by Jon Pressick
In spite of her own largely positive experiences as a young porn model, Vendetta’s views align with Braun’s—and then some. In the process of relaunching BellaVendetta.com, she’s made the decision to restrict modeling opportunities to those above the age of twenty-five, a full four years older than Braun’s age limit.
Why twenty-five? “In my experience young people have a hard time thinking about the rest of their lives,” she says. “When you make porn, even if it’s just one time, even if it’s softcore photos, even if it’s for a small website, it will affect you for the rest of your life There are certainly some twenty-two-year-old models I know who are incredibly bright and have thought long and hard about the consequences of posing naked on the Internet. But they are few and far between.”
There are also her own personal tastes. “I prefer to negotiate scenes with adults who have enough sexual experience to know what it is they like…. I am not personally turned on by the idea of defiling a young girl.”
At nineteen, I spent a few months as a cam model for Ducky Doolittle, a peep-show girl and burlesque performer turned sex educator. Early in our relationship, Doolittle called me to discuss the ramifications of my decision to be naked on the Internet.
“I want to be sure that you know what you’re getting into,” she said. She wanted to make sure I knew that whatever pictures I modeled for, whatever I publicized, it was forever.
As a younger woman, she’d posed nude for magazines, naively thinking that when the month was up and they disappeared from the newsstands, they were gone for good. But nothing ever goes away: people save magazines, images are archived, the choices you make in your youth can always find a way to come back to you as an adult.
As we talked, I told her I understood. I told her I was comfortable with my decision. But over a decade later, I’m not sure that I did, or that I really could. In 2002, it was impossible to predict how the Internet—then a seemingly private, anonymous playground where secrets could live on in the shadows—would mature into a highly public, perpetually archived platform for the mass sharing of information. Whatever I thought I was agreeing to, it wasn’t what I actually signed up for.
It’s that sort of youthful blindness that’s made Vendetta uninterested in working with young models. “I have always made it a policy to fully discuss all the risks of making porn and the ways in which it will affect you forever,” she says. “I even put it in my models’ contracts that I will not take your photos down if your mom finds out or boyfriend gets mad. But that doesn’t stop it from happening.
“When I looked at where these problems were coming from it was always from young models.”
In explaining his decision, Braun offered justification for the twenty-one-year minimum thusly: “The percentage of talent who start performing at eighteen and are out of the industry by the time they turn twenty-one is staggering. Those are the ones who are not cut out for porn, and who could very well spend the rest of their lives regretting their choice.”
The implication here is clear: porn work should only be pursued by people who plan to make a full-time career out of it. It’s a sentiment echoed by Vendetta when she contrasts her experience as a teenage porn performer with that of the young people she’s worked with since. “Unlike me, a lot of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds aren’t looking to build an entire career or brand off of the adult industry. They think this sounds fun and crazy and exotic—and the money doesn’t hurt either.”
It is true that the work you do as an eighteen-year-old porn performer will stick around—and, potentially, haunt you— for the rest of your life. But is that reason enough to limit porn performing to those who aspire to make a career out of it?
Around the time that I was launching my porn website, Courtney Trouble—then an Olympia, WA-based phone-sex operator—was putting together a website known as NoFauxxx (now Indie Porn Revolution). In 2003, Trouble and I connected through message boards and later met in person; we stayed in touch over the years as our careers both diverged and followed parallel paths. These days Trouble lives in Oakland, CA, where she’s a part of the vibrant queer porn scene.
Unlike Braun and Vendetta, Trouble isn’t convinced that upping the age limit on performing in porn is a good idea—and she doesn’t think that leaving the adult industry at twenty-one is necessarily a sign that’s one’s choice to do sex work was the wrong one.
“A lot of people only do sex work for a few years,” she says. “When you’re super young it’s an incredibly easy way to make money for college or your family or your future plans.
“Leaving the industry quickly doesn’t mean it was an age-related mistake. It may actually be more of a reflection on the way that young women are treated in the industry by producers and agents than it is a reflection of their age. If porn were a safer place…maybe [performers would] stick around longer. The question isn’t only about age, but labor practices.”
* * *
It is difficult to separate the adult I am today from my decision to pursue porn modeling at the age of eighteen. If I hadn’t modeled nude, I wouldn’t have fallen in love with the promise of indie porn, and I wouldn’t have been inspired to launch my own website—a decision that provided me with the industry knowledge and business sense that later enabled me to take over Fleshbot.
And it’s also difficult to deny that, had I waited until twenty-one, I probably wouldn’t have ended up on this track. At twenty-one I was out of college, working my first full-time job, and no longer feeling the same thrill I once got from taking off my clothes in front of a camera. At twenty-one, I was ready to move into a more mainstream career. Because as much as I enjoyed making porn, as much as I enjoyed learning about the adult industry, as important as the entire experience was for me, I wasn’t interested in being a full-time porn performer. I had never been interested in pursuing porn performance, or porn production, as a full-time, or even long-term, career. At twenty-one, the window of opportunity for experimenting with porn, for experimenting with my identity, was closing. Had I waited until then to model nude, it might have been too late.
Though Trouble isn’t convinced that banning teenagers from porn is the best idea, she is encouraged by Braun’s attempt to make porn in a more ethical way. “I find it encouraging that mainstream porn directors are trying to find ways to bring their own ethics to their work. Each of us as directors experience the industry differently because we all make different movies, and maybe for Axel—taking advantage of brand-new adults isn’t something he wants to risk doing.”
Age restrictions are certainly one way to attempt a more ethical porn-production environment. But it seems worth wondering whether there are other ways to ensure that everyone on a porn set is safe, respected, and taken care of, rather than merely limiting performance to those presumably old enough to know how to advocate for themselves.
I shuttered my porn site at twenty-two, and quit the adult industry completely a few months later. I thought I was done with the whole thing, and even when I found myself reimmersed in the world of porn through my work at Fleshbot, I still couldn’t imagine myself jumping back into the fray and attempting to be a model or a performer.
And then, at twenty-nine, I did another nude photo shoot. I was in Toronto for the Feminist Porn Awards, sharing a hotel room with Courtney Trouble and Jiz Lee, a talented and respected genderqueer porn performer. In the bathroom, Lee and I stripped down and took a bubble bath together, drinking champagne out of tiny, single-serving bottles, and we giggled and made out and played in the tub. Trouble photographed us, and the pictures ended up showcased on Karma Pervs, Lee’s philanthropic porn project.
At twenty-nine, in a porn-friendly career, on a set with my friends, there was nothing dangerous or threatening about being naked in front of a camera. I didn’t have to worry about who might find the photos, I didn’t have to worry about the effect they might have on my career. I could enjoy myself and simply celebrate the experience of being a sexual person, making sexual art.
Most people don’t have the freedom that I had that day. Most people—especially young people—can’t dip in and out of the sex industry without worrying about the blemish it might place on their resume, the damage it might do to their relationships.
But perhaps if they did, we wouldn’t have to worry so much about whether every eighteen-year-old who wants to shoot a porn scene is going to still be doing porn five, or ten, or twenty years down the line. If it was easier to shift between the worlds of porn work and mainstream work—to dip your toes in the adult industry without fear of permanently ruining your resume—then teenagers intrigued by the adult industry could have the freedom to experiment with it without being burdened to commit to it. Teenagers could have the freedom to be teenagers, without fear of permanently blemishing their future.
But failing that, maybe limiting teenagers’ involvement in porn isn’t the worst thing. If involvement in sexual media is destined to be a life-altering choice, it’s one that should be made by people old enough to understand the ramifications of that.
Disability and Sex
Jason Armstrong
After two pot brownies, my friend Alex was in fine form at the party we were at. Minus the pot brownies, this was a pretty staid group of people, but once Alex got a little high, all bets were off. “You’re so attractive. You make me moist!” he bellowed at some mortified straight man. My head spun only to find Alex talking to said straight man and his girlfriend. Alex was propositioning them for a threesome but qualified it to the girl by saying it was only to get into her boyfriend’s pants. I decided the straight couple needed to be rescued from Alex and went over. “You’ll have to excuse Alex, he’s had a stroke, and he’s had two brownies.”
“The stroke didn’t take away my sight and I know an attractive man when I see one,” Alex said, taking one more glance at the straight man as I pulled him away. “Do you want to sniff my diaper?”
Alex was indeed wearing a diaper, and was just the kind of man who let everybody know it. It was a badge of honor for all that he had been through. He’d already been living with HIV since the early ’80s, since before HIV had a name. His bowels and bladder didn’t always give him much warning. I remember the day I received a call from our mutual friend David in September, telling me that Alex had had a stroke and was in the emergency room at the General.
I got to the hospital and found Alex. The right side of his body was paralyzed, including his face. His mouth drooped on the right side and his speech was slurred. He looked up at me as I knelt to kiss his forehead. “They say I might not ever walk again,” he said, enunciating as best he could.
“We’ll get through this Alex. You’ll walk again, I know it,” I countered.
“Damn right I’ll walk again. There are still men to fuck.”
Alex didn’t see the inside of his apartment again for four long months. After being in the emergency room for a torturous week until they could find him a room, and then two weeks in that hospital room, he was transferred to a rehabilitation center. While I watered the plants in Alex’s apartment and collected his mail, Alex engaged in the arduous task of learning to use the right side of his body. His doctors warned that another stroke was not an impossibility. He battled through and was released from the rehab center just before Christmas. And that’s when he completely broke down.
Alex was henceforth differently-abled, if you will. He required a brace to walk, to walk ever so carefully. His right arm was still immobile. We had dinner together every Saturday night once he returned home. We would order pizza and I would read the latest essay I’d written for my sex blog to him. He was the one person to hear my essays before I posted them, and my short essay would launch us into an examination of our sex lives. Alex never allowed for bitterness, but I remember the Saturday night that he looked at me and asked, with tears in his eyes, “Will a man ever want to be with me again?”
I remembered, long ago, in my midtwenties, being at the New York City Pride Parade. I recall only two moments from that parade, and both of them left a deep impression on the young gay man that I was. The first moment was when the float passed by on which there were men who had fought at Stonewall on that fateful night in ’69, when our history changed forever. These men were old, with canes and in wheelchairs. They had been there, and they were here with us now. As they floated down the street, I realized I’d just witnessed history. My history. The whooping from the crowd told me that everyone around me was sharing the exact same feeling.
The second moment that I recall was when a gay group in wheelchairs passed by. Young and old, of every race, their presence hit me. It became all too clear, all at once, that our society neglects to recognize the disabled as sexual. And here they were, claiming their orientation, refusing to be left in the shadows or on the sidelines. As with the men who had fought at Stonewall, I knew I was witnessing something that I did not feel much of within my own belly: I was witnessing what looked like courage, and I found it beautiful.
After Alex had his stroke, I did some research—on Xtube. I found an instructional video for sex workers on how to best cater to the needs of their disabled clientele. And then I found a video by a man who suffered from some type of palsy. He was jacking off and I so wanted to be there with him. His pits, his cock, his absolute engagement were hot—his palsy did not matter. I wrote him a message telling him how amazing his video was and posted a comment on his profile. I didn’t hear back from him.
Alex is improving. He’s walking without a brace, and he’s getting movement back in his right arm and hand. He’s even venturing forth to the Eagle again. More than that, he got picked up recently and took the man back to his place. But he called me to tell me that it didn’t work. His body did not want to cooperate with his desire. He was momentarily bereft. He is not supposed to take Viagra, but to hell with it—he ordered some online and his doctor is turning a blind eye for him. Alex is a force to be reckoned with.
Last night, I hit the streets of the Village to go get a pack of cancer-causing smokes. I began to think about the ways we are all disabled. For some of us, it is visible to others. But for many, it’s invisible. It’s the disease that’s eating us from the inside. It’s the mental anguish that we mask so as to appear normal. Among the many casualties of illness or disability is our sexuality. Always, we are fighting to reclaim it, from external forces, or internal.
As I walked down the steps from the tobacco shop, I noticed a young man in a motorized wheelchair. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four. He, like the man in the Xtube video I had watched, appeared to suffer from a palsy. He was alone on the street, in this Gay Village, and he looked bewildered, lost. He did not see me see him. And he was gorgeous. My instinct was to reach out to him. I wanted to make love to him. I wanted to let him know that if he was in the Village seeking comfort from the men who walked by, he would find it. I wanted to take his cock in my mouth. I wanted to enter him and fill him with light so that he shone like a nuclear reactor. I wanted to believe that my feelings were not born of pity or fear that by the grace of god, that could be me. I wanted to apologize to him if these thoughts were in any way construed as condescending or patronizing. I wanted to tell him that even though I am so-called able-bodied, I have struggled since childhood with an illness that I rarely discuss, an illness that constantly thwarts my sexuality, an illness that no one can see, but that I experience so profoundly. I wanted… But instead, seeing him carry on down the sidewalk, I too continued on my way. But oh how I wanted.
When Alex first got home from rehab, he was sternly warned against walking too far from home. And to walk, especially in the beginning, was laborious for Alex. But secretly, one day, Alex walked from his apartment to the nearest tattoo parlor. The next Saturday night, he surprised with me his tattoo. On the inside of his left forearm, he’d had the word Courage inscribed in glorious script. I wondered, like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz, if I would ever have the courage to both come back from an illness, or to eve
n get and stay sick, and still reclaim myself and my sexuality. In my twenties, I thought that the perfect man was the one with the six-pack abs. But Alex’s courage to face disability and still move forward changed that. I think that having just turned forty, I am maybe, just maybe, growing up.
Fumbling Towards Humanity: How “Trans Grrrls” Helped Me Open Up to My Partner
Amy Dentata
I was single by choice for years before I felt the dating itch again. I took to OKcupid and, on the rare occasion someone actually responded, met up with a stranger. Without fail, we would realize we lacked chemistry and never see each other again. After each dating failure, I felt a mixture of sadness and relief. A failed date meant I didn’t have to worry about physical intimacy. It meant I didn’t have to worry about taking my clothes off in front of another person. It meant I didn’t have to face the chance of, at best, another Teachable Moment regarding transphobia, or at worst, mortal danger.
I lose no matter what. Giving cis partners the Trans 101 talk is exhausting. When dating other trans people, I still feel gross because of my body. I’m pre-op and very uncomfortable about my genitalia. It’s hard for me to get off even just masturbating. I have to cover myself in blankets and touch myself just right so my anatomy feels like it’s configured the right way. Sometimes I’m okay using my current equipment, but even then it feels weird. It’s just weird in a way I can enjoy.
At least when masturbation does work, I know exactly what buttons to push. I know just the right way to jiggle the door handle, the right twist to turn on the faucet. Teaching that to someone else takes time. It requires a partner who is willing to listen, and who can handle freakouts when my body upsets me. The stars have to align just right to find a partner like that. Dating is a crapshoot for anybody, but for me the odds are stacked even higher.