On How Porn Can Teach Us All to Share :: Sophie Le-Phat Ho

Broad CDS2 Carly Delso-Saavedra, www.sharingissexy.org

Please note that the people answering these questions are part of SiS, but they don't speak for the collective, only for themselves.

First off, could you tell us what prompted this project and the form it took? Sort of give us more details about the origin as well as the (collective) process and so on?

Scruffy Eudora : SiS is an outgrowth, or a mutation, of radioactive sanDiego, The Rubber Rose, San Diego Indymedia, all the art and activism that we've been doing for the last few years.

Klm : I moved to SOCAL from NJ, and once here, I went on an intense search for a hot, sexually charged group of queer individuals to make art with, and partake in community.   What I discovered was a group of “sexy guerillas” who wanted to advocate change through radical porn.

The collective process is unique.   We use “informal consensus” to come to decisions about who will take off there clothes first, and who gets to wear the strap on, and who gets to be the fluffer.

Lotus : We began with a series of discussions and meetings about if and how we might make porn, and documenting them on our wiki. Then we started having porn watching nights and discussing what we were watching, critically, deciding what we like and what we don't.

A major concern of mine from the beginning has been to try to maintain an open and accessible collective, for example, by using accessible language when introducing people to the project and by trying to maintain an environment where people feel like they can ask questions because we're all learning and experimenting.

Also, as with many collectives, we've had new people join and old collective members move away in the year we've been working on the project.

Angelbeast : I had never paid much attention to porn, mainly because it didn't seem to represent me and my sexuality. I have never found myself turned on by the porn I have seen. In turn, that created almost a distaste in me for pornography in general. When Suicide Girls came to be, I was briefly excited – there was an alternative that fit into my sexual desires. Body modification is one thing I find quite appealing. However, that seemed to be one of the only alternative things I found to be different from the mainstream porn I had been exposed to. I have recently been checking into what types of free porn exist on the Internet and, still, I haven't found anything that I feel is a fair representation of my type of queer. So yeah, I'm the most recent addition to the collective, a collective that represents many aspects of my desires and of my sexuality, and I have found it to be amazingly empowering to be able to put my sexuality out there.

Mel : I wasn't involved in the start of the project/collective. My beginning was prompted by a need for getting involved in something new and not so politically based. It was something that fit into what I'm interested in: sex, change and equality. Also, it gives me the opportunity to focus on a passion that I've had to keep on a back burner for a long time: photography.

Your manifesto starts with "we are sexy guerillas". What is/are the "war(s)" you are referring to here? And what's sex got to do with it?

Mel : I don't see this as a largely political based project. Therefore, I don't see us having a manifesto. We are a group of random people who are sexy, perverted and radical. I focus more on the equality of all types of people in sex and the sex industry, and putting a stop to the so-called taboos of sex. There are no taboos, just what gets us off; really we all fuck and we all like it. My involvement is to show people that sex is good, fun, diverse, and not a shameful act – and that porn should show all types of people of all walks of life.

Angelbeast : I'm in this, doing this, because I advocate sex positivity and gender fluidity. I want to appreciate variations in body type, skin color, gender, gender fucking. I want to be turned on by what I'm participating in and I want others to be turned on by my participation.

Scruffy Eudora :   I don't know what the shit this means.

Klm : It has nothing to do with sex, but everything to do with love. SIS is about spreading the love via the worldwideweb to hot sexy bois and grrrls.

We really aren't guerillas. We're lovemonsters. And it isn't a manifesto, it's a quick blurb.   And I'm not into destruction. It's all about creation. Down with the man.

Masturbate to me fucking myself with a bike seat. I love you, don't you get it?

Lotus : We don't have a manifesto. I don't want to manifest, but to un-manifest, to shapeshift, to slip away. With SiS, I want to conjure images that are confusing, that disrupt your conception of a guerilla, a rebel, a sexy person, a boy or a girl.

In one way, yes, there is a war going on, as people around the world suffer violence everyday because of their genders and sexualities. If I think there's a war, it may be because I live in the borderlands, where the rhetoric of war is all around me and the military jets and helicopters fly overhead everyday. If there is a battle I'm fighting, perhaps it is the battle for fluidity and against rigidity, against the lines and categories that people are trying to enforce on the world.

I'd so much rather have sex than fight a war, and so, I'm much more excited by summoning and casting new worlds, with all the people who want to join in that space of the shaman, the ritual of sex, in-between worlds, shaping new ones.

J-late-at-nignt-h, Don J., www.sharingissexy.org  

You also mention "we like our anonymity and try to maintain it [...]". How do you explain and/or negotiate the tension between the desire for anonymity and the drive for display and the proliferation of images, as modulated by Web 2.0 commercial sites of social networking (and surveillance)? How do you see the role of FLOSS, open source, copyleft and so on within this tension?

Klm : I'm a pornstar. Really, that's how I see myself. I take off my clothes and take sexy photos, perhaps videos. I have a porn name and a MySpace page. I guess that complicates things like anonymity.

Angelbeast : The first thing I did when my first set was posted was to text and to email almost everyone I know. I found it to be a totally liberating experience to walk through campus, at work or just out and about, knowing that I was a part of something that is everything I am and everything I want. I'm completely uninterested in perpetuating a feeling within me that encourages shame for expression of my sexual being. There is a choice on my part to maintain a certain level of anonymity, such as my social security number and address and so forth, but participating in SiS has given me an opportunity to be ‘out and proud'. This is me, and this may be you, and sharing ourselves is sexy.

Scruffy Eudora : I'm struggling with this question of anonymity. There was a time when I was worried that getting tattoos would make it difficult for me to get jobs in the future. I don't worry about that anymore. I do porn now with hopes of exorcising a similar fear.

Mel : With all walks of life come all walks of dangers. I mostly see anonymity in this time of our lives as a necessity for our safety. In regards to the project/collective, I see anonymity as something that can't be defined in the confines of our subject matter; we have no specific name, ideal, or type of porn.

Lotus : On the website, I don't use my real name because I know that in our society, there are people with bad boundaries who may want to look me up and come visit me after jerking off to my images, and I might not want them showing up at my front door.

The issue of anonymity for porn performers is nothing new, and so in a way, whether it is in a magazine or on the web, there is still a need for people doing erotic performance to protect their personal space.

MySpace is probably the place where I think I'm least anonymous. Putting our latest photo shoot up on our website is one thing, but sending out a bulletin to all of our friends, in MeatSpace, where my personal MySpace page is linked to SiS, worries me, because I wonder if my sister or niece are going to see the bulletin and go look at my photos.

I see the open source license on our images as one thing that makes the images more accessible because people are free to reuse them. So when I have gone to another website and seen my image posted there, it makes me feel happy, but also a bit nervous. Still, there is a fine line between having the images online at all and encouraging people to share them legally. People take photos from websites and reuse them all the time. Mostly, I see the Creative Commons license we use as a way of challenging the commodification of my photos. In a way, online space is separate from offline space, so I realize that I'm less anonymous to all the people around San Diego who know me and who've seen the images, but more anonymous to visitors to the website from the Netherlands, Spain and New York.

In a way, I see SiS as exploring online social networking outside of the limits of sites like MySpace and Facebook. On SiS, I have a profile and images of me, but the content of those images would never be allowed on MySpace or Facebook.

Finally, what is porn? And what would you qualify as "good porn"? Also, you make it clear that one of your aims is to inspire positive attitudes and actions. Could you detail how this can be achieved via SiS? In turn, what inspired and inspires you?

Klm : “Good Porn” can be found at www.sharingissexy.org. I mean, have you seen the site? Who wouldn't have a positive attitude watching a person fuck herself with a bike?   That shit's flippin' hot.

The math is simple. Radical queer bodies – clothing = change.

I'm inspired by the beautiful individuals that compose SIS.   You lovemonsters make me wet.

Scruffy Eudora : I think this question of what would qualify as good porn is interesting. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. I just heard Nguyne-Vo Thu Huong speak at UCSD (University of California, San Diego) and one of the things she said was: "I can't produce an essentialized truth to counter a construction." That applies to this question in that to define porn as good or bad would be an attempt to make an essential truth. I don't think the categories of good and bad can be applied to porn because in so doing, you silence certain stories, you exclude certain perspectives. I think you can ask how porn functions in society and you can ask if it is ethical. The things that come up for me in terms of it being ethical deal with the way it was produced. To me, something done ethically has to be done with justice and oppression in mind.

Mel : Porn is the explicit depiction of sexual subject matter, especially with the sole intention of sexually exciting the viewer. What makes good porn is something I can't answer as a general statement. Honestly, I have no clue what makes good porn. Porn that gives me a hard on is good porn... to me.

Lotus : Porn is such a huge category that it is almost impossible to define. It seems to me that porn might be defined as content which is intended to create arousal in the viewer, to activate the body in a way.

I see SiS creating positive actions on a few levels. One is at the level of our collective, where I'm trying to participate in creating a space where we can all feel sexy and feel appreciated. Another level is at the level of the viewer, where I'm hoping that someone might see my photos and think differently about transgender people, hopefully opening up to new possibilities of how they see them. Barbara Hammer talked about how she didn't "come out" until she was thirty, because she didn't even know the word "lesbian." I had a similar experience of not having an understanding of “transgender” until I was thirty. Another is at the level of discourse, where I hope that we can challenge the religious conservativism in this country and the lack of open, honest dialogue about sex.

I am inspired by Carolee Schmeeman, No Fauxxx, Annie Sprinkle, Orlan, Deleuze and Guattari, Violet Blue's blog "open source sex", Compartir es Bueno in Spain, Girls who Like Porno in Madrid, the EZLN, Ricardo Dominguez, Hardt and Negri, the Piquiteros in Argentina, squatters around the world, people in resistance everywhere and most importantly, my friends and lovers, and all the people in SiS.

Angelbeast : For me, good porn is something that I relate to, get off on, appreciate. I recognize and respect that each individual has a different idea of what ‘good porn' is. SiS is my type of ‘good porn', and I'm guessing there are others out there that feel the same. I am also guessing that, just like myself, there are others out there that will find a new appreciation for themselves and their sexuality by discovering SiS. Whether one decides to join the collective or explore the images available through SiS, I have hopes this will help expand sexuality, or the ideas of sexuality as a whole.

So what's next for SiS and how can Montreal folks get in on all that sharing?

Lotus : Klm and myself will be presenting some of the work of Sharing is Sexy in Montreal between March 25-30 th , 2008. We don't have the exact date or location yet, so check our website for the details!

Klm : I'm down to travel. I've always wanted to see Portugal, but Montreal will work for now.

Oh, and did I tell you I love you.

Sis Winter Wonderland 9-1 , Don J., www.sharingissexy.org