America Unzipped (27 page)

“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!”

 

M
idori 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.”

 

“
A
wesome!” 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.

Back in the bar I meet a fellow named Bruce, who happens to be from Ohio, also not far from where I grew up, and so we laugh about all the Buckeyes in the Porn Palace. Bruce was “in computers,” which is what computer guys say when they instinctively know you are incapable of understanding what it is they really do. I ask him what, exactly, he does, and he explains it, but of course I am incapable of understanding anything. This is partly because the computer terms are so much gibberish to me and partly because Bruce appears to have swallowed a dozen Ritalin. His eyes are bugging. The mass of brown curly hair on his head has turned into nervous little springs mounted on his skull and he speaks without punctuation. But I gather that when Bruce was in college back in Ohio he invented some sort of computer program, and then ended up working at Apple and making fistfuls of money when twenty-year-olds could still show up in Silicon Valley and make fistfuls of money, but blew it all on good drugs and hookers and professional dominatrices in Europe and Asia, but it was worth it, man, you know? Because you got to live, man, and you don't want to wait to do that stuff until you're old, and now he works here at Kink and really likes it because there is so much state-of-the-art gear and he can't seem to stop talking like this and staring wide-eyed and unblinking and grinning at me as he describes his debauched years that I've stopped understanding anything he's saying, except that BDSM is like a higher existence, you know? Practically spiritual, but it runs up your credit card debt and you gotta pay that off so you need to get a job.