America Unzipped (25 page)

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 straight.”

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.”

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.”

 

D
onna 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.”