The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  My partner and I slipped into our seats, beside a man shivering with excitement. He told us that Annie Sprinkle was his favorite porn star. As soon as Sprinkle and her partner, a champion of eco issues, got onstage, hugging and dancing around the faux trees, this man, overwhelmed perhaps by the illicit atmosphere of porn, or the lesbian couple holding hands beside him, began to masturbate. We moved seats quickly, feeling sullied and intruded upon. The incident reinforced the seedy, objectifying image of porn, which this event was meant to belie.

  I returned home that night to research the piece I had agreed to write. But when I watched the videos that made up Sprinkle’s back catalogue, they were of the same old formula, replete with all the typical tropes of hard-core porn: vaginal and anal fistings, double penetrations, and gang bangs in dirty rooms and urine-stained pissoirs. The material grew darker: Sprinkle was being penetrated by the stumps of amputees. This was completely different from anything I had ever seen, imagined, or thought of as sex. Clearly the porn industry was engaging in practices that had previously been beyond the pale. I remember breathing in but not being able to breathe out.

  What was any of this to do with the erotic, I wondered? Of the sweet, fleshy tumbles with my partner? It was the aesthetics of the freak show. Come, it said, let us watch women’s flesh be poked and prodded, stretched and spread to the limits of what is bearable; a hideous, awful circus that used spurious theories to excuse its profound hatred and abuse of women. When I stopped watching all I wanted was to somehow un-see this material, mercifully wipe it from my mind. But the flashbacks went on for months.

  Despite these abominations, pornography, among many feminists, was still seen not as a problem but an opportunity. And third-wave feminists like myself dreamed of establishing a utopia where we would be as free as men about our sexuality. It was a vision that entranced my generation; and a feminist porn industry emerged to make it true. Our porn would not be like the mainstream industry that abused and exploited women like Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat. Instead this was porn for women by women; a pornographic utopia, where the performers were treated well; and the representation of sex challenged the tedious images that had evolved in La La Land where women’s bodies were merely the landscape, and men’s pleasure the real goal.

  I recently traveled to San Francisco, commissioned to explore the city’s feminist porn scene. It is one of the most significant hubs of the contemporary American feminist porn industry, and has produced porn for over a hundred years, ranging from one-reel silent classics, such as A Free Ride, where a man picks up a girl in his Ford Model T automobile, to adult productions like smokers, blue movies, and stag films.

  The city’s alternative porn scene is an industry within an industry, a subset of L.A.’s dominant porn-valley scene, the biggest porn hub in the world. The San Franciscans specialize in BDSM (bondage, domination, sadomasochism) just as other locations specialize in couples’ porn or other genres.

  I am staying at the Geary Street Hotel, popular with fashionable gay men. The furnishings are minimalist and the broadband is super fast. I am going to a feminist porn shoot in the morning, so I decide to watch some mainstream porn, to explore the contrast between the two worlds. I choose a generic but well-known porn provider. The content is classified into numerous categories: ebony, lesbian, gang bang, anal, as well as a couple that I have to decipher by watching, for example, POV, which means “point of view,” and DP, which stands for “double penetration.” I start soft with the lesbian category, and open up a tab randomly. I am confronted by a group of three women with dyed blond hair extensions, matching pink leotards, and white fishnet tights, attacking each other with pink dildos. Their nails are long and white and I cannot help but worry as they insert them into each other. The women moan loudly, and I wonder who is fooled by this display, especially since there has been virtually no contact with a clitoris. Mainstream porn’s egregious indifference to women’s pleasure is obvious; it is effectively a middle finger up to women and their needs.

  I click again. As a black woman, I’m curious about the “ebony” category. I am presented with a series of black women being penetrated by black and white men. The ubiquitous porn aesthetic continues. Almost all of the women have the same hair and nail extensions, the same massive implants and terrible makeup. I click again, disconsolately. The next image is a woman trying to insert a supersized dildo into her own anus. The dildo is hard and inflexible. The pain she is experiencing is evident for all to see. And then surreptitiously, she looks swiftly to the right, and I see a moment of fear pass over her face. I wonder if she is looking at someone, someone whom she is frightened of displeasing, and I wonder suddenly if this is a trafficked woman, deprived of all choice.

  The next click and I am in the gang bang section. This is particularly harrowing: the configuration of one woman and four men looks like an attack. The girl tries to accommodate every organ and hand, manipulating her body so as to avoid as much discomfort and pain as possible, while unconvincingly feigning pleasure. The misogyny of mainstream porn has created a sexual narrative that is irrelevant to how women really achieve pleasure. It has enshrined practices like anal sex and shaving pubic hair as de rigueur even though many women do not want to do them. The clip concludes with a predictable close-up of traumatized anuses and semen dripping from faces. It breaks my heart that we are breeding a generation of men who will see this dispiriting spectacle, even before they have enjoyed their first kiss.

  I promise myself that I can stop soon. I click again. A tired-looking woman in her late forties is ranged across a bed, while a hideous man inserts the handle of a rake into her vagina. I rub my eyes—I am reaching the end of my tether. I click again. This time I am confronted by a woman lying on the ground with a man fisting her while another is pissing on her face. I shut my computer down abruptly, truly shaken. I understand now why some women don’t watch mainstream porn for fear of what they will find. And I recall a quote from a well-known porn director, who once said to the writer David Foster Wallace, “Nobody ever goes broke overestimating the rage and misogyny of the average American male.”

  It is largely in response to this pernicious industry that feminist porn has evolved. Feminist pornographers emphasize the importance of practicing safe sex, as well as issues of consent, and stress the right of performers to negotiate how they present themselves and what they will or will not do. On a more theoretical level, feminist porn asserts that sexual minorities (for example, black, trans, or older subjects) should take an equal place in queer porn’s erotic panoply. More profoundly still, feminist porn is an attempt to decolonize women’s imaginations, reminding us that we are more than just the object of desire, more than just abject victims of a misogynist culture, but active, yearning seekers after sexual pleasure, who deserve erotic satisfaction. Feminist porn urges us to create new sexual scripts and build new imageries that focus less on pleasing men, and how women should look, and more on what truly fulfills us.

  I am on my way to my first porn shoot, chauffeured by my cab driver, a young Nepalese man who has won his green card through the lottery, and is struggling to come to terms with this unfamiliar city.

  He asks me what I am doing in San Francisco and I tell him that I am writing a piece on feminist porn. He looks at me carefully through the rearview mirror, and says, “No, no, no, we are not involved with that.” I don’t know what he means by this, but smile politely back, and we both tactfully change the topic.

  There is someone else already at the entrance: a young work-experience girl of Ethiopian descent, who wants to know more about working in alternative film. She is the only other interloper on this shoot and we get close over the day. My contact buzzes the formidable spiked gate open and comes to escort us into the Pink & White Productions studio, where filming is to take place. We walk into an unruly cul-de-sac that houses a series of alternative business. Pink & White is situated opposite a music company, beside a Harley-Davidson repair shop.

  I am her
e to see the filming of The Crash Pad series: an ongoing online sequence inspired by Shine Houston’s award-winning film, of the same name, released in 2005. Houston, who has become a formidable figure in the feminist porn industry, evolved the Crash Pad model. Undoubtedly it is genius: born out of the reality-TV era, it features an apartment where couples, whether of long standing or recent hookups, go to have sex. The space is rigged with cameras, and we, the voyeurs, get a chance to watch.

  I am distracted by two women sitting together at a table eating hummus and fruit. I am not sure initially who they are, but suspect that they are the performers (otherwise known as the “talent” or “models”) who are scheduled for that morning’s shoot. My suspicion is confirmed when they start on the paperwork demanded by the studio. This may seem dull, but the rigor with which feminist porn producers both inform and legislate their relationship with their workers is one of the most significant differences from the mainstream porn industry, whose exploitation and abuse of their “talent” has been a major complaint of the antiporn lobby. The team here is very much a family, young and fun and multicultural, but still scrupulous about documenting their relationship with their performers.

  Anyone who wants to perform at Pink & White must present their driver’s license or passport showing their date of birth and legal name. They must sign waivers that give up their right for approval of the finished product, and present a medical certificate of their HIV status. There is another questionnaire, optional this time, which is a sort of getting-to-know-you list with a hippy twist, asking for the performer’s stage name, nickname, and zodiac sign. It asks whether they are “tops or bottoms”; that is, whether they prefer to be the active or passive sexual partner. It asks whether or not they are in a relationship, and for details such as “Turn ons!” and “Who I’d like to meet!” Finally, there’s a query about “tags, nicknames, and pronouns,” asking performers whether they prefer to be called he, she, we, or they; and whether they identify as trans, queer, feminist, polyamorous, butch, or femme.

  It seems to me that the working conditions at Pink & White represent the best intentions of feminist porn. Most of the staff work on both sides of the camera, and understand the particular challenges of shooting porn. They collaborate with their performers on the choreography of the scenes, as well as dress, makeup, and accessories. Indeed, the performers are consulted all the way, including how they want to be photographed for marketing material like the DVD covers. It is no surprise that Shine Houston is widely known in the business as “the ethical pornographer.”

  But it is the wide variety of body types represented in The Crash Pad series that, according to my contact Jiz Lee, most appeals to Crash Pad customers. Pink & White productions include young bodies and old ones, black bodies and white ones, fat ones and thin ones, trans ones and tattooed ones, as well as the disabled. It is an aesthetic that is very different from both the mainstream porn universe and the wider media in general. It is no surprise that this sublime variety is what provokes the most feedback and gratitude. For if you are one of those people—most of us—whose body style is rarely represented anywhere in the media, it is thrilling to be represented as beautiful and sexy.

  The intern and I go outside so she can have a smoke. We are joined by the two performers who have driven all the way from Wisconsin for this. River Stark is a petite dark-haired girl in a wheat-colored sweater and green jeggings. Her partner is taller, with an equally beautiful face, and dark hair with a strip of pink. It is only her arms, strong and defined, that make me wonder if she might be trans. Her nom de plume (or rather, nom du porno) is Viviane Rex. I ask her why she got into porn. Sucking voraciously on an e-cigarette she replies, “I am a feminist. And doing porn is a way of saying ‘fuck you’ to everybody who believes that a trans woman shouldn’t be allowed to live.”

  Viviane has a solid porn CV, and works in the mainstream industry as well as in feminist porn. She also runs her own studio. They both talk big, but behind the bravado there is a sweetness about them. They show me their tattoos and tell me what else they want done. And when they discover that I am from London they are thrilled: they love Doctor Who and have a huge crush on Peter Capaldi. Watching their shining faces I realize how young they are, and thus of course how vulnerable.

  The performers go to the bathroom and prepare for the shoot. Makeup and fake tan are not compulsory in feminist porn, but this pair prefer to use both. Meanwhile the intern and I are allowed into the set—a bedroom with olive walls and cream curtains over faux windows. The double bed sheet is rust-colored, one pillow orange, the other yellow. It’s a generic bedroom—but around the bed is the camera equipment to record the sex that will soon follow.

  We return to the main part of the studio since we are not allowed to be in the crash pad while Shine and her team are filming. I tell the intern that I’m a bit nervous. She agrees. Both of us are familiar with the more extreme BDSM that sometimes is part of the studio’s repertoire, including caning, electric play, and bondage.

  The feed starts, and the pair begin to kiss, like they really mean it, a kiss that promises real lovemaking, people in search of real pleasure. They are a beautiful couple and it is a pleasure to watch them. I have seen River’s body earlier when she dashed onto the set, and it is not a porn body, more a dancer’s body with perfect champagne-cup breasts and a thin landing strip of hair on her pudenda. They undress and get into bed. I knew that Viviane was trans but I had assumed she was post-op. I was wrong: she has a penis, and not a modest one, either. This is a really impressive schlong.

  For a second I am not sure how things will work, until the pair really begin to get it on. The real penis competes with a variety of sex toys, whose use is encouraged by the studio, perhaps because of sponsorship deals. They are confident in this scenario, especially Viviane, who works a lot for the big mainstream porn studios. River reaches for her partner’s surgically enhanced breasts. (She will later tell us, to our amazement, that the mainstream porn merchants have encouraged her to have more surgery, because apparently her DD cups aren’t big enough.) It is easy to tell that they are comfortable with each other; there is enough affection between them to make the sex feel genuinely passionate. Certainly watching this is much more enjoyable than watching the mainstream fodder on the internet. But I can’t help but notice that there are tropes from the parent industry that I wish weren’t there: the over-speedy thud thud thud of penetration (whether with penis or dildo), the random face- and bottom-slapping. I get a sense that the San Francisco producers are worried that lesbian sex is too soft and girlie to be cool; and that it needs to be roughed up and sped up.

  All of a sudden the sex talk is interrupted by the sound of revving engines from the bike shop, but the two concerns have lived beside each other for a long time and happily work around each other. Someone is sent to ask them to desist, for the time being anyway. Filming is resumed and the sex heats up. Then all of a sudden the feed goes down and we can no longer see the action. All we can hear is River’s ululating cries. They rise up and down like scales on a piano, and I realize, as the crescendo of the oh, oh, oh, oohs of her pleasure reverberate in my head, that for me this sound bereft of images is the most exciting moment of all.

  The afternoon shoot is very different. Two French girls, Moriah and Riley Saint, arrive. There is a lot of whispering in corners and strained voices. One of the girls keeps disappearing and there are numerous outbursts of tears. I wonder if one of them, or both, has cold feet. Inevitably some of those who agree to do a porn shoot as a sort of pair-bonding exercise find that they cannot go through with it. This does not surprise me. It is a brave—perhaps even a foolish—act to enshrine an image of your passion on the web. Once uploaded, it is virtually impossible to erase. So in the end one of the girls pulls out and the other, makeup-free and hair pulled into an unglamorous topknot, diligently masturbates for the required time, and gets paid the standard fee: $400. Her partner, meanwhile, is sobbing outside.

  I feel w
rung out by the day, particularly this last scene. Despite the porn industry’s assertion that sex is a spree, something to merely bring us off, I am aware that porn plays with dangerous toys, not just dildos and whips, but love and desire, fidelity and betrayal. I can imagine myself in that girl’s position, feeling, in a moment of bravado, that I could do this thing, and then realizing that I couldn’t; that this very private act was now to become a product completely out of your control, something anyone could share, buy, watch, and judge. What might a transient act like this do to one’s relationship, to others who love you? Would it break the spell of love, or cement it?

  How and why does a woman get into the business? As much as it seems a cliché, a lot of them still seem to be recruited from the vast number of females who, like the wannabe starlets of old, migrate from small towns attracted by the beacon of Tinseltown; hoping to be dancers, singers, or other kinds of performers. A much smaller number actively seek out the porn industry hoping to become famous—but there are no stars in porn anymore.

  In order to understand the decision to work in porn, I interview the gender-fluid performer Jiz Lee, who prefers to be referred to as “they.” Jiz is described on the Pink & White roster as a production assistant, but this modest title belies the significant position in San Francisco’s porn scene that Lee has occupied: ten years of work, and more than two hundred projects across six countries, winning numerous awards. As well as working in L.A.’s mainstream porn industry, including hard-core gonzo productions, Jiz has worked extensively in queer and independent porn.

  We grab a chance to talk whenever there is a rare break in Lee’s duties:

  “How did you get into the porn industry?” I ask.