to be asking is my cunt.

If you rouse me from slumber and demand communication my gut impulse is to swear at you and make the thing that is waking me up go away. The time when I’ve been woken is not a time for questions. I have no answers. I can dig into the action oriented part of my brain and do something. You can make my body respond, my body will be vaguely aware of the context, but my conscious mind will flicker in and out and it will hate you every single step of the way.

In my bed at home and with the familiar context of my partner’s touch, smell, and environmental fingerprint I have very seamless boundaries and so his touch is very welcome. This is also because I’m good (to a fault) at informing him when touch is not welcome and that I’ll be walking the dog through the neighborhood for a few hours or so. Having a solid no boundary is a key component to the “go ahead and start having sex with me in the morning when I’m still out cold” part of a sex life. At the very least, it’s something to talk about and to get that there are some instinctive reactions to interrupted sleep that humans have. For all of my best intentions, you might get clocked in the head. It’s a risk. And if that happened I might be very sad you didn’t attempt again the next day in spite of having been clocked.

It’s not as though we’ve never been injured because of the other. Not in a domestic violence way, not in a ritualistic sex S/M thing, either. It’s purely the byproduct of going out on a lot of outings to the middle of nowhere with one another, often. The glorious wear and tear of intimacy is strewn on our bodies. Some scars have hilarious stories. My right thumb now has a circlular abrasion scar like a small silvered moon from when I was holding a Hitachi Magic Wand against his cock while getting him off with it and the vibrator head took off a layer of skin on my thumb. This is why you use lube and remain aware of whether or not you are sustaining an open abrasion in the process of getting your partner off. Word to the wise. But still, there is comfort and a long history of good faith interactions even when some amount of discomfort may be involved.

I could love you and you could be waking me up and asking me if I want cake and I’ll probably just want to punch you because I’ll want sleep more than cake. I’m an insomniac, sleep is a rare thing for me, so I don’t give it up easily. However, because I trust my partner so much there’s that magical space of semi-consciousness where my body is positively present with sex and my mind is still in a half-sleep state of consciousness. I’ll orgasm rapidly in this state. I may make strange noises. The best way to end it is to let me roll right back into sleeping. This works well when I can sleep in longer than he does. My alarm goes off later.

I love the morning sex but setting an alarm would kill it for me. Alarms kill my libido. I avoid them at all costs. I don’t like having to set alarms to do anything. It doesn’t work. When my partner knocks on the door of my cunt, he’s going to get a warmer response than tapping me on the shoulder. The truth is, he hasn’t gotten kicked in the face yet. The mornings when he does indeed initiate sex while I sleep are often nights when I’ve gone to bed hot and horny while he was knocked out cold. While full on sleep sex has never been reported by my bedmates, the few I’ve spent more than a year sharing beds with have reported the occasional bout of sleep humping.

There appears to be a strange game of kinetic sexual energy at play. It’s exciting. I’ll go to bed horny, softly hump him through the night, then he wakes up and knows because it’s all obvious over time. Co-habitation is a small collective reality. Less a fetish for sleep sex, it’s a potential outlet of intimacy. It’s not just trust but the long simmer and collection of information. He never makes a blind guess when he takes up an opportunity to knock on my pussy for sex. It’s not an action of domination, not that there would be anything wrong with negotiating something like that, so much as it’s the fact that we both have better days when we share quick pleasure before being away all day.

It must suck to leave a warm bed and your lover for an alarm clock. As stated earlier, I find it intolerable. I need time to acclimate to waking consciousness. I need the ritual of grinding my coffee beans, boiling water, and making a pot of coffee. I need to smell it, hold it in my hands, and slowly join the world. Articulation is the last part of my mental hard drive to boot up. That’s why asking questions is difficult. It’s hard for me to vocally iterate anything but my other body processes can run fine without the outward projection of my thoughts. I get the privilege of being able to wake up in the way that lets me thrive. He still has to answer the alarm. Having a bonding moment of pleasure and intimacy is really helpful to make all of that suck less.

I do find that liminal space between sleep and waking fascinating and I’ve never had the opportunity to explore it so much with someone. Really, it started when I told him that he should feel free to ejaculate onto me if he was masturbating in the morning before work. Despite whatever you’ve heard about facials being degrading, I love them. I get as close as I can to the orgasms I come near. It’s such incredible mind-body synthesis that I can say I’ve never been bored by a single orgasm I’ve seen or experienced. Having someone come on me rather than in me allows me to get closer to what’s happening. I love when I’m squirted on after fingering someone in just the right ways. I love watching the whole body contract as well but the epicenter of the orgasm is an exciting place to be.

So it was a warm joke and endearing part of our relationship that he would come all over me before heading to work. I would fall back asleep and sleep into hazy dreamscapes of lust and his fuzzy chest hair. It worked. Then I told him to start knocking on the pussy. On mornings when I would have scowled if he cheerily asked if I wanted coffee, his cock at the opening of my cunt would get it immediately wet and open. When the light is early and I hear him scoot the cats or the dog off the bed before shutting the bed and walking straight to my side of the bed, I start getting wet.

I don’t think I could organicly rise from sleep and request sex. The times when I have are nights with little sleep. I’ve generally been awake for quite some time if I’ve got an eager face. Sometimes I can tell from the very way my partner gets up from the bed 10 minutes before he’s going to initiate sex that he will, just from the way the springs of the bed seem to roll. Maybe it’s because I’ve been making them roll with thrusting. Maybe I’m projecting and throwing sex phermones out into the room. Maybe I’m a Jedi. What I know is that I haven’t been wrong.

It’s rare, but it happens, when his body comes into contact with mine while I’m still sleeping. My hazy half-sleep sex is generally from a brain that understood that it didn’t need all of its systems running for the activity at hand. Actually being surprised is another experience entirely. There’s a rush of vulnerability but also a sudden wave of relief and pleasure. Rather than kick, I tend to wrap my legs around him and pull him closer to me. I recognize him so quickly I don’t ever feel a gap of fear. We sleep beside one another, eat beside one another, and have built a home together. His body feels so much like a part of mine that when he moves to enter my body in the morning it doesn’t feel foreign at all. It feels just right.

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May 3, 2012

Stop Dominatrix Shaming

There’s a disturbing trend in critiques of the “BDSM Scene” to blame the dominatrix for ills and inequalities among the real players. Let’s cut right to the heart of why this is bullshit: sex workers live at the mercy of the state on top of being stigmatized. For those who care about consent, remember that this is a form of adult consent that the state says that you cannot make and that feminists say you must be mad or mindless or both to pursue and then society says that when you cross that river you can never really come back.

Sex workers not only lack the right to make a consensual transaction, sex workers are also denied their rights to justice in American courtrooms. This means all sex workers.Why can’t we go to the police? What the fuck good will it ever do for us? We don’t live in a Law and Order world where our glamorized dead bodies are sneered at and justice is seen as fetishizing the law even when it’s a whore. I’m going to illustrate with a story I obsessed over as it occurred. My favorite coverage came from the OC Weekly and starts off with this paragraph:

No one disputes that an on-duty Irvine police officer got an erection and ejaculated on a motorist during an early-morning traffic stop in Laguna Beach. The female driver reported it, DNA testing confirmed it and officer David Alex Park finally admitted it.

To really paint the picture, an officer of the law stalked this woman. It was such a problem that even his department told him to knock it the fuck off. On this night, he stalked her. He turned off his GPS in the patrol vehicle so the car wouldn’t record where he was. He waited until she was on a secluded road.

He was acquitted.

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April 23, 2012

Terminal Masculinity

There’s nothing like a nerdy action film and Terminator is no exception. Cyborgs, blazing guns, SPLOSIONS, and the battle of humanity against its creations-what’s not to love? The original film is stunning to watch because of the incredible attention paid to the visual details. The shots are well planned and motifs and themes are carried equally well even when the plot has a few holes and the time space continuum is confusing. So far as analysis is concerned, there’s a lot to be said about the way that machines are referenced. The answering machine at Sarah Connor’s house is forever reminding callers that they’ve been “fooled by a machine,” and references to humans ignoring red flags by listening to blaring music through headphones, ignoring emotional gut instincts over “reason,” and ultimately missing the evidence that machines were in control of war spurring the great war run in the background of the film keeping things tight, moving, and lots of fun to watch.

Gender, specifically masculinity, is another interesting background theme in the film. As an interesting piece of trivia, Arnold Schwarzenegger was originally cast in the role of Kyle Reese. We can certainly debate the decision making skills of the former Governator of California (whose ‘signature’ is on my college diploma) but we can all agree that when he told James Cameron that he would make one hell of a homicidal cyborg he was right on the money. The tone of the film would have taken on a strikingly different color if  Lance Henriksen had carried the role in this film. For the record, Henriksen would shine as a cyborg in another classic nerdy action film, Aliens.

Watch the entrance of the Terminator closely: we see him in a prepared warrior crouch through the haze of smoke in his entrance not all too different from the stage debut of an erotic powerhouse. His physique is buff and immaculately sculpted. He is naked and unashamed as the cultural image of masculine perfection. The camera utterly adores his body and relies on shots that are traditionally used on the erotic female form; close-ups on body parts, a camera starting at the feet and working up the body, and situations that create tension in the body to enhance the look of physical features. The terminator stands silhouetted against the cityscape of Los Angeles glittering like the night sky and is framed at the center of everything.

In contrast to this, the character Kyle Reese is practically thrown into a skid row alley and lands trembling in a fetal position. Later in the film, his character would describe time travel as being similar to birth. His body is already damaged; we see scars and burns on his back and rather than strutting, he scurries like a rat. Unlike the Terminator who confidently walks upon to a trio of hard punks posturing with aggression and demands clothing at the expense of death, Reese is immediately pursued. He wears the pants of a homeless man (interestingly, homeless individuals are stripped of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality in general by society) and pulls clothing off the racks of a nearby store. Not one person is killed as the result of his actions whereas the Terminator shocks us by reaching into the chest of one of the punks and ripping out his still beating heart. Reese is seen as practically pathetic so far as his body is concerned but his quick thinking innovation wins us over. He is distinctly human.

Now, the thing to remember is that Michael Biehn is far from being scrawny. He’s certainly got a set of well-defined muscles and he knows his way around a gun as well. His character is that of a life long soldier who has seen the ravages of war and desperation for his entire life. The terminator is the hyperbole of masculinity in both his larger than life physique, completely objective thinking, and patent disregard for any obstacle. Kyle Reese is presented to us as a real man. He still falls into many of the stereotypes with his own quick trigger finger (Sarah Connor advises him to put the gun down on multiple occasions as if femininity is defined as moving away from violence) and strong body but he is also endowed with immense vulnerability.

“Flashbacks” are a common narrative device that explains the story to the viewer but Reese is depicted as emotionally suffering from the war he’s seen. At one point, he sits in his parked car and the construction machines become the war machines of future and the losses he has sustained as a fact of life. The way that he jerks and drives on is the reminder that humans feel pain and loss, that soldiers suffer. He has apparent physical scars, a tattoo/laser brand, and what looks a lot like a form of PTSD especially when the following deleted scene is taken into consideration.

Throughout the course of the film, the terminator’s human skin is battered. The beauty that he had at the start of the film becomes mangled, especially in his face. Eyes are the window to the soul and one of the first things we learn is that the terminator is soulless and terrifying. His power is seen through his relentless resurrection. He’s shot, run over by a truck, set on fire, and blown into pieces and yet he persists. This is also presented by humanity’s quest to persevere against the impossible odds of fighting machines through the inspirational leadership of the unseen John Connor as messiah who wakes up the fighting spirit of the humans and brings them back from the brink of extinction through their will to live.

Notably, Sarah Connor has a continuous buildup of power throughout the film. Physically, she is the weakest link and has the least knowledge of weapons. She is also a powerful observer who always seems to have second thoughts or “bad feelings” about things despite lacking the confidence to act on them at the start of the film. It is after she initiates sex with Reese that she experiences her biggest internal change on both a physical and emotional level. On the physical level, she has conceived the human messiah and on the psychological level she starts to charge barking out the command, “On your feet, soldier!” and pushing Reese to continue forward with her.

What I find fascinating about the love story between Reese and Connor is the question of dominance and submission. Reese is not the leader of the revolution, he is a soldier in it. In the bizarre space time continuum, it is his son that is the leader of the revolution as well as his superior in the human army. In regards to his relationship with Connor, it is made clear that his entire life has been about her despite having never known her. He lives in service to her and the revolution is recorded in matrilineal terms. Despite her obvious love for him, the name of her son is John Connor not John Reese which counters the traditional naming process of first born sons. Moreover, he has never known any pleasure aside from her and in the end he dies for her.

The terminator has one objective: to kill Sarah Connor. At the start of the film, we are led to believe that Kyle Reese has the singular objective of protecting her. After explaining what the terminator is, Connor asks if he can stop it. He pauses solemnly to say that he does not know and ultimately we learn that his mission was not to defeat the bad guy and get the girl as with most action films but rather to find the woman he has served his entire life, consummate that love, and then take her to the next level of battle with that which is inhuman. It is Sarah Connor who ultimately prevails over the machine after what we learn was the conception of her child.

Their love scene is incredibly powerful as it is the keystone of Reese’s mission. Although their child may be the savior of humanity, Connor has little in common with the Virgin Mother of the Redeemer. She is the one who initiates sex between them after he reveals that he is a virgin. We can surmise that she is not. Moreover, the camera spends a fraction of the time eroticizing her body. She is nude only within the crucial plot point of establishing that sex is happening unlike the many scenes that oogle the bodies of men. Although there is very little sex in the movie, it is sex positive and in many ways it has to be. Sexuality is indelible to the human story and it is treated as such in the movie. The love scene is sexy but it is in no way gratuitous and without it the entire story crumbles.

What could have easily been a male dominated impregnation scene is not. It is a female led scene. She is sexually experienced, he is not. She is fully clothed and uninjured, he is shirtless and wears both bandages and scars. They are both vulnerable and emotional but unlike him, she is more comfortable with having feelings of fear and anxiety and more willing to be present with them. She asks him about the women in his time in an admittedly heterosexist frame of inquiry as to whether or not he has experienced intimacy in the past and he responds within the context of war: they are “good fighters.” She clarifies her question to be more specific about her intentions and he opens up about the intimacy he has experienced looking at her photograph. His pain moves her to tears as her hand caresses one of the larger scars on his back. At the end of his monologue, he withdraws from her and walks straight to their handcrafted bombs in another retreat back to war. She chases him and initiates the kiss with both of her hands around his throat.

Her fierce compassion for Reese refuses to give up and she is seen throughout the film protecting him by advocating non-violence as an equally powerful tool for survival. She does not use sex “against” him but rather for him and his emotional well being. On both a micro and macro level, sex is key to survival for individuals on the brink of emotional extinction and for humanity as a whole. Neither character is aware that the product of their lovemaking will be John Connor.

Masculine dominance and power is always being expressed in the movie through violence. Connor’s femininity is expressed through her abject resistance to violence and comfort with sexuality without being an erotic object in the film. In an early scene in the film, she is unshaken by a lewd phone call intended for her roommate with a sense of humor and nothing but warm feelings for the ill-fated duo despite the fact that neither have taken her into remote consideration. When Reese hands her a gun while he gathers supplies, we see her discomfort with it and she does not open fire and even in her final confrontation with the terminator she kills through indirect means. Where most female heroines keep sex appeal in their tool belt, empathy is the strongest tool that Connor wields.

Her empathy is what sets her aside from the other humans in the film. The police fail to actively listen to the situation, the psychiatrist with training in how to listen is depicted as being deeply committed to not listening and being self-involved, her roommate spends every moment possible listening to her music through head phones, and humanity itself is nearly doomed purely because it did not pay attention to the signs that Skynet had become self-aware. Although the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity are present, human vulnerability is honored across the gender spectrum. Although it puts us at risk it is also our salvation.

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April 19, 2012

Feminist Porn Awards 2012

The 2012 Feminist Porn Awards are just kicking off in Toronto, and as a new startup we are very proud to have two nominations in the mix less than a year from our launch. The Feminist Porn Awards, run by the awesome sexy ping center Good For Her, are the premier showcase for alternative, queer, progressive work in the adult industry. Since they began in 2006, the awards have featured the work of many of our role models including Shine Louise Houston, Jiz Lee, Tina Horn, Courtney Trouble, and Tristan Taormino. We are honored to be acknowledged alongside these awesome folks and many others, and we were counting on the publicity to promote some really hot new content we’ve been working (and screwing) hard to produce.

Imagine my surprise this bright and sexy morning when I woke up to this rather unsettling email from Verotel, the credit card processor for Meet The Mayhems. The email informs me that our account is now subject to a €500 fee, which they assume we cannot afford, so they have been kind enough to terminate our account for us. You can read my rant about this here if you’re interested. To have our credit card processing yanked without warning only a few days before the FPA award ceremony is a serious and unexpected challenge.

Financial douchebaggery aside, the bottom line is that we can’t take your money for a few days. Does that mean that we’re going to deny you the incredible sexiness you’ve come to expect from us? Hell no! You awesome perverts mean more to us than that. It’s time for a whole long weekend of FREE PORNO! 

Running our own small, homemade independent porn site together has been a challenging but rewarding experience. Over the past year the two of us have built our own small business completely from scratch. We make up for having next to no investment capital by pouring our own time and skills into the project. The result is a true DIY porn site where everything from web development to editing to accounting, shooting, legal issues, photography, and marketing is done in our little Oakland apartment by the Mayhems ourselves.

Naturally there has been quite a steep learning curve in many of these professional skills, but we started small and have learned by doing. We ask our customers for only $8 per month, significantly below the industry standard price, with the caveat that a bad flu or a business trip might interrupt our schedule of updates. The quality of our product has grown steadily over the past year, and our membership has been slowly growing with it. We are now poised to launch innovative new sections of our website including homemade adult product sales and written erotica, and we have agreements with other independent adult performers and small studios who want to launch their own small porn sites using our software architecture. We are working not only to create an independent income stream for ourselves, but also to create a viable business model for all of the little guys in porn who want the tools to profit from their work without sacrificing their creative and entrepreneurial autonomy.

We’re excited to share some of the fruits of our labor with you free, for a limited time. Enjoy, and stay tuned for tons of new footing in the coming weeks, including performances by Wolf Hudson, James Darling, Ruby Reaper, Denali Winter, and Bianca Stone!

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