It’s no secret that as queers we have a special relationship with mommies and daddies. We depart from the bounds of biological families to create chosen families, we become daddies in leather bars and we mother ourselves. Family for us is a site of constant grief and elation: dreaming of the queer family utopia or understanding that family in a conventional sense might not be for us. And of course, there is sex, where we may choose to play with these complicated feelings. 

For Vex Ashley, director, porn performer and creator of Four Chambers, being called Mommy was part of her creative and sexual interests for a long time. Over the lockdown, she has decided to collaborate with her close friend Valerie to explore the complex nature of the Mommy kink. “When me and Valerie connected over a shared love of deep discourse and being called Mommy we knew we had to become co-conspirators in this project. We embarked on a journey together, putting our bodies to the test in a biohacking experiment. It took us years of research, long conversations, intense protocols and thinking and rethinking what being Mommy is and means for us…” she writes. 

The two-film series ‘Maman’ is now available to watch on Four Chambers. The first film with JV explores the beauty of vulnerability, submission through comfort and the pleasure of forgetting yourself. The second, with Sadie and Velvet, delves deeper into Mommy kink in the queer communities, its radical potential to play with gender and (in Vex’s words) “explores body parts and their symbolism and power, how MILF is an object but Mommy is a subject, how a breast can feel like more like a dick but also how a dick can be a proxy for the breast and what happens when it's Mommy's dick”. 

Sadie and Velvet both admit that the process of filming was comfortable as they both worked on one of the previous Four Chambers films, titled Crash, and the mommy dymanic was an important part of their relationships at the time. “It was interesting playing with different combinations of dynamics throughout filming, as I was very much in the role of mommy (together with Vex and Valerie) but also wanted to be mommied simultaneously,” Sadie admits. “We called this multi-level mommying.”

 

 

For both performers, the notion of mommy goes much further than just the sexual realm as something meaningful for their identities, intimacy and ways of connecting with others. 

“I don’t see embodying the figure of the mommy so much as a kink—as something that is reserved for scenes or play—but as a way of moving through the world, of relating both to others and to myself,” Sadie adds. “It is at once deeply introspective and inescapably relational. It is the desire to nurture those you love, whether through preparing food, giving emotional care, or other forms of providing comfort.

For years after coming out I searched for a mother figure in the queer community, and through exploring the role of mommy in my relationship at the time in a more conscious way, I realised it was just as much about being a source of nurturing care for myself as much as it was about nurturing others. To remind myself of this I got mommy tattooed on the back of my neck. While the mommy’s dick can be considered a proxy breast of sorts, through taking progesterone, my breasts have developed the mammary glands necessary for the production and secretion of milk, so perhaps one day—with the correct supplements—I too, as a trans woman, will be able to lactate and breastfeed.

Beyond indelibly marking my body with the word itself, the physical act of breastfeeding would inscribe mommy-hood into my body in a way that is typically reserved for the sacred feminine, a carnal expression of my inextricably gendered desire to nurse—both literally and metaphorically—those I love.”

 

For Velvet, Mommy represents the nurturer and a way to let go of societal pressure.

“I’m quite an independent person, so one of my love languages is when people take care of me. It allows you to just be small for a bit, kind of helpless. That’s sort of what I was referring to earlier when I mentioned the relinquishing of control. Food and the act of feeding are present in this very inherently, whether that be through making a meal, or through receiving milk or cum from mommy. The sexual was also a way to reciprocate the platonic care given by mommy.

In terms of gender, the mommy dynamic is also affirming of my own androgyny. The role of the baby, or sub space, has no gender for me,” Velvet explains.

“My relationship with mommy play has changed massively since the film was made. Sadie in the film was my partner at the time, and that was the first person I had really explored that dynamic with. We broke up not long after the shoot though, and listening to the interview part of the film still feels heavy. In our relationship mommy was as much a deeply sexual dynamic as it was an interchange of care in a more platonic sense. Since the breakup, the role of mommy has been enacted by many different people in my life in small ways, but the sexual aspect is almost entirely sidelined from my life at the moment.”

To get even deeper into what Mommy truly means today in queer spaces and beyond, we talked to Vex Asley about taboo, biohacking, gender play and the journey of making ‘Maman’. 

 

 

 

 

I know that at the heart of ‘Maman’ is your friendship and collaboration with Valerie, and the Mommy kink as a long term interest – how was it working on a project which comes from such a personal place? 

With Valerie, we basically gestated, for lack of a better word, the project together. We are really good friends, and we have a shared love of talking quite deeply about sexuality and kink and why something is hot and how. Through lockdown, we decided that together we would start taking this medication to induce lactation and were going to make a film out of it at the end. 

It was essentially a conceptual collaboration between the two of us, a shared performance and a shared vision. It's been fascinating because it's obviously personal to both of us as part of our sexual appetites. But really immersing ourselves in it has been incredibly expanding… It's given us new perspectives on it, a new sense of what's interesting and important and hot about it. 

 

 

What were the initial ideas you wanted to explore in the project? 

At first, we were thinking about the project as a way to process some of the grief that comes with giving up being an actual mother, alongside some of the complexity of being people who maybe love to give in our relationships, love to look after, to take on like a kind of caring role. 

That caring role can leave you with a sense of burnout or frustration, or feeling unacknowledged, whereas being Mommy is a space where all of that care is received openly, all of that care is acknowledged.

 

Was the queer potential of the Mommy kink something you were thinking about as well? 

That’s what was so interesting about the process: as we were talking more and more about being Mommy we were going, oh, it's actually way more complex than people would consider.

Mommy used to be a space that's very feminine coded, but so much about being Mommy and specifically the lactation doesn’t feel that way. Why I love having my tits sucked so much is because it feels so much more penetrative, like pouring something into somebody's mouth, somebody consuming something you've made in your body. To me, it feels so much more like having your dick sucked than when somebody's eating your pussy. 

The body parts are not necessarily just about how they're coded, but more about the power that you give them. So even though Mommy is in lots of people's minds a space for femininity, there are some really interesting genderfucky elements to it. 

 

 

 

I feel like in the queer context, there are so many meanings and possibilities which could be explored for the body – from gender to biohacking to treating it as something which is constantly evolving. 

It was so fascinating to push the limits of your body. It was also amazing to realise that anyone regardless of gender has the apparatus to lactate. There are stories of people across the gender spectrum accidentally lactating just from stimulating their nipples….  It really helps break down this idea that any of this stuff has to fit into these very neat categories. What happens if you're being penetrated, but mommy's penetrating you – it's no longer an aggressive, forceful act. It's like an act of submission through care rather than submission through force. 

I think it's strange that we have so many femme daddies, but we don't have very many masc mommies.

When we were talking to Sadie and Velvet, it really expanded our understanding of being Mommy, but also being baby as a space for genderlessness, coming back to a stage of life where you're not burdened by expectations around that. Being baby just to please mommy and just to be this needy, hungry mouth is almost like a space for the obliteration of gender constraints. 

 

Why do you think the Mommy kink is still so taboo? 

I think that there's this idea that mothers in society are the pinnacle of womanhood, the pure manifestation of the divine feminine. They are sexless. They are just there to provide. They are essentially just vessels for carrying the seed, perfect beings on a pedestal. To fuck with that and to take that space when it's not been given to you, especially if you're perceived as the wrong kind of woman, like a sex worker or a trans person or even a childless person – to play in that space is almost to sully it in some way. And I think that we find the idea of sullying motherhood really subversive and I think people are still not necessarily prepared to talk about it.

 

 

You have explored a few taboo topics while making Four Chambers films. How can taboo become creative, inspiring, or liberating for our sexuality? 

I think sometimes when we talk about sex positivity or normalising sex, there is this idea that we have to strip it of shame or any of the complexity. 

Sex definitely can be a space of comforting positivity. But sex is also this incredible playground for experimenting with some of the more complex undercurrents that run through society.

For a lot of people, sex is one of the few places in adult life where there's still an element of play, getting to try on different identities and push boundaries. You're putting yourself in a position where you're both being held by somebody, but looking into the darkest heart of things. 

I think to turn away from the difficult elements of sex is to strip it of some of its power. The taboo is where we get into our guts and our blood and the stuff that feels visceral, get into the muck and mess around for almost a joyous experience. 

 

Do you think people are more open to niche or fringe kinks these days? Because I feel like with internet culture and memes being mommy or daddy or kitten has become much more part of the mainstream conversation.

Yes, we’ve definitely seen this happening with Mommy while making this film – it’s become almost like an offhand sexy way to refer to yourself. I almost see these as micro kink trends. I don't mind that much because I think it allows people to maybe try something on and explore something and then if it does suit them, they'll probably keep it. But maybe it's not something that they're authentically interested in, and then it will be discarded in the next round of what's fashionable.

One of the things that I loved about being on Tumblr when I was starting out was seeing people talking about what I would consider to be weird kink stuff. I would have never been exposed to that otherwise. But instead of it being just an anonymous porn video, it was somebody's blog where they were talking about their experiences, and I sometimes miss that – having that authenticity instead of the memes. 

 

 

Could you speak a little bit about the film’s aesthetic, the colours, the textured, the costumes and your intentions behind these? 

Valerie and I were both obsessed with this idea of the “Mommy pink”, a shade of pink that's not bubblegum pink, but almost a kind of fleshy, browny pink, kind of the colour of a Formica bathroom. The latex we used looked almost labial, and the sofa covered in pink latex was almost a womb. And we’ve decided to wear these Stepford Wives mommy tea dresses. We were very aware that in lots of ways it was very camp and a bit silly. 

Our films often come across as very serious, but essentially the idea of a grown person calling you Mommy is a very silly thing. And I think the silliness makes it really powerful. It's a very vulnerable thing that you get to do together, and we didn't want to shy away from making it a little camp. 

 

 

 

 

Credits:

'Maman' & 'Maman 2' by Vex Ashley and Valerie, starring JV, Sadie and Velvet for Four Chambers

Photography and copyright Four Chambers

Text and interviews by Anastasiia Fedorova 

Editor Ella Boucht

Archive submission proposal by Vex Ashley's manager Helena Kate Whittingham / Lover Managment

 

18/11/2023