by Lynsey G
CHAPTER 17
The Feminist Porn Awards
THE MONTHS BEFORE AND AFTER the 2011 AVNs had been revelatory. I was pulling the majority of my income from writing set copy and reviews for the print magazines that had gotten me into the porn industry in the first place, but I was increasingly frustrated with them and the industry they represented. The more I questioned the way things were in mainstream porn, the more I gravitated toward the diverse territory of indie, queer, and feminist pornography.
Each of these adjectives—indie, queer, and feminist—encompasses its own hunk of the landscape, with many overlaps and just as many variations between the genres. Indie porn embraces a wide variety of styles and ideologies, from kink content to art films to bizarre-o parodies of cult favorites (my favorite: Faster, Pussycat! Fuck! Fuck!). Indie porn, moreover, tends toward the showcasing of bodies and sex acts that mainstream porn eschews, whether due to concerns over obscenity or the bottom line. There’s a DIY aspect to indie porn that goes beyond low budgets—a sort of bare-bones realness that reflects the filmmakers’ need to show their visions as part of a lived experience that must be shared. When I talked to Clark Matthews, the director of the short film Krutch, which swept the Cinekink film festival in 2013, about his indie porn-making debut, he summed up the indie mindset: “Especially with video technology being what it is today,” he said, “it’s totally fruitless to sit around and say, ‘Why aren’t other people telling my stories better?’ Just do it yourself. There’s so much authenticity to it.”
Queer porn is a specific subset of indie porn for the most part, which often pushes the boundaries of what sexual behavior can be documented even further. Queer porn usually features performers whose sexual and gender identities don’t fit into the neatly binary categories that mainstream porn prefers. Gender designations and the sex acts that usually go along with them in straight porn are tossed by the wayside in queer porn, in favor of whatever the performers want to do, no matter their identifications or body parts. It’s all good. And it can level the playing field for performers of all types, from cisgender blondes to disabled transgender women of color. That isn’t to say that no categorization happens in queer porn—naturally there are films that focus on different groups (like trans men, women of size, and so on), but the differences between performers feel much more celebrated than exploited in most queer porn I’ve seen.
And feminist porn … Well, feminist porn is sort of the umbrella under which I decided to lay out my towel in 2011, and where I’ve happily stayed ever since. Feminist porn is a broader field than either “indie” or “queer” porn, but it’s easy for indie and/or queer porn to also be feminist. Due to the ever-changing evolution of what “feminism” means, it is open to almost anyone who identifies as a feminist and who makes porn ethically according to the feminism they espouse.
Feminist porn has never been interested in anything short of a revolution in the way our society treats sex and pleasure. From Betty Dodson’s drawings of women masturbating in the 1960s and her decades of running Bodysex Workshops in which she helped women examine their sexual responses; to the sex-positive performances of “golden age” feminist porn stars (and artists and publishers and activists) Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Hart, Veronica Vera, Candida Royalle, and Gloria Leonard who created a support group for like-minded feminist sex workers in the early 1980s; to Susie Bright’s anti-establishment erotic magazine for women, On Our Backs, in the mid-eighties; to the late eighties’ Pink Ladies Social Club in California started by Nina Hartley, Angel Kelly, and Jeanna Fine; and forward through the decades since, feminist-identified women (and trans folk, non binary people, and men) have been making pornography and championing a philosophy that subverts patriarchal standards. Their aim has always been to educate the world about the unexplored power of female sexual agency—and really any sexual agency that doesn’t conform to cisgender, heterosexual male standards—in a world that seeks to repress it.
There is no agreed-upon designation of what makes porn feminist, nor is there an easy-to-use directory of companies, directors, or performers who fall under its auspices. Its ambiguity is due largely to the fact that almost anyone making porn anywhere could be making porn that ascribes to feminist standards, without even knowing it. But despite its nebulousness, “feminist porn” has more or less coalesced as term for a body of often independent, frequently artistically motivated, politically active, sometimes queer, and largely feminist filmmakers, sex workers, and activists. Not all of them see eye to eye; as Shine Louise Houston, the woman behind Pink & White Productions and The Crash Pad put it to Rolling Stone in 2016, “You say feminist, and then you get into what’s feminist and everybody fights.” As in many progressive movements, there are struggles within the group about what “the rules” should be, how terminology should be deployed, how money should be handled, and so on. Feminist pornographers, furthermore, are far-flung. They’re spread out globally.
In 2013, The Feminist Press published The Feminist Porn Book, a collection of essays by pornographers and scholars who participate in or study the medium. In it, many of my new heroes wrote on their varying ideas about what it means to be a feminist pornographer, and the editors of the book offered the following definition: “Feminist porn uses sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, age, body type, and other identity markers. It explores concepts of desire, agency, power, beauty, and pleasure at their most confounding and difficult, including pleasure within and across inequality, in the face of injustice, and against the limits of gender hierarchy and both heteronormativity and homonormativity … Ultimately, feminist porn considers sexual representation—and its production—a site for resistance, intervention, and change.”
Meanwhile, the Feminist Porn Awards, held yearly in Toronto by the feminist sex shop Good For Her, judged submissions according to a list of criteria that held feminist porn must show the following elements: “Actors are treated with respect, paid fairly, given choice and ethical working conditions, [and] empowered in their work; directors collaborate with and incorporate the actor’s own sexual desire and fantasies (making for better scenes too!); it expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and challenges stereotypes especially of women and marginalized communities; realistic pleasure is depicted.” Good For Her further specified that feminist porn could be or include: “edgy or soft; high production or low; storyline or none; straight, queer, cis, trans, bi, or a combination thereof; made by, for and includes people of any gender/sex, size, age, race and ethnicity, ability, orientation, and desires (including men); and of course is hot!”
That’s a lot to bear in mind, but I also really like director, performer, and educator jessica drake’s simplified version: feminist porn, she believes, could be as simple as “treating people the way they should be treated.”
All three of these definitions are overviews of exactly the things I was looking for in my professional smut in 2011. I’ve already mentioned the difficulty in putting too high a priority on “authenticity” in adult film, but it would be silly not to note that one of the most defining features of feminist pornography is the ongoing pursuit of authentic pleasure in its performers.
Most mainstream porn aims to portray a fantasy version of sex that does not exist in real life. In this idealized world, penetrative sex lasts for at least half an hour, erections are immediate and long-lasting, women achieve orgasm quickly and easily, unprotected sex has no repercussions, and anal sex is effortless. (Pro tip: Those oh-so-easy-looking anal sex scenes in pornos? Contrived. As Madison Young told us, most porn stars do at least one, sometimes several, enemas before they shoot, and after having spent a considerable time relaxing the orifice with a butt plug before shooting.) Performer and director Seymore Butts once informed me, “I see it as it’s happening in the raw, and in the raw it’s not anything like the finished product.” Of course, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the finish
ed product’s glamor; escapism is important in today’s world, I believe. But it’s vital to realize that these fantasies, reproduced ad infinitum by mainstream pornography, don’t exist in a vacuum. That’s why they have concerned critics of the industry for decades, and especially over the last ten years as people who use this particular brand of fantasy as their guide to sexuality might be getting incorrect notions about what’s expected of their bodies, their partners, and more.
And that’s why feminist porn is important. Whether or not true authenticity in pornography can ever be achieved, it seems worth striving for, to remind us fallible humans that sex can take many different forms, not all of them athletic, toned, and heterosexual. While feminist porn also offers fantasy sex that sometimes does and sometimes does not look more “real” than mainstream fare, its attempts to portray pleasure in accessible and—yes—authentic ways makes it stand out. It’s an alternative to mainstream pornography that can give the savvy consumer a more nuanced understanding of what sex can be.
My review of The Crash Pad had been like a springboard in the search for more porn that reflected its makers’ interaction with the questions I was now ready to ask about the implications of pornography on the world. Since I’d breathlessly (and naively) extolled The Crash Pad’s many virtues for WHACK!, I had talked my way into screener copies of feminist porn films from studios that prided themselves on tossing out old, tired tropes in favor of fresh perspectives. The material I was seeking out and writing about looked to me like porn that wasn’t just made by smart people, but made for a smart audience, as well. (I’d argue that actually, the majority of porn is made by intelligent people, but that much of it is marketed to what its makers consider the lowest common denominator.) I’d been so impressed by the performances in these films that I had also begun to seek out their stars and directors for interviews. I was able to publish most of these at WHACK! But sometimes my questions went places that didn’t fit the magazine’s brand; I wanted to explore the depths of feminist porn and its importance, to look at the differences between queer feminist sex on camera and its counterparts in mainstream porn and examine why they mattered. WHACK! wasn’t the place for these questions, and although I could ask them freely on my blog, there wasn’t much of a readership for them.
So I started looking for places where I could write about alternative porn for a wider audience in a blatantly feminist way. In late 2010 and early 2011, there were not very many of these outlets, but I eventually became a contributing writer to feminist porn star, director, and artist Madison Young’s website TheWomansPOV.com. The site was a mish-mash of reviews, op-eds, interviews, and links to Madison’s art, docu-porn, and straight-up-porn films. It was all feminist, gleefully queer, often beautiful, sometimes hilarious, and exactly what I wanted.
Through TheWomansPOV, I gained access to more feminist and queer films, directors, and performers, and was able to go in-depth on the topics that obsessed me. For instance: Why was there so little porn shot from a female perspective? (Luckily for me, as the website’s name hints, Madison was making her own series of hot women’s POV films, and I got to see a lot of them.) What was the point of feminist, indie porn showing people fellating strap-on cocks, since those cocks didn’t have nerves in them? And why did these strap-on blowjobs so often look just as hardcore as mainstream gonzo porn blowjobs coming out of LA? Wasn’t that regressive? (The short answer I got from the several feminist filmmakers and performers about this question was, simply, that what constitutes a feminist sex act isn’t what it looks like—it’s how the people performing it feel about it. Queer porn maker Courtney Trouble, to whom I turned with my quandary, informed me, “Part of the reason that I like giving super-sloppy gaggy blowjobs is because I like to be dominated. And so, like, the act of ‘being forced to do it’ is part of what’s hot to me.” Performer Syd Blakovich, who also helped me wrap my brain around the idea, chimed in: “We are deciding what we do and how we want to do it, what makes us hot. And if … our core erotic themes revolve around the idea of subjugation, then the act of subjugation itself can become an empowering act if we are willing and consenting parties to it.”)
Interviews like these were my self-guided version of Gender Studies 101, with a focus on porn and feminism, and as I dove into them I also compiled a list of grievances with mainstream porn. The list was augmented by an ongoing series of talks I was having with entrepreneur, feminist, and all-around rabble-rouser Cindy Gallop. In 2009, Gallop had given a TED Talk in which she told her stunned audience, “I date younger men, primarily men in their twenties. And when I date younger men, I have sex with younger men. And when I have sex with younger men, I encounter, very directly and personally, the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography in our culture.” She had noticed a marked tendency in these younger men, she said, to re-create what they’d seen acted out in porn. Unnerved, Gallop—a business veteran with years at the helm BBH US, a leading ad agency in New York, and the founder of tech start-up IfWeRanTheWorld.com—decided to do something about it.
She developed MakeLoveNotPorn.com, a simple site that pointed out, in adorable cartoons and with plain language, that while in porn most women love facials, in the real world, they might not. And similarly, it revealed that not every woman is comfortable with anal sex, or a variety of other acts that might seem normal in porn. It suggested, in most cases, asking about these things before trying them in the heat of the moment.
A simple enough idea, it would seem, but one that needed a champion. And Cindy Gallop was a champion indeed. Her TED Talk and website became two of my favorite things, and I quoted her line about “the creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography” as sex education in America in one of my McSweeney’s columns. Shortly after it was published, I received a social media missive from Ms. Gallop, and we began a series of conversations over e-mail (and, to my delight, in person at her lavish, art-festooned Black Apartment in Chelsea) about the ways in which the porn industry could be held to a higher standard.
Since our time brainstorming, Gallop has gone on to launch MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, a website that strives to “do for sex what social media has done for everything else.” At MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, users are able to upload videos of their own sex—“in all its glorious, silly, beautiful, messy, reassuring humanness”—for curation and sorting by Gallop’s team. The videos they keep are posted for members to watch—at five dollars per video per three-week rental period. During that time, users are encouraged to watch the videos as much as they want, to share them with friends, to enjoy them, and talk about them on the site. Gallop seeks to normalize the everyday sexual experiences of regular humans, show the world what real-world sex and real-world pleasure look like, and to let people watch it, think about it, and talk about it freely without shame.
Gallop’s goal is to not only enter the once-empty space between pornographers and consumers, but to make that space welcoming and exciting for the rest of the world to enter. Her aim is to create “an open, healthy dialogue around sex and porn, which would then enable people to bring a real-world mindset when they view what is essentially artificial entertainment. The entire message of MakeLoveNotPorn boils down to one thing, which is just simply: ‘Talk about it.’”
AS MY INTEREST IN alternative and feminist porn deepened, in March of 2011 I attended Cinekink, “The Kinky Film Festival,” in New York City, and my horizons in sexy filmmaking exploded. Cinekink was in its eighth year of celebrating kinkiness on camera. From a documentary about the International Mr. Leather pageant to adorable shorts about pissing to hardcore porn vignettes, the festival explored kink in a big, dark theater in the East Village for a long weekend every year.
I was nervous but excited about my first experience watching porn in a theater with strangers, and was delighted that in doing so I felt very little awkwardness and even less judgment—the crowd at Cinekink was comprised of perverts like myself, and nobody was sneering down their nose at me for getting turned on by the bisexual three-
way in Kimberly Kane’s My Own Master or crying during the documentary Bucking the Trend or applauding wildly for Kink Crusaders. We were all of one mind, and I was so rapt in my enjoyment of the atmosphere and the vast amount of information I was soaking up about kink lifestyles of all kinds, that I nearly starved myself over the course of the weekend, unwilling to leave the premises for long enough to get meals.
Heightening my rapture was Cinekink’s tradition of combining the Saturday afternoon porn showcase with a panel discussion to which filmmakers and performers were invited. To my delight, the 2011 panel convened to discuss ethics in pornography—the very topic that had been on my mind for months: How do pornographers go about making their films in such a way that nobody has to feel gross after leaving the set, or the computer or television?
They each had their own ideas about these topics, of course, but every answer centered on treating performers with respect, and allowing that respect to come through in the finished product. Paying everybody on the same scale, regardless of race, size, ability level, or gender identity; refusing to pigeonhole models according to their body parts or ethnicities; allowing anybody to work with anybody; pairing performers who specifically chose to work together; providing food, water, and other amenities backstage; having a variety of sex toys, condoms, lube, and other accessories available for performers to use as they pleased; and establishing clear consent at as many junctures as possible throughout the process of filming.
The concept of consent really struck a nerve for me. I had never heard it discussed so openly before, though the topic had been brought up in my interviews and writing, and I think that panel at Cinekink really set me on a track of thinking that I haven’t yet left. A path that beckoned me deep in my gut, as a direct answer to the gnawing anxiety over the morality of the material I’d been ingesting for years. I never explicitly equated my decision to watch porn professionally with the processing of my personal trauma, but looking back at the directions in which I took my career, it’s obvious to me now that I was looking for something to get me through the tendrils of shame, fear, and sexual dysfunction that clung to me after I was assaulted. The panelists were talking about one of the most fundamental issues at the heart of all pornography, and one that had called to me even though I hadn’t understood it: How does one establish clear, enthusiastic, and ongoing consent for those involved in producing pornography, and how does one then make that consent clear to viewers?
