Sex

To her mind, this is part of a broader cultural trend led by “a handful of women bloggers” who, after being ripped to shreds for divulging “their youthful indiscretions” online, are “sobering up quickly.” She says “it’s as if young women are going through the cycle of rebellion and regret much faster than other generations — because it’s all being publicly chronicled as it unfolds.” The visibility provided by the Internet has given the pendulum one big push in the opposite direction. Now, she says, some of the very women who epitomized the hookup generation are pointing out the merits of not having sex.

Grose used Harvard junior Lena Chen, who organized the “Rethinking Virginity” event, as her main example. A couple years back, the 22-year-old gained infamy for writing explicitly about her sex life. Then her ex-boyfriend leaked naked photos of her and she followed by electing to post an image of herself after a facial (not the kind you get at a spa). The backlash from fellow students led to panic attacks for Chen and, ultimately, caused her to become a much more guarded writer. Grose points out that Chen also got a live-in boyfriend and a dog. In other words: The wild mare has been tamed! 

Only, in response to the Slate article, Chen took to her blog to explain that “this is just NOT AT ALL what happened.” She took a break from blogging about her sex life, “because I realized that I go to school with some incredibly fucked-up people who have absolutely no qualms about making my existence at Harvard miserable.” Chen doesn’t consider herself to be domesticated or reformed; she just isn’t broadcasting every detail of her personal life to the world anymore. As for the “Rethinking Virginity” conference, she explains that the quoted panelist “was speaking specifically about the public health consequences and not wagging her finger at promiscuity.”

Slate wasn’t the only publication to get in on the no-sex talk this week. The New York Post declared that women were saying to hell with casual sex and going the celibacy route (celibacy, in the case of one interview subject, meaning a two-week-long self-imposed dry spell). A handful of temporarily celibate celebrities are given as examples: Ashley Dupre, Lady Gaga and Courtney Love. I can also credit the piece with introducing me to the term “celibacy cleanse,” which kind of makes it sound like abstaining from sex is a spa treatment for the vagina and the soul.

Even Caitlin Flanagan joined in this week with a piece for the Atlantic — although, predictably enough, she sees girls and young women as still being firmly in the grips of hookup culture. They aren’t contemplating a real alternative, she says, but rather escaping reality with entertainment — like “Twilight” and “High School Musical” — that relies on “the Boyfriend Story.” As they prepare for and endure sexual “acts and experiences that are frightening, embarrassing, uncomfortable at best, painful at worst,” they cling desperately to these fictional happily-ever-after love stories (as though that is a phenomenon unique to today’s teen girls).

What’s often lost in the never-ending stream of stories about the latest trend in female sexual culture is the nuance and diversity of individual experience; young women are treated as symbols of the culture at large and spokespeople for their entire generation. Not only does that tend to cheat others of their unique voice, but women like Chen inevitably end up feeling terribly misrepresented and misunderstood.

The question of why the money shot has since then, ahem, exploded in popularity is more complicated. The most obvious explanation is one of pure mechanics. “It has to do with the real physiology of orgasm and ejaculation,” says Lisa Jean Moore, author of “Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid.” “The way that male orgasm is external, as opposed to female orgasm, which is internal, it sort of lends itself well to cinematic capture.”

In terms of evolutionary biology, the money shot also triggers sexual competition. Ogi Ogas, author of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” a book that explores human sexuality through popular porn genres, says, “The penis itself is a sperm competition cue, unconsciously triggering arousal designed to motivate a man to have more vigorous sex with a woman than the man who just finished,” he says, drawing on theories in evolutionary psychology about sexual competition. (For example, one study showed that heterosexual men produced more potent ejaculate when masturbating to images of two men having sex with a woman, compared to porny shots of three women together.) “The sperm might also function as a sperm competition cue in the same manner,” he says.

It’s also simply the case that viewers desire proof that the pleasure they’re seeing performed on-screen is authentic — and in the age of Viagra, an erection itself isn’t convincing enough. “The money shot actually implies that what we are seeing is real,” says Cindy Patton, a professor of sociology, anthropology and women’s studies at Simon Fraser University.

The irony is that such proof actually requires suspension of disbelief, because “the male pornographic film performer must withdraw from any tactile connection with the genitals or mouth of the woman so that the ‘spending’ of his ejaculate is visible,” writes Williams. “Within convention, viewers are asked to believe that the sexual performers within the film want to shift from a tactile to a visual pleasure at the crucial moment of the male’s orgasm.”

In recent years, in a bizarre sleight of … penis, some “pornographic videos, and particularly the cover photographs that entice one to buy, feature partially concealed artificial yet very realistic phalluses that shoot decidedly unrealistic quantities of artificial semen when squeezed,” writes Michael Thomas Carroll in “Popular modernity in America: experience, technology, mythohistory.” He explains, “This desire to provide the ‘evidence’ of male sexual pleasure has given way to ‘natural magic’ and illusory spectatorship.”

Some cultural commentators have paradoxically argued that the money shot is the result of the relative invisibility of the typical female orgasm. “The problem of an equally irrefutable and visible proof of female orgasm, at a physiological level, both leads to the convention whereby male orgasm stands in for female orgasm and to attempts to convey female orgasm by more indirect means,” argues Bill Nichols in “Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.”

Williams writes in “Hard Core,” “While undeniably spectacular, the money shot is also hopelessly specular; it can only reflect back to the male gaze that purports to want knowledge of the woman’s pleasure the man’s own climax.” She calls the cum shot “a poor substitute for the knowledge of female wonders that the genre as a whole still seeks.”

Some would rather explain this gender divide in terms of sexism. In heterosexual cum-shot porn, Carroll argues, chauvinism is evident in the “domination of the standing male/kneeling woman stance that is one of the most popular forms of this image, but also in the implied degradation of the phallus ‘spitting’ on the woman’s face — that part of the body which is most closely associated with one’s individual dignity and personality.” (It’s worth noting that a similar dom-sub dynamic plays out in gay porn, too.)

In some but not all contexts, Moore sees the money shot as a way of “marking” a partner as “territory or property.” In a paper titled, “Cocktail parties: Fetishizing semen in pornography beyond bukkake,” she and co-author Juliana Weissbein wrote, “The most prominent type of [cum shot] video on X-Tube … was of disembodied males masturbating to ejaculation onto a still photo of a female,” they explain. “The women in these photographs, often difficult to see, are described variously as ex-girfriends or ex-wives, famous models or actresses. Ejaculating onto photos of a specific woman allows the man to claim her as his property.”

Perhaps most important is the impact of AIDs and HIV since that seminal moment in “Deep Throat” four decades ago. “In heterosexual contexts, women have avoided semen for a long time, partially to prevent pregnancy,” as well as various STDs, says Moore. But the AIDS and HIV crisis gave ejaculate an even greater “toxifying, disease-ridden” image. “Semen is something we’ve tried to sanitize and protect ourselves from in a prophylactic sense — we’re covering the body up, or covering the penis up, figuring out ways to avoid contact,” she says.

The funhouse mirror of sexuality often eroticizes that which we most fear and abhor, thus “a fantasy develops about somebody actually wanting [semen], and they want it so badly that they want to drink it and they want to slather it all over their bodies and they want you to wipe it all over their faces,” Moore says. “The messages that are so adverse and make semen to be this abject, disgusting substance have had this other effect of making male spectators want to live out the fantasy that women and men actually want it and are celebrating it.”

Carroll argues that it “is not merely a carnal fantasy; it is also an emotional one — a fantasy of ‘unconditional acceptance’ in which the female” — or male, presumably — “seems to say ‘I exist wholly for you. I will never reject you. You cannot disappoint me.”

A few years later, after a stint teaching sex ed at an after-school program, she started Boinkology, a site about sex and pop culture. That got her noticed by the folks at Fleshbot, which has always specialized in a mix of sexy content from both porn and mainstream entertainment (for example, a red-carpet shot of a celebrity with a see-through dress or a sex scene on “Weeds”). She quickly rose from a contributor to associate editor to editor in chief.

The recent split with Gawker was a result of the fact that “Fleshbot required all this special attention,” she says, because everyone from advertisers to banks are scared of being associated with an adult site. “They couldn’t devote the energy to optimizing it, and it wasn’t bringing in enough to justify the problems it was creating.” In an interview last year, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, who recently reported a record of 35.6 million unique visitors across all his Web properties, said Fleshbot accounted for only 5 percent of the company’s traffic.

So Denton put it up for sale. Alptraum can’t go into details because of “some nondisclosure stuff I signed,” but says, “Basically, they had a really short timeline on a sale, and there were interested people who just couldn’t make an offer in time. So it ended up going to me, basically.”

Now she’s the 29-year-old CEO of an adult site, and one of a growing number of women taking the helm of everything from porn production houses to sex toy companies. That said, the industry is still dominated by old white guys. But that’s slowly changing. Quentin Boyer, who has been in the industry since 1997, says “the shift in the ‘porn executive demographic’” began “in the late ’90s, when Internet-based companies began to assert themselves in the adult entertainment market.” Says Boyer, the public relations director for Pink Visual, a porn production company that advertises on Fleshbot and also happens to have a female CEO: “In my view, Lux is part of the wave of new talent that has arrived in the adult entertainment industry as a direct result of the industry’s ‘webification,’ if you will.”

Alptraum agrees. “I’m someone who’s kind of a Web native and who comes from a sex positive background of not necessarily embracing the dominant narrative of what’s sexy,” she says. “I’m kind of like the embodiment of what the Internet has done to porn.” By freeing up the means of production and giving direct access to niche audiences, the Web has empowered all sorts of people who don’t fit the typical porn mold to enter the business, and from all angles.

Women have slowly made progress outside the alt and Internet-based sectors of the industry too. “There are several video companies that have females in high-ranking positions,” says Mark Kernes, a senior editor at Adult Video News. For example, heavyweights Wicked Pictures, Vivid Entertainment and Digital Playground. Miller says, “Certainly the assumption from outside the business is that it’s male dominated, and that’s the majority still, but women have made a big impact in recent years.”

Much like Alptraum, Fleshbot is unusual within the industry. “They have tapped into a unique niche within the adult media and publishing world,” says Dan Miller, executive managing editor of XBIZ, an industry news source. “They’ve been able to dip their toes a little bit into both worlds.”

The site’s also unusual in terms of its “feminist and respectful ethos,” argues Alptraum. “It’s not vulgar, it’s not treating these performers in a degrading way,” she says. “We never shame anybody’s body because we believe that anybody who’s willing to put themselves forth as a sexual object is worth celebrating.”

But the biggest thing setting Fleshbot apart from other porn blogs is that it publishes straight and gay content side by side. “From a marketing perspective, that’s a real departure from the industrywide tendency to categorize and segregate content starting with sexual orientation as the first point of separation,” says Boyer. Instead, Alptraum sees the site as a collection of “anything that we feel could be hot.”

It’s a decidedly Internet-era mindset of plurality and pansexuality. “The reason why I’m able to run Fleshbot, and the reason why Fleshbot is in ascendance, is the same reason why alt porn became popular: the Internet is dramatically transforming the adult industry,” she says. “It’s not so much of a top-down dictation thing anymore.”