If you watch porn that is queer and/or kinky, you have probably seen something featuring Madison Young.
photo from http://fuckyeahmadisonyoung.tumblr.com/
Since my early days as a porn fanboy, I have admired Madison Young’s work. She runs her own porn site (Madison Bound) as well as an art gallery in San Francisco (Femina Potens), which features female and transgender artists and focuses on blending the lines between sex and art. A noble and relatable cause, I think. She’s also just generally sexy and DIY and one empowered artsy & kinky motherfucker who still manages to pass as the “Girl Next Door”.
Madison Young with daughter Emma (image linked to on Twitter – uncertain of original source)
Madison has been publicly posting about her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter for quite some time, including the above portrait, which was featured in one of her art exhibits. Now, we’ve all heard the conservative arguments regarding breastfeeding in public. People have their opinions on it, but generally speaking, sex-positive folks are all for it. Right.
But apparently, one’s status as a porn star takes this documented moment in Life and automatically makes it pornographic. At least, that’s what today’s rants from @furrygirl seem to imply.
I understand @furrygirl to an extent. Her issue is consent, and that someone who is unable to give consent (an infant) is included in these photos. I see where she is coming from, and it’s true that Emma may grow up and feel uneasy about being in public portraits with her mother in any work under her porn persona’s name*. Emma may grow up to feel uneasy about many things. Most children do. My mother once tickled me after feeding me mushrooms, and it made me vomit. I haven’t been able to eat mushrooms since. These things happen. I would compare this portrait consent issue to anyone who posts photos of their children on Facebook. I know plenty of people who get upset over the photos they get tagged in. If your child grows up and realizes you posted an unflattering baby photo of them years prior, will they get upset? Perhaps. People still do it, and it’s not a Giant Issue.
@furrygirl’s other big concern is that not only is Emma in these photos without consenting, but that there is an infant and breastfeeding being displayed in pornographic imagery. This is where I have to disagree. In no way has anyone else, including Madison Young, regarded anything involving Emma as pornographic content. There are no baby photos on Madison Bound. These are tasteful portraits intending to capture an image of motherhood. Does Madison’s career automatically make every single thing she does pornographic? Is it inappropriate if she buys underwear around other civilians at the mall, for she may wear that underwear in pornographic material? Is it obscene by default if MADISON YOUNG, XXX GIRL NEXT DOOR KINK.COM PORN STAR buys lunch for herself at a restaurant?
(As I type this, there is a man singing “suck my dick all day until I cum in your mouth” down the alley outside my apartment. Speaking of public obscenity…)
Let’s say for a moment that I agreed with @furrygirl. That Madison Young’s breasts are inherently erotic and that posting any of her family business under her porn name is wrong and obscene and sexualizes her child. Sure. Even then, I absolutely cannot support @furrygirl expressing her opinion with phrases like:
“*Who* is interested in seeing videos and photos of a porn star breast feeding? It’s not ‘art’ fans, it’s creeps & pedophiles.”
Or:
“You are a revolting person. Your child will need so much therapy when she grows up and finds out how she was treated by you.”
(These quotes were directly in response to Madison Young.)
I can feel the Someone Is Yelling At Me On The Internet shame and frustration on Madison’s behalf. We’ve all been there to some extent, and it fucking sucks. But to have your parenting insulted that way is completely intolerable.
I support Madison Young. I support her art, I support her porn, and I support her family. But you know what? Even if I were in @furrygirl’s boat and thought she was fucking up her child’s life, I’d keep my damn comments to myself, because that is not my child and it is not my right to declare what is right or wrong for her.
Kick ass, Madison!
*Update - Madison Young replies: “thank you for your support. For the record Madison Young is not just my “porn” name its the name my partner calls me..my dentist, doctors, gym, the cafe I go to in the morning, etc”. So the fact that Madison Young isn’t even an exclusively porn-related personality makes it even more ridiculous to declare this work as “pornographic”. Essentially, the only sexual thing about this photo is that Madison Young has had sex. Psst…guess how babies are made.
How *dare* Madison, as a woman, show her breasts being used for anything other than sex! All women’s breast’s are sexual, in every context!
I’m glad you’re showing support for Madison. I agree with you on all accounts above, and I think @furrygirl and others shaming Madison should stop for a moment and take a look at how many social constructions and ideals they blindly follow.
good job.
Great post. I am perplexed by Furrygirl’s reaction, especially coming from someone who is a porn star herself. This is not some outside conservative freaking out because ‘the porn star be breast feedin’, oh no!’ This is someone who usually calls herself a pro-sex feminist and poses naked herself. It is that aspect which makes this such a huge fail for me.
I met Furrygirl once at a sex conference in San Francisco, and I followed her for a while via Twitter and the public parts of her site. I admired that she is working her niche has a unshaven hippie girl porn star, not afraid to be opinionated or geeky — in many ways the kind of girl I love to date. Yet I stopped following her a while back, I think because she was stirring up drama with someone else and seemed to have that ‘eau de troll’ about her. This is just beyond anything acceptable, and I wonder if she’s at all conscious of how she looks right now.
“This is someone who usually calls herself a pro-sex feminist”
She specifically does *not* call herself a feminist. She is in fact sharply critical of feminist and feminism.
Just a point in fact…
Kit, I love that you call her a hippie and a feminist in the same post, because she’d flip out about being called either. She rants about hippies and feminists on her Twitter.
Point is, no matter how complex and nuanced and clever she thinks her identity is, she still looks like a hippie feminist to most people.
I even empathize with Furrygirl’s position too in some ways — for example I hate seeing family photos on dating sites because it feels like using your kids as bait for a wannabe dad or mom. Yet mother and nursing child art work is as old as it comes, because it is a beautiful moment, and to say its different just because MY did it is ridiculous.
There are people who PREFER to date people with kids? Well good for them. I think they’re in the minority and I commend people who don’t hide their families on dating sites for being up front about it.
Thank you for this post. I think the photo is incredibly beautiful and tasteful and I cannot fathom someone thinking otherwise. I love Madison’s response.
I agree with this post. I would even take it a step further and say that even if some people find the photo erotic it’s not worth getting worked up over. To me, one stratagem of sex negativity is to deny the way the erotic permeates everyday life. The bottom line is the kid may not be consenting to being photographed, but she is consenting to feeding. To read some of furrygirls posts, you would think the baby was being used as a dildo or somehow participating in someone else’s sex play or being breastfed by someone other than her mother for that person’s erotic pleasure.
The whole thing was ridiculous. It’s really unfortunate the way someone like furrygirl can hijack a discourse and get everyone busily antfucking over NOTHING.
It’s like someone said, there is way too strong a whiff of troll about furrygirl, who I respect in a lot of ways. She likes to fight too much and when she does, she does it poorly. She abuses and preens and in the end is quite repulsive.
Even if I’d agreed with her on this, I would have unfollowed her. I was really sick of seeing her ragefests show up in my feed and this one did me in completely.
Like Kit, I ended up unfollowing Furrygirl when her troll-fight tweets were starting to pollute my twitter feed. I agree with some of her sex-positive positions, and reconsidered unfollowing her when she uncovered and was vocal about the hipster photo book of the google-streetview “streetwalkers”. But this is much too rude. She should know better than this, if she’s such an internet-savvy techiecon attendee that adds so much to that discourse.
“This is someone who usually calls herself a pro-sex feminist”
Actually furrygirl says explicitly that she is not a feminist, mainly because it comes with too much baggage that she does not support, particularly in the area of sex work. Her reasoning on this makes for good reading on her blog, Feminisnt by the way. Her blog is good. She’s a smart person. Just really not very nice, sometimes. Twitter brings out her bad qualities.
Thanks you’re right, I misspoke in calling her a feminist. I have read her blog and should have known better.
I have known people like her in my local community — smart, reasonable, clear headed people with interesting skills and things to share but get them on the Internet and their inner troll comes storming out…
[...] to Sonya JF Barnett for telling me about this picture and for the link to SPATS’s blog post where you can read about the debate over this image. This entry was posted in Tickles My Fancy. [...]
Interesting that some people found the image ‘sexual’ or ‘erotic’. I found the image sad and haunting. Madison’s expression seems downcast or woeful. The image made me wonder why she seemed sad. Was she pining for a lost partner who had helped her to conceive this baby? Was she sad because she disliked breastfeeding? Was she sad because someone whom she loved did not appreciate her? I found myself genuinely intrigued. People who see in this image only ‘sex’, ‘porn’, or ‘eroticism’ clearly aren’t looking that carefully. The photo was brilliant. Had Madison used her baby in an explicitly sexual photo, I would agree that this violates consent. But to me, this photo embodied the best qualities of art that makes you think, that grabs your attention, that isn’t just shock for shock value. Well done and I am now intrigued to know more about this talented artist.