The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (13 page)

In the early 1990s, a male journalist coined the term, “do-me feminism” to describe the growing number of young women who were claiming their right to make and enjoy porn. But it’s only in the new century that I’ve seen a noticeable increase in porn movies directed by women. It’s as if it took an entire generation before women felt brave enough to step behind the blue camera, whether for commercial sale or to post on the Internet. But is it “feminist” simply because it’s made by a woman? When I watch porn directed by a woman I’m hoping to see something different, innovative, something that speaks to me as a woman. All too often I find myself disappointed by what turns out to be the same lineup of sex scenes containing the usual sex acts, sometimes more extreme, following the same old formula and ending in the almighty money shot. Rather than creating a new vision, it seems many of today’s young female directors, often working under the tutelage of the big porn distributors, seek only to prove that they can be even nastier than their male predecessors. And it’s not so much the type of sex that offends me, it’s the crude in-your-face depiction that seems more interested in shock value than anything female viewers might enjoy. Do they really think that most women are going to be turned on by seeing a woman screwed in every orifice by a bunch of seedy guys who finally relieve themselves on her face? And if they’re not concerned with what women want, should it then be considered feminist?

When the women’s movement fought for a woman’s right to a fulfilling sex life, it meant that men had better start learning about what turns us on and gets us off. We empowered each other through books and consciousness-raising to learn about our bodies and our needs, without shame and guilt, and to expect nothing less than a respectful partner who cared about how we felt and would stop at nothing to please us.

I wish I could say that my greatest source of pride is the impact my work has had on the enormous adult industry, but that is not the case. Other than a handful of women whose work stands above the rest, I believe that like many social and cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, “women’s porn” became co-opted by mass media, stripped of its original intent, and regurgitated by the still male-dominated porn industry, which wallows in low-brow shock entertainment for the masses. “Feminist porn” is not dead, but it has a long way to go before it can take its rightful place as a force of change.

If women don’t create their own erotic visions, their own sexual language, men will continue to do it for us and we’ll never fully understand
our own unique sexual nature. Women have so much to contribute to what constitutes sex or lovemaking. Our sexuality is more complex, more nuanced. We bring elements of unpredictability to lovemaking. If men can teach us to be more open, we can teach them to be more subtle, to take their time, and to luxuriate in every moment as it evolves. It’s time we women were encouraged to nurture and explore our still largely untapped sexual nature. I’m not calling for a softer, gentler porn. I like down and dirty sex as much as anyone, and I’ve tried to depict a range of fantasies in my work. But I’ve always tried to do it with a sense of respect and dignity. I want women to feel good about themselves after they watch my movies. Maybe some of the women whose work I am critical of don’t care about reaching women; perhaps that’s not their agenda at all. What bothers me is the media identifying their work as feminist when it has nothing to do with speaking for women and advancing the principles of feminism. And it saddens me that so many young female directors are passing up the opportunity to make a difference.

I challenge young women who are fortunate enough to have the means to produce and direct erotic cinema to have the courage to explore what is uniquely theirs rather than reenacting what is someone else’s. To create a vision that inspires other women, that helps them feel comfortable with their sexuality, that gives women permission to experiment and find their own voice. I believe this is both feminist and humanist. It serves to make all our lives better, and isn’t that ultimately what we want?

My Decadent Decade: Ten Years of Making and Debating Porn for Women

MS. NAUGHTY

Ms. Naughty
(a.k.a. Louise Lush) is a writer, editor, blogger, entrepreneur, and filmmaker with a passion for women’s erotica. She jointly runs
ForTheGirls.com
, an adult paysite, along with numerous other erotic sites aimed at straight women. Her erotic fiction has appeared in
Best Women’s Erotica
and her erotic short films have screened at numerous international film festivals, with three nominated for Feminist Porn Awards. She lives with her husband in a small Australian town, surrounded by fundamentalist Christians.

I
still remember the day I bought my first porn magazine. It was 1993, I was twenty, and I was safely two hundred and fifty miles away from my hometown. I walked into the newsstand and, stomach churning, purchased
Australian Women’s Forum (AWF),
the new and exciting magazine that featured photos of naked men. The cashier didn’t give me a brown paper bag, so I was forced to roll it up and make a dash for the car.

I took it back to the house and devoured the contents, loving the fact that this magazine contained no fashion or diets, only sex and feminism. Especially thrilling was the letters section, rife with steamy and sometimes embarrassing real-life stories of sex. My then-boyfriend (now husband) and I always had fantastic sex after I bought
AWF
.

It wasn’t the first porn I’d encountered, of course. As a kid I’d been fascinated by my father’s badly hidden
Penthouse
and
Mayfair
magazines. They were deliciously naughty, yet confusing. I had no idea what an orgasm or cum was, and I had never seen a single penis. Still, I became certain of two things. First, I liked porn. It was rude. I knew I shouldn’t look at it; I would get into serious trouble if I were caught. But I liked it nonetheless. Second, I became certain that black suspenders and stockings were the epitome of sexy. I couldn’t wait to wear them when I grew up.

Buying
AWF
was the first time I openly embraced my love of porn. After years of furtive glimpses and stolen moments, I finally stepped up
and claimed it for myself. Even though I was terrified that first time, I was able to find the courage to buy it because
AWF
was
different.
It wasn’t a dirty men’s magazine hidden at the back of the shop. Instead, it was sassy, bold, and unapologetic.

It was
feminist.

Buying
AWF
that day ultimately changed my life. It led to my career as a feminist pornographer.

I set out to create porn for women.
¹
I wanted to replicate the positive, empowered, female-friendly philosophy that I had seen in
AWF.
I wanted to create porn that I would enjoy, and I wanted to share that porn with other horny women.

That wasn’t my only motivation, of course. I was in it to make money, just like everyone else. Porn was a rich seam in 2000, a gold mine offering easy cash and good times to anyone willing to learn the ropes. Nonetheless, I opted for the more obscure and less profitable option of catering to straight women—at that stage, an unknown and dismissed market.

The thing was, I liked porn but I really didn’t like how most of it was marketed. I hated the way it ignored me as a viewer. It was always aimed at men and spoke only to them. It concentrated on sex acts that men liked and didn’t seem to care about giving an equal share of the pleasure to the woman. The photos and movies cut the men out of the frame, concentrating only on the woman’s body. The guys were often unattractive and seemed creepy or obnoxious. There was little romance, foreplay, or cunnilingus—the things that I wanted to see. The women always kept their shoes on and looked directly at the camera as they were being fucked. The scenes almost always ended with a facial “pop shot” and I didn’t want to see that—I thought it was degrading and also kind of stupid. The woman would often kneel with a slightly pained expression on her face, trying to look adoringly up at the man while he squirted semen in her eye. The camera never showed the man’s face during orgasm, which—to me—was a travesty. Men’s faces are beautiful at that moment.

Put simply, I liked porn but I also didn’t like it—a reaction that I knew other women experienced as well. I wanted to change that. I wanted to make porn
better.
I still do.

For me, making porn for women was a feminist act. I didn’t buy into the prevailing Dworkinesque wisdom that all porn was evil and inherently woman-hating because that philosophy didn’t reflect how I personally felt about it. I knew porn wasn’t perfect but that didn’t mean I had to dismiss it completely. Surely, I reasoned, it would be better to change it, to make it more positive and include a woman’s perspective in the process.
If women had their own porn that acknowledged their experiences and desires, surely the scales would be evened up a little. To me, making my own porn was a positive solution to a difficult question.

I began by licensing photos from other adult photographers and putting them on small sites that linked to pay sites with affiliate programs. It was far cheaper and easier to buy existing photos than to try and make my own (especially given the censorship laws in Australia). I’d browse through photo sets of naked men that were intended for a gay audience and simply choose the guys I liked the look of, editing out the “open bum” shots and any pictures that looked stereotypically “gay.” I was trying to sell a fantasy of a good-looking, straight (and therefore attainable) nude guy. In the end, though, it didn’t really matter if they were actually gay or not, as long as they were good-looking.

And
hard.
Being able to see erections was so important because they’d been hidden from view for so long. The guys in
AWF
were flaccid in compliance with censorship laws. Indeed, the editor once told me they used a protractor to measure the “angle of the dangle” to ensure the magazine got past inspection. The Internet was different. It offered a beautiful level of freedom and there were no government rules declaring a hard cock to be “obscene.” To me, being able to publish photos of erections was a subversive, feminist act. Male nudity was still rarely seen in mainstream films and television, though female nudity was common. The penis was a no-go area, a last bastion of secrecy, a final preserve of male power. The Internet enabled me to pull down the curtain and show the cock in all its glory.

When it came to photos of sex (and in this case, we’re talking about heterosexual couples), I went looking for images that turned me on. I often opted for photo sets that had more kissing, eye contact, and cunnilingus or ones that focused on both partners equally and didn’t have the woman looking at the camera. I tried to find images that showed female pleasure and realistic-looking sex (as opposed to the deliberately over-the-top, “porny” gonzo style with uncomfortable positions). These were few and far between and I would spend days trawling through content sites trying to find just the right set.

I became part of an online community of mostly American webmasters who were making and promoting porn for a living. We’d get together on message boards and Internet relay chat channels and discuss new ideas and the best way to market our porn. The community was predominantly male and often rather obnoxious and sexist. Being a female webmaster was unusual; trying to also promote porn to women was often considered to be a waste of time.

Still, there were a few of us and we got together on our own board, the Women’s Erotica Network (WEN), made up of about twenty people. There we discussed our own particular “niche” and the best ways to promote our product, along with the more philosophical questions about what we were doing.

Everyone at WEN was a believer in porn for women. We were all capitalists, yes, but we wanted to change the world, too. There was much about porn that we didn’t like, much that we wanted to do differently. We didn’t always agree with each other but that was part of the fun.

We were essentially making up the concept of porn for women as we went along. There wasn’t much to go on; we really only had the films of Candida Royalle and the male centerfolds of
Playgirl
as a guide, as well as our own ideas of what was sexy. We often pondered the question of “what women want” and agreed that there wasn’t any one thing that all women desired. We also knew that women were likely to have different tastes on different days.

Still, we knew what
sold.
Heterosexual couples porn, both romantic and “tasteful hardcore” did well, as did good-looking naked men and erotic fiction. These three types of content eventually solidified into the gold standard of porn for women and what many people associate with it.

That’s not to say it was the whole story. We diversified in our own ways; I had small sites featuring BDSM, female domination, male-male-female bisexual fantasies, costume porn, anal and pegging, as well as sites about kissing and cunnilingus. I remember one discussion where we looked forward to the day when women’s porn had as many “niches” (fetishes) as mainstream porn. The problem was, there were very few of us making it and not a lot of support for our vision within the wider adult community. There were many times we’d discuss porn for women on the major adult message boards and be dismissed out of hand. “Women don’t buy porn,” was the usual response. “Women aren’t visual.”