LAUREN KILEY
Imet Ashley* at a benefit concert for SlutWalk LA. It was in 2012 and several years before Amber Rose was involved, so it made sense that the benefit was a punk rock concert in a converted warehouse in Silver Lake. I hosted a table for Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP), handing out pamphlets, selling buttons, and collecting emails for our newsletter. This work also includes listening to everyone in the room tell you their opinion about sex work. Even in a relatively receptive environment, meeting a fellow adult performer felt like a breath of fresh air.
My experiences with both activism and sex work have been fluid. I’ve had a variety of names and roles. I’ve been in leadership and secretarial positions. I have worked for a variety of community and social justice causes and in several different niches of the sex industries. I’ve become burned out and dramatically retired from whoring and organizing, only to come back months later in new capacities. Like many millennials, I’ve had to work several jobs at a time and cobble together paying gigs here and there to put together a precarious livable income. For me, that’s mostly included various forms of sex work and vanilla jobs. I have lived off full-time sex work earnings and I have had months where I didn’t meet the minimum earnings payout on any platform. Picking up an extra shoot in a month could be a bonus luxury or the difference between making rent and overdrafting my bank account. This is true for a whole class of part-time sex workers who dip in and out of different aspects of the sex industries. This is especially true for a lot of sex workers when first starting out.
Ashley was a full-time porn star with several years of experience both performing and directing for her own site and well-known studios. Just about everyone I knew who worked in queer or lesbian porn was familiar with her and she had about ten times more social media followers than I did. She walked up to the table and promptly told me she didn’t identify as a sex worker, but preferred the specificity of “porn star.”
“I don’t mean, like, any offense to prostitutes or anything,” she added.
That probably should have been my first red flag. But I could see her point. I like to distinguish between filming fetish porn and mainstream porn for similar reasons. It’s just a very different job and the industry operates in some pretty different ways, even while recognizing and respecting the obvious overlaps. She wasn’t the first or the last porn star to say that to me at a SWOP table anyway. And some of them come around.
Ashley proceeded to drunkenly yell at some asshole who made some whorephobic comment. She was brash and unapologetic and I liked her a lot for it. She reminded me of one of my exes. They had the same hairstyle. We kept in touch via Twitter.
A few months later, she booked a photography shoot with me. She had shot with a few of my friends, so I asked what she was like. “Rough,” they said. And that she “liked to push limits.” But everyone assured me that they thought I could handle it. These were people I was particularly close with who knew my work and limits very well. I felt little bursts of pride and confidence in my own toughness and modeling capabilities.
And we were all correct. That first shoot was fun and hot.
A photographer rented out a room in a BDSM dungeon and it was one of those scenarios we don’t talk about very often, somewhere between a shoot and a session—but part of the point was something of a live, intimate kink show. It was closer to enacting the fantasy of a photoshoot than prioritizing the images themselves. A big part of why the photographer hired us was for the experience of spending an afternoon with beautiful women playing together in a dungeon. Ashley and I worked well together beyond having good physical and personal chemistry. It’s hard to explain what that’s like—intuitively leading a client through a couple hours when he doesn’t necessarily have the language to ask for what he wants. I mentally promoted Ashley to a higher level of trust.
The photographer sent me a greeting card after the session, and he continued to send them on occasion for several years after. He sent a gift as well: a makeup bag with a shot of my body printed on it, strapped naked to a table, straining against the bonds while Ashley stood over me in a catsuit. I finally threw it out a couple months ago.
After the shoot, Ashley and I agreed to keep in touch and to work together again. I was excited to make my fetish work a little sexier and she said she was interested in making her lesbian porn a little kinkier. But she mostly shot content that involved fucking and I didn’t, so we rarely had an overlap of work.
UNTIL WE DID. Ashley called to say she had an opportunity to book a fetish shoot, and I eagerly agreed. I had been shooting fetish porn for a little over two years at that point, and exclusively fetish clips. The vast majority of my porn is me talking about fetishes to a camera. I am an independent, part-time producer. I have perpetual ambitions of doing more and growing more successful, but I still work on a pretty small scale. I am not famous or well known within or outside of the industry. This was even more true back then.
Every other video shoot I had ever done was at someone’s house. Even the fancy professionals who had rooms dedicated to shoot spaces or different sets were still operating out of their living spaces. It was a very different thing to go to a warehouse in downtown LA with an office in the front, a messy changing room, and the casual air of people who may or may not have been involved with the production milling around. It was less personal. Maybe that’s more professional, but it was already a major difference. I didn’t even realize we were filming for a real porn studio until I got there. I was going to be on a DVD and everything!
I showed up and they were running late and still filming a hardcore sex scene. I was a creep. I took some pictures. I was casually acquainted with one of the performers and thought she might like some hot behind-the-scenes photos. Regardless of my amiable intentions, this was a shitty move on my part. I didn’t ask permission. No one stopped me. And I didn’t see that giant red flag waving.
In my scene with Ashley, I was strapped to a bed while she used a vibrator on me. It’s typically referred to as forced or coerced orgasms. We shot it in phases with an interview, a section of lighter play, and then a section of higher intensity. Somewhere in there a photographer shot still images. We didn’t specify what we meant by “higher intensity” and this meant I had not explicitly consented to every action she performed. I remember the pain when she slapped me. I remember the surprise and humiliation when the camera got a close-up of her spitting on me. She didn’t technically violate any of the boundaries we had set. This was “higher intensity.” But.
I have filmed countless versions of the same scene, before and since, with a variety of people and a variety of fantasy scenarios. None of them have been like that.
The feeling that bondage elicits depends on the scenario. For instance, I respond differently to bondage for work and bondage for personal pleasure. But in any case, there are psychological and physiological effects. There is a feeling of helplessness, and adrenaline, and fear. And that’s kind of the point most of the time, on camera or off. But this time it wasn’t the dreamy euphoric version of subspace I had felt before. The loss of control was not comforting. I know that I could have stopped the scene at any time, but I don’t actually know that I could have stopped the scene at any time.
I was in something of a daze after we stopped shooting. My muscles were numb but my skin was vibrating. Ashley promised to edit the footage for me because I wasn’t familiar with multi-camera editing. I’m still not very good at it. I never got any of the content. I never got paid. That scene was released (on DVD!) and is still being sold by the studio. As far as I can tell my name isn’t even on it. Under any other circumstances I’d be pretty pissed if work I did was uncredited. But in this case I’m just grateful. I don’t like thinking about people watching that scene. My stomach knots up and I can feel the blood draining from my face. There are other clips I’m not proud of. There is other content I cringe at the thought of people masturbating to. I know what it is to feel regret and embarrassment for porn I have performed in. This is a different sense of violation.
I SPENT A long time thinking that I had fucked up that shoot. And in some ways I did.
I should have been up-front about the fact that I was nervous and not entirely comfortable with the situation. We should have discussed the choreography beforehand. If we had, the scene wouldn’t have changed by much but I would have felt completely differently about it happening.
I should have either left with the content or payment. We should have had the agreement about that in writing before we started shooting.
But I was not the only responsible party. Besides my erstwhile costar, there were the two directors, both of whom I understood to have stellar reputations and decades of experience within the kink porn community. They were active in similar activist groups I had been involved in. We had some mutual acquaintances. They had no business even agreeing to a content trade with me. It should have been a paid shoot. The idea and value of content trade rests on the premise that the partners are coming from relatively equal footing. This was blatantly not the case. Did the other people on set technically have a responsibility for my well-being? I guess not. Ashley had coordinated most of the shoot and they had no reason to assume things weren’t going as planned. But when I am working with somebody new, I make sure to go over every detail as thoroughly as I can and err on the side of less intensity. Sometimes it takes more time than necessary and is annoying. It doesn’t matter.
I don’t think anyone should have to learn these lessons the hard way. We don’t have a welcoming committee or training certification. We have whisper networks, friends, and internet forums. And those are limited in scope. Those are exclusive based on class, race, accessibility, and the sheer privilege of knowing where to look and having time to find them. Of course, those systems fail us; but I still fight to protect them because it’s better than not having them. I have turned down shoots where references didn’t check out. I have walked out of rooms where something just didn’t feel right. And I know I have avoided some bad situations by listening and trusting my colleagues and community.
I didn’t accept what happened and I still have trouble defining it as an assault. At the time, I just glossed over the parts that hurt because I didn’t want to believe that the queer kinky porn community I was so invested in would hurt me like that. It was easier to make myself and everyone else believe that everything was fine.
ASHLEY WAS BLACKLISTED from the industry for #MeToo reasons a few years after our shoot.
The field of waving red flags began to fill gradually. There was some internet drama at first. Accusations of racism and transphobia. I defended her in some instances. I stayed quiet in others. It helped that a lot of the criticism was being launched by people I didn’t particularly like. Then one of my best friends and closest sex work colleagues told me Ashley had been accused of groping another performer at a convention. Then more rumors started going around. The first stories I heard suggested that she had gotten drunk and handsy and sexually aggressive. I didn’t know what to think. And after all, Ron Jeremy was also at these conventions. He wasn’t banned until 2018.
Then more explicit allegations of rape and assault started reaching me. More and more stories and they started to echo each other like a bad Law & Order episode. The same best friend told me she had been afraid to tell me about the rest of the rumors because she knew Ashley and I were friends. I was gutted. Part of me was insulted. Didn’t my friends know that I am a Very Good Activist? That I Believe Survivors? That I would have Done Something? But then I thought about the times I had spoken up in Ashley’s defense. And how terribly painful it had been when I saw other Very Good Activists take the side of the accused rapist. And so I didn’t blame my friend for not telling me. She probably did the right thing for both of us.
And I thought about that shoot I had with Ashley.
One of the rapes was on the same set, for the same studio, with the same directors. When that allegation became (moderately) public, they fired Ashley as a performer and director. The last update I heard about Ashley was that she had divorced her wife and left the country. It doesn’t escape my attention that Ashley was effectively driven out of the industry while many other people with reputations for rape have not been. This isn’t a happy ending without shades of homophobia and misogyny.
The directors I worked with that day are still producing porn, even working with well-known sex work activists. They are still getting nominated for AVN awards. This is not surprising. One of the glaring misconceptions about #MeToo is that there have been significant consequences for the people who make the most money. I don’t know what the community accountability should be for the negligence that leads to rape on a producer’s set, but I definitely think it should be more than a blip of embarrassment from a couple of public Twitter fights about it.
Whenever I hear a #MeToo story shared, one of the first questions that comes up is “why didn’t you tell anyone?” I am in a very different position now than I was at the time of that shoot. But I still don’t feel like I have the credibility to call out a major studio for a relatively minor incident that happened over five years ago. And who would I have told? And what would I have told them? That Ashley was rougher with me than I agreed to and pushed my limits so far that she was working around them rather than respecting them?
I told my friends. They weren’t surprised.
Was I supposed to tell the directors the day of the shoot? It was the same day I had met them. They were good friends with Ashley and clearly financially invested in her. Was I supposed to tell my story on the internet? I have seen the results of performers who publicly complain about set conditions. I have seen the way rape victims are treated. I have seen the way big stars are treated. The most optimistic view I have of that option is that I’m not well-known enough to attract that much negative attention. But what would be the payoff?
I don’t think the point of sharing our stories is limited to the consequences for perpetrators. Otherwise we’ve already lost. We have to shift most of the point to healing and supporting each other. Not because I don’t believe in consequences, but because they aren’t happening and they wouldn’t be enough anyway.
The first time I told this story in full was to a group of sex workers. One of the first reactions was from someone else in the group who had also worked with Ashley. It had been when they were young and new to the industry and new to the Los Angeles queer scene. It had been a much worse experience than mine.
MY PHILOSOPHY OF activism for the past decade or so has essentially been to get a bunch of sex workers in the same room. It’s community building at its most literal. I see sex workers taking care of each other. I see us opening our doors in the middle of the night to offer a safe place to sleep. I see us keeping mental databases of houses where a partner doesn’t know what legal name to look for. I see us driving across the city to pick up a stranger because an unofficial network was activated in a group text thread. I see us cyclically giving money to each other’s online crisis funds.
And I see us making spaces in the industry where the rules are different. I see the increasing accessibility of video cameras and editing capability letting porn stars create their own content and control their own sets. I see us sharing resources and getting each other work. I hear my friend talking about how she was letting another model come live with her for as long as she needed. And she explained to me very simply that in the BBW model community, “that’s what we do.”
I see us building a new economy. I see us pouring our sex work dollars back into supporting other sex workers. We buy each other’s art, pay each other for services, and find ways to make us all more money. We aren’t making up most of these systems. We are learning and borrowing from our elders and previous movements. We use social organization tactics from church groups, navigate health-care resources that grew out of the AIDS crisis, and apprentice in BDSM traditions that stretch back generations.
That’s the “we” I want to build. My focus as an activist is no longer to convince anyone that sex workers are people too. I did that for years and, frankly, it was exhausting. I don’t have the time or energy to convince anyone that it matters if we are raped, killed, or beaten. My time and energy are devoted to building this “we” and making it better.
*Ashley is neither her real name nor her porn name.