Posted by Johnno on October 19, 2000 at 04:46
From the City Hub - Sydney
Jackie McMillan - Bondage Mistress/Porn mag editor Entering Jackie McMillan's lounge room one is confronted with a selection of whips hanging from the wall and pictures of Jackie and others receiving or administering various forms of punishment. This is clearly a woman who brings her work home with her. At 26 Jackie has just submitted a B.A honours thesis on issues around sexual consent in relation to sado-masochism. She is hoping to continue her work in the area with the aid of a PhD grant. She finances her studies by working as a Bondage Mistress and editing three porn mags Wet Set and Dripping Wet (catering for piss fetishists) and the gay porn publication Thrust. So how does a girl from the suburbs end up brandishing a whip? "Suburbia as a whole led to me going there must be something more fun and interesting... I was going into places like Hellfire and thinking that is wild and funky, I want to do that. I was watching a lot of shows and being involved as a person someone else worked on and gradually turning around and going 'what I want to do is learn these skills'. It is about taking people on a journey and showing them all these amazing sexy things you can do beyond penis-vagina sex." Though money was not the prime motivator in Jackie's career choice it was a factor. "Austudy covers your lifestyle if you want to live in university housing at Ryde it doesn't cover the kind of lifestyles and communities I wanted to live in so I supplemented that by doing mistressing. I can go to Hellfire and I can earn the same amount in a half hour show as I would doing an eight hour waitressing shift . For me that is a good part of it. The same with working for a porn magazine. If I worked for a mainstream magazine I'd get a) less money and b) I would not be as high up." Academic feminism isn't exactly renowned for its appreciation of porn and I ask Jackie's opinion of the theorists she encounters in her Womens Studies classes. "There was a point where women like Andrea Dworkin were writing very strong and very influential rhetoric about women being victims and that all sexual choices women make are in some way coerced by their oppression. I think we've come out the other side. I think that feminism is looking at new and more dynamic ways of talking about oppression they're not going 'resist, resist, resist- close your legs and go to bed by yourself and you'll be OK'. I think post-modern feminism is much more interesting." So what does Jackie, as a stick mag editor, make of the pro-censorship feminist left. "With the feminist left I think they said a lot of things that were really interesting about the way people can be silenced by things in pornography... My approach is make pornography - don't allow women to be victims. Go to a magazine like Wetset and go - how can I make this scenario better? You can empower women, you can put little feminist morals deeply disguised in your wanky porn" Jackie genuinely loves her work. "It is a way of life. My life is very integrated. I'm certainly not a victim, I'm certainly not someone who is exploited by this industry. I feel good about the magazines I produce". Has mistressing empowered her? " I think I've learnt to use my sexuality and my sexual presence very well. It has made me very confident." Nonetheless Jackie is cautious about painting too rosy a picture for potential recruits to mistressing. "When a man comes in and he picks the young blonde bunny even though the mistress
twenty years older has the skill he actually wants - I think some women find that very challenging to their self esteem. If the industry is right for you it will do positive things for you. If the industry isn't right for you, it'll make you feel bad and the money will not be worth it and you'll have to resort to things like substance abuse to go to work every day."
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