Thoughts on My First Time, or Is Queer Porn Anti-Capitalist?
By Misha Mora
I wake up naked in bed with my partner to a hot and sticky LA summer morning and I need water. I look at my phone and I have an email from Crash Pad Series. “Hi Misha, we had a couple cancel and we want to know if you can come up to SF for a shoot from 2-5 on Saturday.” I am ecstatic about doing my first solo scene. I had done some art porn a few years ago and lots of erotic performance between then and now, but never any professional work. A week of relationship negotiation, processing, anxiety, excitement and arousal ensue.
The night before, I stay up too late packing. It’s like Christmas, I can’t sleep. Early in the morning light, I’m still trying to get some sleep. At 7:30AM a noise from the window wakes me and I check my phone for the time. I have a text message transcription of a voicemail from Google Voice: “Hello, This is. You know I need to easy update for the rebooking message your flight. Yeah. 9. Yeah 00. Yum. Yeah, … been affected by cancellation. Yeah, we apologize for the inconvenience. We have made additional arrangements for you. 1) The best available. Alternate Flight your new itinerary is United flight number 7. Yeah, 11 your parting from yeah Los Angeles International. Yawn. Yo August. Yeah 20th at yeah 5 yo 2) Yeah, M and arriving at yeah Francisco, California yanks 15 yeah yank you for choosing United. Yeah. Bye.” I spend the next hour on the phone with them finding a flight that works. The only option is out of Ontario, so I get in the car with my partner and we drive there like mad women, almost an hour away on the highway.
In the airport while getting coffee I tweet:
I pull up to the Crash Pad in a cab with a huge dirty grin on my face. I love that it is this nondescript little apartment in San Francisco, people walking outside on the street totally unaware of the hotness inside. I feel something like a secret agent for porn and pay the cab driver who has no idea what I’m about to do. I wonder how many other people on the street are on their way to some fantastic sex work and you’d never know.
X, Jay, Tristan and Shine are all here, and are totally welcoming. There are snacks and food, but it takes me about 10 minutes to get over the fact that I am in the Crash Pad and finally meeting them face to face after years of love and admiration. I apologize for both my lack of sleep and the total fan girl moment that is taking me over.
I get dressed, undressed and dressed again for the profile photo. T wants it to be a “teaser” for the scene, so I don’t get too undressed.
The shoot is live web streamed, which I like because it complicates the performance even more for me, adds layers, and my partner can watch from home and masturbate with me. Shine and I talk about my ideas for the scene on the live stream. The delay is about 6 seconds, so I can hear an echo from the laptop in the other room. I don’t know how much detail she wants about my plans, but they’re pretty straightforward: come in, play with my ass, get off. Not much in the way of plot or storyline this time. She tells me we’ll run through the entry scene a couple of times and then she’ll “let me go” which is just what I want to hear.
[caption id=”attachment_521” align=”aligncenter” width=”540” caption=”Misha Mora, from her solo scene on CrashPadSeries.com”]
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On the bed in the Crash Pad, I look around at the hot photos of the wall, gorgeous queer bodies kissing, fucking, tits tied up in rope bondage. To get myself started, I just suck it all in, start touching my body and start a little tantric breathing, deep breaths in circles through my chakras, imagining energy moving up the front of my cock around and down my back. I start playing with myself and quickly move on to the gloves and lube. Indulging in some serious anal play, I see how many fingers I can get into myself. Usually it’s my partner fisting me. The breathing gives me a long energy orgasm, and I convulse and breathe out for a long time while touching myself.
All of that you can see on video, but mostly I wanted to write down some thoughts I had after the post shoot interview. During the interview, moments after getting off, still dripping in sweat, mascara running down my face, I was pretty out of my mind, and I think, not very articulate. Actually, I think I didn’t finish any of the sentences that were important to me. So here are some of those sentences.
Shine asked me why I came to the crash pad, and I said that I want to make art that is challenging to myself and to the viewer, and that involves a personal risk and commitment. What I forgot to finish in that sentence is that I think that making porn for the internet involves, in my mind, a personal risk. Being a professional porn performer online is likely to change your life, as more and more people know about it, and also necessitates some concern for your personal safety, as people have written about the need for anonymity. As for the challenging part, I also think that seeing a trans and genderqueer girl like myself on a queer porn site, from a company that describes themselves as “porn for pussies”, is challenging to people’s expectations of porn. The amazing way that Shine presents the crash pad performers is vastly different from the mainstream porn depicting transgender and transsexual people, and also doesn’t perpetuate the ways that porn classifies bodies, and that can challenge both viewers expectations and also the industry’s idea of what is “possible”.
I also said in the interview that porn inspires me, porn performers inspire me, I want to inspire others and porn can be liberating. I feel totally liberated by doing porn. I love being watched. It makes me feel beautiful. It makes me feel sexy. It makes me feel like I can do whatever I want. I’ve actually wanted to model for crash pad for years and to finally do it felt amazing. I can’t wait to go back.
Every day walls and governments are falling all around us. A few weeks ago it seemed like the US was still too apathetic to join the movements sweeping the middle east demanding change, but today Occupy Wall St has inspired 60 cities around the US and more internationally to stand up against economic inequality. Yet still, so many of the walls keeping people set into heteronormative lifestyles stand, and the police for gender and sexual non-conformity aren’t just the police with batons and guns, they’re your friends, your lovers, your family.
My first time making queer porn was empowering, beautiful, deeply pleasurable and transformative. But what if queer porn is something more? What if queer porn, feminist strip clubs and sex worker collectives point us to a possible future economic model beyond the exploitation of capitalism? Feminist geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham ask “Why might it seem problematic to say that the United States is a Christian nation, or a heterosexual one, despite the widespread belief that Christianity and heterosexuality are dominant or majority practices in their respective domains, while at the same time it seems legitimate and indeed “accurate” to say that the US is a capitalist country?” They continue their project with two books “deconstructing the hegemony of capitalism to open up a discursive space for the prevalence and diversity of noncapitalist economic activity world-wide.” The apparent global dominance of capitalism, even in the minds of anti-capitalist activists, may prevent us from seeing existing alternatives right before our eyes. Maybe survival doesn’t have to mean subjecting ourselves to exploitative jobs that we are alienated from. Maybe survival can mean creating queer community and following our own pleasures and joys?
Or maybe we just want to get off and should keep it up. Whatever, I can’t wait to do it again.
