by Jon Pressick
Now, as the president of my own production company (which partners with the online broadcasting network AEBN.net), I’ve been given an opportunity to follow my own conscience and to control my own career and financial future. Should I refuse to bow to “the Man” and go underground like many of my peers have already started to do? Shoot without legal film permits and operate in the shadows? Or do I search my soul for truths that don’t stem from a need to rebel against authority or protect my own bottom line?
I’ve concluded I want my performers to be safe more than I want to be “the most successful porn director.” I want them to leave my set feeling good about participating in my movie and to never look back on it with regret. I don’t want them to experience a surge of fear and shame when they learn their next STD test results. And most of all I don’t want to encourage them to be nonchalant about their health.
“What if?” arguments aside, condoms, along with a current, valid STD test, will do a pretty good job of ensuring that performers on my set will go home without anything new to worry about. Are condoms foolproof? No. Neither is an STD test, even if it’s a very recent one. But would requiring condoms and a test make for a safer work environment? Yes—by a very wide margin.
But what if nobody buys my “condom porn” movies? What if my competitors continue to shoot “bareback sex” in secret locations, avoiding detection and forcing me out of business?
That’s a possibility I fear. But nowhere near as much as I fear exposing already vulnerable, stigmatized performers to preventable STDs on my set. Not as much as I fear being directly responsible for a performer’s inability to pay their rent as I go on paying mine, indifferent to their struggle. I don’t want to live that life. I don’t want to be that person.
Yet, I do believe there are valid First Amendment arguments in favor of condom-free porn. As an artist it bothers me that I can no longer film completely nude bodies or “all natural,” explicit lovemaking, even when shooting monogamous, married couples. It bothers me that those of us with allergies to condoms will not be accommodated and will be completely shut out of performing. I believe there should be room for accommodations; there should be exceptions made if, for example, adherence to certain rigid health and safety standards can be verified. Just as mainstream directors are allowed to put actors and stunt people at increased risk as long as increased safety protocols are followed, a similar provision could apply to the adult industry so that we might maintain our right to freedom of artistic expression. (Some of us do actually venture to make art, believe it or not.)
But the catch is, we have to prove we’re responsible enough to follow such rigid safety standards and to take rules and laws seriously. (Not just those we “want” to follow or have imposed on ourselves.) We have to show we can operate within the law and not angrily threaten to break it when there’s a ruling we don’t like. We have to demonstrate that we care about the health of those we work with more than we care about making a quick, sleazy buck. If we want legal rights and protections we have to accept the reality that, like any legitimate business, we will be supervised, held accountable and penalized if we don’t conduct ourselves professionally—and ethically.
We have to do something that an industry obsessed with being forever young, wild and free is loath to do:
We have to grow up.
Pregger Libido
Ember Swift
When our bodies start making another human body, the process is so complex that it’s no wonder we’re exhausted. As this is my second pregnancy, I’m surprised that I’d forgotten this fact. I’m currently six months along and so for the past half a year, I’ve found myself wanting to nod off at 10:00 p.m. or falling asleep the moment my head hits the pillow. Although, this time, I also have a toddler who still wakes me up at night to go “pee pee,” but sleep mercifully returns quickly after that task is done. Sleep has become my most steady companion.
When I was pregnant with my first child—my daughter—I was equally exhausted, but this also permeated my mood, which in turn permeated my libido. I don’t think pregnant women speak often enough with each other about how pregnancy hormones affect libido.
I was shy to admit to my friends (especially those who had had children or who were also pregnant) that I was absolutely not interested in having any kind of marital relations with my husband. There were occasional exceptions to that state of mind, but it’s truthful to say that our intimacy levels dropped substantially during my first pregnancy. This embarrassed me. I feared others would think I was punishing our partnership for what was happening to my body. I was also afraid that I had forgotten how to connect with the person I loved. Thankfully, after the birth of our daughter, things went back to a relative normal.
With baby number one, I also did all my previous prenatal care in China and we were advised early on to avoid sexual relations for health and safety reasons. Chinese doctors are notoriously discreet in this regard and so the rationale was vague at best. In the West, the necessity for abstinence during pregnancy—even during the first trimester—has long been disproved. In fact, having intimate relations with our partners is now encouraged by Western doctors. Both the rocking motion and the hormones generated through pleasure are comforting to the growing fetus.
Regardless of knowing this more modern information from the West, during my daughter’s gestation I was quite happy to adhere to the old-fashioned practices advocated in China. In a conservative country, I opportunistically became conservative myself—an excellent veil for what more accurately was just an absentee libido.
Now, fast-forward to baby number two. I am a fine example of the saying, “every pregnancy is different.” I am not as emotionally exhausted, I’m in a brighter and better mood, and I have a strangely elevated sex drive. More desire, less darkness. I am receiving my prenatal care in Canada and now it is my partner’s turn to opportunistically adhere to more liberal Western practices. In other words, it’s time for him to accommodate the demands of my growing libido!
This is where you are anticipating a happy ending. You might expect to read that my husband and I have been having wonderful, wild sex throughout this second child’s gestation. This piece will have successfully solicited both congratulatory nods and hints of reader envy. Maybe I should quit while I’m ahead….
Alas, truth is my model and so I must confess that ever since my belly has become visible, he’s hesitated, unsure as to whether he wants to have “sex with his son.”
What?! I have been hard on him about this, arguing that my body is still my body, my “needs” are still my “needs,” and his son is never going to remember his father in any compromising position. He still hesitates (but usually complies). Sometimes I truly feel like the stereotypical man in this partnership; it’s the first time I’ve had to convince him to go to bed with me. Geesh.
This mysterious situation never had the opportunity to present itself during my first pregnancy because I simply wasn’t interested. How many other pregnant women have found themselves feeling horny only to be confronted with their “freaked out” partner who is concerned about the connection between the child and sex? Or their fear of hurting the baby or crushing the baby in the act, et cetera? Where is the line between being a woman and being a mother? Does our sex appeal disappear as soon as our bellies swell? These are questions I may never know the answers to. As I mentioned, we pregger ladies aren’t talking about this enough.
As a saving grace, my husband’s hesitation has found a peaceful perch between my elevated exhaustion and elevated libido. When sleep has become my greatest companion, do I even have the energy to convince my partner that he’s missing out? And for myself, when I can’t keep my eyes open in bed, how are my desires going to get fulfilled? I’ve proposed several creative solutions, not to fear, and he’s intrigued by my persistence. I’m too shy to write about them here, however. Wish us luck.
But, as a final commentary, I believe strongly that as our pregnant female bodies change, get larger,
get unrecognizable—especially the first time it happens—it’s so important to push ourselves to allow our partners to love us, to touch us, to celebrate our body’s new shape and growth. Often, our addition of a baby bump makes us even more beautiful and sexy to those who love us, even when we don’t believe it.
If, like me in my first pregnancy, our libidos have left through the same door as our entire wardrobe, we women nonetheless have to push ourselves to stay open to letting our bodies be loved. There are lots of options in this regard. Massage, being bathed, or allowing our partners to rub oils or skin cream into the rising globe of our baby bellies enables our loved ones to stay connected to our physical changes, not to mention gives us another (nonsexual) outlet to staying physically connected with them.
This time, I’m doing better at remembering these things and celebrating my body.
But first, I must sleep. At this very second in time, sleep is the sexiest bedmate!
The White Kind of Body
Alok Vaid-Menon
A couple of years ago I performed a poem about my internalized racism and how it shapes my sexual desires. After the performance several people approached me in private and confessed that they, too, had grown up with white fetish, but never felt comfortable articulating that publicly. Since then I have traveled across the world sharing my poetry and facilitating workshops about desire, capitalism, and colonialism. Everywhere I go there is always that similar moment of confession: I feel the same way.
Race, it seems, structures our desires just as much—if not more—than gender. As queer people of color we find ourselves struggling to make sense of our identities and desires with the language of sexual identity politics that was never meant for us. In this piece I want to share my personal story as a queer South Asian growing up and show how the ways we have come to talk about sexuality perpetuate white supremacy. It is my hope that by (re) turning to our personal narratives—rather than merely adopting prescribed sexual identities—we can begin to imagine new ways of talking about sexuality, power, and identity that center racial justice.
Coming Out (White)
The mainstream gay narrative often requires a story that begins with trauma, abjection, and insecurity and ends with liberation, visibility, and confidence. We are asked: When did you know? When did you first figure it out? And we respond with the stories they want to hear: we tell them about screaming “I’m gay” outside in the middle of the night, we tell them about sneaking looks in the locker room, about that perpetual fear of being found out. But we do not tell them about the first time we were called a terrorist. We do not tell them about how we refused to speak our native tongue at home. These gay coming out stories privilege the trauma that comes from being a sexual minority, but they rarely hold space for the inherent violence of navigating the world with a body that is not white. For a culture so invested in notions of authenticity and visibility, the silence around racial justice from white queer people is revealing.
The truth is I have always been attracted to whiteness. I remember in kindergarten I would develop crushes on all the white boys in my class—those white boys who came from rich families with mothers who ran the parent-teacher organizations, those white boys who played Little League baseball and joined Boy Scouts. I’m talking about that kind of whiteness: that accumulation of culture and class that every immigrant is fed as representative of the American Dream.
These were the days I would go home and ask my mother why we didn’t go to church. I would tell my grandmother to stop wearing saris and put on pants instead. These were the days I’d ask my parents why we weren’t like other families: why we didn’t eat steak for dinner, and watch football, and do the things that normal families do. Growing up I always felt inadequate and embarrassed by my Brownness and my Hindu culture. I would willingly attend Christian youth groups with my white friends and feel so much more validation from their acceptance than from the elders in my own community.
This attraction was always about power. I wanted to be white so desperately because that meant I would finally be normal, finally be accepted. I admired the white boys in my kindergarten class because they had power, they had respect, they were beautiful.
When you are a Brown kid in the South you are never given the language to articulate your constant feelings of inadequacy. There is no lesson, there are no textbooks, there is no acknowledgment of your struggle. There is just the unbearable whiteness of being that swallows you whole and you hope that you are spit out still alive. It was only after 9/11 that I gained access to a word that finally described the distance between me and my classmates: race.
I remember it vividly: on September 12 my mother told me to be careful at school. My middle school had an assembly in the gym. We were all instructed to wear red, white, and blue and we gathered and sang the national anthem. I remember singing as loud as the rest, and I remember feeling part of something bigger than myself. I didn’t really understand what happened, but god-damnit I knew that I was American. I knew it in the same way my Hindu temple knew that it was a good idea to put an American flag on the back of our T-shirts: God bless America / we will never forget September 11. After the assembly a white classmate came up to me and asked me, “Why did your people do this to us? ” And for the first time everything made sense. The lines were drawn in the sand. I was Brown and they were white and there was nothing I could do about it.
The truth is, at some level, I began to believe everything they said. I began to believe that I was not an American. I began to believe that my people were guilty. And in the deepest parts of myself I began to believe that my people were ugly for it.
Coming into consciousness of my Brownness occurred at the same time I began to come into awareness of my queerness. It’s impossible for me to divorce these narratives—they have been, and will always be—interrelated. The boys I began to fantasize about were the same boys I wrote love letters to as a child, were the same boys I wanted so desperately to become. The boys—the men—I was sexually attracted to were the very white men who made me feel ugly, made me feel insignificant, made me feel worthless.
In some ways, my queerness worked as a mechanism of my racial oppression and contributed to my feelings of racial inadequacy. Now, the very white men who degraded me felt sexy to me. My desire shackled me to white supremacy. As much as I wanted to love my Brownness—I became even more drawn to, tantalized by, and attracted to whiteness. As much as I resented the racial trauma inflicted by the white men around me, I found myself deeply attracted to them. I found myself accepting their insults, their stereotypes, their constant racism—excusing it because at least they were paying attention to me. This is how insidious white supremacy is: it will not only terrorize you, but will make you desire your own oppression. How are you supposed to escape from a nightmare when it feels like a wet dream?
When I “came out” and began to consume queer media—pornography, blogs, movies, et cetera—the depictions of queerness upheld white supremacy. Queer characters were almost always white, gay porn almost always included white cisgender men— unless it was explicitly marked as interracial or racial fetish. At first I didn’t mind this. In fact, I enjoyed it; I found these depictions of whiteness seductive.
The representation of queer life on the screen proved to be fairly accurate when I moved to the Bay Area in California and finally had access to other queer people. Almost everyone was white. Nonetheless, I threw myself in headfirst, joining every political group and attending every function I possibly could. Now that I look back on it, consuming this media, coming out as “gay,” and organizing within a traditional “gay rights” framework made me happy at some level because I felt like I was becoming more white. Being “gay,” being part of a “gay” community, gave me an opportunity to escape from my race, gave me new connections to whiteness, new ways to intimately embrace it and experience its validation.
As I began to get more involved with mainstream gay life, I found myself feeling less Brown. I used language
and identityframeworks that were inaccessible to the South Asian community I grew up with. When my family didn’t understand the word queer, rather than trying to understand where they were coming from I dismissed them as homophobic and transphobic. My white peers assured me that people of color “tended to be more traditional” and I believed them because I had to in order to sustain my delusion and our relationships. I went to parties and conferences with mostly white people who would identify me as the “minority in the room.” The more time I spent in white queer communities, the more I stopped thinking about race. This didn’t mean thinking about race only in the abstract, it meant that I stopped thinking about my family. I stopped thinking about my people. I became so focused on liberation for (white) queer people that I couldn’t see how that didn’t actually mean liberation for anyone else. White queers found any conversation about my experiences of racism going on to be an “unrelated issue,” so I even fabricated a more conventional coming out story to fit in. This is how effortlessly white supremacy works: it appropriates and distorts our own narratives and bodies into its own image before we even recognize how this might be affecting the rest of our people.
There Is No Brown in Your Rainbow
In queer communities I began to hear people talk about how validating their relationships with other queers were. There seemed to be this idea that all heterosexual relationships were inherently oppressive no matter what and that, in contrast, queer relationships were subversive.
The truth is my first and most transformative relationship was with a woman my first year of high school. She was South Asian. We started getting close after we shared our experiences with racial trauma, our experiences as diasporic Indians, and our anxieties about our Hindu religion in our small town. Our subsequent relationship was perhaps one of the most significant journeys for my path toward self-actualization. I began to feel beauty in Brownness, to not be ashamed of who I was and where I came from. Looking back, I was less attracted to her gender, and more attracted to her race. Dominant ideas of heterosexuality suggest that cis men enter relationships with the “opposite” gender. Heterosexuality is understood as an attraction to difference. But this model could not hold my intense desire for this woman. I was attracted to her because of our mutual sameness, not our difference. But at the time I did not have the language to explain what was going on. I grew up thinking that if you had desire for men like I did you had to be gay. So I told her that we could never be together.