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The Holding Court Issue

These Environmentalists Film Blowjobs to Save Mother Earth

Ever since the free-lovin’ 1960s, lefty types have combined sexual liberation with environmentalism, but never so literally as the men and women behind Fuck for Forest. The German nonprofit makes porn and sells it to raise money for conservation...

Photo courtesy of Fuck for Forest

Ever since the free-lovin’ 1960s, lefty types have combined sexual liberation with environmentalism, but never so literally as the men and women behind Fuck for Forest. The German nonprofit makes porn—often featuring stereotypically dreadlocked, tattooed hippies banging each other in Berlin parks or cramped apartments—then sells it to raise money for conservation efforts around the globe. When FfF was founded in Norway in 2004 they received six months’ worth of seed money from the government, but officials later found out about the porn and cut them off. The group moved to Berlin later that year, where they continued their smutty crusade. Today you can get a monthly membership to their website—which gives you access to more sexy videos of young activists with unkempt pubes than you’ll ever need—for $15 a month. Whatever else they are, they’re savvy fund-raisers who’ve collected roughly $500,000 by my count. Unfortunately, they have trouble giving away their sex-tainted cash. “It’s difficult for us to donate the money,” FfF co-founder Leona Johansson told me. “Many NGOs are afraid of us.” The World Wildlife Fund told them that it would take their money, but wouldn’t allow any official connection between the two organizations because “we cannot be linked to certain types of industry.” And the Norwegian Rainforest Foundation refused their donation outright. “I cannot see that this helps the work for the rain forest,” the foundation’s director told a Norwegian TV station after Leona and her boyfriend, FfF co-founder Tommy Hol Ellingsen, had sweaty sex onstage at a music festival. Michal Marczak, a Polish filmmaker, recently spent more than a year shooting a documentary on FfF, which will be released this month. Michal has footage of the group’s members fucking in front of an audience in a Berlin basement and convincing strangers on the street to have sex for their cameras—they’re like the BangBros, only they scavenge food and clothes from dumpsters. Michal also accompanied the group to the Amazon Basin, where they attempted to bring the indigenous people their money and their message of copulation for conservation. But the locals called them liars and child rapists and refused to take their charity. The filmmaker told me he was fascinated by the clash of cultures: “The side commonly regarded as developed is exposed as more savage than the culture they are trying to help.”

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