Madison isn’t so sure. They huddle. “Not all of them,” Madison says. “I think trans men identify as trans generally.”
“But that is not to say I don’t do it with a boy here and there,” Donna adds. “Queer is a little bit more all-encompassing, because otherwise it is pretty limiting. I mean, like, saying I am a lesbian?” She rolls her eyes in that “soo last century” way.
“Well,” I suggest, because I am completely lost in Donna’s gender shell game, and because I don’t really care all that much and am sorry I brought it up, “how about pansexual? Would that be accurate?”
Donna is losing patience.
“No. Queer is the only way to describe my sexuality. You always have to ask whoever you are talking about,” she instructs. “Pansexual is not how I define myself, but somebody else might. Not many people in the queer community do,” she says with pedagogical authority. “Not any that I know.”
Lisa says she’s queer, too. “We have a lot of queers in the office.”
“Queer is a political statement more than a biology issue,” Donna insists again. “But Chuck is straight,” she says, as if trying to find me a bro. “Or vanilla. Heterosexual. Married.”
“Vanilla!” Donna and Lisa say, kidding Chuck.
“No, I got kink!” Chuck whines defensively.
“You’re married, you’re married!”
Chuck is married, and happy to be married and have a job making decent money. He used to work in public access cable, and then for the state of California, but this pays better, it’s local, and he gets home every night to his wife. She doesn’t mind the nature of his work; she just doesn’t want to hear about it.
Donna’s parents don’t mind either. She told them recently, over Thanksgiving dinner, exactly how she earns her living. They knew she worked at a porn studio but had not known she was on camera. “My dad said, and I quote: ‘That’s okay, I don’t have any problems with sex work.’” Lisa is impressed. “I know,” Donna says. “I was, like, ‘Wow, Dad. Cool.’ And my mom just had a bunch of questions, um, about, like, tying people up. And she was, like, ‘Why does it matter to you?’ And she was, like, ‘Anybody can tie people up.’ And I was, like, ‘No, Mom. This is different.’”
Donna does have other ambitions. She is planning to create an instructional video on yoga for bondage models.
Tina Butcher’s family still doesn’t really know what it is Madison Young does. An uncle back in Ohio did find a few online images of Tina from an art performance piece and was shocked to find her naked. That prompted a call from her father, to whom Tina explained that she was sometimes nude for her art. That wasn’t a lie, exactly.
Chuck volunteers that his parents have no idea where he works and what he does, so could I please change his name? But he likes working at Kink. “This is as close to family as I have come in any work establishment,” he says as Donna finishes roping Madison’s naked body into a web of knots called a torso tie. She is also trying to affix tubular glass suction devices over Madison’s nipples, but this is proving challenging because Madison has pierced nipples. Then, like some mad dentist with a grudge, she buckles a steel mouth expander around Madison’s head. This forces Madison’s jaw wide open. She cranks a winch labeled “Not for Movement of Humans,” to lower a steel ring from the ceiling, hooks Madison into it, and then cranks Madison off the floor while Chuck continues his thought.
“This is a very family atmosphere.”
Donna grabs Madison’s labia and swings her back and forth.
“Action.”
“Ahh ahha oh…”
Donna cranks Madison higher. Clackclackclackclack…
“Ooh oh oh hah ophah oh no.”
“Moaning? Are you moaning?” Donna asks.
“Oh! OH OH!”
“You know what, Madison, let’s put this in there…”
Lisa’s camera clicks rapidly. Clickclickclick.
“And get that little pussy stretched out. Spread your legs! Mmmmm.”
Donna rubs lubricant on a large dildo and slides it into Madison’s vagina. A red wire leads from the base of the dildo to an electric box on the floor. There are dials and a digital readout on the box. Next, Donna clamps heavy chains onto Madison’s labia and hooks four old, rusty padlocks through some of the links. Madison is hanging vertically now, her ankles tied together, her arms tied behind her back, a rope harness wrapped tightly around her chest so her breasts are squeezed out between the rope coils, the glass tubes dangling off them. The chains and locks pulling her labia rattle along the floor like a pornographic Jacob Marley’s.
“See those numbers? See it?”
“Holt! ‘See those numbers.’ Action.”
“See those numbers? What number is that?”
“Hiii.” Madison can’t pronounce nine because the steel expander is keeping her mouth wide open. Drool runs down her chin.
“Nine?”
“AHH!…Heehee-ix!”
“Fifty-six?”
“Hurhy-hree…Hay-heen…”
Donna hits Madison with a black leather flogger.
“OH! OH! OWWW! OH Gah…Hurhy…oh oh.”
“Holt! Do another reading of those levels. Action.”
“Horhy-hore…Hihhy…Hurhy-hoo…Huhee-ree…Huhee-hor…Oh OH! Gah oh gah huhee-hive!” Current jolts Madison’s body, making it jerk upward.
Now Donna is using a pneumatic pump to create intense suction on Madison’s nipples, sucking them far into the glass tubes.
Chuck is really sweating now, shouldering his camera and jumping all over the set to get the right shots.
“Action!”
“Have you learned? Think you have learned your lesson?”
“Hesh! Hesh! Hesh! Ohhh oh oh…”
“Say nice things about me when you are hanging up there.”
“Eah. Eah. Eeoo r hah. Eeoo ha hate hans. Eeoo eel reahhy ood. Eeo uck ee o ice.”
“I am not thoroughly entertained yet. Keep going…I am still turning it up until you think of something better to say.”
“Oh eah. Eeoo r ucking hah. Eeoo r o ucking hah.” Long rivulets of drool hang from Madison’s chin.
“I think you can be a little more enthusiastic! I have a setting at ninety-nine! That could make you much more enthusiastic when it is up to ninety-nine!”
“Argh argh eeoo so hah eeoo so argh hah! oh oh ah ow ow ow ow.”
“Holt!”
Click, click, click. Clack clack clack. Donna winches Madison higher.
“You all right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I am going to turn it up. Just say ‘Unh-hunh’ whenever it’s too high. They are going to think it is going up to ninety-nine, which is, like, hot wires.”
“Hey, I believed you,” Lisa says.
“Well, I will if she doesn’t say ‘unh-hunh’ before then.”
“Action.”
“You wanna please me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What would please me is if we turn this all the way up. I am going to turn this all the way up. Then we are going to count to one hundred. There it is at ninety-nine.”
“Holt! Repeat there it is at ninety-nine. Action.”
“EEEOOOOOHHHH!” Madison squirms as if trying to climb out of the ropes. “OH! HE! EH! EH! EHE! EHE! EHE! EHE!”
“There it is at ninety-nine.”
Smack! Donna hits Madison with the flogger. Smack!
“Count!”
“Unh, oo, ree, or, hie…” Madison is on the verge of tears.
Smack. Smack.
“OH! Huahhuha…huhee-oo, huhee-ree…”
“Holt! Twenty-six. Go.”
“Huhee-ix…Hurhee-ix…Horhee…”
“Keep counting,” Donna instructs. “I will come back when you are done.”
Madison counts between sighs and cries and yelps. “Hayhe hor, hayhe hive…”
Click. Click.
Pornography is defined as the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures
and/or words that also includes women presented dehumanized as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or women presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or women presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or women presented as whores by nature; or women presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or women presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.
Andrea Dworkin wrote this for a 1989 preface to her 1981 book Pornography: Men Possessing Women. It parallels the text of an antiporn law she and lawyer Catharine MacKinnon were campaigning for in cities around the country.
Dworkin, a radical antiporn feminist, was not subtle in her writings. “In contemporary American pornography, of course, the Jews do it to themselves—they, usually female, seek out the Nazis, go voluntarily to concentration camps, beg a domineering Nazi to hurt them, cut them, burn them—and they do climax, stupendously, to both sadism and death.”
Madison Young was a newborn when Dworkin first published her screed on porn. It was an ideal time to mount an antiporn offensive because Ronald Reagan had just been elected with help from a new Christian conservative movement. He appointed Edwin Meese his attorney general. In what was one of America’s most unusual political alliances, Dworkin, MacKinnon, and other antiporn feminists found themselves working with Meese and fundamentalist Christians to advance the law in one battleground city after another, making porn a national issue. Meese formed a special commission to investigate it and began putting the weight of the U.S. Justice Department behind prosecuting it (until suffering defeats like the one administered by Phil Harvey). Dworkin was happy. “This law and the political vision and experience that inform it are not going to go away,” she boasted in 1989. “We are going to stop the pornographers.”
“Who is Andrea Dworkin?” Lisa asks when I wonder out loud what Dworkin and MacKinnon would say if they were here.
“They did those antipornography sex ordinances, that whole confusion that being antiporn, antisex work was feminist; it was antiwoman, actually,” Donna interjects as if Dworkin, or the very idea of such a thing as an antiporn feminist were phlogiston, a quaint, wrongheaded notion from the history she learned at NYU. “It is so funny. That was the one time that feminism became completely confused with right-wing politics. Like the church and the right wing? And feminists making laws that were supposed to support women…
“I just laugh about it when people ask me how I can make porn and consider myself a feminist. I make porn because I am a feminist.”
Donna turns to Lisa and asks, “Is my hair okay?”
“Action!”
“OH OH mmmm oh gah, oooh oh gah oh oh ooohh uhh ooo hmmm ah oh hmmm…”
Donna has hung Madison upside down by one ankle. She bends Madison’s free leg back with rope, wraps the rope around her ankle, and threads it through Madison’s mouth so Madison looks like a masochistic ballet dancer in inverted airborne attitude. She turns Madison’s labia into a Baskin-Robbins French vanilla cone by spitting on them and then licking with gusto. Chuck and Lisa surge forward for tongue-on-vulva close-ups, the money shots.
Clickclickclickclickclick.
“Ah ah ah ooo ah ooooo mmm m m ohh ahh.”
“Holt!”
Donna retrieves clothespins attached to electrical wires and attaches one to each of Madison’s labia. Next comes a glass dildo wired for electricity. She slides this into Madison’s vagina, then crouches down onto her hands and knees so her ass is in front of Madison’s inverted face.
“Action!”
“Oh OH HA HA oh oh oh oh ah ha ha uuuuuhhhhhh.”
“I am not asking for you to do it!”
Madison somehow manages to slip her tongue from behind the rope in her mouth to lick Donna while Donna masturbates.
“I want to make sure you are really turned on before I fuck you.”
“Holt!”
There’s a mad scramble to get the girl-on-girl oral shots. Lisa splays on the floor; Chuck leans over, dripping sweat off his nose. They are inches away from Donna’s organs of reproduction, a phrase that occurs to me because they remind me of medical interns at their first gynecological exam.
“Action.”
Donna is a screamer.
“Oh OH HAMM HAMMM oh oh oh oh ah ha ha oh ahh ooh ahhh hahh oh mmmm mmm hmm hmmmm oh oh hmmmm oh oh ha ha ha ha hoooooooo oh ha ha ooh oh OH OOIHA OHA SMMMMMM OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH…”
Things are moving quickly now and it’s tough for me to keep up. Wait! There’s Donna with a cattle prod. Zzzzut! Zzzzut! Zzzzut! Miniature static lightning bolts race across the gap between the two copper nodes at the end, and for the first time Madison’s expression betrays some genuine fear.
“AYEAH! YAEAH! OW! OW! OW! OW! YWEAH!” Is she being shocked by the prod? The thing in her vagina?
Clack clack clack clack clack. Donna and Lisa rush to winch Madison to the floor. Madison can take a lot of pain; she thinks being a redhead gives her more pain tolerance. But even Madison has limits to how long she can dangle upside down, contorted, with her breasts sucked into glass tubes, electricity shooting through her body.
Madison is standing now, awkwardly because she’s got her hands tied behind her back with rope. Donna has it looped over…what? The ring in the winch? A pulley? And she’s brought it down to tie it into a big knot of Madison’s hair. Oh, I get it. Every time Madison lowers her bound hands, she’ll pull her hair.
Diabolical.
But there’s more. A lot more. The finale is coming soon, I gather, because there is some serious gearing up. A candle is lit. Objects are brought in from the storage room next door. In all the fussing, however, somebody has forgotten to remove the dildo from Madison’s vagina. Finally, Lisa notices it’s still in there and she and Donna laugh. “I always forget those things,” Donna says.
Peter Acworth is thirty-six years old and favors the slightly stodgy fashions of a clubby banker working in the city of London. His shirts are usually buttoned down, his brown hair neatly trimmed, his soft face closely shaved. He can often be found standing with his arms folded across his chest on the periphery of a clutch of people, smiling congenially. He is, in fact, a congenial fellow. If it hadn’t been for the Internet, Acworth would have been one of those unassuming chums Britain seems to grow as regularly as the barley harvest, a well-to-do, educated banker with a small country house, an appropriate wife, a loyal dog, and a kink for bondage and domination.
In 1997 he was living in New York earning a graduate degree in business at Columbia. He had already graduated from Cambridge where he studied mathematics, and he had worked at the staid British investment bank Barings, so his future seemed set: maybe a stint in New York after Columbia, some time in Singapore to learn the Asian markets, then back to London and the pinstripes. But then he latched on to the idea of throwing a few bondage photos he had purchased onto a website he created, Hogtied.com, figuring to make a little extra money. The hit counters on his Web page started moving the first day. The money followed. America, it turned out, contained many people like Acworth who appreciated the sight of people being tied up for sex.
Soon thereafter, Acworth became a full-time pornographer. He moved to San Francisco and happily rode the boom–bust–boom cycles of the Bay Area’s wired economy, virtually immune from the panics that decimated other dotcom businesses. In what amounts to a small-time re-creation of the old Hollywood studio system, with Acworth as Louis B. Mayer, Acworth built his own studio, hired the talent, and exhibited on his own websites. Now, his fifty or so employees churn out up to four or five new productions per day for the Kink family of sites. There is Wired Pussy, of course, and the original Hogtied, but also Whipped Ass, Fucking Machines (in which women, typically, ride mechanical devices equipped with dildos, something like the bucking mechanical bull from Urban Cowboy), Men in Pain, Water Bondage, Sex and Submission, and Ulti
mate Surrender, a female wrestling site. More are planned. Madison’s boyfriend, James Mogul, is producing one called The Training of O.
The popular sites gross about $300,000 per month. If you’re a good site producer, you could make up to $150,000 per year. That sort of money attracts people like Reena Patel, vice president for marketing. She joined the company four months ago after working in the Bay Area’s pharmaceutical industry. In fact, about half the employees are women.
When I arrived at the Porn Palace this morning, there was no evidence of this success. I wasn’t even sure I was standing outside the right building. It was completely anonymous without signage of any kind, on a run-down block. But inside, success was obvious. On the top floor, offices lined one wall and in the open floor spaces, where another company might have stuffed cubicles, about ten video editors sat in the dark in front of banks of large flat computer screens. Each wore headphones. The soft tapping of computer keys and mouse clicks provided the only accompaniment to a mosaic of body parts floating unconnected in digital space-time.
When Madison arrived, we walked down a flight of stairs and into a realistic-looking castle set Acworth obtained from the Walt Disney company. This level also contained a jail set, a barn, a functional bar, an operating room—a backlot crammed inside a building in the middle of San Francisco.
In the basement several heavily tattooed guys pounded on wood and steel, backed by a heavy-metal sound track. They were building new set pieces and creating new fucking machines or servicing old ones. The other half of the basement contained a storage room for supplies and equipment, some technical, like cameras and lights, and some props and safety devices like surgical gloves, lube, dozens of ball gags, dildos, chains, handcuffs, leather straps, whips, and electrical devices whose functions I could only imagine. Madison is shooting in an attached dead-end corner room.
But even as I am watching Madison and Donna work, Acworth is negotiating for much larger space. He is arranging to buy the landmark San Francisco Armory building for $14.5 million so he can turn the former home of the California National Guard into the new Porn Palace.
America Unzipped Page 22
