Future Sex (13 page)

Rites of Passion
, Annie Sprinkle’s 1984 collaboration with Candida Royalle about tantric sex, is typical of Femme’s style: soft-focus video and women with teased hairstyles
explaining their sexual dilemmas. Jeanna Fine plays a young woman increasingly dissatisfied with her lovers. She has unfulfilling sex with an uncaring bodybuilder type, then expresses her frustration and asks him to leave (he does, in a huff). Afterward, she sits alone in her apartment in an armchair next to a pseudo–Georgia O’Keeffe painting hanging on one wall.

“In my search I tried everything,”
she says of her failure to find sexual satisfaction. “Every type of man, every type of woman. I tried it everywhere, from on airplanes to on the subway at rush hour. Threesomes, orgies; I even tried”—here she pauses—“monogamy.” Her despondence deepens. “Maybe I should just become celibate and forget the whole thing.”

Then she meets her long-haired tantric lover. They have tantric sex over animated
backdrops of autumn leaves and lotus flowers. “I returned to the place where I existed right from the start, where spirit meets flesh,” she says. “We were the universal life force.”

Sprinkle wanted to depict climax with something other than a cum shot on the face, so her heroine’s orgasm is represented by an explosion of early-1980s computer effects with a roiling saxophone accompaniment. “I
borrowed a special effect from
Star Trek
,” Sprinkle said, in the autobiographical
Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn
, of her attempt to create “the feeling of a cosmic orgasm of love.”

As the years progressed, Sprinkle’s porn did, too. She has described herself as “metamorphosexual.” She invented a genre she called “docu-porn” and in 1991 directed and starred in
Linda/Les and Annie: A Female–Male Transsexual Love Story
, the first porn with a surgically constructed penis. She performed in art-porn movies like Nick Zedd’s
War Is Menstrual Envy
and played the role of God in Cynthia Roberts’s 1996 “feminist sex fantasy”
Bubbles Galore
. She made performance art, most famously with “Public Cervix Announcement,” in which she inserted a speculum and invited the audience to inspect her cervix with
a flashlight. Today she identifies as eco-sexual, which means she finds sexual stimulation in nature. She told me that there is even a culture of sadomasochism in eco-sexuality: people who might, for example, run naked through a field of nettles.

Annie Sprinkle explored sexual possibilities that would become familiar to the mainstream only decades later. What was, in the 1980s and 1990s, the
future of sexuality was not really found in the pages of
Ms.
, but rather in the fringes of the pornographic, in the work of people like Sprinkle, who used pornography to explore their physical and psychological limits, to identify unconventional forms of sexual stimulation, and to question the gender binary. If the future was to be defined by a more honest and nuanced sexual culture, one in which
sexual diversity was valued, the people with maximalist ambitions were futurists, and they had knowledge unavailable to those who had not considered their extremes. A better sexuality, if such a thing were possible, would be discovered by people who explored the widest range of sexual practice, not those who treated it as resistant to literal representation. I valued the ideas of feminism that
spoke of liberating feminine sexuality from masculine ideas of sexiness, but it was as if, having cleaned out the clutter of masculine pornographic language and imagery, the only inoffensive concept left was a spartan white room dotted with patches of sunlight, starched curtains gently blowing from the open floor-to-ceiling windows. This was either the empty canvas of the liberated sexual imagination
or evidence of a deep aversion to physical reality, where any image of sex provoked disgust and had to be replaced with an innocuous interior design concept.

Today, marketing of porn intended to appeal to women often emphasizes producers’ “tasteful,” “natural,” or “romantic” aesthetic. Or it appears under the
Cosmo
-inspired alibi of education and self-improvement, such as the genre of “guide
pornos” that present themselves as how-to workshops on having better anal sex or giving a better blow job. It shrouds sexual stimulation in stories of dating, personal confession, self-help, romantic intrigue, and education. One self-described feminist video I watched had as its plot a woman turned on by watching a man assemble IKEA furniture. Another,
Marriage 2.0
, which won Movie of the Year
at the Feminist Porn Awards, had long scenes of couples discussing the politics of their open relationships and a cameo by Christopher Ryan, the co-author of
Sex at Dawn
. These videos offered worthwhile romantic and educational entertainment, but did they inspire masturbation? In the marketing of these movies, the sex itself was not emphasized, the way it was on the online porn tubes. The video
I Fucking Love IKEA
, for example, which was directed by Erika Lust, was not described as “ripped carpenter bro cock fucks the shit out of insatiable busty rich girl” but rather, “I have a thing for IKEA (I know, it’s weird), but making him buy and build stuff for me turns me on.”

The pornographers at Kink, feminists themselves, had thrown all of this perceived self-censorship and sensitivity in
the trash, along with the notion that feminine sex was a delicate, unnamable mystery. The rage and misogyny of the American male is an astonishing thing, its own natural wonder, like a geyser in a national park. But it had taken feminism to explain how the gagging, slapping, and sneering of porn might be hateful to women, and feminism to enhance its taboo. You couldn’t have nun porn without Catholicism.
You couldn’t have Public Disgrace without feminism.

*   *   *

But I preferred the white cube. For years after watching the pornography shoots at Kink I still thought of myself as personally uninterested in porn. Instead of watching porn I read articles with titles like “Why Women Don’t Like Porn.” I read interviews with Stoya or Joanna Angel or Nina Hartley in
Cosmo
about why they made porn.
I had interviewed Princess Donna, and watched her make porn. I still didn’t go on xHamster and watch videos and masturbate to them. Googling “tiny blonde tied up and ass fucked in public” will lead you to a video I saw recorded in San Francisco one April evening. In life, the sex I saw there did not upset me, but when I came to the video via Google I wanted to turn it off.

My aversion to pornography
was not because the images didn’t stimulate, but because I did not want to be turned on by sex that was not the kind of sex I wanted to have. I knew I shared this feeling with certain Christians, certain feminists, and many people who could only articulate an uneasiness that fell outside of an ideology. I remained at least half-persuaded by the argument that a woman watched or made porn only
as a member of a subordinate group trying to win the acceptance of the dominant group by conforming to its standards of sexuality and beauty. Nobody at the feminist sex shop suggested that the way to maximize pleasure was to go online and masturbate while watching “bondage slut gets a rough gangbang,” which is what I finally did one day.

I was honestly surprised that it worked. It usually took
me a long time to give myself an orgasm without a vibrator. I only had to watch the video for ten minutes. I started looking at porn on a semiregular basis, maybe once a month, when I was alone, had no prospects for sex, and didn’t have a vibrator with me. The site indexes were useless, since I didn’t have a particular fetish. I would click through until I found something that didn’t annoy or upset
me. I liked porn that had both masculine and feminine characters. It had to have a woman, and it had to have dicks. If a dick was a strap-on it had to be on a masculine-looking person, but she did not have to be a biological man. I didn’t need and felt bored by setups, stories, character-specific fantasies, “talking dirty.” I disliked the index terms. I wished, for example, that the “gang bang”
category had a different, less aggressive name, like “group sex with >1 dick” and that a MILF (“Mom I’d Like to Fuck”) was “woman >30.” The industry’s tendency to reduce people to the most offensive stereotypes of their age, race, ethnicity, body type, or gender seemed entirely unnecessary, although a friend of mine argued that the point of the language was to demarcate fantasy, just as in
Star Wars
the light saber was not called a “laser sword.” So, on the Hot Guys Fuck channel, I watched porn advertising “big dumb Chad” or “tattoo stud Blake,” and, on For Her Tube, browsed through the Doctor Tube, the Office Tube, and the Seduce Tube.

I had once thought of porn as a male-dominated force that standardized sexual expectations, and that it therefore imposed its will on my sexuality,
but I saw that porn defied standardization. Some men clearly watched porn to experience a feeling of domination and control over women, and a lot of porn played to these fantasies. This fantasy of control transcended porn into an evident belief that masturbating to someone, or casting sexual judgment on her, was an expression of power over her. A common choice of insult by disdainful men on Internet
comment threads was to say that they masturbated to some piece of content made by a woman with serious intent. I don’t know why, but knowing porn as he does diminishes the specter of the leering man. You invade his temple, his redoubt. You have felt what he feels but you have felt it in your own way.

Watching porn left me more confident about my body. The “sexiness” used to sell clothes or toothpaste
was very different from the sexiness that incited actual sex. Porn represented a wilderness beyond the gleaming edge of the corporate Internet and the matchstick bodies and glossy manes of network television. Porn had body hair, tattoos, assholes, bodily fluids, genitals, Mexican wrestling masks, birthday cake, ski goggles. The index entries on the most fetish-specific sites included “big
clit,” “chubby,” “puffy nipples,” “farting,” “hairy pussy,” “aged,” “9 months pregnant,” “short hair,” “small tits,” “muscled girl,” “fat mature,” and “ugly.” In looking through all this I found unexpected reassurance that somebody will always want to have sex with me. This was the opposite of the long road toward sexual obsolescence that I had been taught to expect.

Because porn was a tour of
human sexual diversity, I also watched porn that didn’t really turn me on but that interested me as an exploration of the human body and what it looked like and what it could do. The experimental work made by Sprinkle was a more artsy example of this kind of porn, but it also happened in more commercial porn, often under the direction of women. If there were differences between porn made by men
and porn made by women, it might be that the feminine aesthetic was less literal, showed a wider variation in stimuli, and tended to have costumes and fantasies that had nothing to do with the traditional repertoire of nurses, babysitters, and stepmoms. Porn made by women tended to be a little more bizarre, as I realized when I started to watch the work of Belladonna, who retired in 2012 but was probably
the most influential pornographer for the current generation of women making porn. The directors at Kink spoke of her with reverence, as did many other directors in the industry.

Belladonna’s non-porno name was Michelle Sinclair. She was born in 1981 in Biloxi, Mississippi, and raised in Utah. She started making porn after working at a strip club in Salt Lake City called American Bush. She became
famous in 2003, when ABC’s
Primetime
aired a documentary about what it was like to be a naive young woman in the industry. “Inside the new world of pornography,” said a severe Diane Sawyer. “Be there as an eighteen-year-old makes a decision she can never take back.” San Fernando Valley could not have pitched it better. A few years later Belladonna was a star performer and perhaps the most successful
female director of hardcore pornography in the industry. For years she was the only female director under contract at the giant Valley studio Evil Angel. She had a franchise of more than eighty DVDs, many of them made with her then-husband, Aidan Riley, including seven installments of Belladonna’s Fucking Girls, and ten chapters of Fetish Fanatics.

Belladonna, like Annie Sprinkle, seemed metamorphosexual.
She had a round face and a gap-toothed smile. She occasionally performed with her head shaved and her underarms hairy. Her body was athletic. She made every kind of porn, including some of the most intense and violent porn I had seen, but it wasn’t the sex that upset me the most. I had trouble watching
Manhandled 4
, where in the lead-up to the sex Ramon Nomar plays the jealous and abusive boyfriend
all too convincingly, and slaps Belladonna for having looked at another guy. In addition to double penetration, peeing, deep throating, gagging, and begging, Belladonna also made porn about two people waking up in bed together and having vanilla sex. She made foot-fetish porn and sex-toy porn. She made porn with scenarios removed from any power dynamic I could try to impose on it, because it
was porn between women wearing bunny heads. She made porn where she instructed how to give an enema, where she wore a surgical mask, or carnival face paint, or a vinyl outfit with pigtails, or where she played Dance Dance Revolution. She made porn when she was pregnant. She made a movie called
Cvrbongirl
, described by Evil Angel as “the fantasy of Belladonna as the ‘Doll Maker,’ a cross between
Pinocchio’s Gepetto, the Wizard of Oz, and a perverted Doctor Frankenstein, bringing dolls to life in her workshop so they can engage in lesbian depravity with each other.” She made porn about a glory hole, where “the backdrop is a perfectly disgusting bathroom with rotting tile, a grimy floor, and numerous duct-tape-reinforced holes to serve as entry points.” She made
Dirty Panties
, where “the
director’s cast of lovelies enjoys the powerful aroma that emanates from a woman’s moist butt crack.” Her own contribution to the genre of guide pornos, the ironic
Belladonna’s How to Fuck
, includes the aforementioned enema, and a blow job during which the man pinches her nose as she goes down on him. She has performed in porn with people of many races and gender identifications, including in
Strapped Dykes
, parts one and two, and
Transsexual Playground
.