Future Sex (12 page)

Of the 21.2 billion visits to Porn Hub in 2015, data analytics identified about 24 percent as female and 76 percent male. A lot of theories were floated on the subject of why so many women didn’t like watching porn. Most of them fell into one of three arguments:

1.  Women did not watch visual porn in equivalent numbers to men because the images
were the wrong images.

2.  Women were not physically “wired” to respond to visual stimulation and preferred to fantasize with novels or stories.

3.  Women had simply suppressed, through cultural conditioning, some vital part of their sexual psyche.

And yet:

1.  There were a lot of images to choose from.

2.  Thinking of an aversion to porn as a biological preference was easier, perhaps, than
having to wade through fantasies like “tiny teen snatched up and fucked in van,” and “stepdaughter fucked by pervert dad.”

3.  Not wanting to click on a link that said “hardcore lesbian scissoring” and touch myself didn’t mean I was repressed.

Or?

I started to think about the origins of my rules.

*   *   *

Deep Throat
, which came out in 1972, was the first (and possibly the last) pornographic
film that American women watched in significant numbers. The film was made for $25,000. It grossed tens of millions in ticket sales. It remains an artifact of a singular moment in time, when a lot of Americans had rejected the religious prohibitions against porn but had yet to hear about the feminist ones. Both
Time
and
Newsweek
ran cover stories about its star, Linda Lovelace. The film received
reviews in mainstream publications such as
The New York Times
. Even the feminist publication
Off Our Backs
dispatched a reviewer, Christine Stansell, who attended a screening with a male friend.

“There was none of the male sadism and negation of female sexuality which I had predicted,” wrote Stansell in her review. “But this intellectual understanding of the quality of degradation fails to account
for the most significant aspect of the film for me: the fact that I freaked out.” She spent most of the film in the bathroom, “to minimize the feminist martyr aspect of it all.” She concluded that
Deep Throat
was symptomatic of “a culture which sucks emotion out of sex and sensuality out of our bodies and turns the whole business into a hot-dog stuffed in a Wonder Bread bun.” And soon a new kind
of moral objection to porn found articulation: the feminist one.

The anti-porn feminist movement began with protests of depictions of violence against women. The movement was galvanized in 1975 by a slasher film called
Snuff
, which claimed (falsely) to show the real rape and dismemberment of a woman. A year later, more women protested when a Rolling Stones billboard on Sunset Boulevard in Los
Angeles showed a bruised woman tied up in a chair next to the words “I’m ‘Black and Blue’ from the Rolling Stones—and I love it.” Images like these made women feel like lesser citizens of the world. The feminists proposed a vocabulary with which to express this dismay—words like
exploitation
,
objectification
,
misogyny
,
degradation
. They showed how these images fit into larger patterns of structural
inequality and violence. Today, if I were to explain what is wrong with the 1978 cover image from
Hustler
of a woman’s leg being shoved into a meat grinder, I would use the language of feminism to argue that violence against women is a tool of patriarchal control, and that the commercial exploitation of violence against women informs the ideological foundation of their continued oppression.

The movement shifted from boycotts of violent images to boycotting porn with the idea, as Andrea Dworkin wrote, that porn “conditions, trains, educates, and inspires men to despise women, to use women, to hurt women.” Susan Brownmiller called pornography “the undiluted essence of antifemale propaganda.” The feminists dissected the politics of sexual stimulation. They articulated what might be demeaning
and servile about women dressed up in bunny costumes. They taught men that women were not in the office to be groped. They explained that a woman with a clitoris in her throat was a self-serving male fantasy.

“There can be no ‘equality’ in porn, no female equivalent, no turning the tables in the name of bawdy fun,” wrote Brownmiller in 1975. “Pornography, like rape, is a male invention, designed
to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object of sexual access, not to free sensuality from moralistic or parental inhibition.” In 1978, the first feminist anti-pornography conference in San Francisco culminated in a march around a cluster of porn shops on Broadway. The protest included a float plastered with pictures of porn as well as a statue of a bride, dozens of lit candles, and
a lamb carcass smeared with blood and red feathers. The concept, according to
Off Our Backs
, was “to convey the theme of the oppression of women through the images of madonna/whore.”

A legal strategy followed. In 1980, Linda Lovelace, the star of
Deep Throat
, published her memoir
Ordeal
under her given name of Linda Boreman. In the book Boreman alleged she had acted in pornographic films only
under the threat of abuse from her husband, Chuck Traynor. She would later testify to the Meese Commission that “every time someone watches that movie they’re watching me being raped.” Anti-porn feminists including Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, and Gloria Steinem flocked to her aid, investigating the feasibility of a lawsuit, but the statute of limitations had passed. In 1983, Dworkin and
MacKinnon, who were both then teaching at the University of Minnesota, drafted what they called a “Model Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance” that claimed as its legal legitimacy that “pornography is an act of sex discrimination.” Activists in Minneapolis, where anti-porn feminists had taken to occupying sex shops and surrounding the men browsing the video racks, succeeded in bringing the ordinance
to the city council, where it passed, only to be vetoed by the mayor, who said that it violated the First Amendment. When a version of the ordinance succeeded in Indianapolis, the courts determined that it did, in fact, violate the First Amendment. There the feminist legal challenge to pornography expired.

Today, because porn has triumphed, anti-porn feminism is thought of as a failed movement.
I would say this isn’t true. Anti-porn feminism might not have done much to temper the explosion of pornography in the video age but it deeply affected the way some people, perhaps especially some women, felt about what they were watching. Catherine MacKinnon’s statement that “porn is the theory; rape is the practice” was a glib overgeneralization, but the idea lives on that porn is a theory that
has negative effects on the practice of sexuality. The radical ideas of the movement filtered down into popular culture as a series of moral arguments against porn that social liberals could accept. These were the notions that I had inherited, that had made me wary of porn: that porn by definition was oriented toward the sexual desires of men; that it therefore offered few positive experiences
for women; that it objectified and racialized women’s bodies and glorified sexual violence. From the earliest days in which feminism turned its eye to porn, it became acceptable to make the distinctly unfeminist assumption that the women involved in porn were unconsciously complicit in their own exploitation. Porn performers were victims: they were traumatized by childhood abuse, forced into their
jobs by abusive men, or abusers of substances themselves. This did not go unnoticed by the performers. When
Ms.
magazine convened a panel on pornography in New York in 1978—a panel that neglected to include anybody who worked in the industry—the porn stars Gloria Leonard, Annie Sprinkle, and Marlene Willoughby stood outside holding signs that read “I Am Not a Female Captive” and “Ms. Exploits
Sex Too!” (One poster showed an issue of
Ms.
with the cover line “Erotica and Pornography: Do You Know the Difference?”)

Anti-porn feminism created another problem. What did “feminist” sex look like? If a feminist felt sexually stimulated while watching
Deep Throat
, would she compromise a more equitable future by enjoying it? “Porn” means only material produced with the intention of inciting
a sexual response over an aesthetic or emotional one. What is pornographic is therefore a highly subjective experience. What inspires sexual feelings in one person might provoke disgust or boredom in another. If pornography was inherently masculine, “an act of sex discrimination,” were the sexual desires of “women” therefore impossible to visualize? Did they resist representation and articulation?
Soon another wing of the feminist movement, grouped under the label of “pro-sex” or “sex positive” feminism, emerged to address some of these questions.

“When I first heard there was a feminist movement against pornography, I twitched,” wrote Ellen Willis in her 1979
Village Voice
essay “Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography”:

For obvious political and cultural reasons, nearly all porn is sexist in that it is the product of a male imagination and aimed at a male market; women are less likely to be consciously interested in pornography, or to indulge that interest, or find porn that turns them on. But anyone who thinks women are indifferent to pornography has never watched a bunch of adolescent girls pass around a trashy novel. Over the years I’ve enjoyed various pieces of pornography—some of them of the sleazy Forty-Second Street paperback sort—and so have most women I know. Fantasy, after all, is more flexible than reality, and women have learned, as a matter of survival, to be adept at shaping male fantasies to their own purposes. If feminists define pornography, per se, as the enemy, the result will be to make a lot of women ashamed of their sexual feelings and afraid to be honest about them. And the last thing women need is more sexual shame, guilt, and hypocrisy—this time served up as feminism.

Willis criticized the attempts of anti-porn feminists to distinguish between “pornography” (bad for women) and “erotica” (good for women). She wrote that the binary tended to devolve into “What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic.” In these early years
of anti-porn feminism a pattern emerged, where what was envisioned as “feminist” sex tended away from literal descriptions of physical activity. Andrea Dworkin’s
Intercourse
is an extreme but lasting example—her assertion that women want “a more diffuse and tender sensuality that involves the whole body and a polymorphous tenderness.” One theorist Dworkin quoted pictured a possible future of sex
without thrusting. Instead, sex would be like “a stream that meets another stream,” and “a more mutual lying together.”

Other feminists responded to the feminist porn wars by making porn. In response to the anti-porn polemics in
Off Our Backs
, a group of women began publishing
On Our Backs
in 1984. Billed as “Entertainment for the Adventurous Lesbian,” the magazine soon expanded from print to
include Fatale, a line of pornographic videos aimed at the lesbian market. Another direct response came from women who had worked for years in the industry, who began speaking and writing about their experiences with porn, responding to the claims about their exploitation, and directing their own films. The Golden Age film stars did not all have Linda Lovelace’s story of exploitation, although Linda
Lovelace remains the archetypal tragic victim of porn in the national imagination. Some found their way to porn via the utopian ideas of the counterculture, others by the usual accidents that shape people’s destinies.

Annie Sprinkle came to sex work by way of a hippie adolescence. After dropping out of the artists’ commune in Oracle, Arizona, at the age of seventeen, she got a job answering phones
at an erotic massage parlor, then began giving erotic massages and sometimes having sex with her customers. It was 1973, and Sprinkle had a hippie’s view of sex as a natural and abundant gift to celebrate and share.

Sprinkle moved to New York after starting an affair with Gerard Damiano, the director of
Deep Throat
, whom she met when he came to Tucson to testify in an obscenity trial. In New
York she began working at the Spartacus Spa in Midtown, and then found her own way to porn. Her first starring role was in a film called
Teenage Deviate
, where she performed under the stage name of “Annie Sprinkles” (her given name was Ellen Steinberg).

At eighteen, Annie Sprinkle (as her name was later shortened) had bobbed brown hair, full breasts, and a twinkly smile. As a performer, she affected
the airy grooviness of the hippie she once was, with a wry sense of humor coming through. As the 1970s progressed she came to be known as one of the performers most willing to try controversial sex acts. She peed on men, fisted them with Crisco, and even vomited on one (using, she later revealed, canned soup). She held the hand of another performer during what might be the first clitoral piercing
in porn. After performing in more than a hundred movies directed by men, she directed one herself.
Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle
was the second-highest-grossing X-rated feature in 1982.

In 1983, Sprinkle began hosting a support group for performers who were now leaving the industry. Its members were Sprinkle, Gloria Leonard, Veronica Vera, Candida Royalle, and Jane Hamilton (who acted as Veronica
Hart). They called the group Club 90, for the address of Sprinkle’s apartment on Lexington Avenue. All five would put their sexual experience in pornography toward other professions: Vera founded a cross-dressing academy, Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls; Gloria Leonard was the first president of the Free Speech Coalition, which advocated for the First Amendment rights
of the industry; Hamilton went on to work as a porn director and later an executive at VCA, a major Southern California production company. In 1984, Candida Royalle produced Femme, a series of videos marketed to women and couples.