I am utterly baffled that I have to explain these things, but the sexy mommy mob is still hysterical after my comments on Twitter last week that feminist darling Madison Young is creepy-as-fuck for how she uses her baby as a non-consenting prop for her sexual politics and porn marketing.  I don't expect to change any minds, and I'm not allowing comments on this post because I was sick of this topic days ago.  But, since people are asking me for a "statement," and the sexy mommy mob is intent on growing this "story" into some kind of national outrage, I might was well clearly explain my position in one place.  (I do appreciate seeing how, as this "story" moves out of the feminist porn scene, some other people share these opinions.)

The big take-home point that some people are missing: It's all about context.  I am against breast feeding in places where people go to masturbate.  Madison's posting of breast feeding photos and videos in her Twitter stream and on other sex-themed web sites is appalling to me.  It's no different than breast feeding on stage at a strip club.  Madison has spent her career making everything she does about sex.  There's nothing wrong with that, of course.  I'm a sex-loving pornographer myself!  But you can't spend most of a decade purposefully building an environment where people come to masturbate and then feign confusion when someone like me "mistakes" that environment for being sexual.

It's hard to plead "there is absolutely nothing sexual about these photos/videos" when they are posted in sexualized spaces and/or crafted to look sexy.  The most famous image shows Madison as a Marilyn Monroe knockoff.  I've seen photos of other women breast feeding, and none of them bothered to put on a sexy dress and get their hair and makeup done first.  For most moms with breast feeding photos, I bet they're probably wearing yesterday's sweatpants and looking exhausted, not trying to liken themselves to a famous sex icon.

I've been told that it's beyond Madison's control if sick people are aroused by her sexy breast feeding images.  But if she would never want to encourage people to jerk off to photos of her baby, she should stop posting them in a place where she typically posts porn.  Aside from all the innocent masturbators who clicked a blind link because they thought it was going to be kinky sex pics, who wants to see sexy breast feeding?  Most of us would call them pedophiles.  Best case scenario, Madison's sexy breast feeding schtick is an attention-getting ploy to sell her persona's "realness" so people will buy her "real" porn.  Worst case scenario, Madison is knowingly creating masturbation material for pedophiles.  Either way, it's revolting.  (At what point does one cross over from sexualizing having a baby to sexualizing the baby?)

Madison's loyal fans have spent the last few days calling me an ignorant and cruel monster for taking Madison to task, but what about the actual victim, Madison's baby?

This issue is also about consent.  The baby is not consenting to being used as a marketing gimmick for her mother's porn persona.  There is a huge difference between consenting adults engaging in exhibitionism, and forcing creepy, pedophile-courting public voyeurism on a non-consenting baby.  I am an exhibitionist myself, but I would never drag anyone into my kinks who isn't consenting to be a part of a scene.  For all anyone knows, Madison's kid will be traumatized by her upbringing in public, and end up feeling extremely violated by the sexual attention Madison subjected her to as a child.  Would you have wanted your mother breast feeding you for attention from horny adults, and for evidence of that to be online and linked to you forever?

I am against people using their children as props to serve an agenda.  Madison's use of her daughter to push her politics is no different than when anti-abortion protesters or the Westboro Baptist Church uses their own unwitting small children as props.  Kids aren't political tools to leverage for shock value, they're actual human beings who will one day be adults with their own set of opinions.  To assume that Madison's baby will grow up and be thrilled that her mother used her to get attention for her porn persona is offensive and sad to me.  Several have pointed out that I'm "no different," since I tweet photos of my cat.  But, here's the key nuance they can't grasp: my cat will never be a sentient adult human with his own beliefs and a non-interest in being caught up in my pervy internet trail.

The sexy mommy mob doesn't like these "anti-sex worker" and "sexist" arguments, so they've turned it into a matter of rebutting things I never said.

I never said that no woman should be allowed to breast feed.  I am not against breast feeding in public or private, I am against doing it in sexualized contexts.  I would feel the same way if someone whipped out a baby at a swinger's club, so it's not just about the internet or porn.

I never said that sex workers (or kinksters) should not be allowed to have children, or that mothers can't be sexy.  I have a number of kinky and sex working friends who are parents, and I know some sexy moms.  They, however, possess good sense and boundaries and don't force their offspring to be a part of their exhibitionism and work.  The kinky and sex working parents I know create separation between their lives, they definitely don't seek to combine them at every turn to prove how transgressive they can be.  Not because my friends are prudes, but because they understand that it's deeply inappropriate to mix small children and horny adults.

I never said that no one should be allowed to photograph their kids or photograph breast feeding.  I didn't comb through the Flickr pages of strangers until I found a random mother to criticize.  I'm specifically talking about a porn star who is using her baby as an attention-getting prop in sexualized contexts.

This is not some kind of anti-"lesbian" hate crime.  Madison is married to her male dominant/master, and I mostly fuck men, too.  She and I are basically in the same boat, the difference being that I don't obsessively market myself as queer.  I fail to see how my criticizing her constitutes an attack on "being queer," but some people are really grasping at straws for new ways to frame Madison as a victim of an injustice.

Stepping back...

I hate what stuff like this does to the credibility of sex workers and pornographers as a whole.  People like me try to tell regular folk that porn and sex work is about consenting adults, not weird stuff with kids and/or the non-consenting.  To the sexy mommy mob, Madison is the greatest hero of her generation, but what about the other 99.999999% of America, the majority we need to get on our side in order to make any advancements for sex workers?  If you seal yourself in the safe bubble of San Francisco, surrounded by adoring fans, then of course you're not going to care how you might be damaging the movement for acceptance of sex workers and porn.

I'm surprised that people like Gail Dines and Melissa Farley haven't seized upon Madison's baby fetish as yet another way to attack all of us.  This is exactly the sort of thing they live to hold up as a non-representative example of how we're all horrible people.  Anti-sex work activist Donna Hughes threw a fit a year ago when a small sexuality conference apparently allowed in a high school senior.  For this, the organizer was branded, basically, a dangerous predator going after America's helpless children.  If letting a consenting 17-year-old hear about sexuality is enough for the antis to launch a campaign that says kink bloggers are basically child molesters, I wonder what they would think of a porn star sexualizing the breast feeding of a baby?  But of course, if the antis get wind of the controversy that Madison and her fans are so desperately trying to publicize, she will not be the one addressing the hard questions.  She has her feminist porn "revolution" to worry about, and the rest of us - especially her baby girl - can go eat cake.

It's common for grassroots activists to have issues with creating good branding and messaging, and this topic is something I've been thinking about a lot this year with regards to the sex workers rights movement and what I want to do with my upcoming project.  I've been trying to step back from things and look at them with a fresh pair of eyes.  What concepts are we most getting across to the public?  What are we directly telling them, and what are our actions more subtly telling them?  (This is sort of an extension of the outreach post I wrote earlier this month.)

Graphics-wise, we rally around the image of a red umbrella.  I have no idea how people came to pick this as our logo.  Was it because sex work is so sad that there's a flood of tears, and the umbrella is protecting us from the tear storm?  That's the best idea I can think of.  If I don't get it, I'm guessing that the public doesn't get it either.  It's not as vague a graphic/shape as, say, a red ribbon for HIV awareness, but it's also not as obvious as the Sierra Club's logo of a tree, or March of Dimes' logo of a figure cradling an infant.  "We feel safe inside red umbrellas!  We demand more free red umbrellas from the government!  Stop beating us with red umbrellas!" I have no idea what we're trying to express.

Going deeper than my quibbles with confusing clip art, I think it's a mistake that the sex workers rights movement in the US is pretty much perma-linked with the radical sexuality/BDSM scene.  I am a sex-positive pervert, but that doesn't mean that I think we ought to be tacitly pushing the message that sex workers rights is a niche concern only for sexual deviants.  I've touched on this before, but wanted to stress it again.

Closely linking the sex workers rights and sex-positivity/kink worlds feels like a clique-y move, the banding together of big city sexual rebels to thumb their noses at the vanilla mainstream, not a political strategy that wins mass converts and legislative gains.  I've said it many times: I don't want sex workers rights to be a cause only supportable by perverts.  No other labor or human rights campaign would have a construct like this.  "If you're not into sewing, then there's no room for you to express concern about sweatshops and working conditions in textile factories."  Or, imagine if the gay rights movement had sodomy as its key piece of branding and activism, conveying a message that if you're not into ass-fucking, you're not hip enough to support equal rights for queer people.

And what about all the sex workers for whom the job is just a job?  Must they be subject to grudgingly attending yet another erotic dance party/dildo decorating contest/porn screening fundraiser?  I don't want those sex workers to feel alienated from their own movement just because they're not in the mood to attend a sexually-themed event as a form of recreation.  Sexuality is a big part of my life, but I also have the self-awareness to realize that it's not that way for everyone, and not all sex workers identify as renegade sluts.  (Most don't, I'm guessing.)

It's hard to envision what a sex workers rights fundraiser/event would look like if it didn't involve some combination of topless women, sexually explicit art, loud music, sex toys, and cocktails.  Our message seems to be, "Support sex workers rights, because we're sexy people who throw a good party!"  I don't mean to sound like an anti-party wet blanket, but it would be great to see sex worker events that reach out to public through a medium other than sexy outfits, booze, and dancing.  What about a nice, wholesome bake sale - in the middle of the day?  Sex workers have some amazing cooks in our ranks, so how about we show off a talent other than entertaining people with our sexiness?  What about a "sex workers clean up a city park" day?  Aren't we trying to show that we're a normal and productive part of our communities?  By and large, public events that American sex workers organize are about mostly sexy/arty/party things, then some vigils for dead hookers sprinkled in.  What message does that send?  "We're creative sluts who party, then we get killed, and it's sad?"

Even with more multilayered events like New York's Red Umbrella Diaries, the dynamic of almost all of our happenings is that sex workers are for entertaining the public.  Whether we're titillating the public by working as strippers or telling stories about working as strippers, it's still reinforcing the one-dimensional role of sex workers that our value hinges on our ability to amuse the normals via sexually-themed entertainments.  (This is why I have the world's most boring sex worker blog.  It's pretty much entirely devoid of stories about customers, even though I know that's what brings in the readers.)

I'd like to see the US sex workers rights movement brand itself more as a labor rights movement, a human rights movement, a free speech movement, a privacy movement, an immigration reform movement, and less of a "for badass sexual outlaws only" party bus.  Sexual freedom and sex positivity definitely belong in that mix, but we're holding ourselves back by putting radical sexuality at the forefront with so much of what we do and who we bother reaching out to.  Sex work is a complicated topic spanning all sorts of working conditions, classes, genders, and motivations.  We're selling ourselves short to limit its appeal so greatly.

How do you want to see sex workers portray our cause to the public?  What notes do you think we're failing to hit?  What are similar causes doing it better?

(As with everything I've said this year that calls for more activism and more participation from more types of people, I know I'm going to get comments/tweets/emails bitching at me for daring to criticize existing activism.  I'm not saying "we can never have a party again," or "readings and storytelling are evil and must be banned."  I want to create balance by doing and calling for more of the things that I consider useful, not by censoring or preventing anyone from doing their projects.  Spare me the "Why are you trying to stop ____ from doing ____?" commentary.)

As the dust settles a bit in the wake of all the discussion about Stop Porn Culture, many bloggers are still trickling forth with their own "and this is what all sides keep missing in their posts about the matter" posts.  It's good to see the discussion keep going, and I'll be the latest to hitch my wagon on the end of the ongoing "people are missing the real point!" train.

A running theme I saw in the conversation about Stop Porn Culture, as well as at other times, was people commenting that we need to prove to anti-porn activists that feminist porn exists.  These people's hearts are in the right place, but I don't think that tactic has any chance of swaying feminists who hate pornography.

Some sex workers and pornographers identify as feminists, some of us don't.  As I complained once in a room full of people shooting daggers out of their eyes at me, I'm sick of seeing the word "feminist" being used as the sole or primary qualifier of whether or not a given idea/product/person is good or evil.  It's sloppy, reductionist thinking.  While I'm not at all against anyone calling what they do "feminist porn", and indeed love what comes out of the feminist porn scene, it's awfully tiring to see people act as though the only ethical porn out there is the stuff being made by a handful of small producers in San Francisco.

When people fixate on the importance of spotlighting and praising feminist porn, I, and others like me, are tacitly being slighted.  Why is the label of "feminist" more important than the actual production of what's been discussed?  How about rather than squealing endlessly about feminist porn, we use the term ethical porn instead?  It makes more sense and actually explains, in simple English, what you're talking about.  It would be nice to see inclusiveness towards all the awesome and ethical non-feminist pornographers (ahem - like me), and you'll also avoid the endless semantic debates with anti-porn activists over what feminist "really" means.  Sidestep that bullshit - it's a useless distraction, and you'll never win an argument with it.  Believe me, I spent years trying.

When we get lazy and use the word "feminist" as an all-purpose stand-in for "ethical", we create a false dichotomy by inferring all porn not marketed specifically as "feminist" is not produced ethically.  This helps our enemies fracture us, and it hardly fosters productive dialog about the real politics and ethics of porn production.  If we want to have open discussions about labor and production issues - rather than endlessly rebutting baseless accusations that watching porn turns men into rapists - we need to drop the loaded terminology and use proper descriptive words.

It's also irksome to see the way in which many people in the pro-porn community rush to decry anti-porner's highlighting of BDSM porn in their materials.  While the anti-porners cherry-pick presenting the most graphic and kinky porn they can get their hands on - images of women being degraded, humiliated, and beaten - the pro-porn retorts to this emotionally-manipulative tactic annoy me just as much.  It completely plays into the divide-and-conquer efforts of anti-porners.  "Hey, most porn isn't violent and degrading!  You're just using horrible examples!  Most mass-market porn is wholesome, not abusive!"  This only serves to further enforce the sex-negative overall social norm that kinky sex is defacto unethical and nonconsensual sex.

Excuse me, but since when did either side research the porn in question and figure out if the examples used by anti-porn nutters were produced under conditions that were agreeable to the performers?  Whether the women in the images are doing artistic soft-focus implied nudes or having their faces rubbed into a puddle of piss on the floor, there's no way to tell by looking at an photo how the performers really felt about being a part of the production.  When you're only looking at and talking about images of a pre-negotiated scene, you're glossing over everything that actually matters.  It would be like asserting that a war movie is an illegal snuff film because you, as an audience member, are certain from the "evidence" you were given that you saw people get shot and bleed to death.  Or, that since you found Hollywood's latest romantic comedy to be light-hearted and fun, you're absolutely certain that everyone involved with its production was treated fairly and loved working on the movie.

Guess what?  I've met a lot of women who work in front of the camera doing "violent", "degrading", and "humiliating" porn, and they consistently gush about how amazing their work is and how happy they are with their jobs.  I actually think I hear more kinky porn performers express happiness about their work, and more often, than I see even other happy sex workers glow about their jobs.  Is that anecdotal evidence?  Sure, but it's a lot of anecdotes - more anecdotes than the anti-porners can trot out in the form of a few ex-performers who later decided they regret their jobs and felt abused by having worked in porn.

To channel my inner Christian Bale: hey, it's fucking distracting when people chase the red herrings of "feminist porn" and "violent porn".  Let's stop that, and focus on the comparatively boring issues of discussing labor politics within sex work.

---

I recently got some feedback on my blog that read like an auto-generated essay against porn and sex work, hitting all the key arguments that I've heard a thousand times, just rearranged in a different order.

It got me thinking, hasn't anyone made a bingo card about this yet?  Apparently not, so I made one, with my top 25 most irritating frequently addressed accusations.  (Click here to get a larger version so that you can print it out and play along at home.)

[Edit: Miss Renegade Evolution made a sex work bingo card about a year ago, which I missed.  Go see her version here.]

2009 was good to me.  It was the year I finally started blogging, the year I stopped giving a shit about trying to be a feminist (whatever that means), the year I bought a frosting gun for decorating cupcakes, the year I actively began shooting photos of other people, the year I discovered the joy of sex with hot tubs, the year I didn't get to go on a proper vacation, and notably in my personal life, the year I engaged in a lot more sex in a submissive role.

Killing off your feminist self and nurturing your submissive self? Major upgrade, I assure you.

For 2010, I'm aiming to kick the recession's ass via my great new strapon site, get back to doing pay-per-minute web cam shows more often, read more physical books instead of so many blogs and web sites, hopefully present on how to run a porn site at the Desiree Alliance conference, and, as always, find more awesome people that give me a girl-boner. It's already been off to a good start with an epic voyage to Antarctica (a post on that coming soon), so I need to work hard to keep raising my own bar and being the militant awesome-ist I pledged to be last year.

"Saw an 'adult gigs' ad for actresses, unrated movie, sexual contact. Interesting stuff. I wrote my inquiry- and I think I'll decline.

The premise? It's rape, of course, the only type of sex that mainstream movies care to show explicitly. The man gets caught, justice served-

-but it's still rape porn, adding titillation to women's violence in the guise of realism. Fantasy I get but this is mainstream- not fantasy

And thus do I come to understand the difference between fiction & fantasy. Fiction is made up, fantasy consciously imagined knowing limits.

Fantasies are what we imagine knowing they may happen and often probably should never happen. Fiction happens to other people, could happen.

I'm comfortable portraying sexualized rape (trans, male or female, in whatever combinations) as fantasy, but not as fiction."

-- Sabrina Morgan, on her Twitter at Twitter.com/SabrinaMorgan

"Some feminists say that sexual female submission, or violent sex, is never okay. Clearly as someone who both seeks and gives such, I don't agree. It's also been suggested that my social conditioning makes me equate violence and sex. 'Spose that's possible, but I don't like arguments that assume I am stupid and blind."

-- Calico, in Unforgivables on blog.misscalico.com

The Government vs. Erotica: The Siege of Adam & Eve
by Philip D Harvey
Published in 2001

★★★☆

Recommended: For more serious sexuality bookworms

In an alternate world, Phil Harvey would be a better-known first amendment crusader. Far from the bombastic, abrasive persona of Larry Flynt, Harvey is an adult retailer who seems like he could be your friendly libertarian grandpa. Throughout the book, Harvey maintains a sort of innocent patriotic optimism, and in spite of his own dealings with malicious encroachments on his rights, he seems pretty shocked that the government of the United States of America would ever do anything underhanded.

"The Government vs. Erotica" is a look at the series of coordinated obscenity prosecutions of Philip Harvey, his company, Adam & Eve, and many of his employees. The government's strategy was to indict Harvey and others in multiple districts around the country, bleeding them dry through a series of costly legal battles over bogus obscenity charges. It's the kind of thing that has killed smaller companies with less means to defend themselves.

From the first raid on their North Carolina facility, and along a journey of nearly 8 years and $3 million in legal fees, Harvey covers his cases in detail. He also writes more broadly about porn, class, taste, fear of sexuality, freedom of expression, and the nonsensical nature of American morality laws. I'm sure both areas of the book would be equally interesting to some, but I found Harvey to be a more engaging writer when he's focused on the big picture, rather than the minutiae of his drawn-out battle.

But what a battle it was- Harvey spent from May 1986 to December 1993 fighting off wave after wave of prosecutions around the country. Before we internet pornographers had to wonder if some conservative enclave in Utah or Alabama would find our porn obscene by their "community standards", Harvey was fighting in such places on behalf of his mail-order company. For that, I can't help but respect the guy, even though we disagree on other issues.

My favorite chapter of the book was probably "Pornography and Class", where Harvey muses on what defines the line between that which is considered to have artistic merit, and what which is mere obscenity or trash. Some passages from that section I wanted to highlight:

Judge [Robert] Bork would have us believe that today's popular culture is "more vulgar than at any time in the past." He looks back fondly on the 1930s, when performers sang about "the way you look tonight," with a warm smile, a soft cheek, "nothing for me but to love you." But public lynchings were sometimes popular "entertainment" in the 1930s, too, a phenomenon that strikes me as a lot more coarse than any form of rap.

And

Class-based views of pornography take many forms. "Once upon a time," observes a New York Times writer, "obscenity was confined to expensive leather-bound editions available only to gentlemen... One of the questions asked by the crown prosecutor [in the trial of the publisher of _Lady Chatterly's Lover]... was: 'Would you let your servant read this book?'" Indeed, one of the earliest common-law decisions involving obscenity reflected this elitist attitude. The Queen's Bench rules in 1868 that, to be obscene, material must have the power to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.

Or

In American culture, this phenomenon is exemplified by Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine... As writer and sociologist MG Lord observes, "Hustler's scatological fantasies have less to do with penetrating women than with the rage at having not penetrated the privileged classes." Laura Kipnis adds, "The catalogs of social resentments Hustler trumpets, particularly against class privilege, makes it by fat the most openly class-antagonistic mass-circulation periodical of any genre." [...] Hustler, contrariwise [to Playboy and Penthouse], goes out of its way to harpoon the upper crust, to denigrate those PhD elitists, to fart on the pretensions of the ruling class, or anyone pretending to be holier than thou.

In another strong chapter, "What are We Afraid Of? Sexuality and Censors", he interviews Dr Marty Klein:

There are a lot of people who don't want sexual experimentation going on in the world. It reminds them that they have desire themselves, desires that they are scared by or feel ashamed of or guilty about. Unapologetic sexuality opens up the possibility of a form of freedom - a choice - that sex-fearful people don't want to have. Rather, they try to shut down those sexual activities out there that they're scared of wanting to do themselves.

In the end, after a lot of stubbornness and struggle, Harvey and his legal team accepted a truce deal with the US government, which required that Harvey "throw a bone" tothe state of Alabama. He wouldn't plead guilty to any speech issues, so after much searching, his team found out that they once probably mailed materials into Alabama using 8 or 9 point fonts rather than the 12 point fonts mandated by law on certain mailings. It's a bit of an anti-climactic ending, but one that no doubt saved Harvey many additional years and millions of dollars.

Now, onto my two tangents of criticism that don't really have to do with the quality of the book.

Harvey raises my blood pressure when he repeatedly reminds readers that the porn he was selling featured only mainstream adult content. I'm bothered by the false dichotomy set up in sentences such as "...depictions of positive sexuality between cheerfully consenting adults, without violence or degradation." It's the consenting adults bit that matters, not whether the performers are giggling or sobbing during the scene.

For non-industry readers, I can see how Harvey is trying to make himself look extra "upstanding" by refusing to carry porn that features anything "too dirty", but he does the perv/porn community a disservice by dividing adult entertainment into "good" and "bad" based on whether or not it's kinky, rather than by standards such as the labor conditions under which it was made. Anyone with any sense of sexual sophistication knows that "violence" and "degradation" are not mutually exclusive to "positive sexuality".

Here's the other irksome issue: it takes awfully big balls to sling mud at kinky "degrading" porn because of one's vague personal concern it's possibly unhealthy for viewers, when one can buy from Harvey's company such products as "Adam & Eve Vaginal Tightening Tightener Cream" or "Adam & Eve Anal Easy Lubricant" (which numbs your ass so you have no idea if you're being hurt! fun!), fake breast enlargement pills, fake penis enlargement pills, and of course, a load of toxic mystery jelly sex toys. "Positive healthy sexuality" fail, Harvey.

Adam & Eve doesn't sell anything that's more obnoxious than other mainstream adult retailers, so I'm not trying to single them out too much. I do genuinely respect Phil Harvey for going to bat for everyone's right to enjoy and sell porn, I just wish there was a greater sense of ethical consistency in place of throwing folks under the bus who like their porn (and by extension, their sex lives) with more kink.