Manhattan congressional candidate Mike Itkis captured public attention with a sex tape earlier this month, but the video wasn’t leaked. Itkis himself released it, along with professional porn star — and, in this case, director — Nicole Sage, as part of his campaign.
”Bucket List Bonanza” first appeared on Pornhub four months ago, but it didn’t receive attention until much more recently. At the time of writing, it has been viewed about 962 thousand times.
The video opens with Sage in an anonymous white room reading a series of disclaimers. She’s short-ish and bubbly. She provides the results of both participants’ STI tests and acknowledges mutual consent to participate in a “non-condom boy-girl scene.” They’ve gone over their do’s and don’ts and established a safe word. Sage beckons Itkis over and he appears behind her shoulder, grinning and nodding. His thick eyebrows punctuate an otherwise continuous shiny head. He’s wearing a black polo shirt. She’s wearing a necklace emblazoned with her own name.
The two kiss deeply for about 15 seconds, still dressed. It’s a long 15. The camera cuts to Itkis with his head between Sage’s legs. His back is broad and pale and freckled. Next we see his ass thrusting in the missionary position. Nicole is mostly hidden; we can see her legs in the air.
The video has a second section, filmed on a different day in a less white but still sterile room. Things begin with Itkis and Sage both in office attire, but the trajectory is more or less the same.
I don’t know if it’s the single-camera format, or all of the disclaimers, but there’s something uncanny about Bucket List Bonanza. The camera angles are less than flattering and there’s more silence than a Tarkovsky film. As a sex tape, it lacks passion and mystery. As pornography, it lacks moaning, and momentum.
A friend and connoisseur reassures me, “I’ve seen worse.”
Either way, it’s an interesting political chess move in a post-Trump era when distinctions between politics and culture, politician and celebrity, are exceedingly gray. Add the recent Dobbs v. Jackson court decision and unprecedented social and sexual alienation to the mix, and things become even more muddy.
In Philadelphia, a former stripper is running for congress on a puzzling “right to sex” platform. Last year, a BDSM video was leaked depicting a young Manhattan candidate for city council being dominated. A subsequent statement the candidate made in June began, “Whoops. I didn’t want anyone to see that, but here we are.” People seemed more or less understanding.
Depending on who you ask, Bucket List Bonanza could be a sign of society’s descent into decadence, a deluded man co-opting women’s issues, market neoliberalism’s continued expansion into private life, a lazy gimmick, pure narcissism, a bold and courageous statement, or the logical endpoint of a politics-as-entertainment.
Itkis, a Ukranian-born veteran, hopes his video will bring attention to his “sex-positive” campaign platform while running in New York’s 12 District this November. Disarmingly soft spoken and patient, he isn’t the kind of guy one might expect to raise questions about child support, or to broadcast his own penis as a political stunt.
We spoke on Zoom and over the phone earlier this week.
Discussed: Bucket List Bonanza, sex work, obscenity, big government, Eliot Spitzer, cyber security, free speech, the money shot, the Soviet Union, bureaucracy, corruption, social media, marriage, etc.
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What were your aims when releasing Bucket List Bonanza, and how do you feel like it’s done, relative to your expectations?
My aims in releasing it were a little bit different than my aims in creating it, because when we made the video I wasn’t sure yet if I was going to run. As soon as Nicole said she was ok with releasing the video and being a part of the campaign, that’s really when I put the work into uploading it to Pornhub and making sure it went public. My biggest concern was to make sure that it wasn’t about the video being out, but also that people understood how it related to the policies that I was advocating for.
You didn’t know that you were running when you made the video initially?
I had some ideas about running, but I wasn’t in the position to make any real decision about the campaign at the time. I didn’t know what the district was gonna look like, and I didn't know what the schedules would be. 2022 was kind of up in the air at that point. The motivation was to find out, What’s it like to make an adult video? What would the experience be like, what are the stakes, what the process is.
Did you worry about the video alienating some potential voters?
Honestly, there would not have been any voters if the video didn’t come out. I think the video was such a powerful message in itself. I didn’t worry about alienating anyone, because no one would have even known about the campaign without the video.
Did you know Nicole Sage before filming?
I spent about a month there in LA last year. I reached out to a few people. [Nicole] was the first one to respond, and she seemed to get what I was trying to do. We didn’t make the video right away; it took a few weeks after we first talked, and we did spend a great deal of time planning it. She’d done many videos before that one, and she knew how the industry worked – that’s why she was also the director. I was very impressed with that process. It was very professional, and it does a lot to mitigate risks. We spent a great deal of time talking about consent.
It seems like it’s been well-received in the sense that there’s a ton of views. How does the financial aspect of Pornhub work? Do you earn money from it? Does she?
I chose not to accept any money from Pornhub. I am in their model program at this point, but I did not receive any money, because there were practically no views until the story got out on October 14th. Afterwards, we got in touch with Pornhub to make sure that they understood that I did not receive any compensation from them for the video. It was there really only as a conversation piece in support of the campaign. I’m not looking to make this a career, and there is absolutely no profit motive in doing this. Nor could I use campaign funds to make it, obviously. It was done many, many months prior to me even being able to consider running.
Bucket List Bonanza is missing a finale that’s present in a lot of porn scenes – the money shot, so to speak. Was this a conscious choice?
Let’s just think about the video in different terms. It wasn’t put out to accomplish the same things that most of the videos on Pornhub are there to do. What the video is really meant to illustrate is what legalized sex work would look like. That was the main point – to show all of the work, all of the administrative work that went into it, and how it benefits everyone involved. That’s what it was supposed to illustrate, first and foremost.
You’ve put yourself out there in a way that a lot of politicians don’t. How did that feel, personally, once it went live and the media was starting to pay attention?
When I first posted it on Pornhub in June, I think that’s when it felt really, really scary. But then by October I was just anxious for it to get out. It was strange when it started to happen. Very quickly [the feeling] became kind of a sense of achievement that the idea was working.
It wasn’t something that was easy to conceive of or execute. I felt like I was taking a lot of risks. I was stepping into a very unknown territory, and obviously I felt that I was exposing myself to a great deal of criticism. And I was also very aware that I was going to expose myself to the types of stigmas that all adult performers have to face. I assessed those risks, and I accepted them. When it finally happened, it felt strange, but ultimately it became a good feeling. Because, despite all the criticism that didn’t seem particularly well thought-out – it was mostly just a stream of obscenities – I also got a lot of support from people I know and people I don’t know. I think I touched upon issues that people do care about but are somehow afraid to speak about. Freedom of speech is one of our most cherished freedoms, but I think it’s so restricted that we do have trouble speaking about a lot of issues, and this is a very significant one.
I want to clarify what you mean when you say “sex work.” Because, while adult videos do fall under that umbrella, it’s a fairly big umbrella.
I think the distinction between in-person sex work and doing adult videos, to me, really isn’t that large at this point…. The adult video industry likes to draw the line at, “We only do videos, we don’t allow anybody off the street to come in and do the videos.” It’s a little bit exclusionary, but it doesn’t seem to make sense, because the content creators own their work. There’s no difference between someone like me coming in and creating a video and someone who is already in the industry making a video as an entrepreneur in order to make a profit.
There’s still stigma in the industry against folks who do “in-person” sex work. It’s legally really unclear where to draw the line. But my point is that there really isn’t a big difference.
Are obscenity laws a big part of what you're challenging?
I think obscenity still figures very deeply on the federal level. For example, Title 18… “obscenity,” “lewd,” “prurient,” things like that… These words are very badly defined. There’s no reason to think of normal healthy sexuality between consenting adults as something that’s somehow inappropriate. And that’s also the statement I’m trying to make—that if someone who has a quote-unquote “respectable job” all of the sudden does something like this, there are very likely to be consequences. But there’s no reason for there to be consequences, given how big a part of our culture adult video is at this point.
But some of those consequences aren’t legal, so much as cultural, right?
Yeah. It’s definitely cultural. But also, the legal issues have to do with a lack of specifics when it comes to the language. Like I said, there are a lot of laws still on the books at the federal level. For example, there’s an issue for someone trying to immigrate into the country if they have a history of sex work. There’s still something that prohibits the type of transportation across state lines. That was the issue with Governor Spitzer in New York, around 2008, where he was part of a quote-unquote scandal. He was engaging with sex workers. Everything was consensual, but the federal government threatened him with action because there was an issue crossing state lines. Things like that are extremely unclear, and they create fear.
The financial services industry has also been weaponized in the fight against adult videos, in the form of making payments. We saw that with Onlyfans last year, where there was a big threat. There’s also the problem of running ads on Pornhub using credit cards, things like that. A lot of workers report that they can’t open bank accounts, can’t accept online payments – things like that.
When I first heard about your campaign I sort of assumed you were coming from a Libertarian place. But you actually have faith in big government.
I’m one of those people who thinks that there’s a really big role for the federal government in our economy, and without it the market will not work efficiently. I had lots of professors who were extremely persuasive about how markets could be used for the public good, and I absolutely understand and agree with them. But the government needs to play a role in order to enable the market to function. If you just have free markets left to their own devices, you are just as likely to wind up with a very corrupt authoritarian government. Unfortunately, that’s what we saw in the post-Soviet space. 30 years ago it seemed like, if we just go to the market system it will bring democracy and other rights – a healthy society. That proved to be incorrect. You can have a free market system with a very authoritarian government; that’s also true of China. So yeah, I think a well-functioning large government is necessary.
You were born in Ukraine under Soviet rule?
Correct. I was 10 when I left. I was 11 when I moved to New York.
Do you remember your first encounter with sexual content?
Yeah, strangely enough. It was obviously outlawed in the Soviet Union. But the first place we came outside the Soviet Union was Vienna. They had newsstands with adult magazines displayed prominently and nude women on the cover. I don’t think you’d see that now in places like Austria or Italy. It’s part of a bygone era.
Is that a loss, you think?
Well, these images weren’t very explicit sexually. They showed female nudity. I think maybe there’s been a setback in terms of hiding the human body. It seemed very unacceptable, which is why it was such a shock for me to see. And to me it was one of the first steps in seeing myself sexually. I have to say, a lot of the comments on the Pornhub page were people trying to body shame me. It didn’t bother me too much, because I’d already learned to face myself by making the video.
I was going to ask if you read the comments. Seems like a potentially toxic place to spend time..
I look through whatever comes in. There hasn’t been much discussion or debate. Occasionally someone will make a thoughtful point or observation. But also, I really don’t like to spend time on social media. It can’t be great for the campaign, but I try to spend as little time on it as possible.
How do you avoid the regulatory forces–ones that ensure sex work is performed safely and by adults–falling into bureaucracy?
I think some bureaucracy is a little bit difficult to avoid. It’s necessary precisely to mitigate risks. That’s what Nicole and I faced. We were like, “Oh, we have to do this. We have to do that.” And it’s annoying and cumbersome, but we both understood why it needs to be there. From my cyber security background, we deal with all the issues that I had to deal with in making the movie all the time.
It’s difficult to know who a person is online. There’s room for a third-party organization that has some significant size and can deal with storing personally identifiable information, such as people’s driver’s licenses. That’s how we tend to validate how old someone is. I think that’s necessary to protect everyone in the business. That bureaucratic third party is going to be essential to protect everyone to make sure that there are no underage folks, to make sure that health concerns are addressed. And, honestly, safety concerns and consent are a very big thing, so time needs to be spent on it.
It seems to place a lot of faith in a federal government that we already know tends toward corruption.
I’m not sure that I necessarily agree with that. Because I’ve been working for the Department of Defense, I think having those secure networks in place is much better than not having them. For people to rely on their own devices to keep themselves secure is actually much less efficient or effective, really, than having some kind of a large organization doing this.
I think that’s why a lot of us are very susceptible to things like cyber crime or various types of cyber attacks–specifically because we chose to entrust that to the private sector. And, while the private sector is working very hard to do that, it’s really the organizations that have some size and resources and longevity that do best at protecting themselves. Individuals and small companies or any type of organization, including campaigns, have a very hard time doing it.
People are really suspicious of power and corruption at the federal level, and with good reason. How do you get people on board with trusting something like that, particularly when it applies to sex?
Let me say this – I did not join the military or work with the government in any way until I turned 40 years old. My prior experience was all in the private sector. I came in with the attitude that people who do government work aren’t enthusiastic about it, they don’t have the same skills, they’re not good at doing their work. And I have to say, I met a lot of really, really good people who work for the government, and they work in such a way that their successes are never publicized. One of the things that we do need to speak about more are the great people in the government who do good work. The only things that get publicity, obviously, are the failures or the problems.
That’s also something that we’ve seen when we had to deal with increases in crime the last couple of years. There were a lot of cases where law enforcement wasn’t doing their job properly. But the answer isn’t to just get rid of law enforcement. The answer is to better regulate it, better train people. It’s to have better oversight. It’s not to get rid of it, because once you get rid of it, you’re gonna wind up with a much worse security situation.
People are having a lot less sex these days. What do you attribute it to? Do you think pornography or technology play a role in sexual alienation?
I’ve heard that as well. I wasn’t involved in those studies, so I don’t really have the details of what researchers found out. I think I’d probably like to see more details. One of the things that we don’t have enough of is research into human sexuality and behavior.
A lot of those difficulties may have to do with issues that I saw in making the video. If you just try to go on dating sites, it seems like it’s very difficult to find someone to match up with. Some people are just much more successful than others, and the vast majority of us seem to have a lot of trouble finding someone we’re comfortable with. There are all of these risks that we’re all much too aware of, in terms of STIs; how do we know what the other person’s health status is? I think in some ways we’ve become too reliant on condoms where very often they stand in the way of a good sexual experience. Trying to mitigate that is very difficult. Some people may be afraid of becoming parents. Growing up, that was one of the most sex-negative messages I’ve heard. It’s like, “Well, if you have sex, you’re taking the risk of all of a sudden you’re gonna have a job that maybe you don’t want.” So I think it’s also necessary to speak about that so that, prior to any kind of sexual experience, people actually do talk about it.
With abortion rights being threatened, you’re probably getting a lot of responses from people saying, Why are you making this about men? How would you respond?
I think we absolutely need to look at men’s concerns as well as women’s, and if we ignore men’s concerns we are unlikely to get their vote.
You’ve suggested that men not pay child support without a prior agreement. What would this prior agreement look like?
The idea is just having some kind of legal way for men to say that they choose not to be responsible for being a parent – as long as there’s some way of making sure that both parties are on the same page, in terms of an approved mutual understanding of the decision. The specific legislation would need to be worked out. I’m less concerned about the specifics and more concerned about having that capability. And right away, that’s one of those issues that’s extremely contentious, and people are either really against me and don’t even see a reason to argue their position. Or other people are like, well, that just makes sense. If they’re going to be responsible, then they need to be given a choice. It’s one of those things that needs to be discussed more.
There seems to be a sense of alienation and loneliness among young people that can’t be repaired by transactional sex. I wonder if that’s something that you think about–if people of an older generation have a responsibility to provide a healthy template for sexual relationships.
I’m not sure that it’s good to divide people into age groups. I’ve found that learning about sexuality has been a life-long pursuit. I clearly didn’t know anywhere near as much about it as I know now when I was younger. Granted, it wasn’t something that I studied in school or anything like that; just mostly things I researched on my own. In terms of transactional sex being able to replace other kinds of sex, I think transactional sex is definitely better than no sex at all. In a way, it provides a really good education. In terms of making the video, for me, that was a very educational experience. I’ve never seen myself – I don’t see myself on video much in the first place – I’d never seen myself on video having sex. That in itself is a learning experience, because it’s such a physical thing. Being able to see what people do, or what you yourself do, is a way to improve. I think that can also carry on into more private experiences where you can take the things you learned from transactional sex and simply become better at it – and sex that may be not quite as transactional, or transactional in a different way.
What do you see as the most pressing infringement on sexual rights today in the US?
I think the Dobbs decision is by far the biggest one. It puts into doubt so many established precedents, and we don’t know where it’s going to end. Is it just abortion? Is it going to be birth control next? Is it going to be any kind of sex outside of marriage?
The institution of marriage is the one that people are trying to protect with a lot of these sex-negative laws. But we know that it’s not as universal as it used to be, and it’s maybe not as desirable as it used to be, because 50% of adults are currently not married. I think it’s really important to look at laws regarding marriage to see whether they make sense anymore. I really think that if the government got out of the marriage business and stopped registering new marriages, that would be a significant step forward in allowing people to really figure out what kinds of relationships they want to have over time.
If people want to get married, good. I have lots of friends who are married, have children. It’s great for them if that’s what makes them happy. But we also know that that’s not what works for at least half the people in our country right now.
There’s a lot of fear around what might happen to reproductive freedoms if the House goes red this November. Do you worry about being an optical liability for the Democrats? Could Republicans use your video as a talking point to discredit progressive causes in the mid-terms?
I think people are just uncomfortable dealing with it. The people from the religious right will not be convinced by anything I do or say, regardless. And there is also opposition from the left that sees the industry as being exploitative of women, which is also clearly incorrect. I will never convince them [either.] But the folks who watch the videos, see that Nicole was in charge of the shoot, that she’s proud of what she does, she’s good at what she does… I think that could convince reasonable people to see how legalized sex work could be established.
What scares you?
Extreme partisanship and identity politics are a very serious threat to our political process. My independent campaign is an attempt to address issues that politicians tend to avoid. Hopefully, it can inspire others to stop being afraid and to stand up for what they believe in.
What else is on your bucket list?
Honestly, there were just two items. The first one was to make an adult video. That’s why Nicole actually called the video “Bucket List Bonanza.” The second item was to run for Congress. And, obviously, the second item was dependent on the first one – to see how I was gonna feel about making the video and what kind of experience it’s going to be. For now, this is it. I’m doing the best I can to run the campaign, and then we’ll see what happens. It’s just kind of been overwhelming – in a good way, though. I got to check both of those things off. But both have been very challenging, but things that people strive for tend to be difficult.
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Baited Area in print