Word To Your Moms, I Came To Drop Bombs

by Sunny Crittenden May 9th, 2021

On December 16th, 2002, when I was 23 and at the beginning of my 3rd trimester, my husband and I were filmed having simulated sex for the Discovery Channel, for a TV show called "The Sex Files". For the sake of art, information, and science. We're still cool with that almost 2 decades later. It's a happy thing we did together during the creation of our son. Our "official song" is "The Bad Touch" by the Bloodhound Gang and we both think that's fitting and hilarious!

The footage was used originally on the Canadian Discovery Channel, but it ended up being used in similar productions for Discovery and TLC over the years and throughout the world as it aired globally. I wrote about the day of filming in my LiveJournal where thousands of people followed my pregnancy daily. I got e-mails from folks around the world for 2 or 3 years after the footage aired somewhere to say they saw it, we looked good, and that they learned something.

Our son who was in my belly in this NFT, is 18 at the time of this minting. He's a happy, creative, loving, kind, thoughtful, super fucking smart, an intersectional feminist, adult man who we like as a person, are proud of, love unconditionally, and enjoy hanging out with, and just talking to. That was our only goal as parents, and we succeeded, despite having simulated sex on the Discovery Channel while I was 7 months pregnant, which certain people still don't think we had a right to do or would look down their noses at us for doing. Our family disagrees, and I think the proof is in the pudding, as they say, and one would think.

This NSFW NFT empowers me, and especially did at the time it was filmed. It made me feel beautiful and loved and has helped shaped the fierceness I have in my heart today for calling out injustice and raising my children in a realistic, safe, loving, and open-minded way. I'm honoured to have this and to be able to look back and see my body as it was at that time, transformed and captured in such a beautiful way, with the father of my children and the love of my life by my side. A time capsule of a brief moment in life that everyone tells you to cherish because it's so brief, so we did and we do.

We shared our bodies and our intimacy in this manner with the world because no one was stepping up and we thought it was important to document and for people to see in the mainstream media. I was already naked and pregnant, sharing my body and words online every day and night as a camgirl, but this was a way to reach a mass audience, to help more women feel sexy, loved, nurtured, and cared for during a very vulnerable and often uncomfortable time. And some folks would still fault me for that, say I shouldn't be allowed to do it and would never stick up for my right to do so. They would imply that I'm a bad mom, that we're lesser parents who can't sit with them because we, a married couple, shared our love and a woman's beautiful, pregnant body with the world in an artistic manner.

How on Earth that makes any sense as a feminist in any way to me, I can't figure, but it's true. Do women not remember how most of their children got here?

Some artists think it’s okay when all those old, white, dead, cis male "masters" used sex workers as models, but when women do it themselves in modern times - take agency of, and profit from, their own bodies, images, and experiences - it's suddenly not okay. It’s not something that could ever be respected as real work or real art or valid to society in any way.

Things that maketh one pronounce "hmmm".

This 650 x 445px NSFW .gif I made from an AVI file captured during a Discovery Channel airing of my footage, is the 2nd in a series of 4 being minted on Mother's Day, May 9th, 2021. I was inspired to make it by the Twitter NFT community's support of sex workers and NSFW NFTs and is my response, with love and respect, to the people, artists, and negative attitudes described in the short essay above. They'll come around eventually. (And as long as they're not actively working against my legal livelihood, it's totally fine if they don't either.) ✌️🎬🤰🎥