The Bi Apple and Gender Bending Sex Films

(This post, which was originally published online at Good Vibrations Magazine, includes an excerpt from my forthcoming book After Pornified: How Women Are Transforming Pornography & Why It Really Matters.)

Bringing up the rear

Salon.com recently featured an article—Bringing up the rear—on the growing trend of more straight men exploring a formerly taboo hot spot: the male anus. A national sex survey published last year in the Journal of Sexual Medicine found eleven percent of men ages 20-24 reporting that they've been on the receiving end of anal intercourse at some point in their lives. Says sex educator and editor of Good Vibrations Magazine Dr. Charlie Glickman: “more heterosexual men are discovering prostate and anal play with their female partners than ever before.”

Often compared to the female G-spot, the male prostate is surrounded by two bundles of nerves and plays an essential role in ejaculation. Some progressive sex pedagogical films released since the late nineties reveal the sex positive feminist potential of female-on-male strap-on sex where women’s active role is advanced as gender differences fade away. Among my favorites are:

• Bend Over Boyfriend: A Couple’s Guide to Male Anal Pleasure (1998), a Good Vibrations’ best-selling tape in the years after it came out, and the top rental, it features Good Vibrations staff sexologist Carol Queen demonstrating female-on-male strap-on sex.
• Bend Over Boyfriend 2 (1999), which features more demonstrations of female-on-male strap-on sex.

And then there are Tristan Taormino’s several anal-sex focused films, including:

• Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women # 1 (1999),
• Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women # 2 (2000),
• Expert Guide to Anal Sex (2007), and
• Expert Guide to Anal Pleasure for Men (2009).

New progressive porn is also picking up on the potential of anal sex play to transgress conventional gender stereotypes through a floating exchange of sex roles. Taormino’s porn reality series Chemistry includes female-on-male strap-on sex amongst famous porn performers acting in a way you won’t see them do in mainstream porn.

The Bi Apple

Sex activist Audacia Ray (1980) confronts the homophobic fear of the male anus head-on in her edgy gender bending porn film The Bi Apple (2007). The film follows Simone, a sex researcher who is on a visit to an apartment called “The Fuckhouse” where open-minded women and men hang out and, well, fuck. With notebook and pen in hand, Simone studies a wide range of different kinds of sex play in the apartment’s various rooms.

In one room, Simone meets Tasty Trixie and Tucker Lee (a real life couple who runs the website SpyOnUs.com – Authentic homemade porn). Trixie and Tucker are sitting cross-legged on the floor meditating; she deeply concentrated, he rather fidgety and impatient. The point, explains Trixie, is to balance the chakras and open the senses to attain even greater sexual pleasure. While Trixie shows a genuine interest in experimenting and expanding their sexual repertoire, Tucker always just wants to be “fucked up the ass.” Simone is invited to observe their sex play, which evolves effortlessly the way it does between two lovers intimately familiar with one another.

Trixie and Tucker begin to kiss. She asks him to take off her panties and finger her. Trixie gets comfortable on her back, lying on a yoga mat with her eyes closed. Tucker lies down next to her, propped up on his elbow, still fingering her and following as the expressions on her face change and the blush on her cheeks gradually darkens. He kisses her nipples. She reaches for a tube of lubrication and applies some herself, before his finger finds its way deep inside her. His cock gets hard; he asks her to feel it. Then she bends over to suck it.

Trixie gets Tucker to turn over onto all four and begins to lick, kiss, and rim his anus, teasing one finger into it – two, three, four. He wants more, turns to look at her; “I think we need that big dildo.” She puts on a harness with an erect dark blue dildo and has him lie down on his back; his hips propped up on some pillows, his penis erect on his belly. She penetrates him and pumps him rhythmically this way, before lying down on her back with him on top. He rides the dildo while rocking his hips slightly back and forth, in a way that stimulates her clitoris as well, as she moans contentedly.

Trixi asks Tucker to play with her feet, so he moves down and strokes his penis against her foot; and asks Simone to hand her a vibrator and a bow shaped kegel dildo. Trixie begins to stimulate her clitoris with the vibrator and the G-spot with the dildo. Tucker continues to tickle her foot with his penis, masturbating until he comes over her breasts. But as opposed to the typical money shot in mainstream porn where the woman lustfully swallows the man’s semen, he licks it off himself. Then he massages her breasts until she comes with the aids of her vibrator and dildo.

The Bi Apple is a small budget film that shows a commitment to changing the way we approach sex. Its charm rests in the playful and natural horniness displayed, and the celebration of queer gender bending sexualities; relishing all sorts of sexual appetites, bodies and sex toys. For the film, Ray won the award for “Hottest Bisexual Sex Scene” at the Feminist Porn Awards (2007). The film was also nominated for “Best Bisexual Release” at GayVN Awards, and was screened at Berlin Porn Film Festival (2007) and CineKink NYC (2008).