Sex blogger, executive editor of $pread magazine, film director and author
Audacia Ray recently interviewed Sharing is Sexy, Furry Girl and Madison
Young for her column at Hot Movies for Her.com. Check out her column here:

Power to the Pornographers: A Naked Revolution?

The idea of pornographers with ethics and strong political convictions
seems ridiculous to many people. After all, isn’t porn just about
overly-tanned hedonism, driven by the desire to make a mint while
surrounded by swarms of hot chicks who wouldn’t otherwise give you
(assuming the portly, fiftyish male “you”) the time of day? Not so fast,
assumption-maker...

When the oft-cited Suicide Girls was launched in 2001, it positioned
itself as a site of female-empowerment via Internet nudity. In
subsequent years, this turned out to be a bit more complicated and maybe
not really the way things were running behind the scenes. Still, there
are independent pornographers whose hope for the empowering mojo of
independent porn springs eternal. The Sharing is Sexy (SiS) collective
is one such group - their freshly hatched and totally free website
launched just last week...

Read the rest here:
http://www.hotmoviesforher.com/580/sex-tips/power-to-the-pornographers-a...

For the complete interview with Audacia and Sharing is Sexy, read on...

Audacia: Who is the collective behind Sharing is Sexy? What are your
individual stories and why did you decide to do porn?

We are sexy guerillas, running through the city at night with ski masks
on and our dildos strapped to the barrels of our M16's like grenade
launchers for orgasms. You've probably seen us at a sex party, or a
queer film screening, but we were blending in, totally clandestine,
hiding our g and p spot powers under our ordinary sexy as hell
appearance. We are artists and activists who you've marched with, locked
down next to, screamed beside, sipped wine at ridiculous art openings
with and chuckled at the whole situation, or painted banners and fixed
your bikes with, or sat across from on the bus. We like our anonymity
and try to maintain it.

lotus: I came to porn through a few avenues. After years of media
activism, it only seemed natural to turn all those cameras back onto
myself. After years of hunting down images that would activate
resistance in the bodies and hearts of others, making images to activate
bodies into pleasure seemed like a natural development. Then in art
school, a professor asked in true Twisted Sister style, "why are you
here? what do you want to do?" and I then asked myself, what if in all
the art activism I'm doing, I'm leaving out the things and people I
really care about? What about my relationships, loves, desires?
Ultimately, when I came out as transgender and came into being
genderqueer, and began to love my lover's strap on I realized that there
are whole worlds and galaxies of pleasure and sexual experience to be
explored and became really dedicated to working on porn.

klm: Sharing is Sexy (SiS) is a group of intellectual and creative
individuals who want to participate in a constructive consensual and
sexy community.

As for my individual story, is that like what was it like for me to come
out? I mean my story is layered; I’m a performance artist originally
from the east coast who moved to the west coast to continue making art
and explore life.

I decided to do porn because I thought it would be a fun way to piss off
my mom and stick it to the man. I also, like the idea of bois and
grrrls across the globe masturbating to my image.

j: I came to SiS with the remembrance that the realization of my desires
has healed my cunt from shame and abuse and from this sexual liberation
I am ready to share my desires.

Audacia: What is the mission of Sharing is Sexy?

klm: My mission is to make sex fun again. I want to create a safer
space for those who want to explore their sexuality and gender. I want
to break down stereotypes of what sex workers look like and who sex
workers are. I want to feel sexy, have you feel sexy, and have both of
us not feel ashamed for feeling sexy.

lotus: My mission is to create and propagate hot queer porn, and in so
doing to create our own community and foster others. I want to explore
all the seuxalities that have been excluded and denied from 99% of the
sexual imagery most people see, to find the erotic space beyond the
binary of male and female and to reimagine the possibilities for human
pleasure augmented by the network and the latest technology, from social
software and networking sites to diy sextech hacks.
Given these goals, I advocated for our porn to be free and copyleft,
licensed under a Creative Commons By-NC-SA license, because the genius
at the heart of licenses like the GNU Public License is their
contagiousness. I want people to get off looking at our confusing bodies
and to share our images and sounds with all of their friends, to
repurpose them, to make their own cd's, copy them all over the web and
let our radical queer energy spread farther than we can imagine.

Audacia: Is there any money changing hands - do models, photographers,
web designers, etc get paid? Will there be any parts of your site that
visitors have to pay to see? Why/why not?

klm: As far as I know there is no “money changing hands.” I mean
nobodies paying me.

I would like it if the site stayed absolutely free. I think having a
network of individuals who want to promote sex and sexualities that have
yet to be seen, that are only talked about behind closed doors submerged
in dark cold basements, and practice among polyamorous lovemonsters is
important to be present especially in an accessible place like the world
wide web.

louts: For me, SiS came out of anti-capitalist activism. I've been apart
of movements against capitalism, building alternatives, impeding global
trade agreements, working to abolish borders. These movements work
collectively, all volunteer, with as little involvement with the economy
as possible. So, with SiS, all our content is free, we try to spend as
little as possible, dumpster what we can, leech resources from
universities and jobs and make everything free. I see patriarchy,
capitalism and heteronormativity as all linked and supporting networks,
and I want to work against all of them using a multiplicity of
strategies and strategic subjectivities.

Audacia: How do you think creating porn can challenge perceptions about
sexuality?

lotus: We are fostering our own sex positive community. Our perceptions
of sexuality change at every meeting when we watch porn and talk about
it, they change every time we setup the lights for the photo shoot and
joke about it. We are changing the perceptions of the community of
friends around us by opening up new dialogs that have been hushed for so
long in our puritanical country.

I see porn in the massive stream of images of sexuality that we are
constantly bombared with. If most of these images are heterosexual and
monogamous, and depicting a tiny slice of the possibilities available to
us, that harms all of our abilities to imagine and explore outside of
those narrow confines. I see SiS as creating sexual images with
sexualities and genders as yet unimagined in order to facilitate more
people in finding their own sexual liberation and fertilizing the growth
of sexual experimentation.

For me, SiS is a process of experimentation with my own sexuality. I am
interested in fining out how these new sexual experiences, being
photographed getting off, seeing photographs of myself, sharing those
images, talking about them, will activate my body and myself towards new
forms and levels of resistance.

j: Porn is so perverted, right? Be shameful of your sex and feel guilt
for the unconsensual acts that you have survived... If only I could have
not been bombarded with such absurdities in my life. Well heck, here I
am now. It was hard but with every moan and orgasm I share, a
revolutionary joy pulses from my loins only to resonate in everything I
am. There are the everyday challenges that can be overcome in sharing
our sex and desires, yep, queer bodies are sexy...The more this sticks
around in our desires the more we can push those social insecurities
aside and the more we can say yes! yes! yes!

klm: Whose perceptions? Who is "our"?

Audacia: How do you see the relationship between Sharing is Sexy and
feminist, queer, and indie porn?

klm: SiS is feminist, queer and indie porn.

lotus: Feminist, queer and indie porn are my inspirations. No Fauxxx,
Annie Sprinkle, Carolee Schneeman have all inspired me to want to create
my own sexual imagery. Still, I haven't seen much feminist, queer, indie
porn. We've seen some, but there is definitely a lack of it. Most porn
is totally mysogynist, capitalist and just not sexy. I wish there were
more models for this kind of porn, so I'm making them.
Most gay and lesbian porn is not queer, it's just gay or lesbian on a
mechanical level because you have same sex interactions.

j: I can't wait to make dirty dumpster porn with hoochies in homemade
bloomers.

Audacia: How do you see the relationship between Sharing is Sexy and
mainstream porn?

klm: mainstream porn = good
Sharing is Sexy = better

lotus: One of our primary goals is to not discredit sex workers and "for
pay" porn sites. Personally, I refuse to deny the agency of porn
performers. Part of our project is to demonstrate that people want to
express themselves sexually with porn, and will do so without money
involved.

Still, my relationship to mainstream porn is antagonistic at best. I
haven't spent a lot of time doing a general survey of the porn industry.
In SiS, we work collectively, non-hierarchically, we do what we want.

I acknowledge the arguments of many anti-porn feminists as having some
accuracy when looking at the vast majority of mainstream porn, which is
just awful. I see more recent moves like Vivid Alt as just cooptation of
indie and queer practices by a massive corporation which is just trying
to make a profit. Our project is partly a response to Suicide Girls,
which is composed of mostly women who fit western beauty standards but
have tattoos and piercings. A lot of alt porn isn't really all that alt.

The laws in the US around porn are so restrictive as to make it very
difficult for people without a lot of money to make and distribute porn,
as we have found, and so the situation is that a few large corporations
are making all the billions the industry brings in every year. I would
much rather see something like Xtube or Pornotube have the popularity of
Youtube, and see millions of people experimenting with their bodies,
their toys and their cameras.

Audacia: What are your views on the commodification of sexuality and
bodies through porn?

klm: If you want to commodify my body that's cool. I just want a yearly
percentage of any profits you make off of it.

But seriously, I think commodification can be a form of reclaiming one's
body. I'm setting the price of my body and I'm allowing you and eveyone
else who visits SiS to consume my body.

j: The first thing that comes to my mind are single mothers who are sex
workers struggling to survive and support their families. If there is
commodification at the price of dignity, in a billion dollar industry,
that industry is corrupt and that is immoral. Living wages and dignity
for all!

lotus: Throughout history women's bodies have been more exploited than
other bodies for the profit and pleasure of those with more power, in
particular white european heterosexual men. I see the commodification of
women's bodies within that trajectory, as something to be resisted at
all costs. Still, every image and body is commodified under global
capitalism, so even attempts like ours to operate outside of the economy
can't claim purity, as they will still function in relation to profit
making industries and circulate in the art business.

One of the most interesting and exciting things about porn is that it
can function like a short circuit for the attention economy. Porn gets a
lot of attention, and if our current information economy is so
intimately related to attention, then it seems like a line that cuts
through the system. If you take your clothes off, someone will be
looking. The question for me is, what to say once people are looking?
And what we are saying is that we want a million genders for a million
people, that we want an infinite multiplicty of sexual practices to
propagate, that we want to empower people in learning about their own
desire and following it, that we will be empowered by the system we find
ourselves in by finding its weaknesses and we will use them to get what
we want.

j: If there is anything that is impacting our desires and how we see our
bodies negatively, then that is what we need to resist. Because
oppression is rooted in those lies.

klm: It runs so deep that people don't even know what their desires are
or what their desires can be.