by Jiz Lee
Two years ago, I and cofounders Oonie Chase and Corey Innis launched MakeLoveNotPorn.tv (MLNP.tv)—a user-generated, crowdsourced video-sharing site that celebrates real-world sex, catalogued via #realworldsex. Anyone, from anywhere in the world, can submit videos of themselves having #realworldsex. What we mean by that is simply not performative sex. MLNP.tv is not about performing for the camera, but simply about capturing what goes on in the real world, in all its funny, messy, wonderful, ridiculous, beautiful humanness. We’re not porn, we’re not “amateur,” and we’re not competing with porn; our competition is Facebook and YouTube; or rather, it would be, if Facebook and YouTube allowed sexual self-identification and self-expression. If they did that, MLNP wouldn’t need to exist.
We view every video submitted to MLNP.tv and operate a revenue-sharing business model; our members pay to rent and stream #realworldsex videos, and half of that revenue goes to our MakeLoveNotPornstars, a number of whom are real-world porn star friends. MLNP.tv is honored to be the place online where porn stars share the sex they have in their real-world relationships and talk about how different that is from how they perform on camera.
When my team and I embarked on this venture, we had no idea that we would fight a battle every day to build our business.
Every piece of business infrastructure any other startup can at least take for granted, we can’t, because the small print always says “No adult content.”
Finding funding is extraordinarily difficult. I can’t find a bank anywhere in the world that will allow us to open a business bank account. We had to build our video-streaming/sharing platform from the ground up because streaming services and off-the-shelf solutions won’t host adult content. Our biggest operational challenge has been payments: PayPal won’t work with us, Amazon won’t, no mainstream credit card processors will. I had to write an explanatory blog post for our members entitled, “Why We Make It So Hard For You to Give Us Your Money.” Even something as apparently simple as finding an email partner to send our membership emails out with has been a nightmare; we were rejected by six or seven before we found one willing to work with us.
All of this was a revelation—which is why I am now fighting this battle very publicly, on behalf of all of us. Because the answer to everything that worries people about porn is not to shut down, censor, clamp down, block, repress. It’s to open up—open up the dialogue around sex and porn. Open up to welcoming, supporting, and funding entrepreneurs who want to disrupt and change the world of sex and porn for the better. Open up to allowing us to do business on the same terms and conditions as everyone else.
On the challenging journey to build MLNP.tv, I regularly encounter well-meaning people who say to me, “Cindy, why don’t you just change the name of your company? Take the word ‘porn’ out of it, create an innocuous holding-company name doing business as. It’ll make your life so much easier.” There are practical reasons why I refuse to do that, but the primary reason is principled. When you design a venture around societal bias and prejudice, all you do is reinforce it. I refuse to bow to bias and prejudice; I’m out to change it.
Our battle has connected me with other sextech entrepreneurs who ask for advice, and I find that I often have to say to them, “Take yourself out of the shadows.” People working in sex unconsciously internalize society’s disapproval in a way that negatively impacts their ability to do the business and achieve the vision they want. You have to change the world to fit your business, not the other way around.
In every industry, currently we see the syndrome I call “collaborative competition,” where everybody in a sector competes with everybody else in that sector by doing exactly the same thing everybody else is doing. I believe the future is “competitive collaboration,” when everybody in a sector comes together and collaborates to make things better for everyone on the premise that a rising tide floats all boats. That then enables everyone to be uniquely competitive, leveraging individual skills and talents.
Fast Company called me last year to say they’d like to do an article about the battles we face with MLNP.tv. My response was, “I’m happy to be interviewed, but here are six other sextech entrepreneurs I want you to interview as well.” I don’t care if MLNP.tv gets less column inches; I want the world to know there’s an entire movement of all of us in sextech, to make people understand the Next Big Thing in tech is disrupting sex.
We all watch porn; we don’t talk about it. Porn exists in a kind of parallel universe, a shadowy underground. When you force something—anything—into the shadows and underground, you make it easier for bad things to happen, and you make it a lot harder for good things to happen. I’d like to help good things happen, and that’s why I’m so pleased to be here, in this book, in this company, working with everyone else to change the world through sex.
PORN CHANGED EVERYTHING
Cinnamon Maxxine
Cinnamon Maxxine is a San Francisco Bay Area original diva. They’re a queer porno personality, stripper, and all-around fierce fat femme of color. They’re on a mission to confront racism, race bias, fat phobia, and the generic femme bias in sex work and porn. These issues are real, not just in mainstream society, but in our cherished and loved alternative and subcultures as well. Cinnamon fights these issues every day and loves to educate people. You can find Cinnamon as CinnaMaxx on Facebook and Twitter, or email [email protected].
I’ve been doing porn for eight years, as well as other sex work. And a wonderful eight years it’s been! I am out about my porn to friends and my chosen family. I was not out to my biological family. I had no interest in being out to my family because it just didn’t feel worth it to have them criticize me, judge me, and try to change me.
However, in July 2014, I got cellulitis in my breast. For those that don’t know, cellulitis is a nasty, painful skin infection. My case of cellulitis got so bad that it reached the tissue and I started having scary flu-like symptoms. Due to being sick, I was out of work for several weeks. I was unable to pay bills and other living expenses. A dear friend of mine put together a crowdfund for me and helped me raise the money I needed to get by while I was sick and out of work.
During this time, I called my parents to check in and let them know how I was doing. They knew that I had been sick and they worried when I told them I was starting to have flu symptoms. I told them that a friend of mine had been kind enough to put together a crowdfund for me. My parents know I am a performance artist, burlesque performer, and stripper. I figured, why not share the link with them? There’s nothing on there that would out me as a porn performer.
A month or so after the crowdfunding campaign ended, I’d been trying to reach my parents, but to no avail. I got a text message from my stepmom saying something to the effect of, “Not now. Busy.” I started feeling like they were avoiding me and something was up. The next weekend I was able to reach my stepmother and she confirmed that yes, there was something up. She confessed that she’d snooped and Googled my name and found out that I do porn. In fact, she called it the elephant in the room.
Needless to say, I was frustrated, hurt, and even angry. I’d been doing porn for eight years at that point and I’d been able to keep quiet about it. In the early years, she hadn’t really shown much interest or curiosity in my work. However, in the last couple of years she’s gotten really nosey about my private life, even though I specifically told her I didn’t want to share. I did everything from tell polite little lies—that I’m still just stripping, I’m doing some modeling, or even that I’m doing nude modeling—to outright telling her it’s none of her business and she doesn’t even want to know, so stop asking. But I avoided telling her about the porn at all cost.
My stepmother is one of those feminists that believe I’m doing a disservice to all women everywhere by “letting myself be objectified.” She believes this is not what women fought for and that I’m only hurting myself. There’s also, of course, the moral issues of it all. She thinks I’m inappropriately exploring my sexuality
.
When I tried to explain to her that she violated my privacy by doing something I explicitly asked her not to do, she ignored me and, instead, told my father. She also tried to justify her behavior by arguing that because it’s on the Internet for everyone else to see, it’s fine. Obviously, this argument is weak; porn performers deserve privacy too. If you don’t believe that, then you can stop reading right now and move on to another story. She told me she wasn’t being nosey and that she was simply curious about my life. She even made me feel a little guilty for being upset with her. She made it my problem that she snooped and found out about my porn. She didn’t take any responsibility for her behavior. Instead, because I do porn and it’s on the Internet, I was culpable; I was the one to blame for this new family drama.
I tried to talk to my parents about it, but it wasn’t a very productive conversation. They spent the whole time beating around the bush and being afraid to actually have a real conversation. There was one question they asked that immediately signaled their deep lack of understanding; in other words, after they asked this question, I knew that I would probably never get through to them. My dad asked, “I mean, why? What did I do? Did your stepfather ever touch you?” This is the stereotypical response. I was hurt. I thought my parents knew better than to stereotype in this way. Clearly, they didn’t.
My dad hasn’t spoken to me in months, and I think it has more to do with his inability to come up with anything productive to say to me. It’s like my whole person has changed since he found out I do porn. He doesn’t feel like I’m his daughter anymore. It’s hurtful, but I get it. I’m the one who always tries to understand where someone is coming from and, in this case, I understand the logic that my parents are using to make sense of my work. That’s what my parents taught me to do. They taught me to make a difference in people’s lives when I can; and if people are unwilling to change, learn, or be touched, then you meet them where they’re at, especially people you love. I don’t understand why they can’t do the same for me.
Why does my work in porn outshine who I am as a person, as their child?
Months have gone by and I’m actually starting to feel terribly relieved. I know that I made the right decision by trying to keep it to myself. I made the right decision by making my own chosen family that loves and supports me and thinks I’m awesome. I made the right decision by moving away from my close-minded biological family and discovering new things. I became my own person, and that’s worth more than anything my parents can ever do for me. I feel relieved that I don’t have to go to great lengths to lie, hide, pretend, and let my secrets weigh on me. I’m relieved and it’s great. I can move on, knowing that I’m content in what I do and if what I do impacts who I am so greatly in the eyes of my parents that they won’t talk to me anymore, then I am okay with letting that go.
Throughout this whole writing experience, I tried to keep it professional and classy, but I couldn’t help but think that my adult performer persona would simply say, “Fuck that. Fuck them. Do you.” And that is actually all I need to hear.
FROM OPERA CONDUCTOR TO PORN PRODUCER
Colin Rowntree
As the founder and CEO of Wasteland.com, the Internet’s oldest and most popular BDSM and alternative sexuality site, Colin Rowntree is a true pioneer of the online adult entertainment industry. An eloquent, witty, and thought-provoking commentator, Colin is a frequent contributor to industry trade publications and websites, including Adult Video News, XBIZ, and other media outlets. He has been interviewed by and featured on International Business Times, CNBC, Rolling Stone Magazine, BBC Television, the Fox Network, HBO, ABC Nightline, NewsCorp, Time, Wired, Cnet.com, and Bnet.com. Most recently, Colin was awarded the 2015 Progressive Leadership of the Year XBIZ Executive award.
I’ve had a lot of vocations in my life. From music teacher and music therapist working with the elderly thirty years ago to a long career as a symphonic, choral, on-Broadway director and opera conductor and, as is the case with most working musicians, all kinds of side gigs ranging from wholesale accounts manager for an occult goods company and even a few stints as a late-night radio announcer. But little did I ever expect that I would eventually become a porn director and producer—one specializing in BDSM at that!
In 1994, my wife and I literally stumbled into online adult entertainment by launching an experiment—Wasteland—to see if people on this new “Internet thing” might like to request a mail order catalogue of our offerings of BDSM and kinky bondage gear and leather fetish apparel. Within a short period of time, it became obvious that no one was really interested in getting a mail order catalogue sent to them, but a lot of people were highly interested in seeing attractive models in kinky clothing in various stages of nudity. So we took a wild chance and started charging a whopping $10 for people to view the photos. Wasteland.com, one of the first Internet adult paysites, was born!
It quickly became apparent that we needed to get more kinky photos—lots of kinky photos to satisfy the surfers’ lust for naughty fare. My wife, Angie, was a photojournalist and began showing me the tricks of the trade for shooting high-end fetish-glamour photos. Within a year, I became a full-fledged pornographer.
For the first five years, we kept it all very hush-hush as to the kind of Internet business we were running. Living in a very conservative, small New England town, it just made sense not to be too open about that little detail, especially as I was still working as a choir director in a local church and conductor of a well-known opera company. As luck would have it, by 1997 Wasteland was doing very well and we bought our first home with attached office space, but in a town just a bit too far for the twice-weekly drive to the church for rehearsals and services, so I left that position just in the nick of time.
Shortly after our move, I was contacted by a small regional newspaper that had heard of me from my speaking engagements at the AVN show. The reporter wanted to do a story about our porn business being operated in a tiny town in New Hampshire. Within days of that story being published, I got a call from the Boston Globe asking if they could come by our office for an interview and perhaps take a few photos. They came, interviewed us, took some pictures, and that following Sunday, there was a full-page upbeat and positive story about us in the Globe, complete with a large, full-color photo of my wife sitting at her desk, editing naughty pictures.
At that time, pretty much everyone in New England read the Sunday Boston Globe (it was, after all, before the newspaper industry moved over to the Internet). The following Tuesday, I headed down to my weekly opera rehearsal and was intercepted in the parking lot by the president of the board of directors and a couple of other board members. The board president was holding a copy of the paper, opened to the feature about us with my well-known wife’s smiling face in the middle of it. I anticipated being fired on the spot, but an amazing thing happened: The board members all had nervous smiles on their faces and the only question they had was if it was legal. I assured them it was, and they all laughed and said they would cover my back from any backlash from members, which they did for the following eight years. I eventually got too busy to keep up with conducting and devoted 100 percent of my time to both Wasteland, and my wife’s new porn site for women—Sssh.com—that went live in 1999.
In a similar unexpected reaction scenario, by 2000, we had outgrown our house and offices and bought a much larger house nearby, assisted by the same elderly female real estate agent that helped us into our first home. After the signing, the agent pulled us aside and said something to the effect of, “Just what is it you guys do for a living that you were able to upgrade real estate so quickly?” I took a deep breath and told her the truth—that we run Internet pornography sites—fully expecting disapproval from her. Her eyes widened a bit and the first thing out of her mouth was, “Oh, thank God! I thought you might be dealing drugs!”
As for friends and family, pretty much everyone knows what I do and most are very amused and accepting. In fact, my eighty-year-old mother-
in-law, who speaks five languages, does the bulk of our customer service email translations!
I know we got off pretty lucky in light of some of the horror stories I hear from performers about being banished from their families, ending up in custody battles, and the like, and I thank our lucky stars for our friends, families, and community acceptance—and the endlessly entertaining dinner conversations!
THE NAME OF YOUR FIRST PET AND THE STREET YOU GREW UP ON
Conner Habib
Conner Habib is an author, lecturer, porn performer, and vice president of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee. His Twitter handle is @connerhabib and he lives in Los Angeles.
The email was from another Conner Habib, one who wasn’t in porn.
“My grandmother searched for me on Google and nearly had a heart attack,” he wrote. “So is Conner Habib your real name?”
I had just started appearing in scenes, and it was the first time I’d been asked what my real name was. The email ended there, but I imagined the sentence going on: “Because if it isn’t, can you please, please, please change it to something else?”
“What’s your real name?”
It’s a question every porn performer is asked, and asked often. Answering isn’t as easy as you’d think.
My birth name is Andre Khalil. The name I chose for porn is Conner Habib.
Conner: the name of one of two drunken Irish boys I saw dry humping each other at a pub in Killarney when I was fifteen. “Oh, Conner!” one jokingly yelped to the other, as they played at being gay. He was stocky and drunk and I watched them, electrified and silent, as my family sat close to me, talking about something I didn’t hear.
Habib: the Arabic word for “sweetheart” or “beloved one.”
I’m Syrian and Irish, and the name reflected my origins and displayed my Middle Eastern heritage, which is all but unrepresented in porn. It also helped me avoid innuendo names like Dick Powers or Johnny Thrust. Conner Habib sounded like a real person’s name (and it was!); it’s slightly clumsy, easy enough to remember.
