The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (17 page)

While the duo had long wanted to create hot porn for lesbians, they also wanted to help people of all sexual orientations have better, more intimate, and more satisfying sex lives. SIR Video’s mission, in simple terms, is to “change the way people fuck.” And part of this mission includes creating porn that is entertaining, especially for women. As they had learned from working at women-centered enterprises like
On Our Backs
and Good Vibrations, entertaining women often involved first educating them that they had a fundamental right to enjoy sex in whatever form it may take, be it a piece of erotic writing, a vibrator, or pornography.

Bend Over Boyfriend
features sex educators Carol Queen and Robert Morgan as the video’s anal “sexperts.” “We are here to teach you how to do it right and also help you understand that any fantasies that you have had about sharing this kind of intimate play can come true in a safe and fun manner,” Queen says, as she looks directly into the camera. In frank, accessible, and matter-of-fact language intended to instruct and inform, Queen and Morgan work to dispel common myths and misperceptions about anal sex, and offer encouragement and practical advice to viewers interested in expanding their sexual repertoires through anal play.

Bend Over Boyfriend
offers sexual education that emphasizes sex-positive synergy. The video not only instructs those watching at home how they can have safe and enjoyable anal sex—lube is a must, Queen and Morgan emphasize—but it also models for viewers how to watch an instructional sex video and put whatever tips and advice they may get into practice. This is done by showing two different couples sitting in front of their respective television sets—popcorn and remote controls in hand—watching the video and, eventually, getting down to business.

But the most interesting aspect of
Bend Over Boyfriend
is the way it coaches viewers to be well-informed and savvy sexual consumers. This discourse of consumption is not buried in the video, but is explicitly rendered. At one point, Queen finishes a detailed discussion about the different kinds of sex toys one might use for anal sex—from silicone butt plugs to leather harnesses—and instructs those watching at home to “grab your credit card, go shopping, and meet me back here.” Thus, a very clear dialogue is established in the video between text and context, sex education and consumption, articulating these things together in a highly synergistic and seamless way. As Ragan Rhyne notes in her essay
about SIR Video and the education of consumption, “SIR’s integration of consumption into its videos is, in many ways, a move to create a self-sustaining economy for the continued production of alternative lesbian pornography outside of the control of the mainstream industry.”
²⁶

I would offer a slightly different reading than the one Rhyne proposes about the role that pedagogies of consumption play in SIR’s videos. Integrating discourses of consumption into the narrative fabric of
Bend Over Boyfriend
is less about
creating
a self-sustaining sexual economy, and more about recognizing the extent to which its videos are indebted to, and part of, a much larger, interconnected network of sex-positive culture producers, from dildo manufacturers like Vixen Creations to retailers such as Good Vibrations. Here, the circuit of cultural production comes full circle: consumers wanted quality information about sexual subjects not readily available to them; SIR wanted to make videos that could deliver information about sex in an entertaining and accurate way; and stores such as Good Vibrations were looking for exactly the kind of feminist and queer-oriented porn that Rednour and Strano were making, in large part because customers were asking for it. The result is a version of sex-positive synergy that is not ancillary to the history of feminist porn and the growth of women’s market, but a fundamental part of the broader commercial context that has shaped feminist porn as a form of discursive intervention and cultural critique.

In 2009 Good Vibrations took the idea of sex-positive synergy one step further when it launched a porn production arm of the company called Good Releasing.
²⁷
Good Releasing features three separate video lines: HeartCore films, the Pleasure-Ed series, and Reel Queer Productions, the latter of which fills a niche in the adult entertainment industry for edgy and authentic queer representations. With Good Releasing, the company is involved in everything from project development and production to distribution and sales, resulting in a form of vertical integration that extends the project that Susie Bright started more than two decades ago: incorporating pornography into conversations about sex by inviting people, especially women, to take a peek.

Conclusion: Feminist Porn as Cultural Critique

As I mentioned in the introduction, sex-positive feminists, including feminist porn producers and scholars who study pornography, are often accused by antipornography feminists of lacking a critique of the mainstream adult industry. It is an assessment that strips feminist pornography of its interventionist impulses, divorces it from its wider sex-positive
context, and reduces it to a seemingly pointless reiteration of the very representational codes and conventions it professes to challenge.

A case in point involves commentary about the 2011 Adult Entertainment Expo penned by antipornography feminist Gail Dines. She takes to task the “predatory capitalists” who fill the “airless, poorly lit conference rooms” at the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas. “What excites these guys (and it was overwhelmingly guys),” she writes, recalling her visit to the Expo in 2008, “is not sex, but money.”
²⁸
She continues:

One of the seminars at this year’s expo is called In the Company of Women. Here academics will mix with pornographers to share ideas on how to develop niche products targeted to women. I’m sure there will be lots of talk about how women can be empowered by watching porn, because the pornographers, being the savvy businessmen they are, like nothing more than telling women that porn is actually good for them. This is their “trick,” and one we must resist if we want to replace the plasticised, formulaic and generic images of the pornographers with an authentic sexuality based on our own experiences, longings and desires.
²⁹

The seminar Dines references—although did not attend—was one that I had moderated and helped to organize. In fact, joining me on stage were two feminist sex-toy retailers, Jacq Jones from Sugar in Baltimore and Mattie Fricker from Self Serve in Albuquerque, accompanied by Carol Queen from Good Vibrations, Diana DeVoe, a female porn producer, and Greg DeLong, the founder of Njoy, a sex-positive company that makes high quality, stainless steel sex toys. It was hardly the cesspool of women-hating “tricksters” and “predatory capitalists” that Dines describes; rather, the very composition of the panel reflects the kind of sex-positive synergy and entrepreneurship I’ve discussed throughout this essay.
³⁰

Feminist pornography is not a series of stand-alone texts that exist outside of a much wider context—and history—of sex-positive feminist cultural production and commerce. Nor is feminist porn divorced from meaningful critiques of sexism, racism, heterosexism, and classism. To suggest otherwise is to at best selectively ignore, or, at worst completely disregard, four decades of feminist pleasure activism around topics like female masturbation, sex education, sex toys, and pornography. Sex-positive cultural production, including feminist pornography, has
always
engaged with, and responded to, the limits, exclusions, and biases of the mainstream adult industry. Indeed, there would be little need for something called “feminist porn”—or feminist sex-toy stores, for that
matter—if the mainstream adult industry was a feminist utopia with a long legacy of celebrating female sexuality in all its permutations.

While it might be convenient, at least for the sake of one’s argument, to posit that within the realm of commercial sex, buying and using a vibrator or reading erotica are vastly different practices than watching pornography, the history of the women’s market for sex toys and pornography suggests something quite different: that as platforms for sexual education and modes of expression, these cultural forms—and their uses and effects—might not be as different as some people would like to believe. Moreover, branding anyone associated with the world of pornography as a “predatory capitalist” fails to recognize that consumer capitalism is not fixed and unchanging, nor are its meanings given in advance. Rather, the sexual marketplace, like other realms of consumer culture, can be used for socially progressive purposes, including sex education and social change.

Finally, the move from text to context is not only an analytic shift in terms of how we talk and think about feminist pornography, it is also a political move that enables us to better account for the ways in which feminist pornography is deeply embedded within a much larger network of sex-positive feminist cultural production. As scholar Larry Grossberg reminds us, an examination of cultural phenomena cannot take place in isolation from “specific cultural practices within their complexly determined and determining contexts”—a lesson, I think, that the history of feminist pornography as a form of sexual entertainment, discursive intervention, and cultural critique teaches us especially well.
³¹

Notes

1
. My work at Babeland was part of a multilocation ethnographic project that examined the history and retail culture of feminist sex-toy businesses in the United States. In addition to conducting six months of fieldwork at Babeland, I visited a number of sex-toy stores across the country and interviewed more than seventy-five proprietors, sales staff members, marketers, sex-toy manufacturers, and pornographers in an effort to understand the commercial world of sex-positive retailing.

2
. Sex positivity counters the idea that sex is an inherently negative, dangerous, and destructive force. As a discourse, and, some may argue, a sexual ethic, sex positivity promotes the idea that people deserve accurate information about, and support around, their sexuality.

3
. Claire Cavanah, interview with author, August 30, 2001, New York, NY.

4
. Larry Grossberg, “Can Cultural Studies find True Happiness in Communication?”
Journal of Communication
43 (1993): 90.

5
. Grossberg, “Cultural Studies,” 93.

6
. See Lynn Comella, “Selling Sexual Liberation: Women-Owned Sex Toy Stores and the Business of Social Change” (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2004).

7
. Candida Royalle, “Porn in the USA,” in
Feminism & Pornography,
ed. Drucilla Cornell (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2000), 541.

8.
Candida Royalle, telephone interview with author, November 7, 2001.

9
. Royalle, interview.

10
. Royalle, interview.

11
. Susie Bright, telephone interview with author, June 18, 2010.

12
. Bright, interview.

13
. Bright, interview.

14
. Cathy Winks,
The Good Vibrations Guild to Adult Videos
(San Francisco: Down There Press, 1998), vii.

15
. Roma Estevez, “Good Vibrations” (Unpublished paper, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 2000).

16
. Winks, Good Vibrations, vii.

17
. Ziadee Whiptail, telephone interview with author, March 29, 2002.

18
. Robert Eberwein,
Film, Video, and the Framework of Desire
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999).

19
. Tristan Taormino,
Down and Dirty Sex Secrets
(New York: Regan Books, 2001), 1.

20
. Tristan Taormino, telephone interview with author, November 2, 1999.

21
. Taormino,
Down and Dirty Sex Secrets,
3.

22
. Taormino, interview.

23
.
Bend Over Boyfriend,
directed by Shar Rednour (San Francisco, CA: Fatale Video, 1998), Videocassette.

24
. Jackie Strano, interview with author, June 6, 2002, Berkeley, CA.

25
. Shar Rednour, interview with author, June 6, 2002, Berkeley, CA.

26
. Ragan Rhyne, “Hard Core Shopping: Educating Consumption in SIR Video Production’s Lesbian Porn,”
The Velvet Light Trap
59 (2007): 50.

27
. Good Vibrations had previously launched Sex Positive Productions in 2001. Despite rave reviews and mainstream recognition for some of its films, including
Slide Bi Me,
which was nominated for an Adult Video News Award in 2002, the experiment proved costly and was disbanded after only a few short years.

28
. Gail Dines, “Porn: A Multibillion-Dollar Industry that Renders all Authentic Desire Plastic,”
The Guardian,
January 4, 2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/04/pornography-big-business-influence-culture
.