On any given morning, 6,000 people from around the world turn on their computers to watch Vex Ashley, a 25-year-old cam girl and an independent pornographer from Leeds, take her clothes off.

Fair skinned with long, lilac hair and an affinity for winged eyeliner and delicate jewelry, it's easy to see why Ashley (a pseudonym created when she first started undressing on the internet) is often labeled a "tasteful" porn star. Her fledgling erotica studio and artist co-op, Four Chambers, which combines sex and cinema to make highly-stylized porn shorts on a crowdfunded donation basis, tackles sexuality with an eye for aesthetics not often found in mainstream porn. Still, "tasteful porn" is not a trademark with which Ashley, a fine arts graduate, necessarily wants to be associated.

"I understand that it comes from a place of wanting to put the kind of thing I'm doing in a space that feels more comfortable," she says, explaining that "camming" is as much about adult entertainment as it is playing a role of sexual health coach, "but I find the argument of putting someone's personal choice down in order to lift somebody else's up, a difficult one. I think there's room in porn for all different kinds of sexual expression. The idea that the porn I make is tasteful and, therefore acceptable, means that there is also an unacceptable and 'wrong' [version of porn] and that is not a helpful argument to make."

Vicki King

"What is currently available on porn sites is made for one kind of viewer—the only viewer that producers think will make them a profit: hetero white guys," she says. "It means that people feel their sexuailty is not represented in porn, and, because these ideal consumers in the eyes of the porn producers have so much content to access, the filmmakers start to one-up each other…There's gotta be more dicks, more holes. And as an outsider, someone who has never engaged with that, it can be quite overwhelming and can seem very othering."

Rather than making traditional porn, Ashley decided to forgo turning a profit from Four Chambers (she makes enough from camming to cover her own living costs, she says) and instead relies on pre-order donations from supporters which allows her to make "weird stuff, experimental stuff, and to work with who I want."

"I'd like to think there's more to experience in our videos than the sex," she says, noting that over half of her viewers identify as female. Indeed, one of her recent short films, titled Proximity II, highlights the intricacies and minutiae of sex (breath, sweat, touches). A mirage of close-up shots means the video becomes more about atmosphere and experience, and less about clarity…or, simply, fucking.

Vicki King

Ashley started Four Chambers after a period of working on nude art stills, which led to an opportunity to experiment with moving image. "It's about not being afraid of being graphically sexual while focusing on things that I find interesting in films such as concept and aesthetics," she explains.

Each of Ashley's videos is co-owned by everyone involved, yet another reaction to unsavory and capitalistic aspects of the sex industry. "Any idea that you have of exploitation in the porn industry, of profiting off someone else's sexual labor, it all goes back to the idea of making content 'seen' to make a profit. I was really keen to make things for the love of it," she says. To partially subsidize costs, Ashley turned to crowdfunding, which she sees as an effective way to keep independent people in business, to diversify the kind of people who are able to produce artwork, and to keep creative people creating. So far, she says, the response to the campaign has been overwhelming: Four Chambers takes in roughly $3,000 in donations for every video project.

Having grown up with "really liberal, hippy '70s parents," Ashley says she feels both fortunate and empowered to have such an "incredible support" network, including her partner of six years, a close group of girlfriends, and two silver tabby cats who keep her company during long hours of film editing. She suspects that if the stigma of working in the sex industry was lessened for others, consumers of porn would have much more to look forward to. "We would end up in a situation where more people would make porn, or creative depictions of sexual expression, for themselves; they would be able to experiment, like people do in music and in filmmaking to a certain extent," she says "All of that work can exist: We can still have the huge gang bangs, the stuff people see as the more extreme side of it, but if the market were more diverse, it wouldn't seem like that was all that existed."

Vex Ashley

Ashley, who began camming in 2012 after seeing that girls weren't required to be "faceless genitals," relishes being able to play off her own personality in her work. Though she acknowledges that it would be "incredible" to have greater diversity "of the types of people and bodies that are cast" in porn today, she believes that the industry, which has taken a huge hit in recent years in terms of sales and funding for production, will eventually be forced to defer to independent porn creators, anyway. According to Steven Hirsch, founder of Vivid, one of America's largest porn studios—and home of the notorious Kim Kardashian sex tape—the industry has seen an 80 percent reduction in DVD sales over the past five years. With sites like clips4sale.com, where people can create, upload, and sell content directly, the industry is seeing a decentralization of porn production, allowing for more independence and creative freedom, as well as more personal content.

"There is a silent movement of people who are making their own porn in their bedrooms. Now that we all have cameras, and even iPhones that can shoot high quality video, it has become so much cheaper," she says. "People are taking porn into their own hands, and that is only going to improve the kind of porn we're seeing and make it more representative of the breadth of human sexual experience."

Olivia Fleming Olivia Fleming is the former Features Director at HarpersBAZAAR.com.

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