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Trixie Fontaine

ISSUE 1.3 (2005)

“Will you pee for me?”

It was one of the first requests I got as a webwhore during a private webcam show, and I was happy to oblige my customer for $2.99 a minute. I grabbed a Tupperware bowl, aimed the cam at my pussy, and pissed until my bladder went dry. Cha-ching! I envisioned logging into the camsite every morning to empty my bladder and line my pockets. Who knew webwhoring could be so simple and the customers so easy to please?

A week later I found out it wasn’t so simple; yellow shows were (and still are) against most camsites’ rules and many camgirls’ accounts had been closed for disobeying by spraying. I was flabbergasted—doesn’t a piss ban on a porn site violate common sense? You can see men eating urine snow cones by going to your neighborhood video store and renting Jackass the Movie, so what’s wrong with videos of a sterile body fluid being streamed over the Internet to a porn consumer? I grudgingly stopped doing pee shows to avoid being kicked off the camsite, but the rationale of the no-piss rule eluded me.

Even more befuddling than the camsite’s no-piss rule was the no-menstruation rule. What could possibly be wrong with me masturbating my own pussy at the wettest time of the month? Doing period shows seemed a lot more natural, less offensive, and safer than women doing the ever-popular (and camsite-acceptable) extreme penetration shows, fucking themselves with baseball bats, footballs, and beer cans.

Over a year later I opened my own Internet porn site selling monthly memberships to people who wanted to see my spycams, photos, and videos. Owning my own site meant I was out from under the thumb of the big corporate camsites and could set my own rules. I did pee shows and integrated my period into shows like “Bloody Body Painting” and photo sets like “Blood in the Studio.”

I enjoyed showing off my period not because I got any customer requests to see it, but because menstruation is so conspicuously absent from porn. I was determined that my porn site be honest about me, my sexuality, and my body—how could my site be genuine and real if I ignored and hid the fluid coursing through my cunt once a month? I didn’t want my site to portray only the typical skewed porno version of women’s bodies and sexuality; I can think of no greater misrepresentation of premenopausal women’s bodies than having 100 percent of porn pretend that 15-25 percent of our vaginas’ monthly experience just doesn’t exist.

While none of my members requested to see me on the rag, they didn’t complain when I shared my period with them. Some of them chose not to look at it because they couldn’t handle blood, some of them said it didn’t exactly turn them on but it was “interesting,” and some of them just thought it was no big deal. I was happy my fans were tolerant and supportive, but I was still mystified by men’s disproportionate interest in pee versus menstruation. It surprised me that guys were so much more interested in a fluid that comes out of our pee holes than one that comes exclusively out of women’s pussies.

As it turns out, pee is more easily eroticized by men than menstrual fluid because pissing is something they can relate to and urine more closely resembles semen. The only association most men have with blood is pain. Even scat is far more popular and sought after among porn consumers than menstruation. In the world of Internet porn, chances are you’ll run across more enema enthusiasts than menstruation enthusiasts. You will find more guys on the web talking about how they want to give a chick’s dirty asshole a tongue bath than you will guys who want to eat bloody pussy. Of course, none of this makes rational sense since menstruation is literally the “sexiest” of these three bodily functions (peeing, pooping, and menstruating), since it’s part of the reproductive process and menstrual fluid exits the body through the vagina.

After a while, I found a menstruation fetish site run by Tuna, a man who commissioned period porn from amateurs like me. I was really excited to discover an eager (if small) market for the bloody photos and videos I wanted to make. The webmaster sent me a link to his page for models, describing the types of poses he wanted with sample pictures to illustrate what he was looking for. My excitement waned and transformed into disgust when I saw the emphasis was less on menstruating women and more on waste products: bloody maxi pads, anonymous twats with tampon strings, garbage cans with bloody tampons and panty liners, and a rear end view of a woman with her panties pulled down to reveal a dripping tampon that had overflowed onto a pad.

My naïve fantasy of presenting menstruation as a natural, healthy, and inoffensive occurrence worthy of integrating into sex and porn was overshadowed by images of things that belong in a landfill. I wanted to make period porn so people could start thinking of period sex as good, clean fun, not reinforce old perceptions of menstruation as something dirty and stinky. I wanted to display my period as a fresh, free-flowing, messy puddle of fun, not just something to be stifled and absorbed by a piece of garbage.

In spite of my distaste, I tackled my commissioned photo set with as much enthusiasm and creativity as I could, reminding myself that the webmaster was polite, generous with advertising, and couldn’t be resented for fetishizing the one component of menstruation that’s visible in our society: “feminine hygiene” products. A boy’s first exposure to menstruation isn’t wet, red pussy; it’s advertisements for tampons, it’s the package of Kotex his mom keeps under the sink, its his sister’s used maxi beckoning mysteriously from the bathroom wastebasket. As with most die-hard true “fetishists,” a single thing or one small piece of the whole captures the attention of someone in immaturity and sticks with him as he grows and focuses on the thing, amplifies the thing, and sexualizes the thing. It could be white panties or high heels or armpits or rubber swim caps . . . or pads and tampons. Because a lot of women don’t want to have sex while they’re on the rag, observing her bulging panties or dangling strings, or inspecting used pads and tampons (and tampon applicators) are the closest their male partners ever get to experiencing the intimate details of menstruation.

Even if I didn’t like the focus on “sanitary” napkins and tampons, I grew to enjoy catering to menstruation fetishists anyway. It didn’t adhere to my ideal vision of period porn, but it did appeal to my nonconformist desire to make provocative porn, even if the main reaction I provoked was disgust. I’ve always enjoyed grossing people out and if that meant I could make money in an underserved niche by dripping blood into my mouth from my oversaturated tampons, it was fine with me. I liked confronting people with my body fluids and knew that even if my members didn’t exactly like it, they would remember me for it. There was plenty of other noncontroversial content on my website to entertain them, so I felt that including the unique red content could only help establish my brand and set me apart from other solo girl paysites. Unfortunately, it could also ruin my business.

Rather than get our own merchant accounts and infrastructure for processing payments online, most independent porn webmasters in the United States process credit card payments through a third party, CCBill. CCBill is now the most popular and trusted third-party processor as others turned out to be unreliable and/or folded under new Visa regulations and restrictions deeming porn merchants “high-risk” accounts and requiring substantial registration fees. Not long after I started making period porn, CCBill suspended service on Tuna’s account for violating their acceptable use policy.

CCBill also stopped processing payments for the woman-owned-and-operated site OnMyPeriod.com. When site owner May Ling Su couldn’t find anything addressing menstruation in CCBill’s posted acceptable use policy (besides restrictions on “extreme violence, incest, snuff, scat, mutilation, or rape”), she called to ask them where menstruation is mentioned in their AUP. May Ling Su says:

Photo by author.

Talking on the phone with the people at CCBill, they explained to me that it falls under the bodily fluids and excretions clause. I asked them if they still provide services to sites containing male ejaculation.

“Yes,” he answered, “but that’s different.”

“How is it different?” I asked. “Sounds to me like sexual discrimination.”

“I don’t want to have a semantics argument with you,” one of them started.

“No, you don’t,” I answered. “You won’t win.”

Even if they would entertain our arguments and we could prove that their policy equating menstruation with feces is primitive and discriminatory (their “Bodily Excretions” clause in its entirety forbids “any and all depictions and/or actual occurrences and/or references involving the content of, advertising, or marketing of scat/fecal matter, and/or a woman’s period or menstruation,”) and even if they agreed that menstruation is a more normal function to integrate into sex play than, say, a gang of twenty guys ejaculating on a teenager’s face or a woman being double- or triple-penetrated anally (bukkake, dp, and tp are all “acceptable” in the porn world), CCBill is only bowing to the higher power of Visa, who couldn’t care less if they lose revenue from porn transactions; in spite of unsubstantiated reports about pornography being a multi-billion dollar industry, Visa could certainly live without Internet porn’s drop-in-the-bucket sales and the high charge-back rates endemic in our industry.

With no reliable alternatives for processing payments, May Ling Su made her site free, Tuna turned to a European processor, and I held my breath hoping no one would rat me out to CCBill by telling them I had menstruation content tucked in between my softcore photosets and striptease videos. Eventually I moved all of my red content to its own site, BloodyTrixie.com, to avoid having my white-bread-and-butter site’s income compromised with CCBill (although I am still technically breaking their rules simply by providing a link to my red site).

I don’t think any of us really blame CCBill for covering their asses with Visa, and I doubt that they relish shutting people down. It may sound counterproductive, but I actually appreciate CCBill’s conservativism; we all want to have a reliable payment processor that follows the rules, prevents fraudulent transactions, and pays us on time, and we know the rules didn’t start with CCBill or even with Visa. In fact, no one really knows what the rules are because obscenity laws are extremely vague and entirely subjective, varying from one community’s set of standards to another’s. As attorney Anthony Comparetto says, “the problem with obscenity is that it is the only crime in which you don’t know when you have committed it. Think about that. You are driving down the road doing thirty-five miles an hour, and a police officer pulls you over to give you a speeding ticket. You tell him you were not speeding, and that there are no speed limit signs. He agrees that there are no speed limit signs, as it is up to the officer to determine if you are speeding . . . in his opinion. And you get the ticket.”

The general public might assume laws against obscenity are just holdovers from bygone days, left on the books but never enforced, like laws against playing dominoes on Sunday or getting fish drunk. On the contrary, check out some of the steps made during George W. Bush’s administration to combat obscenity:

1. Under the guise of protecting children, in 2003 Congress enacted the PROTECT Act with an amendment authored by Republican congressman, Tom Feeney, restricting judges from imposing sentences lighter than suggested minimums even in cases involving obscenity that does not involve children.

2. Record-keeping regulations (18 U.S.C. § 2257) requiring porn producers to keep model IDs on file proving they were eighteen or over at the time of the shoot were revised to include a level of detailed documentation and disclosure that jeopardizes the privacy and safety of porn actors and models and is nearly impossible to maintain without error.

3. Continuing the Ashcroft-declared war on pornography, in May the Department of Justice announced the establishment of an Obscenity Prosecution Task Force (in addition to the already-existing Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section).

With these kinds of steps being taken, we can expect the Department of Justice (DOJ) to file even more obscenity-related charges in communities specifically chosen for their conservative standards, increasing the likelihood of conviction. So what are community standards regarding sex acts involving menstruation? Judging from comments in online communities, both men and women are shocked by the censor-free area of BloodyTrixie.com, calling it “gross,” “disgusting,” and “disturbing.” Even jaded adult webmasters accustomed to the most degrading hardcore porn imaginable respond to tame videos of intercourse with a menstruating woman by remarking, “Damn, that is some sick shit. People who enjoy that fetish are really messed up,” and “I’ve seen a lot in this biz but that’s some really nasty shit. Why not just wait till it runs its course or get a blow job? Takes unsafe sex to another level and generally it’s not pleasant pussy.”

On the other hand, plenty of people pipe up during forum discussions about period porn to say that they enjoy red sex and point out that the disgusted parties must not have a lot of experience with women if they’re “afraid to get a little blood on their swords.” On the legal front, the beginning of 2005 saw the US Supreme Court killing the PROTECT Act, and a District Court judge dismiss the charges as unconstitutional in this presidential administration’s first high-profile obscenity case, filed against Extreme Associates. Of course, the DOJ appealed the judge’s ruling, which stated that people’s constitutional right to possess obscene materials is infringed on by the government’s ban on the sale and distribution of obscenity (making it impossible to possess obscenity unless you create it yourself).

The core values forming the foundation of the US government’s war on obscenity are the same as its core values opposing sex workers’ rights across the board: they concede that sex itself is OK, but insist that it’s not okay to actually sell sex. The government’s anti-porn warriors continually defend the persecution of pornographers by claiming to support First Amendment rights and privacy rights, essentially saying that we have the right to create and view obscenity . . . we just don’t have the right to distribute it or make any money off of it. We women (just barely) have the right to do what we want with our bodies, as long as we don’t make money on it. In fact, the sentences for obscenity increase based on how much money you’ve profited through your “crime;” instead of being congratulated and sheltered from prosecution for your capitalistic ways as a good war profiteer, timber tycoon, or pharmaceutical company would be, the severity of your punishment increases proportionate to the amount of revenue you generate through sex.

We’re encouraged to pay plastic surgeons to “beautify” our labia and stuff our cheeks, tits, and asses with implants, but we’re breaking the law if we charge men money to fuck our cosmetically modified cunts. We’re encouraged to pay tens of thousands of dollars to fertility therapists and remain on bed rest for months so we can distend our wombs with litters of artificially conceived babies, but if we sell pictures of ourselves with our girlfriend’s hand in our twats we could be fined and go to prison for distributing the obscenity of fisting. We’re encouraged to buy feminine hygiene products from “respectable” corporations like Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, and Kimberly-Clarke, generating over fourteen billion pads, tampons, and applicators for North American landfills per year, but God forbid we charge anyone money to watch videos of us actually using one of these products. We’re encouraged to buy hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars worth of pills individually to cope with menstrual cramps under a system that makes health care unaffordable for the average indie webwhore, but if we earn money by selling explicit videos demonstrating cramp reduction by masturbating ourselves to a juicy red orgasm we could find ourselves behind bars.

Menstruation may be the last taboo, but being a whore is the first . . . and we still haven’t conquered that one. Before we can expect people to accept eroticized menstruation (or golden showers, or fisting, or a host of other “extreme” consensual sex-play elements) we must demand the basic right to sell sex in general. The current administration and its anti-obscenity posses are on the lookout for people like me, the kinds of people who turn public sentiment against the sex industry by our kinky ventures out of the mainstream, creating easy targets for precedent-setting court cases they can use later to further limit sex workers offering more vanilla fare. Is it worth it to make a big, red target of myself, and the industry in general, just to assert that I should be able to do whatever I want with my menstruating pussy AND make money while I do it?

Maybe I’m doing more harm than good, anyway; while failing to ever depict women menstruating in porn is a gross misrepresentation of our bodies, porn that caters to many red fetishists (e.g. “tampon munching teens”) is also misrepresentative of the average menstruating woman’s experiences—do I really want to pave the way for more male pornographers to jump on the red wagon and populate the web with their own ignorant, exploitative versions of menstruation?

Who am I kidding? The Internet is going to be littered with degrading, twisted, and moronic porn whether I’m present on it or not. The religious right is going to condemn us and sic their Rethuglicans on us whether I stay put or pussy out. The conservative element in government doesn’t distinguish between sex workers except from a strategic standpoint in their efforts to eradicate all of us. Sex work has to be validated and legalized across the board; our rights won’t be won by segregating our ranks between least offensive and most offensive, so I’m just going to keep on offending in whatever ways sound like fun.

TRIXIE FONTAINE lives in Washington State creating homemade autobiographical porn with her partner, making Trixie a photographer, camgirl, model, webmaster, blogger, and overworked webwhore. She’s addicted to computer solitaire. In theory, she could write lots of stories and fight the good fight(s) with the hours she wastes moving virtual cards around on monitors, but she’s mentally exhausted simply writing this seventy-five-word biography. Now? She’s deciding whether to play Solitaire Blitz or Dream Vacation Solitaire.