Future Sex (14 page)

Now she has retired, to focus on motherhood and other projects. I watched a Vice documentary where she drank green juice and performed circus acrobatics on long swathes of silk hung from scaffolding. It was a strange moment when she appeared unexpectedly in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation of
Inherent Vice
, the novel by Thomas
Pynchon. Of all the cameos mentioned in reviews of the film that I had read, nobody had mentioned hers. I wondered what percentage of the audience recognized her, and whether they also had the feeling they knew her far more intimately than they knew Joaquin Phoenix, her counterpart on screen. I later read that she had turned down a larger role in the film because she now refused to perform nude.

Belladonna had moved on, but there was still Dana Vespoli, another director with Evil Angel, who has described the porn she directs as “psychosexual.” Vespoli was born in 1972, and is known for her authenticity (“A tampon string hangs from her vagina as James fucks her asshole!” read the description of
Dana Vespoli’s Real Sex Diary
). Her movies have included a send-up about ride-sharing called
Screwber X
. There was Joanna Angel, the self-described “punk rock porn princess.” There was Jacky St. James, the director under contract with New Sensations who was inspired to make a BDSM video called
The Submission of Emma Marx
after finding the bestselling erotic novel
Fifty Shades of Grey
, in her words, “so incredibly weak and pathetic.” Kimberly Kane, who directed for Vivid, was famous for
having said, “If I had a cock, I’d be in jail.” Sinnamon Love confronted taboos about shooting BDSM porn as a black performer. The enigmatic Mason, who has directed more than 140 hardcore gonzo films in which she stars only as a goading voice from behind the camera, appeared for years at industry events wearing a burka. In her 2004 movie
Riot Sluts
women smash the windows of a car with metal pipes
in between sex scenes.

The pornography we have now is either the nadir of human civilization or it’s pushing the boundaries of human experience. The protagonists of this pornography are not Hugh Hefner, founder of
Playboy
, or Al Goldstein, publisher of
Screw
, but the women who successfully captivate and monetize their online audiences. Porn taught me that the feminine expression of sexuality
did not have to be a dildo in the shape of a dolphin to shed the vestiges of the patriarchy. It gave me an internal answer to the accusation of false consciousness that accompanied so much expression of sexuality by a woman. I knew I wasn’t trying to inhabit the masculine if the force that guided my sexual decisions came from a physical feeling in my body. Figuring out what I liked in porn was like
having my fortune told. It wasn’t real, but it offered orientation.

*   *   *

The panda gang bang took place deep in the basement of the Kink armory, where rivulets of the long-suffocated Mission Creek still traced a path between moisture-eaten columns, and the air hung heavy with a stony dampness. On the day of the shoot, warm light glowed in the center of a cavernously empty space. Bathed
in this glow, Ashli lay sleeping, impervious to the dark immensity of her surroundings. Her sleek black hair was draped over her shoulder; a small silken bow of the palest pink pinned it away from her face into a girlish side part. The hem of her pink dotted swiss dress had been carefully arranged to reveal a glimpse of her upper thigh through the gauze. On her feet she wore six-inch patent leather
high heels embellished with lace. She slumbered on a bed of green leaves in a simulated bamboo forest beneath wraiths of mist produced by a Rosco Hazemaker puffing away beyond the circle of light, the sound of which did not disturb her.

The pandas approached her from behind. They waved their horrible paws and sniffed inquisitively. One stood over her, nibbling at a frond of bamboo. Another gently
stroked her hair.

“Now poke her or kick her,” ordered Donna from the darkness. The pandas fell upon her. The sound of ripping gauze and a snapped bra strap broke the quiet. They fondled and slapped at her now-exposed breasts. She awoke and screamed in fear. “But I love pandas, I love pandas!” she cried out.

The panda shoot was a taxing one. Donna hovered around the bears, using metal clamps
to keep the furry folds of their costumes from hiding the action. They took turns with Ashli without conferring much. Finally the pandas retired to their bamboo bowers and the shoot was over.

LIVE WEBCAMS

On the computer a woman in north Florida was talking about the wildlife down where she’s from. “Raccoons, possums, armadillos, moles,” she listed. “Rattlesnakes, copperheads, water moccasins.” She paused to think. “Black snakes, but they’re not so bad.” Her profile said she was born in 1959. Her blond-gray hair was long. She was topless, with ample, sagging breasts and a stomach
tattoo of Yosemite Sam drawing his guns. On her lap was a large, two-headed dildo. “They’ve got those big-ass pythons in the Everglades,” she said. “They’re breeding with the water moccasins and they’re creating a supersnake, y’all.”

In Virginia, three men lay draped over one another in a bed, fund-raising with an aggressive strategy of languid bared-torso napping. They had promised a show when
they received 775 tokens from their audience, from which they would receive $38.75 in earnings. Their audience discussed in the chat column on the right whether they would actually perform if they met their goal. “Nah, they too tired,” someone wrote. They looked pretty tired.

In Denver, a plump, bespectacled woman spooned cupcake batter into a tin. She said she was eighteen and still a virgin.
She was naked under her apron, and she promised to show her breasts as soon as she got the cupcakes in the oven. In Austria, a woman with a beehive, blue fingernail polish, and a polka-dotted bra gave her boyfriend the most halfhearted blow job in human history. He was wearing a turtleneck sweater but no pants. In Montreal, a woman with fuchsia hair penetrated herself with a toy light saber. A woman
with a thin black ribbon tied around her neck in a bow, who gave her location as “Orgrimmar, Azeroth,” a town from the computer game World of Warcraft, talked about the hardware she had in her computer. She nibbled a Burrito Bowl from Chipotle, slurped from a can of Mountain Dew, and showed off her pierced nipples for an audience of 1,150 people. In another chat room, 3,756 people watched as
a stark-naked twenty-one-year-old with no makeup and a body like a juice guru performed a yoga routine in a day-lit room with creamy wall-to-wall carpeting, a Pilates ball in a corner behind her. She eased into a headstand.

For the first few weeks after I started watching Chaturbate, these were some of the people I watched. Chaturbate was a live webcam site that launched in 2011. It distinguished
itself from the many other live webcam sites on the Internet by its democratic approach. It was free to watch—really free, as in no logging in or setting up passwords—and open to everyone of legal age. Its tabs offered live feeds of Females, Males, Couples, and Transsexuals. To start broadcasting, a person had only to register a name and beam herself to the world, eating Chipotle. Total sexual
anarchy was forestalled by a zealous volunteer police force of users, who operated along the lines of Wikipedia moderators, reporting and shutting down any performers who looked suspiciously underage or who broke one of Chaturbate’s few rules—the usual bans on violence, animals, and excrement.

A lot of the performers used the site to make money. Viewers could tip their favorite performers with
tokens, Chaturbate’s official currency. Chaturbate took a 50 percent cut, such that each token cost ten cents for the person who bought it and was worth five cents to the person who earned it. In exchange for some tokens, the performers might fulfill a request, or address the tipper directly. Despite this payment system, Chaturbate’s freedom extended to impecunious viewers, who did not have to limit
their participation to voyeurism but could also write jokes in the sidebar that made a performer giggle or, less generously, that insulted her. Performers chose dedicated audience members to moderate their rooms. The “mods” silenced misbehaving or mean-spirited viewers, or fund-raised while the performer spanked herself, tied her hand to a bedpost, or was otherwise occupied.

Beyond its lack of
restrictions, it took a while to figure out what made Chaturbate special. At first glance, it was simply a framed box of amateur peep show performers determined to outdo one another in mimicking the costumes and attitudes of mainstream porn. The matrix of webcams that loaded on the homepage looked like most other adult webcam sites, which was to say that it provided an overwhelmingly gynecological
perspective of the world. In the sidebars where viewers chatted with each other, it was still mostly men telling women they wanted to ejaculate on various parts of their bodies, or seeking individual attention from them, or telling them to do certain things or hold certain positions, and the women flattering and cooing in return. The porno gifs bounced annoyingly as ever in the margins; and the
homepage’s checkerboard of thumbnail images merged into a single disingenuous orgasm.

At first I avoided the most sexually explicit channels. I preferred to watch women, but not usually at their most pornographic. I watched when they were just doing things, chatting or cutting out paper hearts for Valentine’s Day or listening to the songs of Miley Cyrus. I watched the women because they were
more interesting than the men, who invariably positioned themselves in a black computer chair at a desk in ghastly desk-lamp illumination, dick in hand, making the usual motions, unless they reclined in bed and did the same, with little in the way of creativity or gimmicks. It was amazing, the diversity of what men wanted performed for them and how little they offered to others, except for a few of
the gay guys, who understood that some form of flirtation might exhilarate the spirit and therefore did yoga routines in bike shorts or lip-synched to pop hits. I watched plenty of women and followed a few couples but I almost never bothered to click on the tab marked “Males” except when it was gay guys actually doing things with each other. I did not spend a lot of time looking at the “Transsexuals”
tab, not because I wasn’t curious but because many of the broadcasts came from what looked to me like a brothel in Barranquilla, Colombia.

Chaturbate first revealed its potential to be something I had not seen before on the morning I watched a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Elisa Death Naked broadcast from a house in Iceland with glass bricks, a spiral staircase, warm-looking patterned rugs,
and a cozy fire crackling in the fireplace. She did not reveal her face, and instead wore, at the beginning of her striptease, a rubber horse mask with a fedora on top, along with a gray crop top, black sweatpants, and rainbow kneesocks. Her primary props were a chair painted with a replica of the Mona Lisa and a strap-on dildo. Her body had the symmetry and thinness of a catalog model, and maybe
it was just the house that she was in or her high-definition camera or a general characteristic of the Icelandic people but even faceless she gleamed with the well-being that emanates wherever per-capita consumption of fish oils is high and citizens benefit from socialized health care. Her sex show, however, was strange.

“I have a pretty weird boner right now,” commented one confused viewer,
as Elisa changed into a Halloween mask of a ghost and began fellating her dildo. She did not interact with her audience, instead exhibiting her free-flowing sexual narrative in a manic trance. I watched her highlight reel, which showed clips from even more creative scenarios—her violently ripping apart a stuffed bear, fucking herself with a toy train, and strapping the dildo to a rocking horse and
riding it. The show was a sexualized riff on the Island of Misfit Toys, plus industrial metal (the soundtrack was Rammstein). In addition to the usual Amazon Wish List (almost everyone had an Amazon Wish List for their fans to buy them things, or to bypass the website’s 50 percent cut and give money directly to the performers in the form of Amazon gift cards), Elisa had links to clothes she wanted
from the British online clothing store ASOS, and I clicked through them, with a vague awareness that I wanted to dress however she dressed.

*   *   *

In the 1990s, futurists had predicted a whole new way of having sex. “Picture yourself a couple of decades hence, getting dressed for a hot night in the virtual village,” wrote the editors of the San Francisco–based
Mondo 2000
in 1992. “It would
be something like a body stocking, but with all the intimate snugness of a condom. Embedded in the inner surface of the suit, using a technology that does not yet exist, is an array of intelligent effectors. These effectors are ultratiny vibrators of varying degrees of hardness, hundreds of them per square inch, that can receive and transmit a realistic sense of tactile presence in the same way
the visual and audio displays transmit a realistic sense of visual and auditory presence.”

This future had not come to pass. A couple of decades hence, we had some rudimentary remote-operated sex toys and no high-tech body stockings. Nobody I knew readied themselves on a Friday night for “a hot night in the virtual village.” Sex online had always been divided between a passive, voyeuristic dynamic
(video porn) and a more interactive one (groups of people in virtual forums verbally exciting one another in the guise of sexually avid Harry Potter characters). The latter had become a more marginal hobby. The “virtual village” most people used now, the publicly traded social networks, did not have the designated orgiastic corners that Usenet had always sustained. OkCupid and Tinder were not
places to go for video sex—enabling the option would have just scared everyone away. While long-distance couples might take advantage of video chat in an erotic way, books such as
The Joy of Cybersex
and
Net Sex
were out of print. If you excluded the video assists of people in long-distance relationships, porn was the routine way of having a sexual experience via one’s computer.