From SF Gate, I'll leave it to you folks to find the links to the sites. I didn't go to any of them, and I don't want to post XXX links on RM.
GREEN
Eco-porn: Great Sex For A Good Cause
Gregory Dicum, Special to SF Gate
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Tommy and Leona are having sex on a tree stump in the middle of a
Norwegian clear-cut. Leona, with a mop of brown dreads and a lip
ring, looks dreamily across the demolished forest as Tommy, a little
shaggy in nothing but a knit hat, works his magic.
A few minutes earlier, Leona and Tommy stood at the same spot
lecturing about the evils of industrial forestry. But now they're
moaning in feral ecstasy, overcoming the powerful negativity of the
place -- the broken branches and dried-out logs -- with the juices
of the life force itself.
Welcome to F--forforest.com (FFF), a porn site with a difference.
Along with raw, explicit images and videos with scenes like the one
described above, FFF is well stocked with facts about the world's
forests. On the Web site, naked sylphs share space with graphs of
forest loss over time and exhaustive lists of the benefits tropical
rain forests provide to society.
It's a novel approach to eco-activism, certainly, but one the duo
hopes will help save the planet. Indeed, in its first year of
operation, this unlikely project has raised nearly $100,000 for rain
forest protection through the sale of paid memberships.
"Everyone must try to create something good using what they have,"
Tommy told me by phone from the apartment the couple shares in
Berlin. "We had nothing, just our bodies." With backgrounds in
progressive and green theater and teaching troubled teens, Leona
Johansson, 21, and Tommy Hol Ellingsen, 28, wanted to do more than
just protest the state of the world -- they wanted to make a
difference. To them, eco-porn is the obvious choice. "Porn makes
really, really a lot of money," Tommy continues in his soft
Norwegian accent, "so why not use that money for good?"
Easy enough, right? But, so far, the pair's biggest challenge has
been giving the money away.
It's a conundrum they didn't anticipate when they got their start in
their native Norway, where they managed to obtain seed funding from
the federal government. "We said we were starting an alternative
environmental organization," says Tommy.
Most of the material on FFF features the gentle Burning Man-esque
couple and/or their friends romping in every imaginable combination.
The great outdoors is a favorite setting, of course, but scenes are
also set in apartments, photo studios, sex clubs and elsewhere. The
sex runs the gamut from couplings involving vegetables used as sex
toys to performances by scary-looking shaven-headed German Goths and
is unflinchingly graphic. Like those of most porn scenarios, the
plots of the video segments are vestigial at best, but in written
material and between the scenes, Leona and Tommy share their
feelings for the forest with visitors to the site.
But even Norway has its limits. In front of 5,000 people at a music
festival last summer, the couple delivered a brief talk about human
impacts on natural forests. Shedding his clothes, Tommy asked the
crowd, "How far are you willing to go to try to save nature?" He and
Leona, grinning, then launched into a raunchy live demonstration of
precisely how far they'll go for the forest. Front and center on top
of a speaker, the pair ground into each other while a local band
played a heavy metal dirge called "Go Forth and F--."
Leona and Tommy, along with the band, were charged by authorities in
Kristiansand, Norway, with staging a public sex show. When Tommy
dropped his pants in the courtroom, the couple was fined the
equivalent of $1,500 each, but they refused to pay. Instead, they
moved to more liberal-minded Berlin, where FFF is now produced.
The notoriety has done wonders for FFF. Norwegian news outlets
covered the trial with the sort of overblown salaciousness typical
of media in quest of cheap ratings. Yoko Ono -- whose 1969 Bed-ins
for Peace with John Lennon made international headlines --
reportedly called the whole affair the best art project she had seen
in Norway.
The site now has more than 1,000 paying members, and its forest fund
continues to grow. Even better, FFF is getting help from all over
the world -- ranging from detailed ecological data for the site to
donations of pornographic videos and other imagery.
As the green community still wrings its hands about the "death of
environmentalism" in the wake of the re-election of George W. Bush,
eco-activism seems to have lost its way. FFF's success in entirely
sidestepping the staid mainstream at this moment is a breath of
fresh air.
"A lot of environmental organizations are too boring, too serious,"
says Tommy. "It scares people away. It's possible to use irony and
play around with this negative information about the state of the
world and still get the information out without being too radical or
angry. It's important to have fun."
And the work he and Leona do on FFF certainly looks like a lot more
fun than knocking on doors gathering signatures or writing yet
another letter to out-of-touch decision makers. "We have fun when we
have sex, and we have fun when we have sex with others," Tommy told
me.
It's no secret that sex sells do-gooder causes just as well as it
sells cars and soda. Long-running campaigns by People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals that pair scantily-clad women with
heads of lettuce and barnyard animals perennially attract a lot of
attention -- attention supporters must defend against accusations of
sexism. But FFF's approach is very different. The site features real
people, not airbrushed sex objects, and the diary Leona contributes
to the site is affecting and sweetly humanizing.
"Sex-positive erotic expression and environmentalism naturally go
hand-in-hand," says Bay Area writer and cybersex pundit Annalee
Newitz. "Both are efforts to show what is beautiful and valuable
about the natural world."
Other sex-themed sites make donations for green causes: Bay Area- based vegporn.com, for example, which features "a cast of sexy
vegans and vegetarians," gives 5 percent of its profits to
vegetarian groups each month. But the site's owner, who calls
herself Furry Girl, says the site is not designed mainly for this
purpose. "Some of us vegans just like looking at naked vegans," she
says.
FFF, perhaps the only porn site specifically created to raise money
for a cause, boasts a mission-centered approach as far removed from
the sleazy and exploitative milieu of the mainstream porn industry
as its fund-raising work is distinct from more traditional tactics.
"It's good to see environmentalists thinking creatively," continues
Newitz, "and acknowledging that we wouldn't have nature without
sex."
But not everyone shares this enthusiasm for FFF's brand of
environmental education. In one session featured on the site, Leona,
in a blue wig, starts the lesson by flogging another woman with a
huge leek. This unorthodox approach hasn't ingratiated FFF to
mainstream environmental organizations, who Leona and Tommy feel are
too prudish to embrace the potential of porn -- or even to accept
its money.
"WWF (formerly known as World Wildlife Fund) Norway didn't want to
speak with us -- they pushed us out of the office," says Tommy. "We
wrote to WWF in the Netherlands; they said they couldn't take our
money, either. After the court case, suddenly, nobody wanted to talk
to us at all."
Though they're perpetually seeking funds, mainstream environmental
organizations seem allergic to money raised through porn. Major Bay
Area-based organizations I contacted for this story responded with
terse brush-offs. "There are just certain stories that there is no
upside to being quoted in," said one staffer at a national
environmental organization based in the Bay Area.
"What is morality when people are destroying the world?" counters
Tommy. "It all started so innocently. We never imagined it would be
so much trouble to give away the money -- it's blowing us away how
surreal it all is."
Because they've had no luck with mainstream groups, Leona and Tommy
are instead moving forward on a project in which they will work
directly with indigenous communities in Costa Rica and the Brazilian
Amazon. "It makes much more sense to just go somewhere and help an
Indian tribe directly and avoid the administrative costs," says
Tommy.
As if being on the lam from the Norwegian courts and getting the
cold shoulder from environmental groups isn't enough, FFF's sudden
success has swamped Leona and Tommy, who still operate the site
themselves. They bear the brunt of not just most of the copulation
on the site but also the billing, Web-page creation and other
business elements.
"The project is too big for us alone -- we're sitting in front of
the computer 24 hours a day now," Tommy told me. "We never imagined
it would be so big so fast. Now we want it to become more like a
community -- we want people to be able to run it and upload content
without us."
In spite of these growing pains, the site's success has been
lucrative. FFF now has $90,000 in the bank earmarked for forest
conservation. It's a considerable achievement for a shoestring 1- year-old organization of two people, suggesting that the pair has
tapped into an undiscovered fund-raising wellspring. Can porn save
the planet? "We wanted to create a trap to capture a lot of people
who were never interested in the forest but were interested in sex -- everyone's interested in sex," says Tommy. "Many of these people
have never given to the environment before."
For Tommy and Leona, however, it's more important that visitors to
the site peruse FFF's environmental material than the photos of the
two of them in a leather-and-latex flesh pile in a Berlin sex club.
"We believe in the spirituality of nature," says Tommy. "[The Web
site] is something we really believe in. For us, sexuality is
something really natural. We don't do it to provoke -- it is the
right thing to do, and it helps connect to spiritual nature. One of
the purest acts humans can do is making love to each other."
That making love and saving the world can be so natural and yet so
troublesome speaks volumes about our culture. But it is clear where
Leona and Tommy stand: "We're happier trying to do something against
that system than trying to live with it," says Tommy. "Often, it's
the same people disrespecting nature who are putting down sexuality.
We see the rain forest untouched by humans as the last place on
Earth where God is untouched."
GREEN
Eco-porn: Great Sex For A Good Cause
Gregory Dicum, Special to SF Gate
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Tommy and Leona are having sex on a tree stump in the middle of a
Norwegian clear-cut. Leona, with a mop of brown dreads and a lip
ring, looks dreamily across the demolished forest as Tommy, a little
shaggy in nothing but a knit hat, works his magic.
A few minutes earlier, Leona and Tommy stood at the same spot
lecturing about the evils of industrial forestry. But now they're
moaning in feral ecstasy, overcoming the powerful negativity of the
place -- the broken branches and dried-out logs -- with the juices
of the life force itself.
Welcome to F--forforest.com (FFF), a porn site with a difference.
Along with raw, explicit images and videos with scenes like the one
described above, FFF is well stocked with facts about the world's
forests. On the Web site, naked sylphs share space with graphs of
forest loss over time and exhaustive lists of the benefits tropical
rain forests provide to society.
It's a novel approach to eco-activism, certainly, but one the duo
hopes will help save the planet. Indeed, in its first year of
operation, this unlikely project has raised nearly $100,000 for rain
forest protection through the sale of paid memberships.
"Everyone must try to create something good using what they have,"
Tommy told me by phone from the apartment the couple shares in
Berlin. "We had nothing, just our bodies." With backgrounds in
progressive and green theater and teaching troubled teens, Leona
Johansson, 21, and Tommy Hol Ellingsen, 28, wanted to do more than
just protest the state of the world -- they wanted to make a
difference. To them, eco-porn is the obvious choice. "Porn makes
really, really a lot of money," Tommy continues in his soft
Norwegian accent, "so why not use that money for good?"
Easy enough, right? But, so far, the pair's biggest challenge has
been giving the money away.
It's a conundrum they didn't anticipate when they got their start in
their native Norway, where they managed to obtain seed funding from
the federal government. "We said we were starting an alternative
environmental organization," says Tommy.
Most of the material on FFF features the gentle Burning Man-esque
couple and/or their friends romping in every imaginable combination.
The great outdoors is a favorite setting, of course, but scenes are
also set in apartments, photo studios, sex clubs and elsewhere. The
sex runs the gamut from couplings involving vegetables used as sex
toys to performances by scary-looking shaven-headed German Goths and
is unflinchingly graphic. Like those of most porn scenarios, the
plots of the video segments are vestigial at best, but in written
material and between the scenes, Leona and Tommy share their
feelings for the forest with visitors to the site.
But even Norway has its limits. In front of 5,000 people at a music
festival last summer, the couple delivered a brief talk about human
impacts on natural forests. Shedding his clothes, Tommy asked the
crowd, "How far are you willing to go to try to save nature?" He and
Leona, grinning, then launched into a raunchy live demonstration of
precisely how far they'll go for the forest. Front and center on top
of a speaker, the pair ground into each other while a local band
played a heavy metal dirge called "Go Forth and F--."
Leona and Tommy, along with the band, were charged by authorities in
Kristiansand, Norway, with staging a public sex show. When Tommy
dropped his pants in the courtroom, the couple was fined the
equivalent of $1,500 each, but they refused to pay. Instead, they
moved to more liberal-minded Berlin, where FFF is now produced.
The notoriety has done wonders for FFF. Norwegian news outlets
covered the trial with the sort of overblown salaciousness typical
of media in quest of cheap ratings. Yoko Ono -- whose 1969 Bed-ins
for Peace with John Lennon made international headlines --
reportedly called the whole affair the best art project she had seen
in Norway.
The site now has more than 1,000 paying members, and its forest fund
continues to grow. Even better, FFF is getting help from all over
the world -- ranging from detailed ecological data for the site to
donations of pornographic videos and other imagery.
As the green community still wrings its hands about the "death of
environmentalism" in the wake of the re-election of George W. Bush,
eco-activism seems to have lost its way. FFF's success in entirely
sidestepping the staid mainstream at this moment is a breath of
fresh air.
"A lot of environmental organizations are too boring, too serious,"
says Tommy. "It scares people away. It's possible to use irony and
play around with this negative information about the state of the
world and still get the information out without being too radical or
angry. It's important to have fun."
And the work he and Leona do on FFF certainly looks like a lot more
fun than knocking on doors gathering signatures or writing yet
another letter to out-of-touch decision makers. "We have fun when we
have sex, and we have fun when we have sex with others," Tommy told
me.
It's no secret that sex sells do-gooder causes just as well as it
sells cars and soda. Long-running campaigns by People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals that pair scantily-clad women with
heads of lettuce and barnyard animals perennially attract a lot of
attention -- attention supporters must defend against accusations of
sexism. But FFF's approach is very different. The site features real
people, not airbrushed sex objects, and the diary Leona contributes
to the site is affecting and sweetly humanizing.
"Sex-positive erotic expression and environmentalism naturally go
hand-in-hand," says Bay Area writer and cybersex pundit Annalee
Newitz. "Both are efforts to show what is beautiful and valuable
about the natural world."
Other sex-themed sites make donations for green causes: Bay Area- based vegporn.com, for example, which features "a cast of sexy
vegans and vegetarians," gives 5 percent of its profits to
vegetarian groups each month. But the site's owner, who calls
herself Furry Girl, says the site is not designed mainly for this
purpose. "Some of us vegans just like looking at naked vegans," she
says.
FFF, perhaps the only porn site specifically created to raise money
for a cause, boasts a mission-centered approach as far removed from
the sleazy and exploitative milieu of the mainstream porn industry
as its fund-raising work is distinct from more traditional tactics.
"It's good to see environmentalists thinking creatively," continues
Newitz, "and acknowledging that we wouldn't have nature without
sex."
But not everyone shares this enthusiasm for FFF's brand of
environmental education. In one session featured on the site, Leona,
in a blue wig, starts the lesson by flogging another woman with a
huge leek. This unorthodox approach hasn't ingratiated FFF to
mainstream environmental organizations, who Leona and Tommy feel are
too prudish to embrace the potential of porn -- or even to accept
its money.
"WWF (formerly known as World Wildlife Fund) Norway didn't want to
speak with us -- they pushed us out of the office," says Tommy. "We
wrote to WWF in the Netherlands; they said they couldn't take our
money, either. After the court case, suddenly, nobody wanted to talk
to us at all."
Though they're perpetually seeking funds, mainstream environmental
organizations seem allergic to money raised through porn. Major Bay
Area-based organizations I contacted for this story responded with
terse brush-offs. "There are just certain stories that there is no
upside to being quoted in," said one staffer at a national
environmental organization based in the Bay Area.
"What is morality when people are destroying the world?" counters
Tommy. "It all started so innocently. We never imagined it would be
so much trouble to give away the money -- it's blowing us away how
surreal it all is."
Because they've had no luck with mainstream groups, Leona and Tommy
are instead moving forward on a project in which they will work
directly with indigenous communities in Costa Rica and the Brazilian
Amazon. "It makes much more sense to just go somewhere and help an
Indian tribe directly and avoid the administrative costs," says
Tommy.
As if being on the lam from the Norwegian courts and getting the
cold shoulder from environmental groups isn't enough, FFF's sudden
success has swamped Leona and Tommy, who still operate the site
themselves. They bear the brunt of not just most of the copulation
on the site but also the billing, Web-page creation and other
business elements.
"The project is too big for us alone -- we're sitting in front of
the computer 24 hours a day now," Tommy told me. "We never imagined
it would be so big so fast. Now we want it to become more like a
community -- we want people to be able to run it and upload content
without us."
In spite of these growing pains, the site's success has been
lucrative. FFF now has $90,000 in the bank earmarked for forest
conservation. It's a considerable achievement for a shoestring 1- year-old organization of two people, suggesting that the pair has
tapped into an undiscovered fund-raising wellspring. Can porn save
the planet? "We wanted to create a trap to capture a lot of people
who were never interested in the forest but were interested in sex -- everyone's interested in sex," says Tommy. "Many of these people
have never given to the environment before."
For Tommy and Leona, however, it's more important that visitors to
the site peruse FFF's environmental material than the photos of the
two of them in a leather-and-latex flesh pile in a Berlin sex club.
"We believe in the spirituality of nature," says Tommy. "[The Web
site] is something we really believe in. For us, sexuality is
something really natural. We don't do it to provoke -- it is the
right thing to do, and it helps connect to spiritual nature. One of
the purest acts humans can do is making love to each other."
That making love and saving the world can be so natural and yet so
troublesome speaks volumes about our culture. But it is clear where
Leona and Tommy stand: "We're happier trying to do something against
that system than trying to live with it," says Tommy. "Often, it's
the same people disrespecting nature who are putting down sexuality.
We see the rain forest untouched by humans as the last place on
Earth where God is untouched."
