When I first read Olivia Davis’s piece for GMP sub-blogger Gen!der!Fight! called “Sex and Snuff: What Dying Twice Taught Me About Eroticized Death“, I was deeply disturbed. For most of us, it’s hard to read about a person being cattle-prodded in the genitals without being disturbed, but even more so when the author admits to hating it so much that she cried.
Olivia Davis’ piece is the story of how, as a fetish model, she was hired to star in a particularly hard-core form of fetish porn wherein she would be clamped, bound, gagged, blindfolded and, as I said above, cattle-prodded. She also would have to pretend to die of asphyxiation with a bag over her head. For some of you reading this, your stomach turns. That’s not sex to you, that’s torture. But for others, a connection is made to porn you’ve seen, perhaps even enjoyed.
My first reaction to reading the article was that it did not belong on The Good Men Project. How does the story of a woman being cattle-prodded, bag-bound and then pretending to die an eroticized death have anything to do with the goodness of men?
But the piece sat with me. In fact, it haunted me.
What occurred to me is that what’s disturbing isn’t the fact that pornography like that exists, it’s the fact that I have never read an unflinching examination of the implications of such pornography from the perspective of someone who actually stars in these films, and actively lives a kink lifestyle. We hear a lot of conversation about what damage may be caused by pornography of varying forms, as well as talk about the benefits of pornography. But how often do we get to peer through the lens of the person who is actually being prodded, or portraying her own death?
In my own work, I advocate for the use of what I call “empowering pornography”—porn that a person uses as an erotic tool and is left feeling stronger, sexier, and more enlightened about his or her own sexuality as a result. What sort of pornography falls into that category will vary person to person, but I do not advocate for the use of faux-snuff porn. I would never say that it should be illegal or banned, but I do not think faux-snuff porn contributes to healthy images of sexuality. I realize that many will disagree with me, and I’m comfortable with that.
But my discomfort with faux-snuff porn does not stop me from advocating for the stories being told by those who participate in this form of pornography. Olivia Davis isn’t writing about a sexy day at work having a ball gag in her mouth. Olivia Davis tells us how the ball gag hurt her jaw. She tells us about her fear. About her regret. She tells us about the inherent problems of discussing consent in BDSM and that element is something we should all understand:
In retrospect, I realize that there was just no good way for Brick Hardmeat and I to talk about my limits. BDSM is vast and strange and there are things in it I’ve still probably never heard of. When Mr. Hardmeat asks me what my limits are, the understanding is that he is allowed to do everything else, even things I’ve never done before. And that, frankly, is terrifying.
Think about that for a moment. If, say, your limits are no urination or defecation and no cattle-prodding, that means that any other thing you’ve never imagined is within your limits. See, you cannot anticipate what you do not know exists. Especially when you’re wearing a blindfold.
I also spend enough time blindfolded that, if something was coming that I really didn’t want, I can’t safeword in anticipation. I can only do so afterward. My options are just two: suck it up, or safe out. I’m uncomfortable being limited to only those options.
That’s why, when we assume that all the sex we see in pornography is completely consensual, we aren’t quite being accurate. When we see a woman bound, gagged, and blindfolded, there is an element of non-consensual eroticism that is inherent to the making of the film, and we need to look that truth squarely in the eyes and have a moment of reckoning. Are we comfortable with the fear that the actor/model may have been experiencing? Are we comfortable with the risk the actor/model took to make that film? Moreso, are we comfortable with the ways in which non-consensual sexuality is erotic to us?
It’s about more than just varied degrees of kink, it’s about something bigger. Davis hits on it here:
In the land of BDSM we have this acronym (because we’re all about acronyms): YKINMK. It stands for “your kink is not my kink,” and means both that and “your kink is okay.” In general, I believe pretty strongly in YKINMK, despite how stupid it looks typed out. Just because I don’t like something, even if it grosses me out or upsets me it’s not my place to judge people doing it safely and consensually. What I felt about my death not only went against that, but called into question everything else I’d done. Why was the faux-snuff not okay, when I felt all right about aping non-consensual violence? And against a woman, no less.
And that’s why we decided to publish Olivia Davis’ story.
You know the phrase, “Nothing about us without us”? If we’re going to discuss pornography, if we’re going to discuss BDSM, if we’re going to discuss paid sex work, we have to include—in fact we have to feature—the voices of the people who are central to that industry in our discussions.
We have to read Olivia Davis’ story earnestly and take to heart her experiences. We need to understand the differences between an eroticized death and a fetishized death and decide for ourselves if we believe there is a difference, because to many, including Davis, the distinction is key to understanding what is empowering and what is dangerous.
When we fetishize something, we hold it to the light. We admire it, even if we also despise it. We find things to love in it, things to covet. When we fetishize something, we love it. It’s that moment when we see a foot and think to ourselves about how elegant and beautiful it is, and oh what we’d like to to/with that foot.
When we eroticize something, we merely smash sex into it. It’s a murder scene in a slasher movie where somebody’s breasts are out and bouncing around like nothing’s wrong. Most fetishization is also eroticization, but those streets don’t go both ways.
We fetishize a lot of objectively horrible things. Rape, torture, humiliation, incest, Nazis. And all of those things are and can be eroticized, too. We can do either to anything, but something cool happens when we fetishize rather than only eroticize: we talk. We talk about what we think is hot. We examine it. We contextualize it within our lives. We make something deliberate out of external horrors. We make it ours. We erect ways to do it, or to come as close as we can, safely. We engage with it explicitly and thoughtfully. We consider matters of consent and matters of health. And through discourse, we destroy fear. We make light of terror and pain. We rob these things of their real power.
And that is what we’re trying to do with Olivia Davis’ piece. We are trying to talk about BDSM in porn, specifically about non-consensual sex and faux-snuff. We are not advocating for what is called “breath play”. In fact, it is important for us to make very clear how dangerous putting a bag on someone’s head, and other forms of erotic asphyxiation, can be. Olivia Davis had the bag removed from her head over and over so she could breathe, and the scenes would be cut together to make it seem like the bag stayed on her head the entire time, and even she admits that this was not safe or smart. Her life was literally in Mr. Hardmeat’s hands every time he put that bag over her head, and luckily she ended up being okay. The same is not always true for the people who mimic those behaviors in real life.
Ultimately, as long as we keep talking about pornography and BDSM, we absolutely must include the voices of those involved in those forms of porn within our dialogue. Nothing about us without us. Let’s read Olivia Davis’ piece and stare it straight in the eyes and gain a deeper understanding of the humanity behind what it takes to create all forms of pornography. Only then will we be able to make truly informed decisions about what we we decide is okay for us, as individuals.
Photo courtesy of Flickr/potzuyoko
About Joanna Schroeder
Think about that for a moment. If, say, your limits are no urination or defecation and no cattle-prodding, that means that any other thing you’ve never imagined is within your limits. See, you cannot anticipate what you do not know exists. Especially when you’re wearing a blindfold.
I’ve never done any sort of work like this but I would like to think that there is allowance for encountering something that one has never thought of but upon encountering it they are able to decide at that moment if consent is given or not.
It stands to reason that when talking about limits it’s impossible to conceive every single possible act.
There are great comments over on the article about opt-in vs opt-out consent, but as I said in my bit here, it’s so important to understand the confounded mess that is consent, especially when it comes to porn.
I saw in a comment somewhere (don’t even remember what article it was for) wherein Archy noted that he always believed that going to a prostitute in a legal brothel (Australia) would be 100% consensual, but now he has concerns over the women being there because they’re forced.
It’s really a slippery slope. When you look at a woman doing porn, even if you know it’s consensual, do you ever wonder if she’s doing it because she loves it or if it’s because it’s the only way she knows to support her drug habit or her five kids. If you knew that she hated it, but consented in order to feed her kids or something, would that change the way you view it? Same goes for male performers, of course.
I’m not even saying that it SHOULD matter, but it complicates things. A relative of mine has said he always saw strippers in clubs as desperate moms, because his mom was a single mother struggling to raise kids on her own. She didn’t strip, mind you, but there were jobs she hated. So he got this whole complicated internalized reaction that made him feel really shitty about the process. Then he felt shitty for not using porn or strippers because he thought, at least they should be making money. But it was so not erotic once he realized how many of them were making consensual, but forced in one way or another, choices to be there. Worse, you can never know which are which.
I don’t think there’s a solution to this aside from making prostitution legal, offering healthcare to all Americans, and perhaps unionizing sex workers and porn actors the way unions are active in Hollywood. I still don’t think this covers everything.
It’s a tough topic, but one that only makes us better people in the discussion of it. If we ignore the complications of it all, it doesn’t make the problems go away, but if we’re riddled with guilt, we’re not doing anyone any good either. Very tough.
Oh I wasn’t trying to provide some absolute answer, just chiming in with what I was thinking.
But to continue this I’ll say this and it is probably going to go to a place that should not be visited.
For all the people that bring up this thought about people that do porn and other forms of sex work I wonder if this slippery slope concern only applies when they think about porn and sex work.
For instance does the thought of, “I wonder if she really wants to do this or is she just trying to survive?” when looking at say, a field worker. A nanny. A construction worker. A miner. And so on.
Your relative for instance. What did he think of sweat shop labor? Did the question of whether the person that made this choose to work in that factory or were they doing that grueling work just to make some sort of living?
I’m not trying to say that all those other occupations are just as dangerous as sex work but they are dangerous, can be degrading, and produce products/resources that consumers to take in without nary a second thought.
Great point Danny. Lots of people do things for money they don’t want to do. On top of that you never know what people are really thinking. Maybe the girl at Starbucks can’t stand working there and wishes she were making porn simulated snuff porn. Admittedly it’s unlikely, but the fact is it’s possible. We can never how people truly perceive their work life unless we ask them.
@Joanna I’m a pretty liberal guy when it comes to sex and my thoughts on how men and women should relate to it. I’ll say I found the article to be interesting and not exploitative at all. It was an honest account of what happened. It wasn’t glamorized and most importantly Olivia took full responsibility for what took place (in that ultimately she didn’t feel great about it, but acknowledged it was her decision to do it). I’m glad the article was featured.
I think we DO think that about miners, even the military, and especially sweat shops (though I worked in fashion for a while so maybe more me than others). We wonder, what made the person who made my $8.99 Forever 21 tee shirt feel forced into working in such terrible conditions?
Also, there is something about sex that makes it different from working in Starbucks, I think.
Yes we do think about that stuff in regards to miners and so forth but from what I can see there is indeed something about sex that changes the thinking in ways ranging from how often we think about it in that context to even if we think about it in that context in the first place.
I’ll put it like this. With miners we are talking about gathering resources to be consumed in the making of other products right? I’m not saying it never happens but compared to discussions (and sometimes arguments) about whether or not a sex worker is truly consenting how often do you see/hear people asking of folks that work in mines and the military truly consent to doing?
Danny,
I think you’re onto something, but I don’t think it’s about te good that’s being produced, I think it’s about shame.
When someon has a job that we feel safe assuming that they take pride in, then we have a tendency not to ask if they consent to do it. So, while we might ask if the janitor really “consents” to his job, we rarely ask the cardiac surgeon the same question.
Sex work is something that we’re inculcated to believe people cannot take pride in. Indeed, we’re even told that someone even seeing you naked (let alone engaged in sex acts) is a form of assault. Our laws literally treat someone who spies on you in the shower the exact same way that they treat someone who punches you in the face (arguably worse if shower-peeping is classified as a sex offense).
We’re left asking ourselves “How much pride can you possibly take in a job that’s equivalent to being paid so someone else can give you a black eye?”
When left with the undeniable reality that some people DO take pride in this work, we create an artificial construct to resolve the cognitive dissonance: “It’s okay…they consent to it.”
But consent isn’t really the same thing as pride. And though we can imagine someone taking pride in a decorated military career, a particularly impressive mining haul, or a latte with shapes drawn in the foam, we still can’t quite get to the place where we see pride among sex workers. This creates the divide: the job is always going to be different so long as we cannot see where the pride comes from.
Ultimately, I think that Joanna might be right about needing to get the voices of sex workers out there. I do not have the words to describe how a sex worker might take pride in their work, and until a sex worker tells me, I’ll never know. But I do think that making it clear that sex work is something you can take pride in might just be the first step towards a better dialogue on the subject.
I think you’re onto something, but I don’t think it’s about te good that’s being produced, I think it’s about shame.
Good point Mike.
This may be the “something” about sex that seems to elevate it to a higher priority when it comes to it being compared to other dangerous occupations.
Ultimately, I think that Joanna might be right about needing to get the voices of sex workers out there. I do not have the words to describe how a sex worker might take pride in their work, and until a sex worker tells me, I’ll never know. But I do think that making it clear that sex work is something you can take pride in might just be the first step towards a better dialogue on the subject.
Of course the voices of sex workers is an important part of the conversation. But at the same time I think that those of us who are not involved in that work need to get down to thinking why we (that’s a collective we) hold sex work in such shameful contempt. The voices of sex workers will contribute to this but ultimately its going to be the rest of us that are gonna have to change.
Yes there _is_ something different about working at Starbucks, it was an extreme example. The point I was trying to make is that you never know what it is exactly that can make an individual feel as uneasy as Olivia was post film-making. I think that can extend to any job/profession/occupation. Someone could feel just as bad about themselves or what they did in a mainstream job as Olivia did in her decidedly out of the mainstream job. However because Olivia’s job and story is more shocking and disturbing ( to the majority of people) it really does get us thinking.
I disagree with what you said about people thinking about miners, military, and sweat shop workers though. You might and I might, but clearly not enough people do. If people really cared we would spend a lot more time and energy on workers’ rights, unions, and not sending young people off to war. Instead we worry about cheap energy/fuel, and cheap clothing and consumables. Wal-Mart didn’t become a billion dollar company by worrying about miners and sweat shop workers.
Well, I for my part am glad that Olivia had the choice to choose whether or not to walk that path. Not a path I would choose, or even go along as a voyeur, but that’s cool. As Olivia says, YKINMK.
The Wet One
Well, what’s interesting is that if you note in her piece, it’s not just YKINMK. Some things feel just very *wrong* and that’s what she’s saying here. Objectively wrong, not just subjective. Subjectivity is the root of YKINMK—as long as we’re the stars in our own lives, we’re good. But when we become the bound, gagged, cattle-prodded person who cannot refuse something being done to her, we are no longer subjects.
And when we start to eroticize death for all to watch—including 12 and 14 year olds who have as much access to it as a 22 year old—we are probably going to start seeing some fallout from this.
Either way, I think we need to notice the nuance Olivia is pointing out there with the subjectivity.
We probably will some fallout Joanna. However, the genie is out of the bottle and I don’t think we can put in back in or control its spread. Then again, consider the oddness and bizareness of Japanese porn (tentacles anyone?). Japan is a very peaceful society. And yet men can buy young girl’s used panties from vending machines. So who knows? Maybe we’re overreacting.
As for the objective wrongness, I concur completely. That said, it is worthy of discussion and examination no matter how uncomfortable such a discusssion may be.
But at this point, I’m just being contrary to be contrary so I’ll be quiet now…
I agree with the posters above and ask: Why do you ‘care’ about sex work so much, why do we ‘care’ that it might (or is) degrading. Why do we ‘care’ that someone isn’t giving full 100% consent. Because it is sex and IMHO because it is mostly women doing it.
For example. Look at prisons and prison reform. I have seen numerous articles over the years here in Canada on prision reform and the vast majority have been about the women prisions even though the vast majority of the problems and abuses are in mens prisons. Hell, in the UK they are even thinking about getting rid of prisons for women all together and replacing them with community outreach centers even for murderers.
IMHO, we live in a gynocentric society, everything is put thru the lens of “How does this benefit or detriment women”. Look at the US elections this year, no one seems to be talking about the economy or jobs or anything else, they are all talking about women and their uterus’