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Key points
- Chancellor Joseph Gow and his wife performed in erotic videos as a way to express themselves.
- After this was exposed, Gow was fired as chancellor of a University of Wisconsin campus.
- Gow and his wife argue that they can be ethical and professional academics and still be sexually free.
In August 2023, Joseph Gow announced that he intended to step down from his role as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. At that time, Gow was the longest-serving active chancellor in the University of Wisconsin System and the second-longest-serving chancellor in the school’s long history. Gow’s nearly 17-year tenure as chancellor was described as historic, marked by growth, achievement, and unprecedented increases in enrollment.
As chancellor, Gow guided the university through COVID and dramatic shifts in higher education and funding. He was praised by his superiors for leaving a lasting imprint and creating a “vibrant, thriving university known for academic excellence, faculty expertise, and student support.” Gow described at his retirement announcement, “I’ve enjoyed every minute of that, but I want to do other things.”
Just a few short months later, the university’s view of Gow changed dramatically after it was exposed that for a few years, he and his wife Carmen had been making professional pornographic videos and exploring their sexuality on camera.
Gow was dismissed from his position as chancellor in advance of his scheduled retirement. He retained his tenured status as a professor of communications. Gow’s wife, Carmen, holds a Ph.D. in counseling psychology and has also served in the administration of several universities.
The news of this sex scandal was covered in major media markets around the world. "Wisconsin University Chancellor Fired After Making Pornographic Videos With His Wife," read the New York Times, where the same official who, just months earlier, raved over his lasting legacy, now described that she was “alarmed and disgusted by his actions.”
These conflicts are in the public more and more each day; there have been numerous cases of teachers and police officers, among others, fired for having OnlyFans sites. Having written for many years about the complex intersections between professional identities and erotic selves, I was fascinated to sit down with the couple and talk about their motivations and their sexual journey.
Gow is a tall, spare, grey-haired whippet of a man resembling a weekend marathoner. His wife Carmen is a vibrant, brown-haired woman who would look at home leaning over a library counter, helping you decipher Dewey decimals. Both are eloquent and composed speakers, and they communicate with each other in a remarkably attuned manner, similar to what I‘ve seen in many other consensually nonmonogamous couples.
Their videos, which, of course, I can’t link to, are a unique blend of sex and vegan cooking. Yes, you read that correctly: Each professionally shot, high-quality video starts in the kitchen as the pair guide their porn star guest through the preparation of a healthy, delicious vegan entrée. The three then retire to the bedroom, where events take a different turn. Some guests were male, others female.
Joe and Carmen met after each had been married previously, and neither had felt fulfilled in past relationships. “Once we were a couple, we just opened up to each other about what we wanted, what turns us on. We opened up to each other in ways we never had before with anyone,” Joe said.
Carmen added, “It started this quest. We knew early on that monogamy was not going to be something that was entirely satisfying for us.”
“We tried polyamory for about a hot second, and that was kind of a disaster for us,” Carmen explained. “It works for lots of people, and that’s great, but it wasn’t right for us.”
On a trip together, they hired a male escort and had a delightful experience. He shared with them that there was an upcoming pornography convention and that many escorts also worked as performers. On a crazy whim, Joe called up an adult film talent agency and said that he and Carmen wanted to film content with some of their performers, as well as interview them. Though the agency was initially skeptical, they went on to make about one video a year.
“That’s one of the things that gets lost in the conversations about us and what we did,” said Joe. “We interviewed these performers, engaged with them as people. We cooked with them, talked with them, listened to them, and yes, had sex with them.”
Carmen continued:
“They’re amazing people, really. Many of them are highly educated. Master’s degrees, nursing degrees, graduates from top schools like MIT. I think that’s one of the things people don’t want to confront here—that porn performers are fully fleshed-out people with brains, lives, and choices who choose to have sex on camera. That’s kind of what we wanted to do, ultimately showing that we also could be academics, professionals, highly educated, and still choose to have hot sex in front of a camera and share it with the world. We wanted to humanize pornography and the people who make it.”
One of the fears that many people have about pornography and sexual diversity, in general, is that it leads to a general moral decay and a loss of ethics and boundaries. “People don’t realize that we were both working, doing excellent jobs, for years, at the same time that we were making these videos,” Joe explained.
“Were you ever sexual with students?” I asked.
“Never,” both Joe and Carmen’s voices overlapped.
Joe continued. “They’re not our type, even if that wasn’t grossly unethical. The performers we filmed with were mostly older, mature, people we could relax with and feel intimate with.”
Joe and Carmen are in their 50s and 60s, and Carmen shared that she’s gotten praise for showing that a post-menopausal woman can have hot sex. Likewise, Joe intentionally incorporated discussion of dealing with age-related sexual difficulties into the videos to normalize aging and sex.
Over his career as chancellor, there were many times when Joe disciplined students and faculty for exploitive, inappropriate sexual behaviors. “What we did was nothing like those unethical and sometimes illegal behaviors," he said. "What we did was completely and explicitly consensual. It worked for us and was a way we could express ourselves sexually, the same way we express ourselves as musicians. We didn’t impose our sexuality on anyone; anybody that watched our videos did so with intent—they had to go find them on purpose.”
Joe and Carmen didn’t say that they would do anything differently if they had the chance. They chose to stand up for their right to be sexual beings, to share their sexuality with others, and to demonstrate to the world that porn stars and Ph.Ds can go together.
“Some people have told us that what we do in private is fine, but it’s supposed to stay private,” Carmen laughed. “But that’s their value, not ours. We chose to be sexual freedom fighters.”
