Future Sex (11 page)

After this conclusion, Penny and I retreated to a stairwell behind the bar. Penny, I learned, was twenty-three years old. I asked if she had been working in the industry since she was eighteen. No, she said, she wished. She had been in the industry
for only six months. Before working in porn she was a lifeguard in Fort Lauderdale. Being a lifeguard in Fort Lauderdale had been pretty boring. She had gone to San Fernando Valley and soon found representation from Mark Spiegler, who is one of the top agents in the business. He was known, I gathered, for representing performers who didn’t play dumb and were willing to have anal sex. Penny wasn’t
dumb. I asked her about the shoot. I wanted to know how it had felt.

“It’s a little uncomfortable in the beginning, for the anal,” she said. (She was presumably referring to a moment early in the shoot when Ramon jumped up on the bar, stuffed a lemon in Penny’s mouth, and had anal sex with her. “Nice boots, man!” someone in the audience yelled. Penny made a nonverbal cue to slow down and Donna
jumped over and slathered her with lubricant.) “But my body warms up pretty quickly and then there’s no discomfort.” Slightly incredulous, I asked if there were moments of genuine pleasure. She looked at me like I was crazy. “Yeah. Like the whole thing! The whole thing.” She apologized for not being more articulate and explained she was in a state of delirium. “We call it ‘dick drunk,’” she said.
“I’m a little dick drunk right now because it was just very nice.” She looked at me. “You want to do something like that?” I tried to imagine a world where I would feel uninhibited enough to do what she had just done. It was impossible.

I rode back to the Mission in a van with Donna and Penny and Ramon. Penny and Ramon were both sleeping over at the landmarked Moorish castle that houses Kink.
They said they usually worked in mainstream porn in the Valley, but enjoyed coming to San Francisco for the fetish jobs. In the shoot he was doing tomorrow for New Sensations in Los Angeles, Ramon lamented, they wouldn’t even let him pull the girl’s hair.

“In L.A. most of that doesn’t require any bondage or much rough sex at all,” explained Penny. “It’s just, like, three positions. We call them
gonzo scenes. It’s super-quick. When I do the gonzo scenes I usually don’t get to have an orgasm. Here, at Kink, they’re like, ‘You’re going to come.’” I gathered that for performers, making more extreme pornography was like being a writer’s writer, where the value of the work was most apparent to other people immersed in the same field, and the respect one earned was of a different, more meaningful
order than mainstream acclaim.

* * *

Over the course of the next several weeks I watched Princess Donna direct and star in more films. I watched her perform in a roller-derby-themed episode of a series called Fucking Machines where she wielded a drill retrofitted with a giant dildo. I watched her train for her new role as director of a Kink series called Ultimate Surrender, a girl-on-girl
wrestling tournament. For three eight-minute rounds, two women wrestled each other. The goal was for one woman to pin the other and molest her for as long as possible. For the fourth round, the winner had sex with the loser wearing a strap-on dildo. It was one of Kink’s most popular series and was sometimes shot before a live studio audience. Princess Donna also directed a series called Bound Gangbangs,
and one day was inspired to do a shoot where all the men were dressed as pandas.

I was not sure what question I was trying to answer by watching the production of so much creative and exaggerated sex. The old question was whether one was “for” or “against” porn. This question had been unhelpful since 2005 if not earlier. Decisions about how porn should be obscured or banned in public spaces didn’t
matter in a time when watching porn was a question of typing some words into a search box while at home alone. It was impossible, in a democracy, to advocate for the censorship of all sexual activity on the Internet. One could draw up a list of crass gestures to which one was personally opposed, but parsing which kinds of sex were “good” or “bad” had resulted historically in the prohibition
of gay sex, interracial sex, transgender sex, bisexuality, and literature about birth control and family planning. Not all porn was like the porn made at Kink, but when you set porn free, the simulation of violence and ritual public humiliation of a woman was what you got. You could refuse to watch it, but not watching porn offered no liberation from the anxieties caused by the other people in your
life, or in the world, who watched it. Banning porn from your life also cut you off from the most comprehensive visual repository of sexual fantasy in human history, which had to have some value.

I, personally, was not having sex while all this was going on. Not that the sex I would’ve had, if I’d been having sex, would’ve been anything like the sex going on at the castle. The Kink actors were
more like athletes or stuntmen and -women performing punishing feats, and part of what I admired was the ease with which they went in and out of it, the comfort with which they inhabited their bodies, their total self-assurance and sense of unity against those who condemned their practice. I possessed none of those qualities. I was, at that time, so miserable about being alone, and half-convinced
by the logic that I could somehow solve the problem of loneliness by avoiding sex until I fell in love, that I was in the middle of a long and ultimately pointless stretch of celibacy.

The women at Kink came to porn for various reasons. Bobbi Starr, a twenty-nine-year-old who won the
Adult Video News
Female Performer of the Year award in 2012, was raised in a Pentecostal Christian family in San
Jose, California, and was homeschooled until middle school. She trained as a swimmer, competed in the Junior Olympics, and earned a scholarship to study music at San Jose State University. She was twenty-two years old and working as a classical musician when she watched porn for the first time. Sitting down with a male friend, who was surprised at her lack of familiarity, she watched several videos,
including one called
Bong Water Butt Babes.
Very little needs to be said about this video except that the bedroom set is covered in sheets of plastic. Starr was mesmerized and applied for a job at Kink. After getting hung upside down and sexually tortured in a tank of water, she signed with Mark Spiegler as her agent and moved to Los Angeles.

Lorelei Lee was nineteen and had just graduated from
high school in San Diego when her boyfriend told her about a website called SoCal Co-eds. Lee posed sitting on a surfboard, lying across a washing machine, sitting at a desk with her feet up, and wearing a UC–Santa Barbara sweatshirt. To accompany the photos she recorded a voice-over. This was in 1999. She figured nobody would see the photos, because they were on the Internet, which nobody looked
at. She did it for the money but even that first time it was not just for the money but also because it was “some kind of thrill.” Her earnings from porn put her through college. She had an MFA in creative writing and met her husband at Kink, where he was a director.

Rain DeGrey described herself as a “24/7 lifestyle kinkster” and “pansexual.” For years she had not admitted, to her partners and
even to herself, that bondage and flogging turned her on. She knew that even in the Bay Area there were people who would judge her, but eventually she “came out as kinky.” One day, she was tied up in her local dungeon, the Citadel, getting flogged by a friend, when someone suggested she try to do some of this stuff professionally.

Princess Donna grew up in Sacramento, where both her parents had
worked in the medical industry. She went to college at New York University, where she signed up for a class in gender and sexuality theory, began reading Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, and met her first girlfriend. On a break home in Sacramento, she went to a strip club and decided she wanted to try dancing at one. When an acquaintance mentioned that she was earning money by posing for photos
for a BDSM website called Insex, Donna thought she might try out that, too.

Insex was founded in 1997 by Brent Scott, a former professor from Carnegie Mellon University who performed in his videos the role of handler, bondage rigger, and dominator under the name “PD.” It was one of the earliest BDSM porn sites on the Internet, offering pre-broadband live feeds where viewers could interact and
instruct the models via chat rooms. Donna had been promoted from modeling to torturing at Insex when she heard that there was an opening for a director at the Wired Pussy electricity fetish department at Kink. She sent in her résumé. In 2004, when she was twenty-two years old, Donna got the job and moved to San Francisco.

Some people said Kink was not “real” porn. Kink was thought of as different
from San Fernando Valley porn because it was in Northern California, had many performers and directors who came to it from San Francisco’s queer pornography scene, and because it consciously distanced itself from the stereotype of the industry as a group of exploitative lowlifes. It fashioned itself as a slightly unconventional tech company in a city of tech companies, offering its full-time
employees catered lunches, retirement plans, and health insurance. Most San Fernando Valley pornographers didn’t care to reassure viewers that the sex they watched had been consensual, but Kink videos were often preceded by a good fifteen minutes of backstage demystification, and not of the professional wrestling fake-reality kind. Kink emphasized consent, they wanted real orgasms, they followed the
safeguards honed in San Francisco’s long-established BDSM scene, they bought lubricant by the barrel (literally: they had blue plastic barrels of lube in the basement). Insofar as was possible in an industry where the employees took physical and psychological risks, they tried to give a clean conscience to consumers of raunchy porn. That did not mean they always succeeded: in 2014 and 2015 there
were four lawsuits filed by performers claiming Kink failed to protect their health and safety on set, including two actors, a couple in real life, who claimed to have contracted HIV on the set of Princess Donna’s Public Disgrace, an allegation that Kink has denied. As far as is known, the lawsuits are still pending with no resolution of the charges.

The company’s self-described mission to “demystify
alternative sexuality” and its woman-centric presentation—the Bound Gangbangs series was advertised as “women explore their darkest fantasies”—meant that perhaps more performers at Kink came from nice families or had college degrees, but not everyone had supportive parents or explained their sexuality with references to Judith Butler. I asked one performer, Ashli Orion, why she had a tattoo
that said, “Shoot Frank.” “Frank’s my dad’s name,” she said. She giggled. “I have daddy issues. I hate my dad. But it’s also from
Donnie Darko
. That’s what I tell people. Not many people know my dad’s name is Frank.”

I didn’t inquire further. Lorelei Lee, who had a happy childhood, had said something with the evident weariness of someone regularly asked to explain herself: “If you look at people
in porn as a group, you might find a lot of people who do not have strong family connections, and in some ways that can make it easier to choose to do something that is looked down on by a lot of people,” she said. “If nobody’s making rules for you, you have to make up your own rules.”

* * *

The porn at Kink made you think about rules. Rules, in particular, about what the sexual fantasies
of a moral person should look like. Legal rules were one thing, and personal rules were another. Some experiences you avoid not because you know you don’t like them but because you don’t want to like them. I had never tried masturbating to porn on my computer. I associated my computer with labor, boredom, and abjection. I associated porn with a man grabbing a woman’s lower jaw to force her gaze
in his direction, or slapping her face as if to keep her from slipping into unconsciousness, or with ads selling “cum-craving sluts.” With friends I had tested out several other explanations for why I didn’t watch porn. I had said I thought the idea of masturbating “to” something was an imposition of masculine ideas of sexuality. I had wondered aloud if women weren’t stimulated by images but rather
by ineffable gestures and olfactory chemicals.

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