Update post here, with info on how Kink.com have responded to the criticisms.
Lissy alerted me to a post by bart_calendar discussing the latest publicity stunt and press release (link NSFW!) for it, by BDSM/fetish porn company Kink.com.
[EDIT TO ADD] It turns out that Miss Maggie Mayhem, whom I've referenced further down in this article, has covered most of my concerns far better than I have.
Now, Kink.com have a relatively good reputation for their approach to sexuality (as we'll see below where a kink.com model who also works in sex education discusses the matter), and in general I feel that they are a good example for the porn industry. That said, just because someone is one of the "good guys", shouldn't mean they get a pass - if they do something dumb or harmful or stupid, we do have a responsibility at least to point it out.
The press release reads:
SAN FRANCISCO — Kink.com will stream the deflowering of young virgin Nikki Blue in a ritualistic ceremony live on the Internet on Jan. 15 at 7 p.m.
The ceremony will be held on The Upper Floor of Kink.com’s headquarters, the San Francisco Armory. Prior to the event, a trained expert will insert Kink.com’s official hymen-cam to validate that Blue’s hymen is still in place and that she is a true virgin. Once her hymen is confirmed, the evening will proceed, the company said.
“We will start the evening by tightly binding Ms. Blue and introducing three Kink.com legends: Mark Davis, Jack Hammer and James Deen,” said Kink.com director John Paul “The Pope.” “Fans will vote for which of them will take Nikki’s virginity. Once the voting is complete, we will move to the sanctum, which will be dressed as a ritualistic chamber with candles and ceremonial tools. She’ll be placed in the circle and the winner selected by fans will deflower her. The other two will then join the ceremony and make her airtight.”
Kink.com founder Peter Acworth adds, “To our knowledge there has never been a model lose her virginity live and streaming on the Internet, nothing has, or will, parallel the event taking place on The Upper Floor later this month.
“We strive each and every day to bring the best possible content to our customers and sacrificing Nikki’s innocence is in perfect alignment with what our fans expect and deserve.”
So far, so icky. For the record, Nikki Blue is identified elsewhere as a "diminutive science nerd 21 year old".
Before I get to discussing all this, though, I want to bring in a couple more sources before I piece my own views together.
On bart_calendar's thread, one response is from a Kink.com model using an old LJ profile under the name msmaggiemayhem and I think it's worth looking at what she has to say:
On one hand I applaud a woman who decides exactly how she wants to have sex. This is best press exposure a woman new to porn could ever hope for and she's going to get more work as a result. Good for her! The pay for performers in porn has dropped a lot in the recession and the gigs are drying up as more and more studios fold. On the other hand, I think it's an archaic definition of virginity with some dangerous implications. Outside of porn I do sex education and it kind of pains me to hear people go on at length about virginity when other sexual acts (like anal sex) pose a much higher risk for things like HIV and other STI's. It's even more disconcerting when I hear that same concept reiterated again and again by teens all over the country. The bottom line for porn is making a product that will sell, but Kink has also prided themselves for being very sex positive and this is a bit of a contradiction.
Msmaggiemayhem also provided personal references for the men involved (having worked with all three in the past, and a link to the video of Nikki Blue's interview. As msmaggiemayhem explains, in the video, Nikki Blue describes how the idea for the event was essentially hers.
[EDITED TO ADD] Clarisse Thorn links to an interview with Nikki Blue by Fleur De Lis SF, who plans to conduct another interview with her after the shoot. The answers there seem to contain much the same information as the other sources, with a bit more detail on some aspects so I'm not quoting it here, but worth clicking to get an even full picture - link might be considered NSFW by some.
So the video of the interview is the final piece of evidence before I put my thoughts together. I won't link to it directly (you can follow the link through msmaggiemayhem's comment if you're curious and okay with NSFW stuff) but here's the parts that I picked out as being of interest.
Firstly, I would like to observe that in at one point in the interview Nikki Blue identifies as being raised in "the South, in Tennessee" and explains that as a result she didn't know anything about enemas, sex toys or anything else, "until I hit 18 and then my world just exploded". She explained had been sexually playing with herself anally for several years before then, using her hands and fingers.
The quotes I wish to pull out from the video are these:
I'm everything but innocent. I am just ... kinky, and I've done so many different things.
...
The hymen is located about 2 inches inside you. The day you become a woman, it gets pierced slightly because the blood starts to go through. And basically, that hymen can only be broken through, tampons, repeatedly using tampons; fingers; or the first time you have sex.
...
I want as many people to see it as possible because I want to show people what a hymen is, what makes a person a real virgin versus someone just saying, "Oh, I'm a virgin," when they're not. And this is like one thing that I can really give the world that, you know, no one else has.
Now, hands up who spotted the big inconsistency between this and the press release?
No?
The press release talks about "sacrificing Nikki’s innocence". Nikki herself says, "I am everything but innocent." [Emphasis mine]
The FAIL continues, however, with both Nikki Blue's and Kink.com's discussion of an intact hymen being the true indicator of virginity (as opposed to, you know, not having had a sexual relationship with anyone yet!) As Lissy and I discussed via IM, by this definition it seems that some women (contrary to the claim of Nikki Blue in her video) lose their virginity to balance beams, stretching at the gym, riding saddles, you name it. It also makes me wonder whether this means that no man is ever a "real virgin" since men don't appear to have a hymen at all? Equally, Nikki Blue describes anal play, oral sex and clitoral stimulation as not being sex; this is part of what msmaggiemayhem finds so problematic about the whole thing.
What really bothers me about this, however, is that continues to uphold the fetishisation of virginity, which is deeply rooted in the idea of women (and particularly, women's sexuality) as being property. While the Kink.com materials do not make any reference to this, the fetish is clearly there both of "lost innocence" (which we've established is false advertising in this case, as Nikki Blue herself admits!) and "ownership". They are linked in the notion that somehow the first person to fuck a girl (and thereby break her hymen) has a special place forever as her first, because he's corrupted her. And this is what the draw is. It's why Natalie Dylan's virginity reached a value of at least 3.8 million dollars, and it's why it might be expected that this "live deflowering" would draw more viewers than a regular staged shoot - and in particular, why it would draw more viewers than a similarly staged live streaming using the same "ritualistic" elements with a woman who played the role of a virgin being ritually deflowered, but whose hymen's status was unknown. The implicit idea (especially as viewers are going to vote for which of three men will be the one to do the deed) is that the viewers will vicariously participate in taking ownership of Nikki Blue's body. Not all the viewers will see it that way, I am sure, and most who do won't recognise that about their own virginity fetish, but all the same I think that is what underlies a lot of it. [EDIT TO ADD] Interestingly, an anonymous commenter at Clarisse Thorn's piece about this alleges that it is known to Kink.com that Nikki Blue has had vaginal sex and therefore the whole thing is a sham - which if true would mean that the whole thing actually is the roleplay scene that I posited!
As msmaggiemayhem pointed out, Kink.com are in the business of making sexual video that sells, and the virgin fetish is one that will help them sell their live feed without a doubt. Also, Nikki Blue's body is hers to use as she wishes, and if she's having fun with the whole thing (or even if she's just making the best use of her assets to get on in a capitalist world) then more power to her sword (or sword sheath, since "vagina" literally means that!) However, that still means this is a backward step as far as Kink.com's credibility as a sex-positive business goes.
[EDIT TO ADD] Clarisse Thorn picks out a comment at bart_calendar for mention:
But another person, who I totally agree with, wrote:
I want to be outraged by this, but honestly? She’s probably getting a lot more consideration and respect than most girls do when they lose their virginity. At the very least, this is being planned and she’s presumably ok with it.
Seriously! My first time was consensual, but it was awful, and I didn’t get paid. (Note: I do think it would have been really bad for me, personally, to have sex for money when I was Ms. Blue’s age or younger. I try to honor the choices of women who choose to have sex for money, while acknowledging that it would be a soul-searing choice for many women.)
I certainly agree with this (see the links I provided from Figleaf!) and certainly I am happy for Nikki Blue that she's getting what she wanted, planned, attentive, etc. On the personal level for Nikki Blue, I have no problem with this. It's the wider social messages that I have been trying to explain as the problem.
The final observation I have again ties in with what msmaggiemayhem was saying, in particular her concerns about sex education. The USA, and particularly the Bible Belt states, are well-known for having very poor quality sex education because of the whole "abstinence-only" thing going on over there. Nikki Blue talks briefly in that interview about how little she knew about sexuality from education when she was growing up in Tennessee, and just maybe it is that poor quality sex education that is responsible for the way in which she presents the concept of virginity and its relationship to the hymen. Television documentaries have pointed out that in Texas many young people use the term "technical virgin" when they have had oral or anal sex but not PiV sex, and in general abstinence-only not only doesn't prevent people from doing high-risk unprotected anal sex, it also doesn't reduce the number of pregnancies, implying that it doesn't result in abstinence either! But what it does do is perpetuate the idea of ownership of a woman through her cunt - you're the first guy to stick your cock up it, it's yours. So there better be a way of telling whether or not it is, and someone decide that was - the hymen.
Once again, I don't think this type of "event" causes the social problems it brings to light, but it is perhaps symptomatic of them.
Incidentally, this reminded me of a piece by Figleaf over at Real Adult Sex, where he'd found an article explaining that the hymen is unlikely to break after puberty anyway (though it can do), because adult levels of oestrogen render it flexible and elastic enough to accommodate a penis comfortably. Figleaf also offers advice for how to conclude a woman's virginity without hurting them (the advice goes whether she's got a hymen or not).
[EDITED TO ADD:] I just want to nod in the direction of Maymay's provocatively-titled piece, in which he identifies this as part of a general failure of the supposedly sex-positive values at Kink.com (or Kink[Inc] as he feels they should rightly be labelled, a label that I think is certainly appropriate for a porn company).
Figleaf has also expressed his view that this is actually just par for the course with Kink[Inc] and actually, sex-positive activists shouldn't be too surprised at the pandering to the sex-negative views of (some of) their customers.
Pippingeek wrote, based on this story, about the social fetish of virginity.
I saw the deflowering live:
ReplyDeletehttp://fleurdelissf.wordpress.com/2011/01/20/the-deflowering-of-nicki-blue/