America Unzipped

by Brian Alexander

  “Um um oh ahh.”

  Smack! Smack! Smack! Donna is slapping Madison’s labia.

  “Holt!”

  Chuck, dressed in a mechanic’s coverall for some reason, is already working up a sweat as he scrambles for a shot directly over Madison’s ass. Lisa is kneeling on the floor, her lens about a foot from the silver ring piercing Madison’s labia.

  “Action!”

  Smacksmacksmacksmacksmacksmacksmacksmacksmacksmack.

  “Oh ah ah ah oh oh oh…”

  “Holt! Action.”

  Smacksmacksmacksmacksmacksmacksmacksmacksmacksmack.

  “Ha ha ha ha ha ummm. Ooohhhhhhh OH! OH!”

  “Stand up,” Chuck instructs. “Holt!”

  Standing up proves awkward for Madison, whose wrists are still handcuffed. Donna releases them.

  “Action.”

  Donna slaps Madison’s face. “Come on! Take your dress off, and go get me the Hitachi.”

  “Holt!”

  Tina Butcher loves rope. She sleeps with a coil of rope next to her pillow so it is the last thing she smells at night and the first thing she sniffs in the morning. She masturbates with rope. “Just the smell of rope makes me wet,” she says. She has always liked rope, sure, but this thing of using it as a sex toy is only a few years old.

  Tina Butcher grew up in the small neighboring towns of Goshen and Loveland just north of Cincinnati, Ohio. Her dad had a tree service there, and so Tina was always around rope. Tree guys use it to haul down big branches, sling over limbs, hoist themselves and their chain saws into the air. “Rope smells like home. It smells like autumn leaves and trees and sex.”

  Tina was a good girl, an extraordinarily good girl. She earned straight A’s all through grade school and even in her performing-arts high school. She almost never dated, though she certainly had some opportunities, being a smart, cute redhead who can, when she wants, strike a very sexy pose. But Tina wasn’t much interested in striking sexy poses. Her first kiss did not come until after her eighteenth birthday. As a matter of fact, she had a reputation for being an untouchable girl, a little fragile even. Other kids protected her. “I was always known as the virginal one,” she recalls. This was just fine with Tina’s mom. After the divorce from Tina’s father, her mother didn’t like the idea of boys anyway.

  “If any guys come near the house, I am going to get the shotgun!”

  Tina’s mother would come to regret this no-boys policy when she discovered one of Tina’s journals. It was a compilation of Tina’s dreams, and wow, did Tina have some dreams. There was the one about being forced to have sex, the one about being kidnapped and blindfolded and raped. Tina would wake up wet between her legs after those dreams. “I had no idea what to make of it, why I was having this funny feeling. I was kind of afraid of my body.” She was also a little afraid of the fact that her dreams were populated by women. Tina was especially obsessed by Catwoman, not Michelle Pfeiffer or Julie Newmar or any of the women who have played Catwoman on film—all of whom inspired deep, abiding crushes in me—but the comics iteration. She masturbated to the pen-and-ink drawings of Catwoman.

  One day after Tina had left for college, her mother found the dream journal. “She read them! When she found out, she was like, ‘Oh shit, I never should have told you men were so evil!’ I got in trouble for my dreams! I was so pissed off, I mean I am not even getting to do this, I am just dreaming about it.”

  In fact, by then she was just beginning to get to do it. Tina chose to attend college just up the road a ways, at Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio, about sixty miles from where I grew up. I used to run cross-country meets there.

  Antioch is one of a handful of small liberal arts colleges in Ohio, some of them so-called Midwest Ivys, like Oberlin, Dennison, Kenyon. Antioch was founded by a local Christian church group before the Civil War, but the church dissolved its association with the school after it hired abolitionist, educator, and former congressman Horace Mann to be the first president and found him to be far too liberal. Mann is considered the school’s spiritual founding father, and his motto, “Be ashamed to die before you have won some victory for humanity,” served as the school’s guiding creed.

  Antioch became known as a tiny laboratory of political correctness. This meant that if you were a white, middle-class, straight male kid and you couldn’t at least pretend to be interested in Emma Goldman and anarchist theory, you might have been happier at the nearby University of Dayton. (In fact, so many students were happier at other schools that enrollment collapsed and Antioch College announced in 2007 it would shut down in July of 2008.) Antioch’s most famous adventure in the politics of sex came in the early 1990s when it developed the nation’s most comprehensive “dating code” after being pressured by a group called Womyn of Antioch.

  The code, formally called the Antioch College Sexual Offense Prevention Policy, is, says the preface, “about empowerment, changing our rape culture, and healing.” There are a lot of steps you have to follow to escape our rape culture, like asking for explicit verbal permission at each phase of a sexual encounter. Moaning and pointing to your genitals don’t count. Unspoken Cary Grant–Deborah Kerr kisses and the pounding hearts of An Affair to Remember are also out. On the other hand, the code does state that it will not “restrict with whom the sexual activity may occur, the type of sexual activity that occurs, the props/toys/tools that are used, the number of persons involved, the gender(s) or gender expressions of persons involved.”

  Antioch was an ideal place for a girl like Madison who had dreams of sex with girls. She majored in theater and women’s studies and had her first real sexual experience there, with a woman. She also used handcuffs once, but really, she knew very little about BDSM until she moved to San Francisco with hopes of making her way on stage.

  Not long after arriving, she met British expatriate Peter Acworth, who asked her to “do a suspension,” to be tied up in an elaborate web of knots and suspended off the floor, a technique known by its Japanese name, shibari, for a website Acworth had started called Hogtied.com, the first of the family of Kink.com porn sites. Tina made a good shibari model because she was tiny and easy to wrangle, plus she had that midwestern girl innocence going for her, but most of all, after leaving home, she had decided to be the kind of girl who was willing to try anything once and being tied up naked certainly fell under the rubric of “anything.”

  “Peter Acworth tied me up and tortured me well and I discovered that indeed I was flexible and indeed I did love pain,” she tells her fans on her own website. “I connected with the rope. It became part of me and the pain became a beautiful electric current that tickled as it ran into and out of my body. I found immense pleasure in the freedom of bondage, the spaces that it allowed me to explore outside of my body. It was a spiritual and challenging experiment in which I was able to document and get paid for.”

  She continued to model, and the proceeds allowed her to partially fund the opening of Femina Potens in a small garage. Over the next several years, Tina became acquainted with, and inspired by, an earlier generation of art-porn fixtures like Annie Sprinkle, famous for her one-woman show involving chocolate sauce, a speculum, and audience participation, and writer and performance artist Carol Queen. Both were among the first group of female performers who argued that it was possible to be both a feminist and a porn star. They insisted that pornography could be empowering to women, could allow women to control their own sexuality and to depict it as powerful and natural, not something to be repressed. They became popular speakers on college campuses in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Sprinkle gained fame as the focus of a political backlash by conservatives who decried the grant of National Endowment for the Arts stipends to theaters where she performed. The backlash, of course, turned Sprinkle, a minor underground celebrity, into a world-famous influential authority on sexual and artistic rights.

  Today, Femina Potens, run by volunteers, is located in a tiny space tucked down the side of a larger building in the Missi
on District. I visited it before heading up to the Castro to meet Tina at her apartment. A continuous loop of a video, Drawing Complaint: Memoirs of Bjork-Geisha, was running. A flyer informed me that I was witnessing a meta-art moment, a “guerilla performance” by two women protesting a San Francisco Museum of Art exhibit related to another work of art, Matthew Barney’s film, Drawing Restraint 9.

  As if this were not confusing enough, in the film, Barney, known best for his multipart Cremaster series, and Barney’s girlfriend, the Icelandic composer-singer Björk, visit a Japanese whaler, undergo a Shinto wedding ceremony (sort of), and wind up cutting each other’s legs off with flaying knives. Whale tails grow out of the stumps. Meanwhile, a giant blob of petroleum jelly slides around the deck of the ship. The film lasts two and a half hours. Apparently, the artists in Drawing Complaint did not approve of Barney’s film, so they dressed up as a geisha (the Björk character) and a fur-covered whaler (Barney’s character) and conducted “unsolicited performances of fan dancing, lip synching, samurai whaling, and chopstick hara-kiri amidst crowds of confused viewers and gallery guards.”

  Over by the desk, manned by a young woman who had just moved to San Francisco from Salt Lake City, a small magazine rack offered flyers, notices, cards, pamphlets, and zines covering the gamut of lesbian and queer protest and social events. A column in a zine moaned about the commercialization of pornography, citing a website called Suicide Girls, which was supposed to be a revolutionary free-form porn collective of tattooed, gothy, powerful women but which turned out to be run by a man for money. Or maybe not. The details were controversial and hotly debated by online bloggers, but the writer of the column seemed pretty sure porn idealism had been sold for cash.

  “From ‘Go get me the Hitachi’…and…action!”

  “Go get me the Hitachi!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What’s my name? Ma’am? Is my name ma’am?”

  “Yes, Princess Donna.”

  “Holt!”

  “Can you put her over here?” Lisa asks, trying to get a better angle on a still photo.

  “Action.”

  Donna forces Madison to the floor and puts a knee in her back. Madison’s rear end is high in the air. Donna spits on her labia and pushes the large Hitachi vibrator up against Madison’s clitoris. Then Donna shoves most of her hand into Madison’s vagina.

  “Ha oh oh uhh uhhhh uuuuhhh ha ha ho ho mmm mm hmm hhmm hhmm ha hmmm ham mmm hammmm oh oh oh ho ho ho ho…”

  “You know what you do when you wanna come here, right?”

  “Oh! Oh oh oh…I…oh…oh…ask your permission?”

  “Right.”

  Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. “Fuck oh fuck ohmmm oh oh ha ha ha ha oh oh ho ho ho uh uh uh hu huh phhh oh can I please come…may I come?”

  “That’s not the whole sentence!”

  “Please miiisss aha ha ha tress Dahhh nahhh caaaan I coooommme?”

  “You can come.”

  “Oh oh ha uh uh haha uh uha ho ho ho haha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ah oh hmh hm hah ah ah a ha hi hi eh he he he eh ehe ehehe HEEEE! ho ho ho ho oh oh oh oh oh oh oh OH OH OH OH ha oh oh oh oh my god oohhhhh oohhhhhhhhh oohhhhh oohhhhh fuck hah ahahahhhhhhooooohhhhhhhooooooooggod yes yes god yess oh oh thhhaaaannnnkkkk you hhahahh hhhahaahahahahahahaaahhhhhaahhhhhhahhhhhhhoh OH! OH! OH! OH! OH! OH! OH! OH! OH! OH! ahah ah hhh aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh.”

  “Did you come, slut?”

  “Oh yeah. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…”

  Smack!

  “At its core, the undergraduate Program encourages students to question the meanings of ‘male’ and ‘female,’ as well as of sexual norms, in both Western and non-Western societies,” reads the description of New York University’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. “Courses seek to unravel the ways in which ideas about gender and sexuality shape social roles and identities, in addition to the ways in which race, class, and ethnicity function in the experience of gender and sexuality within a culture. Gender and Sexuality Studies challenges the privileging of some categories (i.e., male or heterosexual) over others, along with the social and political implications of such hierarchies. Our curriculum makes gender and sexuality central rather than peripheral terms of analysis and seeks to complicate what is often presented as ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ in traditional academic curricula.”

  Donna, a stage name, is twenty-four, still fresh out of NYU, where she was an enthusiastic student who absorbed the theories and now believes that sexuality is “socially constructed.” “I really don’t think I was born with my sexuality,” she tells me when the taping breaks for a change in setup. “I think that I have never liked anything that was normal. I always hated things that were expected of me or expected of women.”

  So she went into porn. Her career began as a “sub,” a model who undergoes what Madison is undergoing now. She was popular because she was tall and pretty with a curvy body and wild, jet black hair. First she worked at a website in New York called Insex.com and liked it there, she says. At Insex, you could actually mark people with bruises and cuts, make them cry, use real blood and real syringes in “needle play.” At Insex, she could shove meat hooks up a girl’s nostrils and practically lift her off the floor. Insex was just the place for a girl who likes to write poetry like this from Donna’s MySpace page:

  How to get Gay Married

  Step 1:

  Gather all the kitchen knives together

  Sit across from one another at the kitchen table

  Cut the top of each others hands

  Keep cutting in the same spot over and over until you have used each knife

  Step 2:

  Smoke cigarettes together

  Rub the cigarette ashes into your open wounds

  Giggle…

  But a few months ago, Insex was bought out by a Dutch company and Donna moved west to run Kink.com’s Wired Pussy site as the reigning queen of electro-torture sex. She finds Kink.com a bit limiting, though, a little too soft. Acworth doesn’t permit crying or drawing blood, or needles.

  “I was hypersexed as a child,” she tells me as she begins prepping Madison for the next scene. While growing up in Sacramento, “I used to get in trouble for my slumber parties. I used to like to do strip shows for, like, the boys in the neighborhood. I use to like to play games, like, you pretend to be sleeping, I get to do whatever I want to you, and if you wake up you lose. And I never woke up.”

  When she saw her dad’s porn stash “I thought that was, like, disgusting. I would think, ‘This is horrible!’ So I would, like, steal it from him and look through all the pages and be, like, ‘Ugh! I will steal this for him so he does not have to look through this any more because this is disgusting,’ but it would totally turn me on at the same time.”

  Her parents were “naked all the time,” she says with a note of approval, and “not, like, super uptight or religious. They were open-minded. One time I asked my mom what oral sex was because I had heard it in a movie, and she said, ‘It is when, like, you kiss someone all over their body’ so this is what I thought oral sex was for a long time.” Donna demonstrates by kissing her arms and hands.

  “She really said that?” Lisa interrupts with a note of indignation. “I feel that’s really deceptive.”

  This isn’t the effect Donna was hoping for. “No, but it is when you kiss someone all over their body! I thought it was really sweet.”

  Like Tina Butcher, Donna identifies herself as queer. I am still a little confused about what, exactly, queer means.

  “What does that mean?” Donna repeats, looking at me the way Anna Wintour might stare down a rube at a Paris fashion show who asked what the hell “rouching” is. “It means I do not generally date biological males. I date people who think of themselves as queer. It is more of a political and cultural stamp than purely what kind of sex I have. No matter who I am having sex with, it’ll be queer.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say. Donna senses my uncertainty.

  “It’ll never be strai
ght.”

  This doesn’t help. If I like to have sex with my wife when she’s wearing, say, one of my white dress shirts and a tie, does that make me queer? What if I think it’d be fun to have sex on a tree stump in the Gallatin National Forest? How about a guy who dates only women but likes bondage? Is he queer? Or straight? Or a woman like Susan who prefers men, says she’s straight, but will include women, sometimes, and likes being spanked? What about my new friend in Missouri who’s a Baptist, has tried threesomes and foursomes and anal and likes to have a good time, but is married and happy being married, and says she’s straight?

  “Well, what does straight mean?”

  “Vanilla. Normal,” Madison says.

  “Yeah,” Donna agrees. “Vanilla.” And then, recalling her NYU training, she adds, “Normative.” She strains to clarify. “I think straight is, like, an unmarked category. Straight is people who do not really think about their sexuality,” she says, looking at me and my wedding ring, “people who think their sexuality is naturally occurring and not a social construct. That would be straight to me.”

  “Oh, I see,” I say, though what I see isn’t exactly what Donna wants me to see. What I see is that I have met a lot of people who think deeply about their sexuality; the Christian Joe Beam does, and thinks about everybody else’s, too, and the pornographer Phil Harvey does, and so does Kathy Brummitt and most of the other people I have met, and as far as I know none of them are queer. I’m not queer. Or am I? No, what I see is that Donna needs to be special and to be seen as being special by being outrageous. I have no idea what normal means when it comes to sex. I am coming to the conclusion that nobody in America does anymore, and if everybody is not “normal,” then we are all queer, or none of us are, but either way, Donna isn’t so special.

  “But if you want the nuts and bolts of who I have sex with, that would generally be women and trans men.”

  “Uh, men to women?”

  “Women trans to men.” But she says this with too much definitiveness and backtracks. “Or, men trans to women, although most people who are trans men really want to be thought of as men.”