The desires to perform for the camera and for a Dom partner are comparable – and complicated.

Naked, adorably chubby and covered in white body paint, I turn to the camera and shout, “I think it’s time for a spaghetti shower!” The footage jump-cuts to show my 24-year-old self pouring canned spaghetti over my trembling body while screaming, “Spaghetti shower! Aaah, I’m gonna get so clean!”

This continues for several manic minutes, and the video fades to black.

My Dom, sitting on his red velvet couch, looks up from his laptop. He’s perturbed. “That was weird and funny. But I found it upsetting watching a hot girl trying her hardest not to be hot.” Then he orders me to strip.

Lest you confuse this for surrealist erotic fiction, I should explain.

In my mid-20s, having recently completed my Master’s degree in fine art and working in a supremely disheartening call centre collecting credit-card debt off old ladies, I made a Facebook post crying out to the internet gods: “Why can’t I have a job that lets me eat chocolate and watch porn all day?”

The gods were in an unusually charitable mood.

Within two weeks, I landed myself a gig as a video editor for a local ethical porn company, on top of contributing to their websites as a performer and weirdo.

What is ‘ethical porn’? That’s a complicated one, and it depends who you ask.

For the sake of this article, let’s say it’s a subset of the porn industry that treats performers with respect and offers fair payment and transparency. It may also show alternative sexualities, a range of body types and so on.

The idea behind ethical porn is that it can be empowering for both performer and consumer. In reality, my experiences have been more complex.

The company I worked for promoted itself as presenting ‘natural’ women. This meant we were encouraged to not remove our pubic hair, not wear make-up, nor behave in ways that might be read as performative.

As a filthy femme with an exhibitionistic sexuality, I actually found these constraints uncomfortable. For me, the guidelines to be ‘natural’ became a pressure to contrive my image and sexual expression so as to fulfil a particular male fantasy. I soon also discovered what was popular on the site: generally, the more conventionally attractive women still claimed the majority of attention and repeat work.

So, while the company claimed to subvert the dominant paradigm, it seemed that capitalistic and patriarchal forces were still strongly at play.

I also got pussy fatigue. Look, I’m a big fan of the vag – a favourite pastime of mine is to bury my face in labia. But when you’ve been staring at close-ups of female genitalia all day, every day, you really start to crave the sight of a good, solid cock.

However, the upsides of the work were priceless and, though I had to leave for unrelated health reasons, I would never change my experience.

I met free-thinking creatives and sex workers who remain collaborators and dear friends to this day. I also became very familiar with the language of the camera as an erotic tool, and engaged in some deep explorations in self-representation and bodily autonomy. A most profound example of this was the time I documented my masturbatory habits over the course of several weeks; attempting to capture ‘authenticity’ while the camera was rolling was a challenging but rewarding exercise.

Finally, once you’ve brought yourself to orgasm on screen a few times, you lose a lot of pesky inhibitions. I’m convinced that this has helped me level up as an artist and become less afraid to ask lovers for what I desire sexually.

I’ve got to hand it to my old boss at the ethical porn company: he really let me push right up against the rules and boundaries of his websites. Which brings us back to that spaghetti shower video. When I made that weird erotic vignette, I had grown frustrated with my intimate acquaintance with male desire, so the video was an exercise in irreverence.

I suppose my Dom’s response was evidence of the video’s success. His unease about a hot girl going out of her way to disguise or subvert her hotness was underpinned by the entitled idea that a woman owes it to the world to be attractive. At the time, I ignored my discomfort with his comment because love and lust always turn my brain into paste.

Image: A film still from a porn directed and performed by Jessie Ngaio alongside erotic filmmaker Helen Corday.

A few weeks after I showed him my ‘porn’, my Dom sent me an SMS: “This is probably going to be the most offensive thing I have ever asked of you, but I would like to order you to start dressing hot. You’ve got an amazing body but you don’t dress like it, and if you did, I think you could be a goddess.”

Offensive? Maybe. Compelling? Yep.

See, I have an erotic affliction: an emotional masochism that means the less I like something, the more it arouses and intrigues me. I’ve always been sexually adventurous, and it’s hard to guess where these desires come from, but I’ve had to admit to myself that the hottest thing in the world to me is when I am being dominated, humiliated and objectified.

So there I was, an arty queer weirdo in abrasively colourful op-shop clothes, being asked to let my Dom dictate what I would wear – altering the very way I presented my identity. I consented.

I’ll never forget our first shopping trip down inner-suburban Melbourne’s Chapel Street, the haunt of slim young humans who spent much of their disposable income on spray tans, manicures and chia pods.

Together, we traversed territories previously unknown to me with names like Wittner, where he bought me heels that cost more than I had in my bank account; Mac, where a nice lady showed me how to make my eyes smoulder; and American Apparel, where we invested in the shortest of skirts and the whitest of knee-high socks.

That afternoon, we returned to his apartment and, excitedly, he ordered me into one of the outfits: a white tank top and a skirt so short you had to squint to see it.

He then decided to take me for a walk around the neighbourhood. I remember my feelings of acute awkwardness as I stumbled along in heels (I had never owned a pair, my mother declaring that heels were a conspiracy against women) and tried to keep the blue skirt from revealing all my secrets.

When a neighbour congratulated my Dom on my short skirt in the comradely tone of a fellow chauvinist, the deal was sealed – my Dom was delighted!

My transformation into someone resembling a ‘barely legal’–style porn star became a major part of our dynamic and brought him a great deal of joy, only intensified by my internal conflict. It was a potent brew for his sadism and my masochism.

Soon, I was expected to dress this way for most of our encounters – even out in public, where I might be seen adopting this identity that was not mine, but rather a projection of one of his fantasies and his desire to make other men jealous. I was, he said, his trophy slut.

On one hand, I was never completely comfortable with engaging in this type of male-fantasy fulfilment which was about transforming myself into a simulacrum of a more youthful woman. But, on the other, I discovered I liked aspects of it. I liked the alchemy of using make-up and clothes to take on an alter ego and, for the first time in my life, I felt hot. And powerful.

Eventually, I stopped worrying about what my outfits might have said about me and began to revel in the rebellion of it. Yes, I’m a hot slut, but you’d better fucking respect me.

Unfortunately, our relationship began to fall apart in ways that were the dramatic stuff of emotional abuse. Towards the end, his treatment of me was nasty and cruel, and utterly broke my heart. It destroyed the deep trust that is required in a Dom–sub relationship, and disconnected me from my libido for quite some time.

Had our entire relationship been abuse in disguise? Sure, it had turned me on so much, but was I a fool for catering to his desires so completely? Had I betrayed my feminist sisters in doing so? I felt I had handed my identity to him, and now I was lost and broken.

Several months after I ended things with my Dom, still reeling from the trauma of it all, I was approached by a friend who was starting her own feminist porn project. It was called Post-Reverie and she asked if I would like to be a part of it. I would be given a Handycam for two months and complete creative control; my friend would then take my footage and edit it into a film alongside those of others. Hell yes.

So I decided I would shoot a montage of my different selves. In one scene, I was with my girlfriend, our bodies painted, coating one another in black goo before mashing our faces into each other’s spaces. In another, I danced naked in my backyard among dodgy, surrealist set pieces, masturbating coated in rhinestones and slime.

The scenes felt like rituals within which I was inhabiting ugly, strange, untamed aspects of my sexuality. Instead of performing for the audience, I was simply allowing them to be my witnesses.

The most intense scene I shot was one in which I dressed in that first outfit my Dom had bought me, with the collar he had made me wear. I slapped my face the way he used to until I was howling with rage, then clutched my clit and brought myself to cathartic climax. Dubbed over the footage, I read a piece that described the shifting outlines of my erotic landscape and unpacked the grief of broken love.

Making these segments for Post-Reverie reignited my passion for creating porn and finally filled in the pieces that had been missing. I wasn’t performing my sexuality for a male audience; instead, I displayed my sexual self on camera without denying all the complexities that come from being human.

I was able to reclaim myself and take power from my experiences. I found glory in my exhibitionist streak and femme power, and affirmed my love for explicit porn and slut pride while not denying the damage that had come from trying to explore my own desires in a male-dominated world. I wasn’t ‘natural’ but I sure as hell was ‘real’.

I’ve always been afraid to speak about my experiences, lest kink-negative and anti porn advocates use it as evidence that porn and kink are inherently harmful. They’re not. Like every other thing in our complicated culture, they have the capacity to be both damaging and tremendously empowering.

Through working in porn, I gained more complex ideas about what erotic self-expression might look like. Through catering to the fantasies of my Dom, I was able to discover a previously hidden desire within myself to be a hot slut.

I’m now working on my own art porn website, through which I want to capture the same radical honesty, hotness, femme filth and violence that forms the core of my sexuality and my identity. It’s going to be good. Like I said in my film for Post-Reverie:

My collision with that man who I loved caused a nuclear explosion, and the effects were devastating and almost fatal. But now, strange new flowers are growing in the altered landscape of my self-perception, and their scent intrigues me. 

I am beautiful, ugly, monstrous, feminine – and lately, as I hold up every single part of myself with curiosity and pride, I feel like maybe I am really fucking powerful.

Jessie Ngaio is a visual artist, performer and pervert. Her achievements include a filthy musical theatre production, Slutmonster and Friends; a hyper-coloured comedy web series, Trying My Best; and performing in a documentary on kink and intimacy entitled Love Hard. She also makes creepy paintings, sculptures and porn.  

This article was originally published in Archer Magazine #11, the GAZE issue. 

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