Sex

Ever since the birth of her daughter, the intersection of motherhood and sexuality has been a theme for Young, who is the director of the feminist art gallery Femina Potens. In an earlier exhibit titled “Becoming MILF,” she served breast milkshakes and displayed a quilt made of burp cloths and “porn star panties.” Controversy certainly comes with this territory: A couple of months back, I wrote about how her maternally focused performance art – including posing for a black-and-white photograph while dressed up like Marilyn Monroe and breast-feeding her baby — inspired a fellow sex worker to accuse her of appealing to pedophiles, which then led to an insider Twitter war. It was a trying time for Young, and made her fear for her family’s safety, but it hasn’t stopped her creative output. She’s writing a children’s book called “My Mommy Is a Love Artist” and organizing an anthology written by members of her group “The Sexy Mamas Social Club.”

We are joined in bed by a handful of her friends and collaborators as the conversation ranges from the extreme, like the challenges of practicing bondage while lactating and age-appropriate ways to explain the concept of pornography to a child; to the prosaic, like how little sleep new moms get. That one of our bed-mates has a 2-year-old girl on her lap lends the sexual parts of the conversation a vague friction, which is fitting, given that Young’s work explores the cultural tension between being a mother and being a sex symbol. It’s part performance art, part interview — and a total trip.

Can you explain the image of you with the spinner between your breasts?

With this one, this is really about the different ways that people see your breasts after having a baby, and the way that you view them yourself. You’re feeding your child with your breasts but you’re also a sexual being. I can be with my partner in the other room making passionate love when we’re interrupted by a crying baby and then I have to rush in and use those same breasts to feed my child.

I think that was even challenging for my partner, he felt like, “Your breasts are Emma’s right now. What if I mess something up? What if I disturb our child’s eating by … squeezing too hard?” There are certain things that even I don’t do with my breasts now; I don’t have them tied up or do any corporal punishment to them. I don’t want to damage any of the milk ducts right now.

Why is the issue of sex and motherhood such a potent subject?

People obviously have a lot of issues around moms, regardless of whether their sexuality is documented on camera. Just Jane Smith having a sex life and having a kid and being out about it is controversial.

I like to make art about what’s going on in my life right now, and my child is totally consuming my life. Even when I’m not with her, my identity is affected by her existence. She’s my inspiration for basically everything that I do now. People would tell me before that everything would change when I had a kid, but I thought they meant, “You’ll never do adult film again” or “You’ll never make art again.” It’s not those kinds of things but rather why you’re doing it or how you do it.

We’re creating our own family, in our own way, instead of feeling like we have to move to the suburbs and have nine-to-fives and give up all that we are because we have a kid.

How much do you personally struggle with this new identity? It seems you’re trying to deliver a message to a general public that has a hard time thinking about a mom’s sexuality, let alone one who’s in the adult business. But I’m sure you also struggle with it internally as well, right?

I’ve spent the last 10 years in the adult industry and I feel like I have become an expert at certain things — like sex! — that I get paid to do. Now, all of a sudden, I’m in a world where I have no clue what I’m doing. I’m just trying to write and to connect with other moms with similar experiences. That’s why I created the San Francisco “Sexy Mamas” club a month after Emma was born. As I started talking about my own experiences, moms started coming up to me and were like, “Thank you so much for doing this. This the first time I’ve been able to be ‘out’ about being a part of an alternative sexual culture and also being a mom.” I think that I find happiness in not feeling isolated and not feeling shame about who we are. That’s really the core of what I do, whether it’s in the adult industry or in art.

What do you talk about in the Sexy Mamas club?

Sometimes we just hang out and have lunch and talk about normal mom stuff, like our struggles trying to get our children to sleep and what solids they’re eating — but we don’t have to be afraid about talking about work or sex as well. Our kids also have each other; they play together and are growing up together.

How do you explain what you do to fellow moms who don’t have that shared experience of sex work?

A lot of times I lead in with the educational element. I’m like, “I speak on sexuality at places like Yale University and I direct for Good Vibrations.”

Let’s talk about the controversy over the breast-feeding image.

What was interesting was that people were projecting all these fears and hang-ups that they have onto that image. So I think there’s obviously some conversation that needs to happen around it, and hopefully we can create some safe spaces for those conversations.

The controversy seemed potentially very frightening. I was just recently reading about a case in which a couple was arrested after their daughter found naughty photos they had taken of themselves and brought the shots to school. That was in 1999, just over a decade ago.

That’s why when people started using the p-word [pedophile], it just seemed so incredibly loaded and dangerous. As a mom, you’re constantly worried: Am I doing the right thing? Am I giving her enough love? Should I be here talking to you instead of being with her right now? It is gut-wrenching to leave her when I go to work every day. And then you feel like you’re not doing as good of a job at work because you’re thinking, “I have to hurry home to my child!” These are things that every mom, especially every working mom, deals with. It’s really challenging on top of that when you have numerous articles and comments from strangers about how you’re not doing a good enough job parenting, because you already have your own anxieties around that anyway.

The one question I always hear asked of moms who are in the adult business is, “What are you going to tell your child?”

What I tell everyone is that I plan on being honest with my child and talking with her in a language she understands, which is the same as I do with any member of my family or anyone who is outside of the adult industry. Finding some commonality, something that they understand and can relate to, and talking with them on that level.

I’m creating a children’s book right now that’s called “My Mommy Is a Love Artist.” It’s about a mom who creates art and film that captures the love that people have for one another. There are hearts everywhere and it’s like, “My mom goes on a safari, she goes through the wildnerness and finds people who are having magical experiences together and then captures them on film as they have their magic love.” It shows them holding hands and kissing. It advocates for love and for connection. And a lot of the people that I do shoot are real couples. Everything that I do is about capturing actual authentic pleasure. I think you can explain pleasure to a child — they have pleasurable moments, they love to give hugs and to receive kisses and be tickled. I’ll inform her about more things as it makes sense to address them, but I want her to understand the basic concepts of what I do. Right now, though, it’s all Elmo to her!

Another question that a lot of people ask is, “Have you told your family?” I really don’t see shame in what I do and I don’t want my child to feel that I do anything that is shameful. I don’t want her to feel that our bodies are shameful. But I also want her to come to her own conclusions. She can either support this when she gets older or she can have her own valid reasons for not supporting it. I can’t make her be a sex-positive feminist when she grows up.

She has to rebel somehow, right?

She might be out there picketing Good Vibrations or something!

The question of why the money shot has since then, ahem, exploded in popularity is more complicated. The most obvious explanation is one of pure mechanics. “It has to do with the real physiology of orgasm and ejaculation,” says Lisa Jean Moore, author of “Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid.” “The way that male orgasm is external, as opposed to female orgasm, which is internal, it sort of lends itself well to cinematic capture.”

In terms of evolutionary biology, the money shot also triggers sexual competition. Ogi Ogas, author of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” a book that explores human sexuality through popular porn genres, says, “The penis itself is a sperm competition cue, unconsciously triggering arousal designed to motivate a man to have more vigorous sex with a woman than the man who just finished,” he says, drawing on theories in evolutionary psychology about sexual competition. (For example, one study showed that heterosexual men produced more potent ejaculate when masturbating to images of two men having sex with a woman, compared to porny shots of three women together.) “The sperm might also function as a sperm competition cue in the same manner,” he says.

It’s also simply the case that viewers desire proof that the pleasure they’re seeing performed on-screen is authentic — and in the age of Viagra, an erection itself isn’t convincing enough. “The money shot actually implies that what we are seeing is real,” says Cindy Patton, a professor of sociology, anthropology and women’s studies at Simon Fraser University.

The irony is that such proof actually requires suspension of disbelief, because “the male pornographic film performer must withdraw from any tactile connection with the genitals or mouth of the woman so that the ‘spending’ of his ejaculate is visible,” writes Williams. “Within convention, viewers are asked to believe that the sexual performers within the film want to shift from a tactile to a visual pleasure at the crucial moment of the male’s orgasm.”

In recent years, in a bizarre sleight of … penis, some “pornographic videos, and particularly the cover photographs that entice one to buy, feature partially concealed artificial yet very realistic phalluses that shoot decidedly unrealistic quantities of artificial semen when squeezed,” writes Michael Thomas Carroll in “Popular modernity in America: experience, technology, mythohistory.” He explains, “This desire to provide the ‘evidence’ of male sexual pleasure has given way to ‘natural magic’ and illusory spectatorship.”

Some cultural commentators have paradoxically argued that the money shot is the result of the relative invisibility of the typical female orgasm. “The problem of an equally irrefutable and visible proof of female orgasm, at a physiological level, both leads to the convention whereby male orgasm stands in for female orgasm and to attempts to convey female orgasm by more indirect means,” argues Bill Nichols in “Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.”

Williams writes in “Hard Core,” “While undeniably spectacular, the money shot is also hopelessly specular; it can only reflect back to the male gaze that purports to want knowledge of the woman’s pleasure the man’s own climax.” She calls the cum shot “a poor substitute for the knowledge of female wonders that the genre as a whole still seeks.”

Some would rather explain this gender divide in terms of sexism. In heterosexual cum-shot porn, Carroll argues, chauvinism is evident in the “domination of the standing male/kneeling woman stance that is one of the most popular forms of this image, but also in the implied degradation of the phallus ‘spitting’ on the woman’s face — that part of the body which is most closely associated with one’s individual dignity and personality.” (It’s worth noting that a similar dom-sub dynamic plays out in gay porn, too.)

In some but not all contexts, Moore sees the money shot as a way of “marking” a partner as “territory or property.” In a paper titled, “Cocktail parties: Fetishizing semen in pornography beyond bukkake,” she and co-author Juliana Weissbein wrote, “The most prominent type of [cum shot] video on X-Tube … was of disembodied males masturbating to ejaculation onto a still photo of a female,” they explain. “The women in these photographs, often difficult to see, are described variously as ex-girfriends or ex-wives, famous models or actresses. Ejaculating onto photos of a specific woman allows the man to claim her as his property.”

Perhaps most important is the impact of AIDs and HIV since that seminal moment in “Deep Throat” four decades ago. “In heterosexual contexts, women have avoided semen for a long time, partially to prevent pregnancy,” as well as various STDs, says Moore. But the AIDS and HIV crisis gave ejaculate an even greater “toxifying, disease-ridden” image. “Semen is something we’ve tried to sanitize and protect ourselves from in a prophylactic sense — we’re covering the body up, or covering the penis up, figuring out ways to avoid contact,” she says.

The funhouse mirror of sexuality often eroticizes that which we most fear and abhor, thus “a fantasy develops about somebody actually wanting [semen], and they want it so badly that they want to drink it and they want to slather it all over their bodies and they want you to wipe it all over their faces,” Moore says. “The messages that are so adverse and make semen to be this abject, disgusting substance have had this other effect of making male spectators want to live out the fantasy that women and men actually want it and are celebrating it.”

Carroll argues that it “is not merely a carnal fantasy; it is also an emotional one — a fantasy of ‘unconditional acceptance’ in which the female” — or male, presumably — “seems to say ‘I exist wholly for you. I will never reject you. You cannot disappoint me.”

A few years later, after a stint teaching sex ed at an after-school program, she started Boinkology, a site about sex and pop culture. That got her noticed by the folks at Fleshbot, which has always specialized in a mix of sexy content from both porn and mainstream entertainment (for example, a red-carpet shot of a celebrity with a see-through dress or a sex scene on “Weeds”). She quickly rose from a contributor to associate editor to editor in chief.

The recent split with Gawker was a result of the fact that “Fleshbot required all this special attention,” she says, because everyone from advertisers to banks are scared of being associated with an adult site. “They couldn’t devote the energy to optimizing it, and it wasn’t bringing in enough to justify the problems it was creating.” In an interview last year, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, who recently reported a record of 35.6 million unique visitors across all his Web properties, said Fleshbot accounted for only 5 percent of the company’s traffic.

So Denton put it up for sale. Alptraum can’t go into details because of “some nondisclosure stuff I signed,” but says, “Basically, they had a really short timeline on a sale, and there were interested people who just couldn’t make an offer in time. So it ended up going to me, basically.”

Now she’s the 29-year-old CEO of an adult site, and one of a growing number of women taking the helm of everything from porn production houses to sex toy companies. That said, the industry is still dominated by old white guys. But that’s slowly changing. Quentin Boyer, who has been in the industry since 1997, says “the shift in the ‘porn executive demographic’” began “in the late ’90s, when Internet-based companies began to assert themselves in the adult entertainment market.” Says Boyer, the public relations director for Pink Visual, a porn production company that advertises on Fleshbot and also happens to have a female CEO: “In my view, Lux is part of the wave of new talent that has arrived in the adult entertainment industry as a direct result of the industry’s ‘webification,’ if you will.”

Alptraum agrees. “I’m someone who’s kind of a Web native and who comes from a sex positive background of not necessarily embracing the dominant narrative of what’s sexy,” she says. “I’m kind of like the embodiment of what the Internet has done to porn.” By freeing up the means of production and giving direct access to niche audiences, the Web has empowered all sorts of people who don’t fit the typical porn mold to enter the business, and from all angles.

Women have slowly made progress outside the alt and Internet-based sectors of the industry too. “There are several video companies that have females in high-ranking positions,” says Mark Kernes, a senior editor at Adult Video News. For example, heavyweights Wicked Pictures, Vivid Entertainment and Digital Playground. Miller says, “Certainly the assumption from outside the business is that it’s male dominated, and that’s the majority still, but women have made a big impact in recent years.”

Much like Alptraum, Fleshbot is unusual within the industry. “They have tapped into a unique niche within the adult media and publishing world,” says Dan Miller, executive managing editor of XBIZ, an industry news source. “They’ve been able to dip their toes a little bit into both worlds.”

The site’s also unusual in terms of its “feminist and respectful ethos,” argues Alptraum. “It’s not vulgar, it’s not treating these performers in a degrading way,” she says. “We never shame anybody’s body because we believe that anybody who’s willing to put themselves forth as a sexual object is worth celebrating.”

But the biggest thing setting Fleshbot apart from other porn blogs is that it publishes straight and gay content side by side. “From a marketing perspective, that’s a real departure from the industrywide tendency to categorize and segregate content starting with sexual orientation as the first point of separation,” says Boyer. Instead, Alptraum sees the site as a collection of “anything that we feel could be hot.”

It’s a decidedly Internet-era mindset of plurality and pansexuality. “The reason why I’m able to run Fleshbot, and the reason why Fleshbot is in ascendance, is the same reason why alt porn became popular: the Internet is dramatically transforming the adult industry,” she says. “It’s not so much of a top-down dictation thing anymore.”