Interview: Amber Pixie Wells
When Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced the terms "sadism" and "masochism" in the late 19th century, his theories were based largely on the erotic literature of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Back then, Krafft-Ebing could not have anticipated the advent of psychoanalysis or the normative partitioning that it would precipitate.
Over a century later, sadomasochistic urges are classified as paraphilias, forms of sexual madness eroding into moral declension and unreason, according to modern psychiatry. That's changing a bit, as popular culture appropriates fetishism for mass distribution and ratings (a survey conducted in 2006 dubbed the above clip from Secretary as the "sexiest scene" in cinema history). Punitive programs honed for extrajudicial institutional confinement have made their way outside of asylum walls, however, informing (ironically) the disciplinary social discourses required for collocating populations into governable totalities.
Yet, dialogic ruptures do exist, and are committed with increasing frequency, if moral crusaders are to be believed. What better way to explore these ruptures than by talking to someone who has turned them into both an identity hallmark and a career? Insert Amber Pixie Wells, a fetish model whose disciplinary practices differ greatly from those of the state.
Q: For better or worse, we live in an age, and a country, that's saturated in moralism, particularly around issues of sexuality. Such moralism often takes on a political tone, in which people who partake of so-called "nontraditional" practices are labeled "socially deviant." How do you, as a spanking model, deal with these kinds of pressures, and what kind of tensions do they create within your industry?
Within the industry, I have found mostly tolerance and understanding, as we are all vested in the same nature of work and/or personal interest in spanking. Of course, society as a whole may have a very different outlook because we don't all share the same drive and some individuals might have difficulty conceiving of someone deriving pleasure from an act that involves some degree of pain. I also believe that there are many misconceptions about what consensual spanking play involves and ignorance of the fact that acts involved can vary widely depending on personal preference. I certainly do not have a full understanding or awareness of every fetish or even vanilla interest in existence, myself, and therefore don't expect everyone I meet to get it. With the exception of a few very close vanilla friends and fellow spanking enthusiasts, I tend to keep the exact nature of my work private.
Surprisingly, the highest degree of moralism I have encountered has been within the spanking community itself, not with regard to the act of spanking, but that as a model, I am paid for the video content I produce. Spanking is a true passion of mine and something I am more than happy to engage in for fun, without pay, in private with a close spanking friend, but if it's a business arrangement or filmed content with intent to distribute, then it's paid as any other service, entertainment, or job would be. I'm thrilled to work in an industry I love and quietly disagree with the notion that because it may be "nontraditional," it ought to be gratis.
Q: On a similar note, the ethics of sexuality are related, I suspect, to the need for everything to be highly ordered in our society, for everything to have its proper place. Thus, we get a kind of mass psychiatrization of sexual norms, in which people whose sexual ethics don't fit within rigid boundaries are said to be socially dangerous and in need of rehabilitation. How do your personal experiences with spanking, or dominance and submission more generally, resist the (fictitious) idea that sexual ethics are the same for everyone, especially with regard to the oft repeated assertion that people who enjoy these activities are merely acting out some childhood trauma?
Again, I can understand how someone that does not share the interest or have firsthand exposure to the spanking community may have that misperception. However, spanking enthusiasts come from all walks of life, with childhood backgrounds varying as widely as any random sampling of the general population. Many reach adulthood having never been spanked or even witnessing a spanking as a child, and yet still have the innate desire to participate in or watch spanking play.
Also, the number one rule respected throughout the spanking community is one borrowed from the world of dominance and submission, which is to only practice safe, sane, and consensual play. That means exactly what it appears, which is to do nothing that would cause true harm (emotional or physical), play with those of sound mind and reason, and only within the agreed upon bounds of both players involved. While there is always the chance of mishap, there is some in any physical hobby and any interaction with another person.
I think generally, we take comfort and reassurance in fitting within these norms. If someone falls outside of what is accepted as standard, it is rejected to further affirm normalcy within the self. This is only heightened with matters that have a potential sexual connotation, since sexuality is a subject that is not openly discussed, despite being a very natural part of life. For spanking enthusiasts that may have felt there was something shameful and wrong with their interest for most of their lives, discovering there are so many others worldwide that share the same passion is a huge relief.
Q: In many ways, women are still portrayed, and still are, treated as less-than-equal to their male counterparts, particularly with regard to economics (for example, wages) and power relations. As someone who not only acts as a spanking model, but has adopted spanking into her personal life, how do you respond to people who say that depicting any type of violence against women is problematic and exacerbates preexisting prejudices?
Certainly, women are not the only ones who enjoy being on the receiving end of a spanking. Many men prefer to be spanked or to take turns in giving and receiving. And in any safe spanking play, it is actually the one receiving that has the control over play. This may not be what it would outwardly appear and the dynamic of the role play that the participants engage in will most often be that the one delivering the spanking has the air of unquestionable authority. However, it is truly the recipient that calls the shots in setting the bounds as far as style of play, intensity, where the spanks may land, level of undress, and so on. If something disagreeable occurs repeatedly, play is ceased by the recipient by use of an agreed upon "safe word" that signals the end.
Q: You probably already know this, but until around the year 1700, flagellation was seen as a somewhat common form of religious penance. In that year, however, Jacques Boileau published a book called Historia Flagellantium, which argued, among other things, that corporal punishment could arouse not only sexual excitement, but imaginative excitement as well, allowing people to transcend mundane bodily limits to achieve a heightened sensual awareness extending beyond sexual acts. Though it's a bit ethereal, do you find any truth in these ideas, or find yourself "awakened" by spanking in ways that go beyond the obvious sexual connotations?
I have not experienced anything I would term "awakened," but I have experienced a pleasurable sensation caused by the release of endorphins as the body's natural reaction to a physical stressor. To anyone that has felt a "runner's high" after a particularly good workout, that is a very similar sensation.
Q: Okay, here's the obligatory "theory" question, and I apologize in advance! I belong to a philosophical movement called "object-oriented ontology," whose basic tenet is that all objects, human and nonhuman, exist on equal footing with one another. Consequently, objects are said to have all sorts of qualities that are not exhausted by human usage. While this seems weird to a lot of people (and rightfully so), it occurs to me that the relationship between a spanking model and the implements used on her might help elucidate this way of thinking. Here's the question: Despite the fact they they're being used by and on people, is there some sense in which implements, or certain implements, take on a "life of their own" for you and become more than just random objects employed in a disciplinary setting?
Emotional associations to inanimate objects are common and perhaps in that way can even be projected on to items. Since there can be quite a bit of emotional charge involved in spanking play, it is certainly reasonable that an implement or type of implement may take on a life of its own, as you say.
Q: Lastly, how does being spanked as part of an enacted fantasy differ from being spanking for an actual offense (if that still happens for you)? In other words, in terms of the way you're personally affected, is the distinction between what happens in front of a camera and what happens in your private life crystal clear, or are both situations equally "real" for you, albeit in different ways?
Even in my private life, a spanking for a "real offense" is done with an element of fantasy. I do not submit to a 24/7 life of submission or set of disciplinary rules. While I may receive a few swats under the guise of some actual common error, it is done with a smirk as play rather than actual punishment. I am a human that makes mistakes and misjudgments as any other person, and I don't think I could bear to be spanked for every small action determined to be a punishable offense. The occasional bit of fantasy play based in reality is quite enough to add spice to life for me.
During a filmed scene, there is always an awareness of the cameras, the need to react in character, to keep the head raised to show facial reactions. I tend to focus more on creating content that will be appreciated by the producer and consumer than how I am affected personally. That said, if there is particularly good chemistry between the spanker and myself during a filmed scene, and the roles are of a nature that I find appealing and comfortable, I can let go of those external concerns a bit more because a quality scene happens more naturally. I am also more likely to experience that "runner's high" afterwards that I mentioned earlier in those cases.
Amber Pixie Wells is a popular spanking model and the web designer for www.punishedbrats.com. She is also involved in efforts to promote animal welfare. To that end, every comment on this post will be matched by a $5 contribution to Humane Society of the United States. Her blog can be read at www.spankingpixie.com.
Categories: Interviews
Tags: interviews amber pixie wells sexuality
Wow, you're courageous, Kris. I could never conduct an interview like this. I think I'd giggle too much, which is ironic considering that Hilary and I have dabbled in spanking fun more than a few times. *winks to my girlfriend*
I haven't dabbled much in issues of sexuality, but I find it interesting that many of the foremost 20th century theorists - Deleuze and Foucault being the most obvious examples - have explored made sexuality, and especially deviant sexuality, central to their work. Didn't Foucault participate in the BDSM community?
Speaking my experience as a bisexual woman that tends toward relationships with women, I think the clinical cleansing of sexuality is anything but erased by pop culture. We see lesbianism, homosexuality, and other supposedly deviant cats portrayed more frequently on television shows, but how often are they presented existentially? Instead, they're usually showcased in a way that makes sexuality the primary, if not only part of an identity structure. So, the modern struggle is twofold: It's not just for legal acceptance, but also for the capacity to be something without having something serve as a totalizing signifier for something that's very fluid. To put it in more object-oriented terms, exultation of my sexual practices as definitive of my the entire structural composition of my identity renders my identity immobile with the assemblage of signifiers, norms, legal strictures, social roles, etc. within which my identity exists, or can exist. It strips away the potential of my sexuality as a signifying or NON-signifying act in itself, thereby lowering the entropy of the entire assemblage via mechanisms we've discussed before.
Brave girl, this Pixie. I really admire her for doing this interview.
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This is a brave gesture, for both Kris and Pixie. I've also not spent much time researching sexual discourses, but I'm familiar with Foucault's trilogy on the history of sexuality and Deleuze's work on Krafft-Ebing and Sacher-Masoch. To me, the most potent political vector produced by S/M, or any "aberrant" sexual practice involving domination play, is inversion of power relations that Pixie mentions. The submissive is in control, while the control of the dominant is reduced to appearance. In that sense. such practices are a complete inversion of more putative political practices produced by the state, in which subjects are "disciplined" into submitting to statist authority for their own protection, or "disciplined" into submitting to the laws of the market, which are said to enhance freedom even as commodity fetishism delimits the range of possible desires. Coupling this inversion with capital investment, making money off it as Pixie does, only heightens its subversive logic. I'm not surprised that she faces resistance for turning a profit, but I wonder if those who criticize realize that their concerns are entrenched in, and reassert, the will of the market over the individual will they'd likely extol and maintain they are advancing.
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I would also like to thank Pixie and Kris for discussing a difficult topic. I hope they don't face any negative feedback for doing this wonderful dialogue.
I'd like to suggest something different about the radicalism of Pixie's profession. The moralism she faces from within the spanking community (in which I've never partaken) may stem from non-enterprised participants being insecure about their supposed "aberrancy." To take money for something sexual, to them, may turn a psychoaffective act into an act resembling prostitution, with all of its perfidious connotations. I don't want to argue one way or the other about whether or not prostitution should be legalized, but it does carry a strong stigma. Pixie's radicalism resides in seeing beyond the stigma. Views of prostitutes are, themselves, socially conditioned, but Pixie avoids the whole normative debate. While she clearly understands the sexual mores at play in her industry, she doesn't speak about her actions in a way that professes superiority for her position over anyone else's. Rather, she just does what she does. If you want to pigeonhole her as a prostitute or under some negative label, that's your concern. Meanwhile, Pixie will continue to suborn the label by refusing the acknowledge it or be interpellated into the discursive patterns from which it emanates. Spanking as a form of philosophical carpentry - why not?
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Mari?! Discretion much?! I enjoy the discussions we have on this site as much as anyone, but how about not embarrassing me? Some of us don't have the courage of Pixie, you know. Shame on you.
To pick up on a comment Craig made in the reading group thread, Pixie's comments play well with the theoretical lines we've been exploring. Object-oriented ontology holds that the status of objects cannot be exhausted by any single or set of relations. As Craig indicated, this indicates that objects cannot be mastered, and that 'mastery' relies on an assemblage of appearances. Like the conflation of fantasy and reality that Pixie mentions, forms of 'mastery' are always in some sense fantastical, imposed, fictitious, contestable. This holds true for political oppression, martial domination, and economic subjugation as much as for spanking.
Physiology aside, part of the pleasure of spanking comes from inverting power relations, as Marisol said. But I think that there is more to it than that. There's an entire appropriation of an aesthetic apparatus involved. I'm impoverished, subjugated as a woman in a patriarchal world, marginalized because of my youth, further marginalized because of my sexuality. Engaging in a fantasy where the desiring-fantasy becomes itself an object of manipulation problematizes myself as a desiring-machine, unleashing a whole new wave of emotional and psychic potential. Pixie talks about a specific kind of release, but I think it's a corporeal manifestation of the release of emotional or psychic potential that is otherwise held back - not withdrawn per se, but forcible subjugated through a kind of systemic violence in which it is nonsensical to the larger political assemblage.
People may not realize it, but this is a very good interview, and I'm glad Kris is going outside of the box to include people who aren't academics. Some of the best melding of theory and practice occurs outside of scholastic halls, and this is a nice example.
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Calm down, sweetie. I'll let you spank me later.
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This is a great interview, but I just have to ask Kris...don't you think this is the kind of interview that can interfere with your career, especially a career in the academic world?
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Fuck no. If I wake up in the morning wanting to be the bad boy of political theory, that's who I'm going to be. In the past 10 years, I've been sexually assaulted twice (once by a college professor/administrator), shot, and pushed to the brink of social marginalization by a particularly insipid evil ex. I came out of it all with one of the most active political action groups in Hawaii, one that wrote, co-wrote or was heavily involved in passing anti-trafficking legislation, electoral reforms, anti-harassment and anti-bullying laws, and an extremely controversial deal on revising the state's educational calendar and time requirements. That's all in our first year of existence, mind you.
The people I roll with in the political and object-oriented thought communities won't see this interview as problematic because of it's content. They have open minds; it's a nice change of pace. Graham Harman translated Largier's book, for goodness sake. Check out the contents of "Deleuze and Sexuality" to correct your myopic view of how scholarship can, or should, work.
Even if someone did have a problem with this interview, so what? It's my career. My goal is to tear the political theory world apart, without pillaging its players. Actually, that's the old goal. The new goal is to show how chaotic it always already is. Either way, the point is to build, and that can't be done without a bit of prior deconstruction. Capiche?
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I think we can safely deduce that those who oppose Pixie within her own community mistrust their own pleasurable feelings, in the post-Grecian manner outlined by Foucault. Roman medicinal texts already betrayed pleasure as productive of nefarious consequences, not only in terms of illness, but also in terms of moral decay. Is it any wonder that the United States, a nation so frequently compared to Rome, exhibits similar moral inclinations?
The politics of moralizing in itself is interesting to consider, in this case. There's a flip between the medicinal angst toward pleasure and the later psychiatric angst, with the latter the basis for programmatic institutionalization and the coding of values specifically resistant to corporeal sensation. No longer were morals and medicine philosophically linked in a post-Socratic, quasi-religious (and at times, quite overtly religious) manner. Instead, you have the Enlightenment exultation of rational analysis converging with medical advancement to secure corporeal potential through an emphasis on the interplay between mind and body at the level of the social. To take Kris's phrase out of context, it's not simply that non-normative sexual practices were, and have continued to be, maligned as symptoms of an irrational personality in need of correction, but that these practices are represented as always already symbolic of these illnesses and the normative structures that pronounce them.
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Is the Graham Harman that translated Largier's book the same Graham Harman that founded object-oriented philosophy? If so, that's very interesting, and I wonder what parallels he finds between 'OOO' and Largier's work, if any.
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You bet! Same guy. And I'm also curious to hear his thoughts, given my interest in extending object-oriented thought to issues of sexuality, more generally.
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As Lacan (and Colin Wright) argued, the body is the site of the uncodable real of jouissance. The 'radicalism' of Pixie's practice, if you want to call it that, is its resistance to singularity. Yeah, spanking, like other sadomasochistic acts, are viewed as normative perversions because of their inability to be counted, along the lines Hilary articulated: How can you discipline or legislate a body that willing endures torture, in the popular sense of what it means to be tortured? The normative resistance is coupled quickly becomes a legal resistance, as the sadomasochistic perversion is revealed as a kind of anti-structure (or anti-philosophy, if you want) with its own ethical trajectory.
What I think is interesting here is that spanking recaptures the body as body, as a non-Cartesian, non-solipsistic, non-commodity. S/M, light or heavy, shows the extent to which the body has been transformed into a site of biopolitical valuation and, seemingly paradoxically, the policing of "atomized difference," to borrow Wright's term. The pathological discourses that render S/M aberrant result from the breakdown of the state disciplinary apparatus, or at least their modern power does. As the omnipotence of the Big Other declines, capillary authoritarian networks take its paternal place. DSM manuals are but a symbol of the new dispersed paternal coding.
It's helpful, I think, to look at the body not as an imaginary totality, but a discrete organism capable of staging jouissance. Forcing biopolitical frameworks to confront the inability of solipsistic fragility, of both the body and the legal codes, may be the only way to advance justice beyond semiotics and institutional bounds.
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If bodies are a site of biopolitical valuation, something I agree with, how do we avoid labeling Pixie "aberrant" or problematic since she's taking money for it? How would we answer something who asked, "Isn't Pixie playing into the system of commodification by engaging in a politically destabilizing act for profit?"
I like your analysis, but I think that question lingers...
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That's an interesting question, and I'll grant that it's not as simple as it sounds. I think Pixie is appropriating preexisting commodity fetishism and redeploying it against its source. Remember, market logic not produces commodity fetishism and certain forms of desire, but also the labor force needed to slake, and more importantly reproduce, that desire. The whole industry and activity Pixie is engaging in subverts the suppressive logic of capital accumulation - she may be doing well as a spanking model, but I'm guessing she's not a millionaire and never will be in this line of work, barring some lucky investments. Thus, I would speculate that the profit motive is secondary to the lifestyle, in that she would continue the lifestyle even if she knew she would never make another dime off of it. Additionally, the solipsistic coding of jouissance, along with the moral codes that follow, are turned on their head by someone paying for exactly what's being crowded out and marginalized. Even if the participation is merely vicarious, there's a sense in which the flow of desire has been redirected toward a subversive fantasy, a commingling of fantasy and reality that blurs the ability of the state, market, or moralists to dictate what's real, what isn't, and how the two should be instrumentalized.
I don't deny that there are probably creepers who enjoy watching Pixie get spanked because they want to see women get beaten my men, because they believe in the continued subjugation of women. As Pixie says, though, that situation has no place in the community at large. It isn't tolerated. It violates the ethical that the S/M community has constructed for itself against the imposed ethical structure that declares it to be strange, off-limits, and abject.
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Jeff Burns wrote:
"I think we can safely deduce that those who oppose Pixie within her own community mistrust their own pleasurable feelings ..."
Unless I misread Pixie's comments, she didn't so much say that people within the spanking community "oppose" her as some are conflicted by a cost associated with a pleasurable experience. And some have said that if she does it for money, she must not really enjoy it, must not really be a "spanko".
I would liken it to a musician who has mixed feelings about paying a studio musician with whom he wants to have a "jam session". For both, music is important and enjoyable, but for the studio musician, it is also his livelihood and he must charge for it, but I don't find it surprising that the non-professional musician wishes that he could be one of the "special people", or as Pixie phrases it, "a close friend" with whom the studio musician might play just for the joy of playing and making music together.
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I think there's that, yes, and that's partly what I was alluding to. But my comment regarding the historical coding of values stands, either way you look a it.
That aside, I don't think Pixie would say that people who oppose her profit motivation are simply jealous that they don't get to play with her without paying. I'm sure there are plenty of people who DO want to play with her, but to reduce all moralism against making money in her industry to a matter of personal privilege or inaccess to a specific person seems extremely reductionist, as if by having the opportunity to play with Pixie for free, feelings of angst would disappear. I don't think that's true. If anything, I think the opportunity to play for free would reinforce the idea that ALL play should be for free.
Pixie has found a way to compartmentalize business and personal pleasure, with the irony being that the business she engages in subverts the so-called "Protestant ethic" that grounds consumption–in two days, no less, since she's not only embracing pleasure, but turning the which putatively stands against pleasure into a pleasurable act for profiting through an economic model that valorizes pain as the sacrifice of pleasure. It's ingenious.
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Interesting interview. I note that the punished brats site does not have whips or chains but rather portrays hand spankings and spankings with small wooden paddles and hairbrushes. It really seems more "recreational" than sexual.
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