America Unzipped

by Brian Alexander

  After our walk-through, Madison and I went to the “green room.” Literally. It was painted green. She sat down for makeup and costuming, not that there was much makeup to apply or anything elaborate to fit. While the makeup artist, a woman with green hair and spiderwebs tattooed behind both knees, worked on Madison, I couldn’t help noticing a stack of empty enema bottles, a one-gallon pump jug of Platinum Premium lubricant, and a supply of Ocean Spray cranberry juice.

  The customer and set designer, who works for San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater when she’s not working in porn, picked out Madison’s dress, and Madison swallowed an ibuprofen; her IUD cramping was better but hadn’t disappeared. Not that she’d notice in a few minutes anyway.

  Donna hobbles Madison by affixing a wooden dowel between Madison’s ankles. She sticks weighted clamps to her nipples, turning Madison’s breasts into a parody of an ancient Bantu matriarch’s. Then Lisa and Donna apply little round patches like those used for medical monitoring onto Madison’s butt, her labia, her inner thighs. Wires lead from the patches to the electrical generator.

  After some discussion about ball-gag diameters, Lisa picks out a smaller one than Madison used to prefer in deference to her TMJ. Donna straps it around Madison’s head. Then Donna straps a giant black silicone dildo around her own waist. As she walks, it flops up and down, back and forth as if it is trying to escape the steel ring holding it into the harness.

  “Action!”

  A black leather flogger flies back and forth through the hot, still air, the strips beating against Madison’s already crimson bottom. With every stroke, the strap-on waggles, Madison moans and yelps, the electricity hums and buzzes.

  “Oh oh hmm hmmmm oh oh oh mmmmmm…”

  “That’s making your pussy wet, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh…”

  “Holt! Repeat that…‘is making your pussy wet.’”

  “Can I get a pussy shot here?” Lisa asks.

  “Action!”

  “Oh ahh ooh ahhh hahh oh mmmm mmm hmm hmmmm oh oh hmmmm oh oh ha ha ha ha hoooooooo OW! oh ha ha ooh oh OW! OH OOIHA OHA Shhthththt OW! OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH…”

  Donna turns on the juice. “Is the fuck doll dancing for me? I can see it shaking your ass.”

  “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 Suuuuuhhhh OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH…”

  Donna then picks up the lit candle and pours hot wax from it onto Madison.

  “OW! OW!”

  Sure as the sun sets, Donna points the floppy dildo strapped around her waist at the target of Madison’s vagina.

  “OH HAM HAM OH OH OH…”

  “Holt! That was good,” Chuck says, apologizing for stopping the action. “I just thought I was going to trip.”

  No wonder. The floor has become a puddle of spit and lubrication. Chuck has to skate across the surface while shouldering his video camera.

  “Can I just get the insertion shot?” Lisa requests. Donna obliges, backing up and then pushing forward again.

  “Can you, uh, maybe if you go back and forth a little bit?”

  “Action!”

  Donna drives the strap-on in and out of Madison.

  “OPHS OHS HA AH AHA HA HA AH OH OH OH OH MAH AHA HA HA AHA HA AH AHA HO OH OH OH OHA HA OH OH OH AHAH AHA AHA OHO OH OHOHAAAAAAAAAHAHAAH AAHAAHA A…”

  “Holt!”

  “Need something?” Lisa asks.

  “I got some lube on my lens,” Chuck says. Now I know why Chuck is wearing coveralls.

  “Okay,” Chuck says after wiping his lens. “And…thrusting action!”

  “Hmmmmm HMMMM OH AHA AH AHA HOOO HO HO OH OH AW AH OO! OO! OO! OO! OH OH OH OH yeah mmmm OHO H ah ah ah aah ah ha OOO! EE EE EE EE!”

  “Can you come one more time for me?”

  “Oh ah wawa um. I wawa um. I wawa um, Mishresh Hanhah!”

  “Okay, so you do some work. Come on! Come on! Do more of the work.”

  Madison is trying to move her hips back and forth, but she has nowhere to go, being roped to the ceiling and all. Still, she makes a brave effort.

  “OOOHHH OH OHOHHHHH OH OH HA AH AOHA HA AH EEEEEE AH AHAH A HEEE HA AHA AHA HJAEER HO HO HO HO HO HOH OH OH HJAEER EAH UCK EAH UCK OPH OH OH OH OHOH OHA HHAH AHA HA OHA AHA HA AHA HMMMMMMMM HM MMM HMMM MM haha aha HAMMMMMMMMM OH OH OH OH OH OH OH AAA AAA AA AAA AAA AAA OH OH HO HO HO HO MMMMMMMOHHH HA AHA HA AHA AH AHA AHA HA AHA AHA AHA AHA AHA AHA AH AHA HA HOH OH OH MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM HMMMMMMMMM OHHA OOHAA eeeaahhhh eeeaahhh oh uck eah oh eah oh eah oh eah eah eah eah aye AYEAH YAEAH OW OW OW OW EAH…”

  “You gonna come? Hmmm?”

  “Esh, Mishrish Haa uhh.”

  Thunklurp thunklurp thunklurp thunklurp thunk…

  “You wanna come for me? You wanna have an orgasm for me?”

  “Esh, reeze.”

  Thunklurp thunklurp thunklurp thunk…

  “Tell me how fuckin’ horny you are!”

  “Ah mm uck ee horhee.”

  “Keep saying that until you are done!”

  “Ah mm uck ee horhee. Ah mm uck ee…”

  Thunklurp thunklurp thunklurp thunklurp thunklurp thunklurp thunk…

  “Horheeahmmuckehhorheeahmmmuckehhorhee aooh hah ahahaha aha ooh oho ohohoh oh ahahah mmm ahahha aha ha uckeh horheeuckeh horheeuckehhorhee AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH ahhhhhhh!”

  Midori is the undisputed queen of American BDSM models. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Midori was born in Japan and speaks fluent Japanese, which gives her enormous credibility, to say nothing of popularity, among a generation of Americans fascinated with Japanese pop culture and kinkiness. But Midori rarely models anymore, choosing instead to travel the country—sometimes the world—giving shibari seminars and BDSM lectures to neophytes who want to turn manga comics into real-life scenarios.

  Today there might be a dozen or so well-known extreme BDSM models like Madison in the U.S., almost all of them under thirty. But the power of the Internet has hugely magnified their influence on the pop culture mainstream and they, and the fetishes they depict, have now become sought after among people who regard irony as king and modern hipsterism as religion.

  In 2006 the San Francisco Chronicle, a Hearst newspaper, desperate to appeal to a younger, hipper generation than the typical readers of its “dead-tree” product, hired a woman named Violet Blue to be a sex columnist. Blue, a porn blogger for a website called Fleshbot (a division of the snarky mainstream Gawker site) and a sometime performer, is one of Madison’s acquaintances and a friend of Acworth’s.

  “As a sex writer and online sex personality, I’m not any kind of ‘safe’ pastiche you see in mainstream media,” she wrote on her blog, trumpeting her hiring. “I have chipped black nail polish, work on lethal robots for fun, have tattoos, am a fetish model, am a pro-porn pundit, a tech fetishist, and make no apologies about sex. I’m constantly in some kind of online controversy,” all of which makes her very, very badass and very, very cool. “And now I write a column for the Chronicle.”

  Later, in a very cool column for the paper’s website, she interviewed Eon McKai, wonder boy of the so-called alt-porn phenomenon, whose first big success was a DVD called Art School Sluts.

  “Down the street, we found comfort in an empty, unhip café with broken, squeaky overstuffed chairs and a server who rolled her eyes at us no matter what we ordered. I’d met McKai a couple years ago in Las Vegas during the Adult Video News porn convention, amid the circus of porn stereotypes, when a small group of us younger, paler, decidedly less straight porn intellectuals, directors, performers and bloggers found each other and clustered at crappy hotel bars and in dank casino hotel rooms, marveling at being outsiders within what we realized was a corporate porn bubble.”

  Efforts to evoke scenes like Paris in the twenties—Man Ray and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Dos Passos and Josephine Baker and Marcel Duchamp and Kiki of Montparnasse—are common with alt-porn habitués eager to paint
a rebel artist sheen onto skinny, tattooed people fucking each other.

  Anyway, McKai explained alt porn this way: “Altporn comes from the Web: sites like fatalbeauty.com, profanepirate.com, Suicide Girls, raver porn and on and on. To break it down more, let’s just say that altporn features performers that are a part of a subculture or a ‘scene.’ As a part of that, they dress a certain way. It’s Goth, punk, emo, raver, shoegazer—and so its permutations are endless. Throw in some bitter hipsters, heat that up until you get some Internet drama…and you have altporn.”

  Cool.

  The built-in flaw, of course, is that cool expires when enough people sign on and what is underground nudges its way to the surface. Whereas the once very cool Johnny Rotten is supposed to have said, “Sex? Aah fucking hippie crap!” thirty years ago, now sex is ironic and indie and alt. Another young woman named Joanna Angel, “writer, journalist, producer, director, model, and an AVN award winning adult film star,” as she describes herself, created an Internet site called BurningAngel, “an independent site that celebrates the intersection of sex and rock ’n’ roll with erotic photos and hardcore XXX movies alongside her interviews with punk and indie bands including Marilyn Manson, My Chemical Romance, the Bouncing Souls, and Bad Religion, among many others.”

  As with Violet Blue, self-congratulation on media saturation is very cool, too. “Referred to as the ‘queen of altporn,’ Joanna has been featured on Playboy TV’s ‘Sexcetera,’ Fuse TV, KSEX Radio, and in numerous editorials, including the The New York Times, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, The New York Press, Esquire UK, Penthouse, SCREW, XBIZ, Fleshbot, AVN, and Heeb, which featured her on their cover and named her an ‘up and coming Jew.’ Joanna holds a B.A. in English from Rutgers University—among her numerous professional and provocative roles, she considers herself a writer above all and documents all her life’s experiences in her BurningAngel blog, which is revered by intellectuals, hipsters and rock n’ rollers across the globe.”

  Sid Vicious was dead before Joanna Angel was born.

  Candida Royalle’s first porn movie was released four years before that. She was an art student, like Eon McKai, and chuckles at the revolutionary rhetoric of the kids. Her generation of porn pioneers and their older free-love siblings “lifted the lid” of Pandora’s box, she told me “and now it has come flooding out.”

  Kiki de Montparnasse died in 1953. Her name is now on a chichi sex toy store in New York City selling overpriced silk bondage ropes, riding crops, and titanium vibrators.

  In fact, there are other signs that this scene has already gone kitsch besides upscale sex stores and the hiring of Violet Blue by the Chronicle, that it has been kitsch for a long time. Madison, for example, has a friend who lives in Los Angeles named Claire Adams. Claire describes herself this way on her MySpace page:

  Just a young innocent thing born far away from where I ended up physically but not mentally! I have been a pervert for as long as I could remember, relishing and celebrating the processes of unconditional love, sadism, and bondage:)

  I enjoy meditation, yoga, nature and hiking. Watching movies in good company, sharing life with my partner, meeting people from all walks of life make this all worth doing and takes up most of my free time. I think a lot: consciously, deliberately, in depth thinking. Something I cannot avoid. It has rewards and also fulfills some sort of masochism I’ve yet to find a definition for.

  My passions lie with psychological innuendos. I like the attempt of understanding the boundaries of my intellectual, emotional, and physiological, and erotic existence. I love bondage and sm and the challenges and wonderful experiences represented in those categories. It is a mainstay in life for me.

  Claire is well known in BDSM both as a model/actress and for doing her own rigging on other people. She worked with Insex, appears with Madison on Madison’s website, and she works with Kink’s websites. She also travels and lectures at fetish gatherings. But Claire’s most recent big moment came in 2006 when she worked with fashion designer Tom Ford and photographer Art Streiber to suspend actor Peter Sarsgaard for the March issue of Vogue magazine. For Tina Butcher, this was proof that what she does in the guise of Madison Young is important. Finally, shibari, bondage, S&M, “sex positive” culture in general are receiving the artistic recognition they so deserve. They may not be mainstream yet, in that boring Ohio-ness mainstream sense of the word, but they are becoming mainstream among the really cool people who count, like Tom Ford.

  But twenty-five years ago, designer Thierry Mugler created dominatrix looks for haute couture, and twenty years ago, Gianni Versace evoked bondage. Today couture routinely takes its easiest inspirations from BDSM porn. Mugler designed an overt dominatrix look for that most obvious of bourgeois Americana, the Las Vegas extravaganza, Cirque du Soleil’s Zumanity. The Gucci “platform runway sandal” ($850) and the silver-spike-studded Dolce and Gabbana spike heel ($560) can be found in the New York Times. Goth-metal icon Marilyn Manson shot a fashion spread for “Vogue Rocks,” a special edition of Vogue, wearing spiked boots and capes and his trademark makeup.

  “Another day, another homage to Mad Max and the Thunder-dome,” fashion writer Cathy Horyn wrote in a 2007 review of a Milan show. “That was the scene at Dsquared, where the designers Dean and Dan Caten ran riot with sexy black leather, rough-looking fur and chain ornament. It was all fun and perfectly banal.”

  “Awesome!” Donna says. “This is your first time on Wired Pussy. How was it?”

  This is the postgame interview, a standard feature of videos shot by Kink, meant to convey the idea that the model was willing and enjoyed the whole the thing, so no harm, no foul, see? We were just playing around.

  “It was great!” Madison answers. “It went by way too fast.”

  “You’ll get to do it some more. What was your favorite part?”

  “Oh, gosh. Well, I really love suspension and I really enjoyed the ankle suspension.”

  “That was cool.”

  “I also really enjoyed the cattle prod actually, and it was pretty fuckin’ hot being suspended and having your pussy pushed into my face. I think I could deal with that happening many many times.”

  “OOOH, so could I!”

  “That was pretty hot. I also really loved the beginning scene we did, having your hands on me. I liked just being tossed around and having that sort of energy, so that was pretty cool.”

  After she has dressed and we are walking around the building, searching for our way back to the offices upstairs, Madison tells me, “Nothing we did today was that intense. It’s like a dance. There is an art to it. You can have a beautiful experience.” When she works with other people, Donna or anybody else in her career as a bondage model, whether it’s in London or Los Angeles or here, “it’s important that intimacy is being shared” because that intimacy comes across on camera. Having an orgasm can’t be faked and still look real, so you have to let go.

  The drawback, of course, is that Tina Butcher has become hard to please. “Sometimes I do think I am a bossy bottom,” she jokes. She has requirements. Rope, hitting, slapping, spanking. All done just right and at the right time. She doesn’t always need them to achieve orgasm, which she regards as the goal of sex, but she has been disappointed whenever she has dated anybody outside “the industry” and so now she only dates people who can give her what she wants, like James.

  When we find the offices, we sit with the talent coordinator, who asks, “Was this vaj rate or anal?”

  Madison and I try to remember if there was, in fact, anything anal and I am amazed to draw a blank. The only part of her body that was not penetrated, shocked, slapped, or flogged, I guess, was her anus. Madison seems surprised, too. Huh. How about that. The coordinator hands Madison a check for $700; it would have been $800 for anal.

  Madison and I are supposed to return to Kink tonight for the company holiday party, but we’ve been here since ten o’clock, it’s now five, and neither of us has eaten. So I invite her for an early dinner.
She suggests a Thai place a couple of blocks away.

  Rain is starting to come down as we leave Kink. A storm is blowing into San Francisco, one of those windy, wet, cold storms. We walk with our heads down and Tina talks about writing a book—memoir of a bondage model—and her artwork and her bondage website where members can sign up for regular subscriptions just like Kink. She would like to travel less, control her own destiny more. After all, there are only so many variations on a theme and after Madison Young has been seen in thousands of photographs and hours of video being bound and punished in dozens of different ways, what’s left? Branching out and becoming your own boss like Midori is the only way to make it in this business, though art is really what she would like to do. The problem is that Tina Butcher has become inextricably bound to Madison Young.

  “Sometimes I’m not sure where Tina ends and Madison begins,” she says. “I forget which one I am.” She is finding the task of running two personalities, two identities, to be more complicated than she had first thought. Who is the subject of the art now? Is she the viewer or the viewed? Is the art porn, or the porn art, or neither?

  Tina the vegan orders noodles and vegetables. She pulls out her cell phone and calls James, who is recovering from a bad cold, and coos into phone, “Hi, baby. How are you feeling, huh?”

  Later I walk back to Kink for the party, which is already going strong by the time I arrive. The caterer is setting out turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy, and broccoli, a very traditional holiday meal. There are mini pecan pies.

  A few people are kitted out in fetish attire, some are wearing jeans, some fancy party clothes. Acworth is wearing a striped buttoned-down shirt and jeans. He spends a lot of time standing by the kitchen door, smiling at his employees having a good time.

  Somebody announces a puppet show is beginning in the barn set, and I imagine PVC-clad puppets with Mohawks and codpieces, but in fact it is a standard Punch and Judy–style show playing for an audience of ten small children and one smart-ass ten-year-old who keeps saying, “Yeah, sure.” They are employees’ kids, mainly.